By the time David A. Boxley was born in 1952, Tsimshian traditions involving song, art, dance, and regalia had been outlawed or almost forgotten for nearly a century in his village of Metlakatla, Alaska.

Boxley described the Anglican missionary who came to northern British Columbia in the late nineteenth century as “so very successful” in moving Tsimshian (pronounced like sim-she-ann) people away from their homes and into an assimilated island village in southeastern Alaska. The founding of Metlakatla followed the banning of traditions that were foundational to the cultural vitality of Tsimshian people. Potlatches, ceremonial dances, songs, and woodcarving were considered sinful distractions from the goals of Anglican Christian conversion.

Consequently, cultural knowledge was difficult to access in 1982 when Boxley decided to host a traditional potlatch and carve a totem pole to honor his late grandmother who raised him. He describes the potlatch as “the hub of the cultural wheel”; communities gather for feasts and attendees are gifted for their witness, an act of cultural recognition.

“I grew up in my grandparents’ house,” he said. “They were fluent [Sm’algyax] speakers. They taught me so much about hunting and fishing and gathering and the subsistence lifestyle, but they couldn’t tell me anything about singing and dancing and carving and our ceremonies.”

He pored over the books he had collected through the years and consulted nearby libraries, researching methods of preparing meats, cooking, and carving—eventually bringing together his community in a way that, painfully, they had never experienced in their lifetimes. Reflecting, he described, “Half of the time I didn’t know what I was doing. I was just kind of hoping I was going to do it right.”

That year, respected Eagle Clan member Alfred Eaton gave Boxley the first of the three names that have guided the good deeds of his life: Ksgooga Yaawk, or “First to Potlatch.” At the time, he did not envision a cultural revitalization movement that would move through his village and beyond.

Emerging from this initial experience, Boxley dedicated his life to sharpening his skills as a Tsimshian woodcarver. “I was a schoolteacher at that time. I was a high school basketball coach. I didn’t realize that one of these days, I was going to drop my keys on the principal’s desk and say, ‘I’m going to be a carver full time.’”

Outside of two short residences with carvers to learn about mask making, he never received “a minute’s help” in learning the specialized skills of totem-pole making. “I’m not bragging when I say that. I wish I had had a number of years working a couple of apprenticeships. My work would have progressed much faster.” However, Boxley is proud that this self-guided journey allowed him to develop his own style that is “not only recognized as ‘Tsimshian’ but as ‘David A. Boxley.’”

In 2019, the Eagle Clan gave Boxley the name Niis Bupts’aan, or “Grandfather of the Totem Poles.” So far, he has carved eighty-six totem poles, possibly more than any other living person today. These poles stand across the world, from Disneyworld in Florida to Geneva, Switzerland, to his village in Metlakatla.

Unable to trace back the traditional techniques used to make the eyes blink or mouths snap on articulated Tsimshian face and animal masks, he visited museums and examined the remaining mechanics behind preserved masks—a collaborative research process with museums and collections that started in the early eighties, at the beginning of his career as an artist, and has continued. “I spent a lot of time looking at the collections in storage facilities, getting those ‘light bulb’ moments. You know, that’s how they did that. I want my work to look like those old masters.”

A couple of years after his journey as a full-time artist began, Boxley visited the American Museum of Natural History in New York City for the first time. As he approached the Northwest Coast Hall, he found he couldn’t go in. “I realized that this was my culture that was in this big hall. And the air felt like Jell-O. Our culture, our art, all of these artifacts… are just there. We have no museums like that in our village and no connection to that.”

Once he finally entered, he spent hours exploring the masks and totem poles that his people had made hundreds of years ago. Decades later, Boxley was a pivotal figure in redesigning the hall, which reopened in 2022 to recontextualize cultural objects through collaboration with Native cultural experts.

Boxley explained the “double-edged sword” of collaborating with museums: “As an artist who’s learned the majority of what he knows from studying old pieces in museums, if they weren’t there, I would have had a much harder journey.” However, “Ninety percent or more of my own people have never seen what I have,” he said. There is no museum dedicated to Tsimshian heritage and culture in Metlakatla.

In response, Boxley is determined to bring Tsimshian culture from within these museums back to his people. “One of my dreams has always been to travel to those museums with a pickup truck full of cedar and alder and carve my way through their collections and take as many of those replicas as I could back home. And say, ‘Look! Look what our people made.’” Boxley’s third name, Nuketsismaask, or “Works with the Cedarbark,” given in 1987 by his grandfather, drives the passion for this dream.

In 1987, Boxley’s revitalization efforts took a new direction when he decided to perform a Chief’s Headdress dance at a cultural event in Metlakatla. “I had no one to sing or dance for me, [but] I had an old song that I put on a cassette recorder, and I had this boombox, and I put a microphone next to the boombox so everyone could hear it.”

