Totem restoration work underway outside of Royal BC Museum

A master carver is restoring parts of a totem that has stood for decades outside of the Royal BC Museum in Victoria.

A master carver is restoring parts of a totem that has stood for decades outside the Royal BC Museum in Victoria.

Renowned Kwakwaka’wakw artist Richard Hunt carved the totem when he was 28. At 75, he’s doing some touchups to prolong its life.

“If this was on our reserve or where we live, we’d just let it go back to the earth,” Hunt told CTV News. “But because these things are in the public domain, then I think that they should maintain it and look after it.”

On Monday, the totem was lowered from its spot in Thunderbird Park. It sits outside Mungo Martin House, which is named after the acclaimed carver, who is Hunt’s grandfather.

“It’s my culture,” he said. “I get mad at myself if I don’t work for two days because I love being in my shop and doing what I love.”

Hunt is deepening grooves that will hold six new wooden sunrays he’s making, so they don’t fall out.

He created the totem in 1979, when he was working as chief carver in the museum’s carving program.

Museum staff said the fact that the refurbishment is happening in Thunderbird Park is historically significant.

In the early 1950s, Mungo Martin House hosted the first “legal” potlatch in 67 years. The federal government had banned the gift-giving and feasting ceremony in 1885, in an effort to force the assimilation of Indigenous Peoples.

“When poles were standing during that day and they fell, it was illegal for us to carve replacements for them,” said James McGuire, the museum’s director of Indigenous collections and repatriation.

“This is one of the first places in BC where we were able to start reclaiming that cyclical nature of our culture.”

He said repatriating ancestral belongings that were stolen from Indigenous communities is of the utmost importance to the museum.

“This museum has been a dark place for Indigenous histories, including my own,” said McGuire, who is Haida.

“We have turned a huge page here as a museum. And I think that’s something we’re going to all be proud of when that page becomes clear to everybody.”

Hunt said every time he makes a totem, he’s reclaiming what’s his.

“There’s a lot of other carvers that do the same thing. Our styles are different, but this is mine. I own the copyright to it and everything,” he said.

“It’s my people that actually own it, but I’m claiming it on behalf of them.”

The totem is the first he made without the help of Martin or his acclaimed father, carver Henry Hunt.

It will be raised again next Monday.