Bill Reid The Making Of An Indian

Preface The last time I saw Bill Reid was in 1994. My book, Between Two Cultures: A Photographer among the Inuit, had just been published and I was speaking to a group of businessmen on the top floor of the Hotel Vancouver. Accompanied by his wife Martine, Bill sat close to the lecture podium. I knew who Bill Reid was -- I had heard him give a lecture at the University of British Columbia in the late 1970s. During his talk, Bill had worn his knowledge of Haida art and culture lightly. I had been impressed by his modesty, manifested in his attempt to diminish the role he had played in what many people have called the revival of Northwest Coast Native art. Yet it was obvious to me that beneath his offhand manner lay a breadth of knowledge about and a commitment to Native art and culture. I did not see Bill Reid again until a mutual friend invited me to dine with him in the summer of 1990. By this time he had overseen the carving of Raven and the First Men, launched his canoe Loo Taas, and was in the midst of his largest commission, The Spirit of Haida Gwaii. Long before I embarked on my research for this book, I knew that Bill Reid was not the sole architect of the so-called renaissance of contemporary Native art. As a cultural historian, I suspected that his public persona as a Haida Indian was as much a product of journalists, art patrons, museum curators, and others associated with the non-Native establishment as of Bill Reid himself. At the same time, I had been bowled over by works like Raven and the First Men. What other sculpture in the history of public art in Vancouver has so excited schoolchildren that they shout, as they enter the Museum of Anthropology: "Where's Bill Reid's raven?" Or prompts adults to compare Raven and the First Men with Michelangelo's Pieta, seen on their summer vacation in Rome? I also knew that Bill Reid was not the only major figure in the history of post -- World War II Northwest Coast Native art. During the mid-1950s I had observed the Kwakwaka'wakw artist Mungo Martin (Nakapenkum) both restoring and creating totem poles in the carving shed adjacent to the Provincial Museum in Victoria. As an even younger child, I had attended a potlatch in the Coast Salish community house at Cowichan Bay on the southeast coast of Vancouver Island. The cedar-scented smoke, the masks and rattles, and the mournful song of the elders, who had beat out the steps for the dancers on their drums, had left no doubt in my childhood mind that Indian culture was very much alive. These early experiences, along with my later contact, during the course of researching my biography of Emily Carr, with the Gitxsan and Nisga'a peoples living on the Nass and Skeena rivers, with the Nuu-chah-nulth in Ucluelet, and with the Haida on the Queen Charlotte Islands, made me question the prominent role that Bill occupied in the story of Northwest Coast art. I began to wonder if "revival" and "renaissance" were the right words to describe the process, and whether "continuation" would not have been a more accurate word when talking about what took place in British Columbia during the 1950s and 1960s. I would like to have had Bill's response to my lecture on Inuit photography that autumn day in 1994. After all, the central theme of my talk -- the ways in which photographic images of indigenous peoples have been used by non-Natives -- was of interest to Bill Reid. He did say something when, at the end of my lecture, I walked over to where he was sitting. I bent my head close to his, trying to understand. Bill repeated his effort. But it was no use. Whatever he was struggling to say was incomprehensible to me, as it was to Martine Reid. Parkinson's is a cruel disease; it not only erodes mobility, it robTippett, Maria is the author of 'Bill Reid The Making Of An Indian', published 0000 under ISBN 9780679310891 and ISBN 0679310894.