Haisla welcome sacred totem back to B.C.

Gone for nearly 80 years, a sacred Haisla totem pole has finally been returned to its home.

The Haisla held a special celebration Saturday in Kitimat, B.C., about 650 kilometres northwest of Vancouver, to welcome back the nine-metre-tall G'psgolox totem following a long campaign to secure its return from Sweden.

Louisa Smith, a spokeswoman for the Haisla totem committee and great-great-granddaughter of G'psgolox, the Haisla First Nation chief who commissioned the totem, told CBC News on Friday the totem holds great significance for the Haisla people.

"There is so much significance around the return of the old pole. It will help rejuvenate the Haisla culture, where we can continue to pass on our tradition to the next generation," Smith said. "Our culture is an oral history and the history is accompanied by artworks just like the old totem pole."

Carved in the 1870s, the totem is believed to have been sold by an unauthorized person to Olof Hansson, a representative of the Swedish government. Hansson then donated the totem to Sweden's National Ethnographic Museum in Stockholm.

The totem stayed in Stockholm until March, when it was formally handed over in a repatriation ceremony.

In a show of appreciation, the Haisla gave the Ethnographic Museum a replica of the totem created by a descendant of the man who carved the original. The replica was raised outside the museum with the help of Lorenz Friedlaender, Canada's ambassador to Sweden, Swedish cabinet minister Leif Pagrotsky and former NHL great Borje Salming.

The totemwas on display for the past few months at the University of British Columbia's Museum of Anthropology before being sent to Kitimat, on B.C.'s north coast, for Saturday's ceremony.

The Haisla began searching for the totem in the 1970s and finally located it in Stockholm in 1991. The Swedish government agreed to return it in 1994, but it took more than a decade to raise the funds needed to ship it back to B.C.

"The current [Haisla] chief Dan Paul has been very grateful to all the people who have helped in making this day a reality," Smith said.