 and C$600 for the pole - estimated to be about C$7,000 and C$10,000 today - and Mr Barbeau obliged. In the summer of 1929, when most Nisga'a people were away working, hunting, or fishing, he and his team simply took it. The 11-meter pole, carved mostly from a single piece of red cedar, had been commissioned to honour a warrior named Ts'wawit, who had died in battle. After cutting the pole down, Mr Barbeau's team bundled it onto a raft that floated down the river to Prince Rupert, on a journey that would eventually see it shipped more than 6,700km (4,200 miles) away to Edinburgh. "We never gave him permission to steal our pole," Dr Amy Parent, whose great-great grandmother was the one to commission it in 1855 to honour her warrior son, told the BBC. Now, nearly a century later, the Ni'isjoohl memorial pole is back in Nass Valley, welcomed by hundreds with an event marking its arrival on Friday. The pole will be on display permanently at the Nisga'a Museum - a modern building with a stunning glass facade and surrounded by){kind=link}
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Watch: A totem pole’s homecoming to its ancestral land
After almost a century and a journey of thousands of miles, an artefact taken from Canada is now home. It is the first totem pole to be returned from a British museum to an indigenous community – a potentially precedent-setting moment in the broader move towards museum repatriation.
Museum curator Marius Barbeau had been eyeing the totem pole for some time.
It was the late 1920s, and the Canadian ethnographer had paid many visits to the Ank’idaa village in the Nass Valley, an indigenous community nestled between picturesque mountains, creeks and waterfalls in a remote part of British Columbia.