Natural History Museum's iconic canoe is on the move, not going far

An indigenous-people’s iconic canoe, acquired around 1883 by the American Museum of Natural History, is being relocated to the home it had there at the turn of the 20th century.

The 63-foot Great Canoe — one of the longest such boats in existence — was wheeled out Tuesday morning from the Grand Gallery at the museum’s West 77th Street entrance. It will debut in spring 2021 in the museum's Northwest Coast Hall, which closed in 2017 for renovation.

Museum advisers from Pacific Northwest’s Heiltsuk and Haida Nations, whose ancestors are linked to the canoe, chanted and sung at a ceremony in the Grand Gallery before workers in orange vests and white hard hats wheeled the canoe away in a wooden cradle.

"Canoes, they connect us," said Jisgang (Nika Collison), of the Haida, who added: "The canoe is integral to being oceangoing people."

The canoe — featuring a stylized killer whale likely painted by Haida artist Charles Edenshaw, as well as a figurehead sculpture of a sea wolf — was made from one Western red cedar tree. It could date to decades before the acquisition, according to curator Peter Whiteley.

Originally, the canoe was used to pay a dowry for a chief’s daughter, said Chief Wigvilba Wakas (Harvey Humchitt) of the Heiltsuk. 

The indigenous people advising the museum receive a small stipend, said Kaa-xoo-auxch (Garfield George), one of the advisers.

The canoe had been in its current location for about 60 years and in a few other spots since the late 19th century.

The Northwest Coast Hall depicts artifacts from indigenous inhabitants of Alaska, British Columbia and Washington State, and when the hall reopens, it will exhibit about 800 objects that have been newly preserved, according to the museum.

The indigenous advisers are helping plan the new hall, including what's displayed and how it's explained.

In the past, there weren't such consultations. 

"The worst of the worst that I've seen was when I came to the Northwest Coast Hall in the early '90s," George said: a docent was telling visitors, wrongly, that a mask on the wall belonged to African peoples.

The Haida's population before contact with European settlers had been in the tens of thousands, according to The Canadian Encyclopedia. By 1915, the encyclopedia says, the population was 588, chiefly because of infectious diseases like smallpox brought by the settlers.

The Heiltsuk had a similar fate: Smallpox in the 19th century had helped reduce the population by 80% or more, according to Michael E. Harkin's "The Heiltsuks: Dialogues of Culture and History on the Northwest Coast." The population had decreased to about 200 by the 1880s, the encyclopedia says.

The canoe itself was the subject of a 2007 documentary "Meet Me at the Canoe" and mentioned in J.D. Salinger’s novel “The Catcher in the Rye”: Holden Caulfield muses about visiting “this long, long Indian war canoe, about as long as three … Cadillacs in a row, with about twenty Indians in it, some of them paddling, some of them just standing around looking tough, and they all had war paint all over their faces.”

Those paddling figures, which dated to 1910, were removed in 2006.

Of the museum's 5 million annual visitors, about 400,000 were school groups and camp groups, 45,000 of whom were from Long Island, according to museum spokesman Michael Walker.

Correction: Harvey Humchitt's first name was incorrect in an earlier version of this story.

By Matthew Chayes

matthew.chayes@newsday.comchayesmatthew

Matthew Chayes, a Newsday reporter since 2007, covers New York City.