An Open Letter to the Hummingbird Doctor
Dear Jasḵwaan,
When I listened to Chief 7idansuu, James Hart, speak last year at the Audain Art Museum, he said that sometimes carvers on Haida Gwaii, himself included, work into the early hours of the morning, or sometimes all night.
This was a rich image for a writer. I imagined these men and women with their tools, carving into the red cedar, the sound of sculpting wood; the smell of the carpet of wood chips accumulating beneath their feet, a dark black sky, maybe even a howling cold wind or ocean breeze.
I know that Franz Kafka wrote late into the night, sometimes until morning.
Massimo Recalcati offers another beautiful image. In a lecture on love, he tells the story of Jean-Paul Sartre walking through Paris at night, passing along the street where Albert Camus lived. Sartre would look up toward Camus's study from the street, to see whether the light was on. And when he saw the light shining through the window, he felt happiness.
Recalcati describes what that light meant to Sartre:
"It's beautiful to know that in that room there is someone I love who is working."
We often forget that when we learn something, the hard work we put into our learning takes time, dedication. But in the end, we work hard in silence. Maybe someone, a friend, or family member, might come by our homes late at night and also see the light turned on.
But often, others cannot see the journey or hard road that we travel along when we learn and dedicate ourselves to something. For you to learn and speak the Haida language, to articulate each sound, those beautiful wave-shaped words of X̱aad Kíl, and the ones that sound like Raven, would be an arduous journey, where you would train your tongue, your throat, your memory, until the language took hold of you, your whole being now dwelling inside it, learning it and speaking it and teaching it and sharing it.
And could you have known that you would return again and again, perhaps also in silence, to the old cassette tapes on which your late mentor and teacher, Tsinii Stephen Brown, so meticulously recorded the Haida language?
This is the sound of silence. Of learning and hard work. The silence of witnessing someone we love work. The silence of imagining another human being work hard.
This, to me, is beautiful.
Strengthening X̱aad Kíl: Haida Language Immersion with Dr. Jasḵwaan Bedard