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PrintAn Eye On The Past
Restoring life to a historic piece of Haida culture
Photography By W. Garth Dowling
(page 1 of 2)
What can a person do to while away the long hours of winter darkness and cold?
How about restoring a spectacularly intact Haida Indian totem pole carved in the 1830s from a western red cedar log?
Though it’s not a diversion that would come to most people’s minds, this is the way sculptor Daro Flood and plein-air painter Greg McHuron spent much of the winter and spring of 2008.
Jackson-based artist McHuron grew up, worked, and traveled with native people of the Pacific Northwest. And Flood, a Jackson native, claims a long history of totem pole restorations, beginning in the 1970s when he served as the youngest-ever conservator of the museum collections at the Alaska State Museum in Juneau. This was the sixth ancient pole Flood has worked on—endeavors he says “have changed my life, and I am humbled to have received such opportunities.”
Citing this as the best preserved and one of the most unusual examples of totem poles either had encountered, the two artists collaborated to repair damage to the pole while striving to remain true to the original carver’s intent.
The pole came to Jackson Hole by way of Terry Winchell and his business, Fighting Bear Antiques. After sitting in storage in a Pennsylvania museum for years—where it is believed much of the deterioration took place—the pole was acquired by collectors who moved it to Oregon and literally built their home around it. When the time came to sell the house, the collectors, friends of Winchell’s, wanted the pole to go to a like-mind individual; someone who would be deeply appreciative and respectful of the piece’s legacy. Winchell believed he knew just such a collector in Jackson. That person agreed, and arranged to have the pole, which weighs nearly a ton and stands more than seventeen feet tall, transported to the Tetons.
Before it could be installed in its new home, however, the totem pole needed repairs. Who you gonna call?
“I was contacted by Fighting Bear,” McHuron recalls. “I went down assuming it would look like most of the poles I’d seen that were in terrible shape.” Pausing, he draws a breath. “I was agog!” he says. “I called Daro and said, ‘You gotta come look at this!’”
On closer inspection, the two men recognized that the wood at the base of the pole needed attention, and that missing pieces on various figures would have to be replaced in order to preserve the overall structural and artistic integrity. The biggest job, it appeared, would be addressing water damage on the raven’s right eye, which had resulted in deterioration of the wood within.
After moving the pole to McHuron’s studio, Flood set to work injecting literally hundreds of needles full of hardener, a compound “I personally composed with the help of my friends at the Smithsonian,” he says. “One at a time, hour by hour, weeks of this.” Once the injection of harderner was finally completed, he began excavating wood that was either rotten or had been affected by insect infestation. Clearing out rotten wood from the right eye of the raven resulted in a crater four inches deep and ten inches wide—a part of the project that was to take on an eerie, real-life parallel: Shortly after agreeing to work on the pole, McHuron was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer that required extensive treatment in Salt Lake City. Eventually, it cost him his left eye.
Flood’s thoughts were with McHuron as he worked on the wax molds he used as models to carve red cedar blanks to replace the eye. “I [would] just keep thinking of that guy down in Salt Lake City,” he recalls.
After recovering from surgery, McHuron performed the final carving of the pieces Flood had carefully worked into place. “There was a spiritual relationship between myself and the raven,” McHuron says. “I lost my eye and the raven had lost his eye. I had dreams about the pole.”
The goal of the artists and the collector was not to make over the totem pole, but to return it to the condition in which it would have been—with its long accumulation of natural wear—had damage not occurred during the extended period of storage.
“Part of what I felt from these two was a reverence for the pole, and a real sense of honor to be able to work on it,” says McHuron’s wife, Linda.
“And we wanted to maintain the honor and integrity of the original carvers,” adds McHuron. “That’s why we didn’t want to paint it or change it.”
