Passage to Juneau
Posted on January 7, 2007 at 3:50 am by kyliu
Tags: alaska, bookreviews, culture, raban, travelwriting
Filed Under travel | 1 Comment |
I’ve been meaning to write about Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings
I got the book from Joel right before we left on our trip to Alaska. It’s a record of Jonathan Raban’s journey in a one-man sailboat up and down the Alaska Inside Passage, from Seattle to Juneau and back — practically the same route taken by our cruise ship. It seemed the perfect book for the trip.
Unfortunately, I only got about half way through it on the trip — there wasn’t enough time to read. By the time I finally finished the book, many months later, I had underlined copiously and marked many pages that I wanted to write about, but I could never seem to find a moment to sit down and do it. Still, better late than never.
Passage to Juneau is a difficult book to describe. It’s not so much a book about the trip as a book about Raban which is told in the form of a trip. Well, that’s not quite fair either — maybe the best way to describe it is to say that it’s both. It’s a book about the Inside Passage, the physical landscape, the weather, the history, the First Nations and Captain Vancouver’s voyages of discovery, and the people who populate the sea and the land along the way today. But it’s also a book about Raban, about his wife, his daughter, his father, his mother, his sense of mortality, his sins and confessions.
Indians in canoes and Vancouver’s lieutenants float down the Inside Passage like ghosts alongside the cruise ships in Raban’s narrative, and as he sails on, the reader, together with Raban himself, discover the deep, restless waters that lie behind him in his home. [1] Add to that the fact that Raban, a Brit transplanted to America, is, like all immigrants, insecure about his Americanness, and that insecurity provides another source of tension in the book. All of these forces driving together make Passage to Juneau something like the Inside Passage itself, full of straits, fathomless deeps, dangerous narrows, endless eddies and whirlpools that suck you in and spin you around until you are no longer sure which is where and why.
I really liked the book, but I think it’s a difficult genre for readers. Raban is likely to be found in the travel section of book stores (or the “local” section in the Pacific Northwest) — but his book is only half about the places he travels through. Readers who are interested in the Inside Passage may not appreciate Raban’s laying out of his emotional life — at times it is so naked that one feels voyeuristic. I admire Raban’s courage and his ability to craft good prose. Sometimes good writing is the only thing that will keep readers in when the book turns out to be not quite what they expected.
Rather than try to convey to you the overall beauty of the book, what follows are simply some snippets, in no particular order, of what seized my interest as I read.
Tradition and Authenticity
Raban is very interested in anthropology and the traditions of the Northwest Indians. But he is skeptical of the authenticity of most stereotyped narratives of “Indian wisdom.” He notes many instances where supposed Indian traditions dating from time immemorial are in fact either recent developments after contact with Europeans or even outright inventions by the Europeans themselves.
One example he uses is the Indian belief in the “Great Spirit.” By the time the anthropologists got to the Northwest Indians, the Christian missionaries had already been working among the tribes for years. It was impossible for the anthropologists to tell whether the Indian oral traditions of a great flood and creation by the Great Spirit were native Indian beliefs or stories from the Bible cast in native imagery. There is little to no anthropological evidence that the Indians “worshipped” any kind of deity before white contact, and belief in a “Great Spirit” appears to be the result of missionary attempts to dress Christianity in native clothing.
Another example is the totem pole, the most potent symbol of Northwest Indian heritage. However, it is very likely, according to Raban and the anthropologists he cites, that the tradition of totem pole carving only arose after the Indians encountered the whites with their great ships. The Indians, laden with metal tools, and newly-found leisure (both from the fur trade and the trade of sexual favors from Indian women to the European sailors), began to carve totem poles in imitation of the figureheads they had been so impressed by on the European ships.
At an Indian dance, Raban notes sardonically that the Indians drink cool-aid and dance in steps likely derived from Shakerism in the 1880s. Rituals like the First Salmon ceremony and “spirit quests” had to be taught to the young by anthropologists — years of active suppression and passive neglect of Indian language and culture meant that by the time it was no longer politically correct to do so, the Indians literally had to go to university anthropology departments and ask the professors to take their best guess at how they could best imitate their ancestors.
