Everyone hushed in the Tahayghen Elementary gym when boys in Haida regalia entered shaking rattles to start the school’s closing ceremony.
Next came all the Tahayghen students, joined by fellow students from Chief Matthews School, drumming, dancing, and singing in X̱aad Kil.
On the walls were 54 blue canoes — one for each year since Tahayghen first opened in 1970. Too costly to upgrade, the school graduated its final class in June. Starting in September, elementary students in Masset will instead go to Daax̱iigan Sḵ’adaa Née, a newly renovated kindergarten to Grade 12 School.
“We’re closing Tahayghen doors, and we’re opening the new Daax̱iigan school doors,” is how Haida language teacher Adeana Young put it when she welcomed everyone to Tahayghen’s closing ceremony on June 20.
Today we will share a story, so listen up, she said in X̱aad Kil, because we’re only going say it once.
Claudette Lavoie, now the school principal, taught three generations of students at Tahayghen. Lavoie said she tried working at other schools, but was always drawn back by Tahayghen’s deep community ties.
All the food at the ceremony — the prawns, the clams, the salmon, and 350 crab — were harvested from the waters nearby by volunteers, she said. And the Haida song that began the ceremony, once rare at the school, is now part of every morning assembly.
“Now we regularly dance, every day,” Lavoie said. “We sing, we celebrate our local culture.”
Jasḵwaan Bedard, who for many years led the development of the Haida curriculum at the school and is now a professor at Simon Fraser University, presented a short documentary film she made together with Nadja Smith-Hanson.
Called “Kyaa kuyáas,” or “Precious Name,” the film tells the story of Daax̱iigan, the late Haida chief Charles Edenshaw, whose name was given to the school, although with an Anglicized spelling, Tahayghen.
In the film Haida artist Christian White, Edenshaw’s great-great-grandson, said the name Daax̱iigan is held by several people today. It refers to steps — the stairs and retaining walls found only in the longhouse of a high-ranking chief — and to the noise a small child might make running up and down them.
Misspelling Daax̱iigan with a “T” is not only improper, he said, but a funny sort of mistake since a “tah” sound can mean eating in Haida. So, rather invoking the sound of children running in a great house, the Anglicized name says “he who eats noisily.”
Dana Moraes, chair of the Haida Gwaii school board, spoke about how adaptability and resourcefulness have long been part of life at Tahayghen Elementary.
Designed for 390 students, it swelled to 450 at the height of local deployments to Canadian Forces Station Masset, and every available space — what are now the school kitchen, art room, computer lab, and StrongStrong rooms — was turned into classrooms.
Moraes noted that the school’s several awards — the Donna Wesley Award, the Rosa Bell Award for Haida-language excellence, and the Faith Thorgeirson Service Awards for adult volunteers — will continue at Daax̱iigan Sḵ’adaa Née.
Other people who spoke at the ceremony included David Jones, who helped build the school in 1969, and who remembers the dog that ran into the gym just as crews were smoothing the last corner of concrete.
Peter Eppinga, who graduated Tahayghen in 1995, was challenged by Claudette Lavoie, his former teacher, to match the well-written signature he left in the school yearbook back then.
“I wonder if his signature is still the same,” she said. “I doubt it, because I hear that doctors have really scribbly writing.”
Now a doctor with a Master’s in public health (and two Lamborghinis), Eppinga said going to Tahayghen meant being raised by a community.
Eppinga remembered how his parents encouraged him to study hard, despite his mother’s awful experience at residential school not so long ago.
He remembered Haida language lessons with Nonie Mary Swanson and her great way of eating potato chips, plus the click-clacking cowboy boots of former principal Andy Ellis, who gave students books for their birthdays because “readers are leaders.”
Eppinga also remembered the elder who told him there is nothing stronger than a Haida with a strong education.
“It’s true,” he said. “These roots are sources of strength and pride.”
Leslie Brown, another student who “graduated in the nineteen-hundreds,” also spoke warmly of Andy Ellis, who gave her extra tutoring in math from Grades 4 to 7 and organized an islands-wide math contest every year — experiences that built her confidence and helped her towards a career in finance.
It was also Andy Ellis who made sure Brown didn’t have to go without enjoying her chinni’s home-brewed root beer at lunch — it was bottled in beer bottles — by having her drink it in the office after he took a sip.
Brown acknowledged too how Haida culture is such a part of the school that kids today tap their feet in rhythm as soon as they hear a Haida drum.
“That wasn’t always our story here, on our own land,” she said.
As the ceremony came to an end, current teacher Jenny Kellar spoke about field trips, the science fair, Crazy Hair Days, other traditions that will carry on to Daax̱iigan.
“That noise in the house pit will be present in the new school also,” she said.
Candace Weir, the Indigenous resource worker at Tahayghen, said the ceremony was an example of tll yada — making it right.
Weir said the absence at the school’s closing ceremony of a district superintendent or of one of the northern Haida Gwaii school board representatives, who apologized saying he was very busy with nation business, was a teachable moment.
“We need to show up,” she said, challenging both to attend the new school’s opening ceremony on Sept. 4.
“This involves our community, our students, our children,” she said. “That’s our nation. These are our leaders.”