Originally published Saturday, June 14, 1997

By JON HAHN  
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

Ralph Bennett straddles a huge section of 2,000-year-old red cedar as comfortably as he would an old Harley-Davidson and rests a chisel across his thigh as he ponders a question.

Woodcarving and all of life is a constant questioning and searching for answers for Ralph, 47, a full-blood Haida and fifth-generation woodcarver from British Columbia's Queen Charlotte Islands and Alaska. There is no real separation between his discourse and his art, save for the common sense of not trying to talk and take his eyes off his carving while pushing a razor-sharp tool.

"I'm not sure what it is that I do as a teacher," he said, brushing back his long raven hair. "I give what I have and cut the b---s---. But you can see it in the work the person does. You've given them a vehicle of expression and it becomes an expression of spirit."

Tucked away in the few high fir trees left on the southwest edge of downtown Redmond, Ralph, his wife, Heidi, and his students are carving native woods in the old native ways, bringing back to life the traditions of honoring family and values in the form of totem poles, masks and other carvings and art forms.

This work-in-progress, straddled by Ralph in the exquisitely crafted work studio, is a totem pole to be dedicated next month in a sister cities-sponsored program in Nantes, France.

Ralph and his small circle of carvers are working at Sammamish Slough House Park, a King County Parks facility hard by the Sammamish Slough as it runs through Redmond. As caretakers of the facility as well as artists, the Bennetts have created a self-guided pathway/tour of more than a dozen historic carvings being stored there. Heidi also has made little garden areas, labeling indigenous plants used for food, medicine or subsistence by Native Americans as well as early settlers.

As resident caretakers and, for all intents and purposes, artists-in-residence, they are in a way keeping alive the heritage first raised here by renowned carver Dudley Carter.

It was Carter, the county's first official artist-in-residence, who built the workplace/studio with its huge beams, carved door and aggregate floor inlaid with great cross-section slices of old-growth wood.

And this piece of cedar being carved for Nantes was salvaged from Carter's "Maid of the Woods," a 40-foot relief of a nude Indian woman carved into the trunk of a 250-foot cedar. Huge sections of the tree were brought down to Redmond after it twice was struck by lightning and burned.

The Bennetts have been the nucleus of the Native Arts & Cultural Center and Haida House, a self-supported educational program.

"We've had some 3,000 local schoolchildren, another 1,000 Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts and Indian Guides, and thousands of others come through our programs in the last several years, all at no cost to any branch of government," Heidi said with no small amount of pride.

"The only government money was in the form of a grant for educational materials we were able to take into the schools to help develop curriculum packages of their own. My daughter, Dea Shipp, often helps me when we go into classrooms and teach kids how to carve their own miniature totem poles, or weave their own baskets."

The totem pole Ralph is now carving includes the bear figure, a symbol of basic physical reality, and the whale, symbolizing the spiritual, mysterious sense of things.

"The artist is lucky, because he gets to venture into the otherworldliness of things, and to experience them and give them form," Ralph said.

This particular totem pole will be shipped uncompleted to France, so that Ralph can finish carving and add the final touches in public, as part of the annual summer festival at Nantes. His work there will be done in the dried-up moat area of an ancient castle in the heart of the city. And Heidi, also a carver and former student of Ralph's, will display basket weaving and other Native American skills.

"We're sending Ralph because their festival theme this year is 'American Pathways,'" said Monica Howell, president of the Seattle-Nantes Sister City Association. "Actually, they are familiar with his work because he did a totem pole for them in 1993, and that piece is on display in their local museum," she said.

The Northwest delegation also will include more than a dozen members of a Native American dance group affiliated with the Alaska Native Cultural Heritage Association. The group performs traditional potlatch ceremonies in full Indian ceremonial regalia.

Ralph, or Goola'Slacoon ("Abalone Fingers") in his native Haida, recalls wanting to be a carver "ever since I was 4 years old, and was crawling around in all the old carving chips and shavings and unfinished totem poles left by carvers of earlier generations beneath the town hall in Hydaburg, Alaska."

His parents divorced when he was an infant, and he was raised by his grandparents until his father remarried and reclaimed him, bringing him to the Lower 48, Ralph said. He learned to read and speak English after the family moved about the Ballard, Fremont and Phinney Ridge neighborhoods, he said.

"Before that, I'd spoken only my native tongue and broken English, a mixture."

Ralph's art is not as abstract as his discourse, which may seem at times, like his totem pole, to stray across the line between reality and otherworldliness. While his work invokes some of the same symbols of his Haida forefathers -- and is executed with hand tools in the way he learned as a child -- his carvings have a form and a presence not seen in many of the knock-off copies of Northwest Coastal Indian art churned out since the turn of the century.

"Instead of being strictly a totem pole carver, I am more a symbolist. I get to create work under the influence of my ancestors, reacting to my environment and things in my life in much the same way they did," he said. "The tradition is not in the line or form; the tradition is to honor all things and all people, all life.

"And my goal is to inspire others to look into their own cultures. That's one reason I like to talk to children, so they can begin finding dignity and spiritual pride in their own heritage."

Jon Hahn is a staff columnist who writes three times a week in the P-I.

Sammamish Slough House Park is at Leary Way Northeast and 159th Place Northeast in Redmond. Self-guided tours during regular, dawn-to-dusk park hours. Class schedules, registration information for Native Arts & Cultural Center and Haida House, 425-869-6359. Seattle-Nantes Sister City Association: 206-232-2983.