A unique and special part of our reconciliation story is our relationship with Jack Gates, a Haida man who was part of our church community for over eight years. Though Jack lived most of his life in the Downtown Eastside, he carried a deep longing to visit Haida Gwaii, his ancestral homeland.
He often shared with sadness that he had never set foot on the land of his people. While he was well connected to Indigenous friends in both the DTES and our church, he still felt a gap in his connection to Haida culture.
Jonathan Ng (our DTES chaplain) and I became Jack’s next of kin, as he had no family to advocate for him. We walked with him through many medical and legal decisions in the final years of his life.
Jack passed away earlier this year. In March, we held a memorial service in his honour. But I couldn’t shake the sense that we were meant to take Jack home to his land. With the blessing of the Old Masset Council of the Haida Nation, we were granted permission to do just that.
It was a significant financial undertaking but God provided. We raised $3,727 through the generous giving of our church and some others who attended his memorial. The total cost for three of us – myself, Angel Joy Robinson, and Jenny Hawkinson – to make the journey was $3,726.17. It felt like amazing confirmation of God’s presence in this act of love and return.
We arrived on a Tuesday, April 15 of Holy Week and returned on Good Friday, having fulfilled a sacred promise to honour our friend and return him to his land.
Reflections on Strathcona’s Trip to Haida Gwaii
By Jenny Hawkinson
When Dawn first mentioned that she wanted to “bring Jack home” by returning his ashes to Haida Gwaii, I thought it was wildly poetic. When she extended the invitation to me to join her and Angel Joy in representing his Strathcona Vineyard community, I was hit by the weight of such a journey.
Jack never set foot on Haida Gwaii. His mother, who was a residential school survivor, ended up leaving her land after marrying a white man and lived in various places in BC until settling in Vancouver when Jack was 10 years old. He grew up disconnected from his clan and culture.
When we agreed to accompany Dawn, our pastor, to Haida Gwaii, we immediately started inquiring through our individual connections about Haida protocol. We wanted to be as prepared as possible as we entered their territory.
We learned, through Angel Joy’s experience as a Gitxsan woman, that cultural practices and expectations vary greatly from one community to another. And so we did what we could. When the flights were booked, we started to put together protocol gift baskets with items that were important to each of us, and we prayed for God to prepare the way ahead of us.
My concerns over how we would be received dissipated as we walked through the doors of St. John’s Anglican Church in Old Masset. We were greeted by a Haida elder with a mischievous smile and an apron that read, “Elsie’s Hot Buns.”
Over the next few hours we chatted with the elders while enjoying fried baloney, spaghetti, and salmon sandwiches on Elsie’s hot bannock buns.
After tea, we met with the Reverend Lily Bell, who had been pastoring in her community for forty years. At one point she exclaimed how delighted she was that we were from Jack’s church. She thought we were from the Ministry of Family Services. Why else would three unrelated women from the city travel this far to bring Jack home?
Dawn told her more of Jack’s story: his involvement in our church, how he was known as “Generous Jack” and loved to share food he had cooked for our weekly Sunday brunches, and his housing advocacy work. The Reverend wept. It was too common for family members to leave and get caught up in the underbelly of the city. Like Jack, many never made it home.
Reverend Lily helped us plan his memorial and the ashes ceremony. A dozen people showed up for the event, including the matriarch of Jack’s clan. We got the chance to share about Jack’s life, the things he struggled with and how Jesus redeemed his experiences.
We spread Jack’s ashes in the water on the shore of his family’s Raven clan reservation, the same water that connected him to the CRAB Park beach in the Downtown Eastside.
One of the honours and heartaches of sharing life with friends in the Downtown Eastside who have been estranged from their communities and family is that we can help facilitate that connection. I wish Jack had been able to do this trip before he passed away to be with Jesus.
May God nurture and sustain the relationships and connections between Old Masset in Haida Gwaii and Strathcona Vineyard in the DTES, and may the resurrecting hope of Jesus Christ be strong in this beautiful place.