David A. Neel reflects on reconnecting with his Kwakwa̱ka̱'wakw heritage in his memoir The Way Home

The Way Home by David A. Neel is a finalist for the 2020 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction. The winner will be announced on Nov. 18, 2020.

Neel is from a family of traditional Kwakwa̱ka̱'wakw artists. But his father died when he was a baby and he was separated from his family, and grew up away from his culture and traditions. Twenty-five years later, when he saw a mask made by his great-great-grandfather in a museum, he decided it was time to reconnect with his culture and follow in his father's footsteps and become an artist himself. He also worked on coming to terms with the trauma and abuse he suffered in his childhood. Neel shares his story in the memoir The Way Home.

Neel is a carver, jeweler, painter, printmaker, writer and photographer who is a member of the Kwakwa̱ka̱'wakw First Nation in British Columbia. The Way Home is his third book.

Read an excerpt from The Way Home below.

When I began to organize the material for this book, it took a great deal of soul-searching to decide what to include and what to leave out. Initially, I thought the book would describe my unusual art practice, which includes woodcarving, hand engraving, photography, writing, painting and printmaking. But I soon realized that an account of how I found my way back to the traditions and culture of my father's people after two and a half decades away was a story worth telling. My people, the Kwakwa̱ka̱'wakw, the traditional inhabitants of the coastal areas of northeastern Vancouver Island and mainland British Columbia, have a rich traditional culture that includes masks, dances, canoes, totem poles, stories and much more. My father, an artist, returned to the ancestors when I was an infant, and for many years I lost the connection with that aspect of my life. Shortly after his death, in 1962, my mother and I moved away, and I began a circuitous journey that wouldn't take me back to British Columbia until 1987.

It is a rare thing for an Indigenous person to come home to his or her people after decades away.

If my story were a typical one, like that of the many Indigenous people who as children were adopted out or separated from their families, I would have lived my life never knowing my father's family or our heritage. It is a rare thing for an Indigenous person to come home to his or her people after decades away. In all cultures family and heritage become undefined and intangible when you've been away for a long time. The sense of having a place of origin fades until it is a dim memory. But, somehow, I always knew I would reconnect with the people portrayed in my father's paintings – although it took me 25 years to realize how that could be accomplished.

Although I didn't have my father to teach me about our culture, I had the rich symbolism of his art, and it nourished my young mind and gave me a vision. Art communicates at an intuitive level through symbols, which can express gigabytes of information. Carl Jung says, "The underlying primal psychic reality is so inconceivably complex that it can be grasped only at the furthest reaches of intuition, and then but very dimly. That is why we need symbols." Symbols speak to the soul, to the primitive psyche, communicating coded messages that bypass the conscious mind to  communicate to  a  deeper part of  the brain.

Northwest Coast art is rich in symbols, and those symbols played an essential role in my early life, helping to form my emotional and psychological foundation. I grew up surrounded by my father's art, and although I had no one to explain the imagery to me, no one to teach me about the Trickster and the Transformer, those images spoke to me and affirmed that there were people and a culture that I belonged to. My father, his family, and our people were embodied in images of masks, canoes, and dancers that communicated to some inner part of me, so that as a child I never completely lost touch with our culture – though I had yet to see an actual mask, a canoe, or a totem pole. My father's art represented that world, and it kept a small but persistent ember smouldering inside me, waiting to be fanned into a flame. And that moment would come, years later, in the most unexpected place, thousands of miles from home.

In 1986, I was living in Dallas, Texas, 3,600 kilometres to the south, when was I called home by my great-great-grandfather Charlie James (Yakuglas). I was 27 years old, I had a house, and I had a promising career as a photographer – I'd already had three solo exhibitions in Dallas. I sold everything, loaded up my Honda Accord, and drove north to pursue my vision of becoming a Kwakwa̱ka̱'wakw artist, like generations of my family before me. I had no contacts and no game plan, just a burning desire to follow in the family footsteps. When I returned to British Columbia, I found that few Indigenous people are able to find their way home after many years away, and even fewer are able to immerse themselves in the traditional culture. How does a person go about reconnecting with long-forgotten relations and a culture that is distinct from and at times in opposition to non-Indigenous society? If that person were able to reconnect with their roots, would they find that the values, beliefs, and social norms were compatible with their own? And, most importantly, would they be welcomed and accepted by their people after being so long away?

How does a person go about reconnecting with long-forgotten relations and a culture that is distinct from and at times in opposition to non-Indigenous society?

In hindsight, it seems audacious to have expected to return and simply become an Indigenous carver, but my ability to believe in the improbable served me well. Through a combination of good luck and a stubborn nature, I was able to achieve my dream. How was it done, you ask? Well, that's an interesting story ...

Excerpted from The Way Home  by David A. Neel Copyright © 2020 David A. Neel Published by University of British Columbia Press. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.