This month my Love and I celebrated our anniversary in the Pacific Northwest, spending time in Seattle, the Olympic Peninsula, and Vancouver. We had a fantastic time and I was able to pick up two books along the way:
Seattle’s Market Ghost Stories by Mercedes Yaeger is a sweetly written memoir of the more haunted side of Seattle’s Pike Place Market. The Market is, of course, one of Seattle’s more famous landmarks and is absolutely, overwhelmingly fantastic. The Market hosts the original Starbuck’s, the Millionaire’s Club (they’re even better live), every kind of sea food one can imagine, and brimming with people from all corners of the globe. We had a great time strolling through all the stands for an afternoon before heading out of town to climb mountains in Olympic National Park.
Yaeger runs the Market Ghost Tours. I had the opportunity to meet her as we passed by on our way to the Gum Wall. She is full of great information about Seattle’s history and Pike’s Place Market, and clearly has a passion for the city. We didn’t have a chance to attend her tour, but I purchased this book as a souvenir and enjoyed reading it on the train to Vancouver two days later.
The book pauses at different places in the Market and alternates between bits of Seattle’s history and stories of people who have passed through the Market and now spend their time haunting the spaces they used to frequent. In a particularly personal verse, Yaeger tells the story of Princess Angeline and then of the Battle of Seattle, addressing the injustices done to the First Nation people with candor and dignity. With straightforward prose, Yeager tells the stories of the people who built the Market with a voice that betrays the fondness she has for them and weaves in her own experiences without pretense or agenda. It is clear that she is writing not only the history of the Market, but of her own Seattle city.
The Raven Steals the Light by Bill Reid and Robert Bringhurst is a collection of Haida myths accompanied by beautiful drawings by Haida artist Bill Reid. I purchased the book in the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. The museum was something I was really looking forward to on our trip and I wasn’t disappointed. Full of a wonderful collection of pieces from various periods in the history of the peoples of the Pacific Northwest, it was the first place I was able to glean real appreciation for the culture of the First People there. I thought the totem poles, in particular, were fantastic.
The Haida are one of the First Nations bands who live along Alaska’s southernmost and Canada’s western coasts. Their spiritual home is called Queen Charlotte Islands in our language and Haida Gwaii in theirs. The book is full of great stories of the trickster Raven: how he created the sun, moon, and stars by stealing the light from an old man and his granddaughter and spilling it as he escaped from them; how he lost his beak, quite painfully, by tricking a hunter away from his home so he could have some personal time with the hunter’s wife, and then of how he regained the beak again, and so on.
The illustrations by Bill Reid mirror the artistic style he applies to his sculpture, jewelry, painting, and printing pieces. He artfully combines traditional Haida imagery and style with modern techniques and mediums to create pieces that celebrate the Haida culture. It was very neat to see his statue of the Raven and the First Men in the Museum and then see a drawing in the book as well. The last chapter in the book refers to a missing story called The Dogfish Woman and leaves the reader with a heavy sadness for all the pieces of life that so many First Nations people are missing as a result of European imperialism and, more recently, US and Canadian policy toward First Nation and Native American people. It makes one really treasure the ten little stories and the lovely artwork that illustrates only a sliver of the Haida culture.
