Kispiox Village

Kispiox Village is located in an isolated valley at the confluence of the Skeena and Kispiox Rivers. Historically the people of this village chose to remain isolated and called itself Andpayaxw, ‘the hiding place.’ But later, weakened by measles and missionaries, it was renamed the Kispiox, or ‘loud talkers’ by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. According to the agent, the village was "the head-center of disaffection, rejecting telegraphs, reserves, wagon roads, fishing restrictions, and logging." Kispiox is still off-the-beaten-path and has been home to this particular Gitxan tribe for over 3,000 years.

Kispiox is one of three villages in our immediate area that is known for some of the last remaining totem poles that still exist in their native setting. Emily Carr (1871-1945) the eccentric female artist from British Columbia who once described herself as a “little old lady on the edge of nowhere,” is famous for her paintings of these and other poles. Her first exposure to aboriginal poles in Sitka, Alaska in 1907, so moved her that she decided to devote her life to making a visual record of the poles in their village settings before they disappeared, decaying back into the deep coastal rainforests. The artwork above left is one of Emily Carr’s paintings of the totem poles in Kispiox (1912).

Totem was the name mistakenly given to the poles by arriving Europeans, especially missionaries. But the poles have nothing to do with religion. The carvings on the poles represent family and clan crests, and important legends and events that have occurred in the life of a village. Only the tribe storyteller could relate the history of an individual pole. Consequently with the decimation of the aboriginals through smallpox, measles, and flu (perhaps 90% of the population died), many of the storytellers were lost before being able to pass the stories on to the next generation of storytellers.

Poles at Kispiox Village

... P. L. Morningstar