SEQUIM — A tall team of healers, plus a relatively short greeter, stand ready now at the Jamestown S’Klallam tribe’s new health clinic.
It took about three hours — under a mercifully rainless sky — Wednesday to erect two totem poles, straight from the House of Myths carving shed in Blyn.
Installer Alan Jones and his Jamestown Excavating crew lowered them into their places in front of the clinic, heralding the fact that it’s close to completion.
The Jamestown Medical Clinic is expected to open in June to provide comprehensive care for the general public as well as for tribal members, Jamestown Health and Human Services Director Bill Riley has said.
The 34,000-square-foot facility will replace the much smaller Jamestown Family Health Clinic at 777 N. Fifth Ave.
The new building, which cost some $7 million to construct, sits on land donated by Olympic Medical Center at 808 N. Fifth Ave., behind the Olympic Medical Cancer Center.
Earlier this week, Jack Grinnell of J.M. Grinnell Contracting — the general contractor for the Jamestown project — said he’s in the process of obtaining city permits, while awaiting shipment of the elevator that will enable him to sign off on the two-story structure.
The tallest totem pole is titled “The Healing Arts.” At 36 feet in height and 3,500 pounds, it bears images of a medicine man and his “spirit helpers.”
A 14-foot totem closer to the building entrance is simply a man wearing a cedar hat and holding out his hands, titled “Welcome.”
The totem poles arrived Wednesday morning, lying horizontal, under blankets on long flatbeds.
Watching, and ready to help guide them onto their support poles, was master carver and totem-pole designer Dale Faulstich.
Faulstich is the man behind the poles at Peninsula College in Port Angeles and at the Jamestowns’ tribal center, 7 Cedars Casino and Longhouse Market in Blyn; he works with carvers Nathan Gilles, Bud Turner and Harry Burlingame.
Faulstich was inspired to design “The Healing Arts” as an ode to the Native American shamanic tradition, in which a medicine man’s role is to guard the health and prosperity of his community.
“He accomplishes this task through his ability to visit the spirit world and return with certain powers that he can use to aid his people,” Faulstich said in a printed tale about the totem pole.
“Just as a shaman inhabited the space between the physical and spiritual planes, those animals that also inhabited transitional zones . . . could grant him his most potent powers,” he wrote.
In the tale, the animals are spirit helpers to the man, and include the mountain goat, who lives between the terrestrial and sky worlds and travels with great ease; the frog, who has the power to transform its body; the “devil fish” or octopus, who can change color and shape; and the “land otter,” who is “at home on land as well as in the water, and is one of the most powerful supernatural assistants.”
Now that the poles are up, Faulstich will go inside the clinic, to spend the next month adding more art.
“It’s a maze in there,” he said, so along with carved panels to decorate the interior, Faulstich and his assistants will install a sign system bearing Native American designs.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
