Thunderbird Park is a
park in
Victoria, British Columbia
Victoria is the capital city of the Canadian province of British Columbia, on the southern tip of Vancouver Island off Canada's Pacific coast. The city has a population of 91,867, and the Greater Victoria area has a population of 397,237. The ...
next to the
Royal British Columbia Museum
Founded in 1886, the Royal British Columbia Museum (sometimes referred to as Royal BC Museum) consists of The Province of British Columbia's natural and human history museum as well as the British Columbia Provincial Archives. The museum is loca ...
. The park is home to many
totem pole
Totem poles ( hai, gyáaʼaang) are monumental carvings found in western Canada and the northwestern United States. They are a type of Northwest Coast art, consisting of poles, posts or pillars, carved with symbols or figures. They are usually ...
s (mostly
Gitxsan
Gitxsan (also spelled Gitksan) are an Indigenous people in Canada whose home territory comprises most of the area known as the Skeena Country in English (: means "people of" and : means "the River of Mist"). Gitksan territory encompasses approxi ...
,
Haida, and
Kwakwaka'wakw) and other
First Nation
Indigenous peoples are culturally distinct ethnic groups whose members are directly descended from the earliest known inhabitants of a particular geographic region and, to some extent, maintain the language and culture of those original people ...
monuments. The park takes its name from the mythological
Thunderbird
Thunderbird, thunder bird or thunderbirds may refer to:
* Thunderbird (mythology), a legendary creature in certain North American indigenous peoples' history and culture
* Ford Thunderbird, a car
Birds
* Dromornithidae, extinct flightless birds ...
of
Indigenous North American cultures which is depicted on many totem poles.
Also in the park are St. Anne's Schoolhouse (built 1844),
Helmcken House
Helmcken House is a museum in Victoria, British Columbia, located in Thunderbird Park. It was built by Dr. John Sebastian Helmcken, the first doctor in Victoria, in 1852, a surgeon with the Hudson's Bay Company. It is one of the oldest houses in ...
(built in 1852 by Dr.
John Helmcken), and Mungo Martin House (''Wawadit'la''), a traditional
Kwakwaka'wakw "big house" built in 1953 by Kwakwaka'wakw Chief
Mungo Martin
Chief Mungo Martin or ''Nakapenkem'' (lit. ''Potlatch chief "ten times over"''), ''Datsa'' (lit. ''"grandfather"''), was an important figure in Northwest Coast style art, specifically that of the Kwakwaka'wakw Aboriginal people who live in the a ...
. The park is part of the Royal BC Museum Cultural Precinct, an area around the museum that contains a number of historical sites and monuments.
History
Totem poles were first erected on the site in 1940 as part of a conservation effort to preserve some of the region's rapidly deteriorating
Aboriginal art. The site was opened as Thunderbird Park in 1941. By 1951, many of the poles had greatly decayed, and in 1952 the Royal BC Museum began a restoration program with
Chief Martin as its head carver. Martin died in 1962 and was succeeded by renowned carver
Henry Hunt. Other artists who have worked as part of the program include Henry Hunt's sons
Richard Hunt and
Tony Hunt, Tim Paul, Lawrence Bell, David Gladstone, David Martin, and
Bill Reid
William Ronald Reid Jr. (12 January 1920 – 13 March 1998) (Haida) was a Canadian artist whose works include jewelry, sculpture, screen-printing, and paintings. Producing over one thousand original works during his fifty-year career, Reid ...
. All of the original poles were replaced with new versions by 1992, and some of the originals are now preserved within the museum.
References
Thunderbird Park – Place of Cultural Sharing(Official website) URL accessed 2017-11-11
(Note that the totem pole layout shown here is out of date) URL accessed 2006-06-24
{{Coord, 48.4200, -123.3665, display=title, region:CA-BC_type:landmark
First Nations culture
Northwest Coast art
Parks in Victoria, British Columbia