Raban explains why tradition and authenticity are so fleeting, mirages in the water, like the broken reflections that inspired so much of the abstract designs in Northwestern Indian art:
Unlike Raban, I don’t think writing changes the equation much. I have long thought that much of what we think of as “tradition” is no more than at most a few hundred years old. For example, the so-called “traditional” Chinese dress, a cheongsam or qipao, is derived from a Manchu dress forced upon the Chinese by their Manchu conquerors at the point of the sword a few hundred years ago (it would be quite ridiculous to call such a dress “Chinese”), and the modern variation of the _cheongsam_ that the West is familiar with — from films about the pre-Communist China — originated in Shanghai in the 1900s (at that time, Shanghai was not a Chinese city but rather a European/Japanese/American colony — a “free” city, in the euphemism of the colonial conquerors) based on Western influences. It would be more accurate to call the cheongsam a flapper dress with Manchu characteristics. But even the Chinese themselves these days seem unaware of how thin the “tradition” behind this “authentic” costume is. In actuality, the authentic Chinese dress long ago had ceased to exist.
Authenticity seems to be sought only after it is no longer achievable. A living culture has no need to seek authenticity or tradition — and when it does, it often disguises what is only a recent innovation as unaltered from time immemorial.
Vancouver
Captain George Vancouver’s expedition to the Pacific Northwest in 1791-1794 was an attempt to discover the Northwest Passage. Disliked by his crew, the class-conscious Captain Vancouver (hopelessly middle-class) was isolated from his officers by his violent temper and conservative outlook. He gave names to the features of the Northwest coast, and according to Raban:
First Contact
The narrative of the first contact between Vancouver’s crew and the Northwest Indians is gendered. The crew tried to entice the Indians to come and trade with them by leaving them presents of beads and shiny baubles — it’s a seduction scene. Vancouver’s crew tried to fascinate the Indians much as they might a girl:
The white sailors sought the soft pelts of the ocean beavers as much as they sought sex with the daughters and wives of the Indians, trading for both with bits of copper, the trading goods most prized by the Indians. As the ships sailed away, they left their genes behind.
Were the Indians taken advantage of? Should one be outraged by this kind of prostitution — and if so, at whom? — or should one accept it with resignation, perhaps even elation, as an affirmation that sex would eventually erase all racial boundaries between us — but at what cost?
Water and Land
The center of the life of the Northwest Indians was the sea. Upon its surface, in their canoes, they found their highways, their playing grounds, their work places and town squares. Their life was centered on the thin strip of land next to the water and the surface of the water. Beyond that lay the dangers of the deep (Puget Sound itself is deeper than any continental shelf) and the dangers of the forest.
The white explorers thought the Indians stupid since they did not have names for all the mountains and peaks they saw around them, and they appeared incapable of rowing their canoes from point A to point B in a straight line. In reality, the Indians simply had a different vision of life. The mountains were featureless to them, since they were simply beyond the places safe for human habitation. Upon the sea that seemed featureless to the white explorers, the Indians saw roads, trading stops, well-marked paths to the next village over. They saw the world differently.
At least that is what Raban and the anthropologists think — we don’t know for sure because that way of life has gone beyond hope of retrieval.
Dofleini
Dofleini, the giant octopus, features prominently in Northwestern Indian lore. Komogwa, the Kwakiutl name for the Indian god of the seas, was a greedy shape-shifted who took the form of the octopus from time to time. Raban notes that at Indian winter dances, many Komogwa masks “represent his bulging cheeks as the suckered tentacles of Dofleini, the slimy grasper whose eight-armed embrace awaited the unfortunate visitor to Komogrwa’s underwater estate.”
I wonder if the portray of Davy Jones in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest as a head full of suckered tentacles was at all an allusion to this portrayal of Komogwa.
Footnotes:
[1] You’ll note that for much of the narrative, Raban’s boat is nameless, and the presence of Raban’s wife is curiously both heightened and subdued. The two are, of course, connected. To say more would destroy the beauty of this part of the story. [↑]
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