Totem pole at Victoria’s Royal BC Museum lowered for restoration

Totem pole at Victoria’s Royal BC Museum lowered for restoration

Published 5:30 am Tuesday, June 2, 2026

The totem pole located in Thunderbird Park at the Royal BC Museum was lowered on June 1 to undergo restoration work by its original artist, Kwakwaka’wakw artist Richard Hunt.

During the restoration, four carved rays will be refixed onto the pole that were loosening and coming out.

“They want me to sink them in about two more inches, just for safety. I said they’ve been here for 50 years, they haven’t fallen out yet,” Hunt told Victoria News.

After completing the work, the pole will be installed again in Thunderbird Park on June 8.

Hunt first carved the pole when he was only 19 years old, working as an apprentice carver at the Royal BC Museum under the guidance of his artist father, Henry Hunt.

“That’s the first pole I did on my own without my dad’s help,” he reminisced.

He remembered how he used to work on the shed that was at Thunderbird Park with the help of his uncle, who was the Kwakwaka’wakw Nations chief.

“I didn’t want my dad’s help, so I told him, I’ve got to do this on my own. And he didn’t know that my uncle was telling me what to do…So the figures are what he said should be on this pole.”

The totem pole that is being restored was completed in 1970 and stands at the centre of the park.

Hunt said that most of the other poles at the park need restoration work too, because some of them have been up there for almost 100 years.

“The things like the beaks and the dorsal fins that are inside the wood are starting to, not rot, but shrink. So it gets loose. So they’re probably going to want those things fixed up.”

He also said that the figure at the bottom of the pole has only four fingers on his left hand because he wanted to portray his friend, who came to watch him working on the totem.

“When he was playing with his friends, they were trying to see how close you could get to your finger with an axe. And somebody got too close and chopped it off. So he said, you should immortalize me and put me there,” he said, revealing why the totem pole figure only has four fingers.