PORT ANGELES — Visitors to the Lower Elwha Klallam Health Clinic now will receive the spiritual healing wishes of a 12-foot-tall, 4-foot wide totem pole erected in a three-hour ceremony Sunday.
Created by the House of Tears Carvers of the Lummi Nation Reservation near Bellingham, it depicts a shape shifter — a human who can assume animal form.
In this case, the creature is a bear.
According to head carver Jewell Praying Wolf James of the Lummi, one way the medicine people of the Northwest healed others was by paddling a spirit canoe to the spiritual world to recover a lost soul.
James’s massive cedar figure holds a canoe paddle for such a journey.
“He stands ready to perform the ceremony coming ahead,” James said. “He is watching, he is looking, he is vigilant as a guardian.”
The totem, received at last summer’s Paddle to Elwha, was intended to stand at Tse-whit-zen village on the Port Angeles waterfront.
Due to litigation over the former Hood Canal Bridge graving yard there, it was erected at the clinic.
Frances Charles, Lower Elwha chairwoman, spoke of the bond of pain between her tribe and the Lummi, who also await closure of the ancestral cemetery of Semiahmah.
