HAIDA GWAII
population
4,775 Residents (Approx. total across all islands)
BELIEF SYSTEM:
Deep-rooted Haida Spirituality & Animism (Interconnectedness of all living things)
SPIRITUAL SCENE:
ndigenous Totemism, Shamanic Traditions & Oral History (Lineage-based societal structure)
GEOGRAPHY:
Remote Archipelago · 53°N · Northern Pacific Northwest (Edge of the Continental Shelf)
Sacred Teachings of British Columbia’s First Peoples
Spirits of the land
by Rev. Leonardo Moena
Cedar, the Tree of Life
On Haida Gwaii, it is easy to feel that the land has its own presence. Cedar, salmon, spirit bears and Raven are not only part of the scenery; for many people, they mark places where the visible world and the unseen brush up against each other. This piece looks at stories and practices from these islands as a way to read the land esoterically: as a living field of signs, ancestors and ongoing exchanges between humans, animals and place.Along the Pacific coast there are trees that are not just trees, and animals that are not just animals. For many Indigenous peoples of this region, the world is woven from relationships of kinship: with the cedars, with the salmon, with the bears, and with the spirits of time and land.
An old Coast Salish teaching tells of a man so generous he never kept anything for himself. He shared food, shelter, and time with anyone in need. When he died, the Creator wanted his goodness to continue and transformed him into a great red cedar, rooted where he had been buried. Since then, that tree has kept helping the people: providing wood for houses and canoes, bark for clothing and baskets, and fibers for ropes and ceremonial objects.
In other stories along the coast, cedar has offered itself to the people since time immemorial. Its wood holds up roofs and walls; its bark is worked into textiles and containers; its roots and branches become tools, masks, and poles. Cedar is not just a useful material. It is a being that participates in daily and spiritual life.
For this reason, taking cedar is not done casually. In many communities, traditional practices of respect are still followed: people ask permission, say prayers, and sing. Often only a single long strip of bark is removed, allowing the tree to live and heal. In the exposed place, offerings such as tobacco, sage, or sweetgrass are left as gestures of gratitude to the tree and to the ancestors who accompany it.
Stories of Yellow Cedar
Among the Nuu-chah-nulth, there is a story of three brave young men who became the first yellow cedars. This is why, it is said, these trees grow high on the mountain slopes and carry inside them an inner bark that is soft and fine as hair. The message echoes other cedar stories: the boundary between human and tree can blur; cedar can be kin, even an ancestor transformed.
These narratives remind listeners that the forest is not a decorative backdrop or a simple “natural resource.” It is a place inhabited by presences with memory, capable of returning the care (or the harm) that they receive.
The Salmon People and the First Salmon Ceremony
Just as cedar connects people to the land, the animal nations bind them to the living fabric of the cosmos. In many cosmologies of the Northwest Coast, humans do not stand above nature, but within an extended family that includes the Salmon People, the Bear People, Raven, Wolf, and many other beings.
In the stories told around the fire, these Animal Peoples often wear “two skins”: one as forest or sea animals, and another as supernatural beings who can take human form.
Through this double condition, they move easily across the boundaries between the physical world and the spiritual one.
It is taught that animals have spirit, and that they enter the human world to offer their bodies as food, hide, or tools. After fulfilling that offering, they return to their spiritual home, “put on” a new skin, and may come back when they choose.
This way of telling the cycle of life instills gratitude and responsibility: the deer that falls to the arrow and the salmon that fills the nets are not “resources” but distant relatives who give themselves under a clear condition: they must be treated with respect.
In several coastal communities, people say the Salmon People live in a village under the sea. Each spring, they decide to send some of their own to feed the humans on land, as long as their remains are honored and returned to the water.
One story tells how Raven, the trickster, is invited to that underwater village by the chief of the Salmon People. After feasting, Raven hides a small fish bone in his robe. When the chief returns all the bones to the sea so they can become living salmon again, one is missing. Once discovered, Raven gives the bone back, and it transforms into the chief’s daughter. Ashamed, Raven takes her back to the world above and promises to protect her. She, in turn, promises that her people will keep returning year after year, as long as humans remember their responsibilities.
That relationship of reciprocity is renewed in the First Salmon Ceremony, which is still held in various First Nations. When the first salmon of the season is caught, the community gathers by the river. The fish is cooked and shared, and its bones are carefully returned to the water with prayers of thanks. Only after this gesture of respect does the main fishing begin. In this way a covenant is affired: the Animal People give themselves; the human people honor their spirits so that salmon and other beings continue to return.
Raven, Coyote, and the Time of Creation
Animal stories are also maps of time. On a windswept beach at Rose Spit in Haida Gwaii the “Islands at the Edge of the World” people say that Raven coaxed the first humans out of a shell. That moment was carved in golden cedar in the sculpture Raven and the First Men, by Haida artist Bill Reid, which is displayed at the University of British Columbia: Raven bent over a large shell, beak open in surprise as tiny human figures emerge into the light.
Further inland, the Syilx Okanagan people tell of Coyote, whose adventures shaped mountains and rivers and who placed the stars in the sky.
Each summit and each bend in a river carries a story and, through it, a teaching. On the central coast, the Tsimshian talk about Wee’get, the great creator Raven another face of the same transformative, clever principle.
When the ice of the last great glacier began to retreat, it is said that Raven wanted to leave a visible trace of the purity of that era. Walking among black bears, he turned one out of every ten completely white, as a sign of the sacred innocence of the land. Those white bears known as moksgm’ol or spirit bears, still roam the coastal rainforests, silent and rare.
Biologically, they are known as Kermode bears: not albinos, but black bears with a special gene that turns their fur white. Spiritually, they are a living reminder of the time of ice. For generations, peoples such as the Gitga’at and the Kitasoo Xai’xais kept their existence quiet, fearing that outsiders might harm them. Anyone who sees a spirit bear fishing for salmon at dawn feels they are witnessing a legend walking along the muddy riverbank.
Time Immemorial and Continuity
Running through all these stories is a particular understanding of time. Time is not just an arrow from past to future, but a circle that returns again and again. Many peoples of the region speak of “time immemorial” to name a past that is not lost, because it remains alive in collective memory.
Among the Haida, for example, oral traditions recall great earthquakes and floods thousands of years ago—stories that Western science would later confirm through geology. Listening to an Elder tell these stories around the fire, it feels as if time loosens. Mythic past and present touch for a moment.
In the Indigenous spiritual world of what is now called British Columbia, time is a continuum linking those who came before with those yet to be born. Every basket woven from cedar bark, every salmon caught and thanked, every traditional name given to a child, is part of a single thread connecting the dawn of creation with the unfolding future.
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