| It is rare for a single work of sculpture to become the subject of a book, but Bill Reid's Spirit of Haida Gwaii is no ordinary sculpture. Commissioned for the courtyard of the new Canadian embassy in Washington, D.C., it sits directly across the street from the National Gallery of the USA. Since its installation in the fall of 1991, it has become one of the major artistic landmarks of the capital and of the North American continent. Canadian artist Bill Reid has spent his life resurrecting the indigenous artistic traditions of his Haida forebears, yet he has never lost touch with the European media and techniques in which he was first trained. He is equally famed for his totem poles and other large pieces in wood and bronze, and for his work on a minute scale in precious metal. |
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The Spirit of Haida Gwaii is a black bronze canoe, six metres long and filled to overflowing with the creatures of Haida mythology. Its passengers include the Raven, the Eagle, the Grizzly and his human wife, the Mouse Woman and the Dogfish Woman. At its centre stands a human being, wrapped in the stylized skin of the mythical Seawolf, holding in his hand a smaller sculpture: an ancient staff in which the story of creation, in Haida terms, is told. Ulli Steltzer's photographs, taken over five years, record the genesis and development of the Black Canoe and of each creature within it. This sequence of nearly one hundred images offers detailed insight into the sculpture's final form and reveals many aspects of the work otherwise lost forever to view. Robert Bringhurst's text opens with a summary of Haida history and traditional culture, gives a brief biography of Bill Reid, and assesses the complex political import of the sculpture in the context of current Native sovereignty claims. But the core of the text is a detailed reading of the sculpture in the light of Haida mythology. Quoting and translating directly from oral narratives recorded by Haida mythtellers and the end of the nineteenth century, Bringhurst reveals a world of great mythic complexity and power, encapsulated here in Reid's masterwork, the Black Canoe. It is a work of sculpture, Bringhurst says, that deserves to be seen alongside "the Moseses and Christs and Davids, Virgins and Laocoöns ... for which the books have already been written." |
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