‘Iconic’ Indigenous canoe moving to Northwest Coast Hall at New York’s Museum of Natural History

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For 60 years, the Great Canoe has greeted visitors at the American Museum of Natural History’s Grand Gallery near the 77th Street entrance in Manhattan. Since 2006, it has floated above the space – a magnificent 63-foot-long, more-than-8-foot-wide Northwest Coast vessel carved from a single red cedar around 1878, suspended in a celebrated museum far away from where it was made by Haida and Heiltsuk hands.

It has a wow effect for first-time visitors, but for New Yorkers, it is also a familiar fan favourite, something they grew up with, a beloved meeting spot (a 2007 documentary about the canoe’s renovation was titled Meet Me at the Canoe), and a work cherished by museum officials, too.

“I think this word is overused, but it’s been called iconic, and I think it really does apply in this instance,” said Peter Whiteley, AMNH curator of North American Ethnology. “It’s iconic for the museum.”

Nuu-chah-nulth artist and cultural historian Haa’yuups (Ron Hamilton) said there may be a number of Northwest Coast canoes at museums around the world, but none have had the impact of this one. “Its size – not just its length, its size. It’s very impressive. It’s like a whale.”

On Tuesday, the whale was on the move, carefully relocated from the Grand Gallery into the Northwest Coast Hall, the museum’s oldest hall and first cultural gallery. The hall, scheduled to reopen in 2021 after a major US$17.5-million renovation, houses Indigenous items from British Columbia, Alaska and Washington State, including totem poles.

On hand from British Columbia to witness and participate in the move were Haa’yuups, co-curator of the renovation; Haida Gwaii Museum executive director and curator Nika Collison (Jisgang); and Heiltsuk community leader Harvey Humchitt (Chief Wigvilba Wakas), the research liaison co-ordinator of the Heiltsuk Integrated Resource Management Department in Bella Bella.

“Just like how we do things at home, this is very serious,” Collison said from New York late on Monday. “It is part of our collective culture, the canoe in general. There’s always ceremony around canoes whether they’re in the water ... or in the air of a New York museum.”

Collison and the others believe the canoe belongs in the Northwest Coast Hall, in dialogue with the other treasures and in the context of living people.

“It certainly has its great beauty in its current location, where it appears as a single item. It’s huge, it’s dominant, it’s magnificent,” said Whiteley, co-curator of the renovation project. “But it doesn’t inform a cultural understanding in the same way as if it’s in association with a lot of other beautifully carved pieces from the same cultural background.”

The Great Canoe – which may have been painted by Haida artist Charles Edenshaw – was acquired by a museum trustee in 1881, travelled by ship down the coast, crossing the Isthmus of Panama by rail, then arrived in New York in 1883 by ship, and finally at the museum via horse-drawn cart. It was put on display shortly afterward.

For years, it was the centrepiece in the Northwest Coast Hall, which opened in 1899, first hanging from the ceiling, then exhibited on the floor of the hall.

In 1960, it moved to the adjacent Grand Gallery by the entrance and was suspended in 2006, at which time the life-sized figures that had been installed inside it were removed.

Haa’yuups first encountered the canoe in the summer of 1967, when, as a teenager, he hitchhiked to New York hoping to find cultural artifacts that originated from his village that he understood were part of the museum’s vast collection of Northwest Coast items. Walking in through that entrance, he found the canoe “a really dramatic display that had a very powerful impact on me," he said on Monday.

“I continue to marvel at the canoe. ... It’s a stunning thing. I was crawling around in it this morning and I could be there for another five days if I had the time and they’d let me.

While the Great Canoe will be suspended in its new home, the hope is to make its interior accessible through video and still images that visitors can access digitally in the gallery below.

It will be one of more than 800 newly conserved objects from the museum’s Northwest Coast collection that will be installed with new interpretation developed in collaboration with Indigenous advisers.

“I’m going to visit some incredible links to my past, my present and my future. I can’t wait for the Hall to open,” said Collison, who will be one of many coming down for the opening next year. “The canoe is what connects us on the coast and funnily enough, it’s now what connects us to the east coast.”

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