Marven Robinson’s first encounter with a spirit bear was a spiritual moment. “It was almost like my life flashed in front of me,” he said.
On the instruction of his Gitga’at hereditary chief and grandfather-in-law, Chief Johnny Clifton, Robinson was showing a crew around his homeland on the B.C. coast to help them find and film the rare white bear.
“All of a sudden … a big white bear came walking out and crossed the creek and went and caught a fish right out in front of us. I was only 19 then and basically it hooked me and I’ve been doing that since.”
Bears are spiritually significant in many Indigenous cultures. The bear represents courage in the Seven Sacred Laws, also known as the Seven Grandfather Teachings, which are shared by several communities. Unreserved is exploring each of the seven teachings in this series, Sacred Seven.
Robinson, also known as the “Spirit Bear Whisperer,” has been a bear guide for more than 25 years. He introduces visitors and photographers to spirit bears and coastal wolves through his company Gitga’at Spirit Tours based in Hartley Bay, B.C.
These rare black bear variants, also known as Kermode bears, are revered by many First Nations. Different legends explain the bears’ colouring. “One of the legends that goes back far to glacial age is that the creator left one in 10 black bears white, just to remind us of the clean, pristine times when this earth was covered with glaciers,” Robinson said.
The story reminds Robinson of his responsibility to take care of the lands he lives and works on. “We’ve been lucky enough to share our territory with this bear. And I think it’s taught us that we’re only sharing it. We don’t own the area, the bears, the wildlife that live there. We just feel like we’re left to look after and try and keep the area the same way it was when we found it.”
Before his passing, Chief Johnny Clifton gave Robinson a responsibility to take care of the spirit bear.
Robinson says his work as a guide has helped him fulfil this responsibility, through public awareness and tourism.
Until the 2010s, the Gitga’at people kept their local spirit bears a secret, for fear of trophy hunting, he says. But eventually, photographing the bear became a key piece of protecting them — and the Gitga’at territory.
Robinson recalls when the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline project was set to run through the Hartley Bay area.
“[Photographer] Paul Nicklin was coming up to shoot some stuff for the cover of National Geographic, and I had taken him out to one of my special places. I called it a nursery for the spirit bears … and I was sitting with him when he first got to photograph one of the bears by a waterfall.
“‘Marvin,’ he said, ‘if you want to save Gitga’at territory, you’ve got to start taking people here, so they got to see what we’re seeing today.’ And once National Geographic had the bear on the cover, the cat was out of the bag and people started coming. People wrote letters and managed to get the pipeline … stopped.”
Robinson says the move prevented irreparable environmental harm to his homeland — thanks in part to the spirit bear.
On the opposite coast, a polar bear skin is helping Vanessa Flowers preserve her Inuit culture.
When a hunter in her community of Hopedale, Nunatsiavut, harvested a young male polar bear, Flowers reached out to him to see if she and her brother Nicholas could observe him as he cleaned its skin.
“He said, ‘Actually, I’m trying to sell it just as it is. Do you want to buy it?’ And we thought, ‘You know, this is the perfect opportunity to learn.'”
The Flowers siblings are cultural teachers. Together with other youth, they created the Inotsiavik Centre, an organization connecting Inuit in Nunatsiavut to their language and culture. Last year they won $1 million to establish the centre through the Arctic Inspiration Prize.
The siblings are well practiced in cleaning sealskins, but cleaning a polar bear was a new, much bigger challenge.
“Between my brother and I, we started at one in the afternoon and we finished cleaning it at seven I believe. I think it was six or seven hours cleaning it straight with a few breaks in between…. It just seemed like it was never ending.”
When the going got tough, Flowers says she took inspiration from her late grandmother, who she had seen cleaning polar bear skins when she was a child.
“When she got so much older, she would tell the hunters, ‘If you’re gonna kill the bear, you gotta learn how to clean it yourself because I’m getting old.’ … And now they clean it themselves because they learned from her. It’s the passing on of that knowledge…. It’s important to carry on the traditions, because if the bear is gonna be killed, the skin has to be cleaned.”
Now that the skin is cleaned, it has to dry for several weeks on a frame. Once that process is done, Flowers wants the skin to be used for programming in her community, as a place to sit in a tent or an igloo. If she and her brother clean a future bear skin, it will be used as sewing material for her program participants.
She wants to recreate the warm, healing environment her grandmother — known to some as Aunt Joy — always made for others in the community. “Somebody said it feels just like Aunt Joy’s, and I was like, that’s why we’re doing what we’re doing, to give people a sense of a homey feeling where they can come and be themselves and live well … and sew and chat and laugh.”
It all adds up to one goal for Flowers: helping Inuit connect to their identities and to each other.
“You gotta know where you came from in order to know where you’re going. I’ve always said it’s like it’s not learning something new. It’s reawakening what’s already inside.”
This story is part of a series from Unreserved called Sacred Seven. The series explores the seven sacred teachings and introduces us to Indigenous Elders, knowledge keepers and community members who are putting those teachings into action.
