Many hands built it and many more will make things inside.
Ts’úu HlG̱anggulaa Née, Cedar Working House, is a new woodworking shop built on the grounds of the Tluu Xaada Naay longhouse and canoe shed in Old Massett.
A crowd of apprentice carvers, summer students, family, friends and visitors gathered to celebrate the new building with a tea and tour on Sunday, Aug. 3.
Haida artist Kihlyaahda, Christian White, welcomed everyone with a song in Xaad Kil. Behind him, freshly cut cedar boughs hung over the doorway and a cedar sign shaped like a copper shield was ready to be unveiled.
White said the Tluu Xaada Naay (Canoe People’s House) Society is dedicated to Haida arts and culture. Most of all, the society aims to encourage young people to take up Haida art in whatever way they want to carry it on, and to be proud of it.
“What I’m doing is removing the stumbling blocks,” White said.
Dry, heated by energy-efficient heat pumps, brightly lit and well equipped, the Ts’úu HlG̱anggulaa Née means everyone working at Tluu Xaada Naay should have the tools and workspace they need.
Steps away from the much larger canoe and totem carving shed built in 1986 by his late father, Morris White, the new building will be especially useful for smaller projects such as masks, bentwood boxes, panels, or smaller totem poles.
“We have no excuses now,” White said.
Featuring red-cedar siding and beams, the long single-storey building has a line of windows placed high so they bring in natural light without taking up wall space.
The concrete floor and plywood lower walls are heavy duty. So is the equipment, which ranges from a bandsaw and table saw to a portable sawmill assembled by Christian’s brothers Todd and Derek. Even a small tractor for hauling wood will be stored there in winter.
White said several tools came thanks to a private donor — an elderly fellow from Winnipeg who worked as a pharmacist but whose lifelong hobby was woodworking.
After seeing Tluu Xaada Naay featured on the TV show Canada Over the Edge, the man drove all the way from Winnipeg with $70,000 in tools to donate.
“It’s really great that we have people like that across Canada, who respect our work and our culture and the work we’re trying to do here,” White said.
Among the new tools is a CNC machine. With a wide table and a computer-controlled arm that can be fitted with either a drill or a laser head, it can precisely carve or etch designs into wood and metal.
To make the copper-shaped sign commemorating the building’s several funders, White made a design that includes a formline illustration of a Haida longhouse with a painted front.
Working on the CNC machine together with local carpenter and teacher Ian MacLean, assistant Tanya White made a scalable, vectorized version of the design that the machine could read. Once the sign was shaped and carved on the CNC, the team hand-painted the text and house-front image, then finished it with trim to show the copper’s three sections.
White said he started designing the building two years ago, and it only took 16 months to build — quick work, especially after it doubled in size this spring.
“Halfway through the project I said, ‘Why not make it bigger?” White said, laughing.
“But we need the space, especially for this mill.”
Carpenter Royce Ward of CDC Contracting was the lead builder on the project.
Tasked with putting up a woodworking shop for a master Haida carver, “You definitely dot the I’s and cross the T’s,” he said with a grin.
Ward, who is Haida, said all the wood for the building was harvested by Taan Forest, the Haida Nation-owned forestry company.
As it happens, some of it was also scaled by his father, a log-scaler who was working in Port Clements.
While putting up some of the red cedar siding, Ward noticed what he thought was one of his dad’s scaling tags — he often sees his dad checking his tags at the end of the day. He asked and sure enough, his dad had scaled the logs before they were milled into siding.
“So it goes full circle,” Ward said — a building designed for Haida carvers made with wood harvested, scaled, and installed by Haida people.
On an island where getting a building up quickly can be a challenge, the Tluu Xaada Naay Society seems to have found a simple answer — plenty of help.
Construction of the huge Tluu Xaada Naay longhouse started in September 2004 and was done by May.
“On weekends, we had the village here raising the quarter posts,” White said.
For Cedar Working House, the extra help came from the crew of six apprentices and eight students now working hard next door to finish the Tluuwee Kwiiyaas, or Beloved Canoe — a 50-foot Haida ocean-going canoe that will launch along the shore by Tluu Xaada Naay on the morning of Saturday, Aug. 24.
Royce Ward said whenever his builders had a long stretch of wall-framing to lift, the canoe crew came over to help.
When the huge canoe needed to be flipped over, he said his crew did the same for them.
“Everybody was on board.”