Kwakwaka’wakw artist Ernest Puglas explains how carving saved his life: ‘This is powerful’

Editor’s note: The author of this profile sits on the board of the Cortes Community Foundation, which commissioned Puglas’s welcome pole. IndigiNews is honoured to share Puglas’s story.

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Standing before a crowd of roughly 50 people on “Cortes Island,” carver Kuma’inukw (Ernest) Puglas first acknowledges his Kwak’wala lineage.

Then, he thanks the Klahoose First Nation for hosting him and for the honour of carving on its territories (the island is the traditional lands of Klahoose, Homalco and Tla’amin Nations), before unveiling his newest cedar welcome pole in a public ceremony.

Puglas’s latest carving — about six metres high — includes depictions of a humpback whale and several human figures. 

His hope, he tells the crowd, is that it serves as a symbol of friendship and respect between all people who call the island home.

He praises his wife, Stephanie Hansen, for standing by his side and lifting him up. The couple had both struggled with addiction, he recounts, and for him the act of carving became a symbol of redemption and transformation.

Finally, he turns to face the cedar pole — still wrapped in a blue protective tarp — and addresses it in Kwak’wala.

As he speaks, Klahoose Youth beat their drums. He gestures for the tarp to be removed, and drops to one knee, his voice loud and forceful as his carving is revealed.

Though for a few seconds, the quiet that follows seems to stretch on and on — the silence broken by one of the attendees, a local carpenter and friend of the artist.

“Nice work, Ernie,” the friend says dryly, as Puglas throws back his head and laughs.

“Well, there you have it,” he replies.

Symbol of friendship between Klahoose and settlers

Puglas’s painstakingly carved pole — unveiled on June 28 outside Cortes Island Village Commons, a new facility in “Mansons Landing” — features at its base a humpback whale. 

The massive cetaceans are common around the island; Puglas calls them the territory’s guardians, words that echo both ancestral guardians, and the First Nation’s contemporary guardian program (he himself once worked for one such coastal guardian organization). 

Rising from the whale’s tail is a Salish matriarch — a clam digging woman who is featured in Klahoose’s creation story. 

And although many artists sand their carvings smooth — working away the scars left by their chisels, knives and saws — Puglas said he usually prefers to leave the wood rough, with each knife cut a reminder of how his work came to be. 

To honour Klahoose Nation tradition, however, he sanded his carving’s surface, in keeping with Salish style. 

It is the second pole Puglas has carved on territories of the Klahoose, Homalco and Tla’amin Nations.

The first pole, raised in 2022, was the first since European colonization to be carved in Toq (the ʔayʔaǰuθəm name for the village that today is also called “Squirrel Cove”).

Puglas’s new welcome pole — commissioned by the Cortes Community Foundation — will stand in an area predominantly inhabited by the island’s settler community, the first of whom arrived in 1866.

Created with Klahoose’s blessing and assistance — the First Nation donated the cedar log he carved it from — Puglas said he hopes the pole will stand as a symbol of friendship between the Klahoose and settler peoples of the island.

He also hopes it will teach unaware visitors they are guests on the unceded Indigenous territories

“The purpose,” he said, “is to have somewhere for people to go and learn about the people of Klahoose.”

The village of Toq is removed from much of the popular island’s tourist activity. 

“There are people who come to Cortes and probably don’t even know that [the village] is even here,” Puglas said

Using wood gifted to him by Klahoose First Nation, he said, “shows the love they have for this island, and it shows that they want people to come to this island and respect it.” 

The pole will stand to remind visitors and locals alike that they are guests on the unceded Indigenous territory. In Klahoose oral tradition, its people’s history on the land dates back to the very mists of creation. 

It is also in that time-scale that Puglas situates his own role, part of a carving lineage in both the ‘Nak’waxda’xw and Wei Wai Kum First Nations.

‘Born to be this person’

More than a year before last month’s pole-unveiling ceremony, Puglas invited IndigiNews to see him carve the cedar log in his makeshift workshop at Toq — in a tent fashioned from tarps lashed together. 

Its walls shook in the wind, letting light from the blue sky in as he worked.

Puglas’s journey as a traditional carver has been neither quick nor easy. He tells his own life story much like he often leaves his carvings; rough-hewn and unsmoothed — scars and all.

“I was born to be this person,” he said, gesturing to the ground with one of his many carving knives. “It just took me a while to get here.”

Shafts of trembling daylight fell on him and the cedar log he bent over, illuminating the beings emerging from the wood. 

