Totem pole in Vancouver's Stanley Park to be moved

One of the totem poles in Vancouver's Stanley Park will be moved to the University of B.C.'s Museum of Anthropology on Wednesday.

The Kakaso'las totem pole has been on loan to Vancouver's largest park since 1985, according to the city's park board. Now that loan has expired, and it will return to the Museum of Anthropology (MOA).

It is six metres tall, and features many important figures in Kwakwaka'wakw culture: the thunderbird, a sea-bear holding an orca, a man holding a frog, Bak'was (the wild man of the woods), Dzunuk'wa (giant of the woods) and a raven.

Kakaso'las was carved by Kwakwaka'wakw artist Ellen Neel in 1955. The Alert Bay-born artist made waves at the time for being one of the first female carvers to find success in a traditionally male-dominated space.

Neel passed away in 1966.

Her family say it's best that the totem pole be moved to an indoor location at the MOA in order to preserve it for decades to come.

Lou-ann Neel, Ellen's granddaughter, is an artist herself. She says the pole is actually named after her grandmother's traditional name.

"There may have been an assumption that that was what the the pole was named, and it just came to be called that after a while," she told Gloria Macarenko, host of CBC's On The Coast.

"We didn't have a problem with it because it still associated the pole with my grandmother."

Neel says her grandmother challenged colonial narratives that "women don't carve," and she was very strong in her cultural ways.

The Vancouver Park Board says Kakaso'las was carved in Ellen Neel's Ferguson Point studio in Stanley Park, as part of a commission for Woodward's department store.

It was initially placed at the Westmount Shopping Centre in Edmonton, before being donated to the MOA in 1984. Ellen's son Robert Neel helped restore the pole, according to the park board, before it was placed at Brockton Point in Stanley Park.

"She was really a visionary for the future of contemporary Kwakwaka'wakw art," Lou-ann said of her grandmother. "She was prepared to try any material any time ... so she made quite a few things."

Lou-ann says that spending time with her grandmother's vast body of work helped her to understand her own artistic style, and she recently has taken up carving herself.