Dancing With Our Ancestors: Ceremony and Celebration

“Generations of dancers fill the floor, creating a sea of woven cedar bark and spruce root hats. They perform their dances, sing their songs, and speak the language of their ancestors.”

In Dancing With Our Ancestors, readers are invited to participate in a special Haida Potlatch in Hydaburg Alaska, the birth place of co-author Robert Davidson. The story is told from the perspective of Davidson’s daughter and co-author Sara Florence Davidson, who shares her experiences of growing up in the heart of the Haida culture. Sara’s story is one of hope, showing the possibilities for cultural renewal. “The potlatch ban did not exist during our time, so we grew up dancing and singing side by side.”

The purpose of the potlatch in this story is to honour the nine Haida clans, with each receiving a dance screen displaying their crest. Illustrator Janine Gibbons’s vibrant and energetic artwork highlights the preparations before the ceremony and the celebration itself. Taking a year of planning, with guests coming from all over and from many Nations, the story serves as an example of the importance of potlatch in establishing and maintaining kinship, family lineages, and relationships in the Indigenous cultures of the Pacific Northwest Coast. Gibbons effectively conveys the build-up of excitement as everything is readied from food to decorations; readers feel like they are there when the dancers arrive with plates laden high with all kinds of traditional foods, steeped in the regalia, art, symbols, and colours featured throughout. Sara Florence Davidson remarks from the sidelines, “I think about the laws that tried to stop us from gathering, to stop us from singing our songs, to stop us from wearing our regalia, and to stop us from dancing. They wanted us to stop being Haida.”

Dancing With Our Ancestors shows the importance of intergenerational traditions and celebrations, and highlights the importance of the continuity of traditions and the renewed connections of younger generations to their culture and heritage.

“Today our history is recorded in our art, our stories, our dances, and our songs. Today we dance with our children so our culture cannot be stolen again.”

Sara Florence Davidson (she/her) is a Haida/Settler Assistant Professor in Indigenous Education in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. Previously, she was an educator working with adolescents in the K-12 system in British Columbia and Yukon Territory. Sara is the co-author of Potlatch as Pedagogy: Learning through Ceremony, which she wrote with her father, and Magical Beings of Haida Gwaii, which she wrote with her stepmother, Terri-Lynn Williams-Davidson.

Robert Davidson is one of the most respected and important contemporary artists in Canada. A Northwest Coast native of Haida descent, he is a master carver of totem poles and masks and works in a variety of other media as a printmaker, painter, and jeweller. A leading figure in the renaissance of Haida art and culture, Robert is best known as an impeccable craftsman whose creative and personal interpretation of traditional Haida form is unparalleled. He has also been recognized with many awards, including being named an Officer to the Order of Canada.

Janine Gibbons, a Haida Raven of the Double-Fin Killer Whale Clan, Brown Bear House, is a multi-disciplinary artist and award-winning illustrator. Janine’s works are inspired by the waters and lands of the Pacific Northwest, and their myriad colours, energies, and languages. Janine graduated from the Art Institute of Seattle and Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. Janine has illustrated four books in the Sealaska Heritage’s Baby Raven Reads series, including Raven Makes the Aleutians, an AIYLA Honor Book, and most recently Nang Jáadaa Sg̱áana ‘Láanaa aa Isdáayaan (The Woman Carried Away by Killer Whales), which is entirely in the Haida language Xaad Kíl.

Publisher: Portage & Main Press (September 2022)
Hardcover 8″ x 9″ | 40 pages
Ages 6-8
ISBN: 9781774920244

Christina Barber

Christina Barber is a writer and educator who lives in Vancouver. An avid reader, she shares her passion for Canadian history and literature through her reviews on Instagram @cb_reads_reviews. She has most recently been committed to writing and staging formally innovative single and multi-act plays.