Stephen Ruttan - Vancouver Island Scoundrels, Eccentrics and Originals: Tales from the Library Vault

Louis in Canadian, February 10, 1969.

Eventually, a solution was found. In 1966, seventeen years after Victoria Janes death, Louis went to live with Wong. Money was provided for his care. And with Louis gone, the developers were free to develop the estate.

A big new hotel was built on the site of Louiss former home. For a few years, there was a restaurant on top of the Chateau Victoria called the Parrot House. But times change and memories fade.

Not long after the transfer, Wong died. While the family continued to care for Louis, he must have missed his friend. The Wong family would not talk, but there was a report that a few years later, Louis, too, had died. And, bowing to fading memories, the Parrot House changed its name. Louis, it would seem, was gone for good.

A good story, though, never dies. Who knows? Louis himself might still be around.

The Hallmark Society is an organization dedicated to heritage preservation in the Capital Regional District. It has named its most prestigious honour the Louis Award, in memory of Louis and his demolished home. The award recognizes an exceptional heritage building restoration, one that demonstrates unusual attention to authenticity and structural integrity, and that has had an exemplary impact on a neighbourhood or region. As it recognizes only the truly exceptional, it is not awarded every year. The recipients are given something Louis would have approved of: walnuts and brandy.

IN THE EARLY 1990s SEVERAL groups of Mowachaht elders left their homes on Vancouver Island and travelled to New York. They had been invited by the American Museum of Natural History to see a mysterious object that had left their community ninety years ago. This object, the Yuquot Whalers Shrine, is composed of an original small building and its contents: 88 carved human figures, 4 carved whales, and 16 human skulls. It was collected in 1904 by George Hunt, acting on the instructions of a museum curator, Franz Boas. The shrine had been built over several generations by Mowachaht ancestors, but few living band members had seen it. The question hanging over the elders was this: should the shrine come back home? But an outsider might well ask another question: why is it in New York at all?

Strange as its presence might seem in New York, it is in fact far from unusual. The American Museum of Natural History has an enormous northwest Native art collection, the largest in the world. And New York is not alone. Museums throughout the world have substantial collections of this art. So the shrine is part of a huge transfer of art and artifacts, from the Pacific Northwest to the rest of the world. The question really is, why did this transfer occur? In their original home, the art and artifacts had meaning and relevance. To the rest of the world, they did not. To understand why this happened requires examining the eighteenth century, when the first contacts between Native people and Europeans occurred in the Pacific Northwest. Only by studying their relationship, and its subsequent developments, can the answer be found.