Soon after, he received a call from a friend who exclaimed, “We decided to make an adult dance group, so you don’t have to dance by yourself anymore!”

Boxley responded, “Well, what can I do? Can I make things? Can I carve things for you guys?” She clarified that the dance group primarily needed songs to dance to. So, Boxley sat down with a pencil, some paper, and what he knew of his language to create six new songs. That summer, he went home to teach the group the songs to accompany their dancing.

“It was the first time they had the opportunity to present the regalia they were wearing. It was pretty neat to see people who I grew up with that finally had the opportunity to celebrate who they are.”

Almost ten years later, in 1996, Boxley created his own dance group. Git Hoan, or “People of the Salmon,” was invited to perform the stories of the Northwest Coast tribes at the Canadian Museum of History for six weeks. Now, Git Hoan stands apart as one of the most popular dance groups in the area and a strong representative of Tsimshian song and dance. Boxley’s group has opened doors that would have never been open for the dancers and his extended family, collaborating with museums and festivals to bring Tsimshian culture to audiences across the United States and Canada—including the 2024 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, with its focus on Indigenous Voices of the Americas.

Git Hoan performs a variety of dances and songs that interpret Tsimshian stories and honor the four matrilineal clans: Raven, Eagle, Wolf, and Killer Whale. During the performance, dancers wear the articulated masks Boxley created from the designs he studied in museums, transforming the dancers into animals and ancestors.

“When you go in to look at the show, you’re going to see everything that we are using right now: our masks, regalia, the big drums, and rattles,” he explained. “We’re not just museum pieces. We’re not a forgotten old culture with all these things just sitting on a shelf for you to look at. Our dance group is a prime example of using our culture as it was used so long ago.”

Since performing at the inauguration of the National Museum of the American Indian in D.C. in 2004, Git Hoan has visited and performed in the museum twice more before the 2024 Festival. In 2011, the museum commissioned Boxley and his son, David R. Boxley, to create a totem pole for the museum atrium. This summer, Git Hoan danced beside the pole again. “We feel like we are vested in the establishment of that place because we helped to open it. And when we go back, it’s, ‘Hi, old friend. Here we are!’”

During the Raven Clan dance at this year’s Festival, the beaks on the dancers’ masks snapped up and down, matching the beat of the drums and the cadence of the singers in the back row who sing in the Native Sm’algyax language. The “Spirit of the Potlatch” dance honored Tsimshian ancestors, and the crowd gasped and quickly pulled out their phones to capture the eyes on the masks that blink and open to reveal, as David R. puts it, “the magic behind their eyes.”

Throughout the performance, audience members leaned forward or squinted, hoping to figure out how the masks articulated; elaborate hidden pulls and mouth controls behind each mask control their animated elements.

Boxley emphasized the importance of watching the little ones in their performances at the Festival. Their inclusion in the show stands as living proof that his efforts to revitalize Tsimshian song, artistry, and dance have impacted younger generations.

Before the performance began, the children chased rainbows reflected from the prisms above or darted from backstage, pushing toy cars across the Potomac Atrium floor, scuffed by countless other performers since Git Hoan was the first twenty years ago. But then, Boxley’s words from our conversation came to life: “Two-year-olds can be two-year-olds. You never know what they’re going to do. But when the drums start and their regalia is on and the audience is there, they’re present.”

As Boxley expressed, these living traditions are what each concurrent generation gets to experience as part of their cultural reality. His son was just one year old when Boxley organized that first potlatch and carved his first totem pole. Four decades later, he stood next to his father as a fellow artist and woodcarver, co-leading the songs and storytelling during the performances. Before them, Boxley’s seven-year-old grandson stole the show, dancing in unison with the other men.

“When I go home, I don’t have to do anything when it comes to the leadership, because so many people now know what to do,” he said. “Many feasts and potlatches have been hosted and totem poles have been raised. They have taken the mantle, and I’m very grateful.”

During the last session of the Festival, Boxley remembered the first potlatch he ever held and the creation process of his first totem pole. His grandfather approached him in his woodshop as he was carving. “He put his hand on my shoulder, and he pushed down, and he said in our language, ‘Do you feel that?’ I said yes. He said, ‘That’s the responsibility you have to teach our people again. It’s a good responsibility. It’s a good weight. That weight is on your shoulder.’”

“I’ve never forgotten that,” he continued. “And whenever I have the opportunity to help my own people, I’m not thinking about me. I’m thinking about all of us: look forward, be responsible.”

Anna Beth Lee is a writing and video intern at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and a senior at Drew University studying anthropology, environmental justice, and photography. She is intrigued by the intersecting pathways of cultural learning, human rights, and the visual arts.

Read more about Boxley’s life story in his autobiography entitled Tsimshian Eagle: A Culture Bearer’s Journey, written by Boxley with Steve Quinn.