In the last few months, I’ve used my lengthy commuting time to get a lot of reading done. Specifically, I’ve read several books about the aboriginal art of the northwest coast. They are, in the order I finished them:
-Solitary Raven: The Essential Writings of Bill Reid, edited by Robert Bringhurst
-The Raven Steals the Light, a retelling to Haida mythology by Bill Reid and Robert Bringhurst
-Bill Reid, an art-historical, quasi-biographical work by Doris Shadbolt (1st edition)
-Bill Reid and Beyond: Expanding on Modern Native Art, edited by Karen Duffek and Charlotte Townsend-Gault.
I had intended to do a proper review of each of these here, but unusual levels of busy-ness prevented me from reviewing at the rate I was reading, and I may end out re-reading each work in order to review them all properly. Alternatively, I may post the odd musing as I find time.
I can say a few things: Reid was a very talented writer, and his prose was as enjoyable for me to read as the essays of C.S. Lewis were when I was a boy, and for me that is high praise. (In fact, I still admire Lewis’s writings, though his starting point as a religious Christian is no longer something I share.) Second, Reid could not have had a better editor than Robert Bringhurst, himself a poet. Interestingly, I learned from the Shadbolt book that Bringhurst wrote several of the stories of The Raven Steals the Light, but the volume does not specify which ones, and neither did Shadbolt. I will have to bring out my source-critical skills, acquired in the study of the Hebrew Bible and its antecedents, to see if I can ascertain which pieces were by which writer!
The Shadbolt book, beautifully-illustrated, was enormously helpful. I picked up my copy, signed by both Reid and Shadbolt, from a used bookstore that sold the book over Ebay. At the same time, though, I found Shadbolt’s syntax and diction often clumsy, and the book could have been better than it was. As things remain, though, it is indispensable, if only for the wealth of Reid’s oral communications that have been transcribed there, and the handy timeline of artistic works.
The Bill Reid and Beyond book should be mandatory reading for anyone interested in the northwest coast aboriginal art “revival,” or “renaissance” that occurred in the latter half of the twentieth century. After reading this collection of academic essays, I have come to realize that the period was much more complex than Reid and Shadbolt made it out to be. Reid had taken the Haida experience of artistic production as normative for the entire northwest coast, and this was a large error in itself. Furthermore, the narrative that Reid participated in failed to take adequate account of the Haida art that did continue to be produced. Reid’s thesis, which predated him, was one of discontinuity and death in the First Nations art of this area. Reid set himself up as the best link with the past, the old art, ignoring the experience of many other First Nations artists. It was particularly interesting to read, if I may use the word, how Reid dethroned Mungo Martin as the link in the chain back to the past. Clearly, the picture is complex, and Reid, himself a complex man, grew and developed within this time, and left his well-made mark on our spirits and in our institutions and collections. If the words “revival” and “renaissance” have been discounted by the academics, surely we can all agree that Reid actively participated in a “flowering” of late twentieth century First Nations art along the northwest coast, and it was a marvelous flowering indeed. For my part, I find the presence of his artwork on Canada’s most frequently used banknote an appropriate climax of his humanistic, creative energy.