Since learning to carve as a boy, he recounted wrestling with drug addiction in “Campbell River,” nearly dying twice, falling in love, and eventually escaping the stranglehold of trauma.

He emerged determined to break trauma’s intergenerational cycle, he said, by bringing stories out of wood. Now, he walks through life in the footsteps of a mentor who died long before he was born. 

“I want my history to be noted,” he told IndigiNews, setting down his tools.

Puglas descended from a long lineage of artists.

He is the youngest grandson of Numatsa (Chief Sam Henderson, Sr.) — a Kwakwakwa’wakw Master carver renowned for “making wood speak” — from the ‘Nak’waxda’xw village of Ba’as, also known as “Blunden Harbour.” 

Puglas grew up admiring his grandfather’s work. His mother, Laverne Henderson, told him stories about his grandfather — passing on the discipline it takes to be an artist. 

As a child, she taught Puglas to draw eagle heads without lifting his pencil from the page.

His grandfather studied both Salish and Kwakwaka’wakw ways of form and line carving, a legacy which Puglas continues in his work today.

Numatsa’s influence is clear in both Puglas’s vocation, as well as in his carving style itself. 

Through his carving craft, he noted, he feels a deep connection to his grandfather, even though they never met.  

“When I carve something, I think of my grandfather,” he explained. “I get emotional when I carve because this is powerful. It’s healing.” 

As a child, Puglas looked up at the poles Numatsa carved during his life. 

He watched his uncles at work carving too, and dreamed of following in their footsteps. 

But initially, he was told he was still too young to handle the knives required for the craft.

At age 12, however, he could no longer resist his calling. One day, as his family was occupied smoking hundreds of salmon, he took advantage of their distraction.

“I snuck into my uncle’s woodshop,” he recalled, “and I made a plaque.”

Instead of admonishing him, however, Puglas’s uncle Billy Henderson was impressed. And he began to teach him to carve. 

Eventually, the teen went on to carve his first pole with his cousin — Waławidi (Tommy Hunt Jr.), today a master carver himself — and found that carving connected him to his culture and ancestors, much like speaking their language Kwak’wala.

He eventually studied art and First Nations studies at Malaspina University, and at 19 years old was given the name Kuma’inukw — traditionally a chief’s name. 

As a young man, Puglas worked as a logger, tree planter and fisherman, and spent more than a decade with the A-Tlegay Fisheries Society.

‘I didn’t touch a knife, pencil or brush for years’

But Puglas’s relationship to his own culture has not always been straightforward. 

And despite his life seeming outwardly positive — including marriage and three children — Puglas said his own traumatic experiences and those of his family and community once threatened to consume him entirely.

He recounted that his father, Hereditary Chief Walas Xanasugwelukw (Andrew Puglas Sr.) of the ‘Nak’waxda’xw Nation— a survivor of St. Michael’s Residential School in Alert Bay — discouraged his children from carving, dancing, or speaking their language during his childhood. 

Years later, Puglas came to understand this as a response to his father’s traumatic experiences —  both of being taken from his family and culture, as well as the generational impact of events such as when his great-grandfather — Mamalilikulla Nation Hereditary Chief Tsu’natsa (Sam Puglas) — was arrested and jailed for practicing their cultural traditions. 

Tsu’natsa was one of 45 people arrested for attending a Potlatch in 1921, during the decades the ancient ceremony was illegal.

“Canada” banned the ceremony, and other Indigenous traditions, from 1884 to 1951. 

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission called the Potlatch Ban was an “assault on Aboriginal identity” intended to undermine Indigenous communities’ “right to self-government.”

It was just one way the government suppressed Indigenous culture, spirituality and art forms.

“We could have lost this art form,” Puglas lamented.

As an adult, he continued, he struggled with addiction, a way of coping with memories of being sexually abused as a child.

“It always came up when I was drinking,” he said, “but you have to make peace with it.”

He stopped carving, separated from his first wife and children, and abandoned his home to crash on people’s couches around “Campbell River.” 

He suffered from a deep depression, he said, and used substances every day.

“I drifted from my culture,” he said. “I didn’t touch a knife, pencil or brush for years due to my addiction.”

‘The start of my healing was that totem pole’

In this state, Puglas met someone else struggling with substance use — and she would alter the course of his life. 

Stephanie Hansen, of Klahoose First Nation, soon became his fiancée. He credits her with much of his recovery.

But the couple first had to struggle to heal from their addictions, he said.

