The artist Bill Reid (1920-1998) was the son of a Scottish-German settler father and a Haida mother who raised Reid as an assimilated subject. Reid worked as a jeweller and a CBC broadcaster before connecting with his Haida roots, after which he worked in larger sculptural forms, including Raven and the First Men (1983).
Any artist who has come to public attention has been asked to pose beside, before, within or atop their art. Reid's appearance atop the clamshell womb of Raven and the First Men (photo: Bill McLennan) brings to mind not only his mother's insistance on raising her son in the Western mode, but her suppression of his Haida ancestry. What was originally intended as a publicity photo is suddenly a work of relational documentary portraiture -- that of a mother's son.
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