Kiidk'yaas
Kiidk'yaas or Kiid K'iyaas ("old tree"), also called golden spruce , was a Sitka spruce , Picea sitchensis 'Aurea', which was found about six kilometers south of the settlement of Port Clements on the banks of the Yakoun River on the island Haida Gwaii grew up in the Haida Gwaii archipelago . The islands lie off the Canadian Pacific coast and belong to the province of British Columbia . The tree had a rare genetic mutation that caused the needles to be golden.
The spruce was worshiped by the Haida First Nation who live on the island. In their mythical world, when the ancestors abused each other, the Creator had buried their village under snow. An old man and a boy hid under the plank of a red cedar tree and then fled up the Yakoun River. The old man warned the boy not to look back, but he disobeyed and was turned into the golden spruce. It was said that the tree would be venerated until the last generation.
On January 22, 1997 , a 48-year-old unemployed woodworker named Grant Hadwin felled the Kiidk'yaas as a political commitment against the woodworking companies. He was later arrested but mysteriously disappeared before he could be brought to justice.
The act shocked the Haida community; the elders felt that they had failed to adequately protect the tree, and some worried that the prophecy that the tree would be worshiped until the last generation meant that the current generation of Haida would be the last.
But in 1977 a group of botanists from the University of British Columbia (UBC) visited Haida Gwaii to take offshoots from the Kiidk'yaas. These offshoots were grafted onto an ordinary Sitka spruce and golden young trees resulted. These trees were raised at the UBC Botanical Garden and Center for Plant Research.
Upon hearing of the tree's destruction, the arboretum offered one of the young trees to the Haida as a replacement for the Kiidk'yaas. The Haida accepted and planted it near where the Kiidk'yaas had stood. In addition, attempts were made to reproduce 80 parts of the felled tree.
Web links
- University of British Columbia's involvement
- The Spirit of Kiid K'iyaas (.pdf)
- New Yorker - The Golden Bough
- The Golden Spruce written by John Vaillant, Knopf Canada 2005
- UBC Botanical Garden and Center for Plant Research homepage
Coordinates: 53 ° 37 '12 " N , 132 ° 12' 29" W.