The Sasquatch at Home

Eden Robinson, a member of the Haisla and Heiltsuk Indigenous nations from the northwest coast of British Columbia, delivers a wide-ranging personal essay that weaves together family stories, Haisla cultural history, and reflections on writing her novel Monkey Beach. The essay moves between memoir, cultural instruction, and literary commentary, connected by Robinson's exploration of how stories carry identity and tradition across generations.

Robinson introduces her dual heritage: Her mother is Heiltsuk from Bella Bella, and her father is Haisla from Kitamaat Village, both small reserves on the coast. Both sides of her family are matrilineal, meaning clan membership passes through the mother's line, so Robinson should belong to her mother's Eagle Clan. However, when she is ten, her father's family gives her and her younger sister Beaver Clan names at a Settlement Feast, a ceremony held to honor a recently deceased chief. Her mother, annoyed at the irregularity, agrees for the sake of convenience since the family lives in Kitamaat Village. Robinson recalls standing in line with other children to receive her name and feeling embarrassed. An aunt tells her to visit her grandmother, Ma-ma-oo, to learn the name's meaning.

Ma-ma-oo tells Robinson's sister that her name, Sigadum'na'x, means "Sent Back Chief Lady" and recounts the dramatic story behind it: A high-ranking woman married a Haisla chief, but his four jealous wives kept trying to poison her, so he sent her home and made her a chief to preserve her honor. When Robinson asks about her own name, Wiwltx°, Ma-ma-oo says only "Big lady." The name implies high rank through marriage, but Robinson is disappointed by the absence of a dramatic narrative and has "story-envy." Changing the name would require hosting a feast costing at least $5,000, and miserliness at a feast would permanently tarnish one's reputation.

Robinson recounts how her parents met. Her mother had just returned to Bella Bella from residential school, a government-run boarding institution for Indigenous children, while her father, at thirty-three, was under family pressure to marry. Her mother spotted him coming up a gangplank near her grandmother's house and declared he was the man she would marry. They danced exclusively at a jukebox joint that night, and when a World War II-era air raid siren sounded to mark the generator shutting off, Robinson's father walked her mother home across the dark reserve. After they married and moved to the Village, Robinson's aunts gave her mother a Haisla name, Halh.qala.ghum.ne'x, meaning "Sea Monster Turning the Other Way," so she could attend feasts. Robinson admires the attitude the name suggests.

Robinson explains that she first truly understood nusa, the traditional Haisla method of teaching children cultural protocols, during a 1997 trip to Graceland with her mother. She had won the Royal Society of Literature's Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, receiving roughly $2,000 CAD. When asked where she would travel, her mother answered without hesitation: Graceland. Despite obstacles before departure, including the crash of SwissAir 111 near Peggy's Cove, hurricanes battering the Gulf States, and an airline pilot strike, they arrived in Memphis. At Graceland, Robinson's mother ignored the audio headset and moved slowly through the house, trembling when she reached Elvis Presley's mother's bedroom. As her mother told stories connecting Presley's life to everything she valued, Robinson grasped that this transmission of meaning through shared experience and place is nusa.

The essay shifts to the Kitlope, a remote watershed about 100 kilometers from Kitamaat Village. The Haisla branch who lived there, the Henaaksiala, once numbered between 1,000 and 1,200 people. Already devastated by tuberculosis and smallpox, they were struck by the Spanish Influenza in late 1918, which killed 10 percent of the Haisla population in under eight weeks. The Henaaksiala were reduced to about 100 people and formally amalgamated with the Haisla in 1948, leaving behind ghost villages dissolving into the forest. Despite this history, Haisla people return to the Kitlope each spring. At the mouth of the Kitlope River, each person washes their face in the water, reintroducing themselves to the living land.

Robinson recounts the Haisla origin stories: The Douglas Channel was believed uninhabited because of a great monster, which turned out to be millions of seagulls feeding on oolichan, a small, oil-rich fish central to coastal Indigenous life. Oolichan arrived at the end of winter when starvation threatened. The rendered oil, called "grease," was the most valuable commodity on the coast, given away at potlatches, or ceremonial feasts, to prove a chief's wealth and authority. Networks of grease trails linked coastal peoples to inland regions. In 2008, Robinson and her father traveled to a sandbar off the Prince Rupert highway to dip net for oolichan because industrial effluent from Kitimat had compromised the runs near their home, and more remote runs had been nonexistent for five years. After a fruitless day, they acquired a bucket of less-than-fresh fish traded from the Nass Valley for cigarettes. Robinson reflects that losing the oolichan means losing "a thread of tradition that ties us to this particular piece of the Earth, that ties our ancestors to our children" (23).

Robinson then discusses writing Monkey Beach. She explains that by Haisla measures of intelligence, which prize the ability to trace family roots to mythic times and to replicate actions after being shown once, she considers herself "special" in an ironic sense: She struggles with oral learning. School was the first place she excelled. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Victoria and entered an MFA program at the University of British Columbia, where she began a novel as her thesis, then switched to a short story collection that became Traplines and used the novel draft as a grant application. Writing Monkey Beach posed challenges: Her main character, Karaoke, was traumatized and lifeless on the page, and Robinson debated whether to set the novel in Kitamaat Village or invent a fictional place. She chose the real Village, finding the story lost its energy otherwise. She also consulted her aunties about Haisla protocols for using clan stories, learning that clan narratives require permission and a feast to publish, while informal public-domain stories can be used unless they contain sensitive ceremonial content.

Robinson attended a Haisla Rediscovery Camp in the Kitlope Valley, a program designed to reconnect youth with traditional learning, which deeply shaped her novel. She learned about the landscape, oral history, and traditional healing plants, including the toxic oxsuli (Indian Hellebore). She also gathered Sasquatch stories from both sides of her family. Her father told her the b'gwus, the Haisla word for Sasquatch, had clans and families with their own songs and feasts. He speculated they might not be ape-like creatures but exiles from their villages, made strange by loneliness and isolation. The last reported encounter occurred in 1918 at Miskusa, when Billy Hall, Robinson's father's childhood acquaintance, shot and killed one he had mistaken for a bear.

Years later, Robinson returned to Monkey Beach with her father to research the novel's ending. Her father could identify the history of every mountain and shoreline, sharing stories passed down as nusa. He told her about Henkwa, a figure from Haisla oral tradition who paddled across Kitlope Lake, climbed a cliff, became stuck, and turned to stone, his dark figure still visible on the mountainside. Robinson's favorite story explains why clams have black tongues: In the beginning, the world was on fire and clams tried to put it out by spitting. As they prepared to leave, Robinson remarked that there were no hungry Sasquatches today. Her father replied with a smile: "They must be at home, writing" (41).