“We both [overdosed] twice; we both died twice,” he recalled. 

“You’d think the first time would have been enough? It wasn’t. We thought we weren’t loved, we didn’t have our kids in our lives anymore, but we had each other.” 

Today, she often spends hours out in his tent carving alongside him. 

Puglas also credits his brother for picking the couple “up out of this dark place.” 

He removed Puglas and Hansen from a drug house they lived in, and brought them to Klahoose to live with Hansen’s grandfather — the late Elder Herman William Francis — as they began three months of recovery.

“It was hard; we were sick,” he said. “We missed our kids, but we needed to get better and stronger to try to see them.”

Francis passed away before seeing the carving unveiled by Puglas, who shared deep gratitude and respect for his grandfather-in-law during last month’s ceremony. 

He honoured Francis’s memory and legacy before the crowd.

Puglas added he was incredibly grateful to be welcomed into the Klahoose community, but even then he did not truly believe he could beat addiction. 

Then, during the struggle of his first weeks of sobriety, he stumbled into an opportunity that would open his path to healing.

“I overheard a conversation at the band office,” he said, “about a totem pole.”

‘I lost everything … now I have built myself up’

The Klahoose First Nation wanted to commission a welcome pole to stand in front of their community building.

“I could do that,” Puglas interjected, half-joking. He had not touched a knife or chainsaw in years.

Today the pole he carved stands proudly in front of the Klahoose First Nation’s multipurpose building.

“The start of my healing was that totem pole,” he told IndigiNews. “I carved it in 32 days. That kept me clean.

“My art is my life now. And I’m telling my story, by carving things like this.”

He wants everyone struggling like him to know he made it through the crucible of addiction. 

“Just to be here now, I’m telling you, this is a blessing,” he told IndigiNews. 

“And a message to anybody out there that’s stuck: I was there. I was right there. I lost everything in my life. Now I have built myself up — I have recreated myself.”

He wishes others struggling with trauma, depression and addiction hear his story, they would know it is possible to heal. 

One of his greatest worries, he explained, is for his son — who he was separated from four “crucial years,” he said.

“But all I can do now is explain to him why this happens to us,” he said. “I want to break the cycle.” 

This is the hope that drives him now. He has been sober for more than three years; he’s carved two poles, and reconciled with his father, who reached out to make amends with both his sons. 

As Puglas tells it, his father regrets discouraging his sons from learning about their culture, and is proud they learned to carve and speak Kwak’wala. His dad is now a figure in cultural work, working as the manager of the Mamillilikula Nation’s guardian program. When he is not carving, the younger Puglas works alongside his father out on the land, and following the ancestral seaways as a Guardian Watchman.

Transformation is central to Puglas’s life, and to his work as an artist.

“Transformation is an everyday thing,” he said. “I see something different every morning I come out here to look at the log.” 

Looking forward, Puglas is open about his ambitions — he wants to be remembered for his craft, and following in his grandfather’s footsteps. 

“My goal in life is to be called master carver Ernie Puglas,” he said, “grandson of Sam Henderson.” 

He envisions his own children and grandchildren staring up at the new welcome pole, and wants to teach other Youth his culture’s artform, passing on what he received from the mentors in his own life.

“Who are you without the kids telling their stories, without listening to our stories and retelling them?” he asked.

A historic responsibility

As Puglas turns 39 this weekend, he’s looking forward to the future; he is saving money and resources to host his own Potlatch. 

“I’ve been making money off of the culture,” he explained, “so I have a responsibility to put wealth back in.” 

He said it will be the first Potlatch hosted by someone carrying the Puglas name since the government imprisoned his great-grandfather Tsu’natsa while attending the ceremonial gift-giving ceremony, a keystone of Kwakwaka’wakw community life.

The Royal B.C. Museum in “Victoria” has in its collections a raven rattle taken from his grandfather during the Potlatch raid in 1921. 

He hopes to have it returned in time for his own Potlatch.

These plans take work, and Puglas said he regularly spends hours in the morning sharpening his tools for the precise work of his form and line carving. 

“I won’t be a master carver until — well you know, I need a few more of these in me,” Puglas said wryly, looking down at his work.

As the autumn day’s light faded from the sky, Puglas offered a warm goodbye, his breath curling in the air. 

“The pole transforms itself; I believe it’s alive already,” he mused. 

“I’ve been dreaming about this thing. And sometimes, it’s walking in my dreams.”

From outside his makeshift tent, a slow, raspy sound resumed. His carver’s knife, slicing cedar wood.