One of the many books I picked up at MacLeod’s last week was the Vancouver Art Gallery’s 1967 Arts of the Raven catalogue, edited by the exhibition’s curator, Doris Shadbolt. This was a landmark exhibition, notable for Bill Holm’s formal analysis of Northwest Coast motifs, but also Shadbolt’s contention that art made by First Nations artists today be considered contemporary art – “high art, not ethnology.”

Although aware of Shadbolt’s proposition, I was not aware of her omissions. Shadbolt writes: “…the main distinction made is between the austere and intellectual elegance of the Haida, Tlingit and Tsimshian, and the flamboyant histrionic style of the Kwakiutl [Kwakwaka’wakw]. For stylistic reasons, neither the Nootka [Nuuchaanulth] nor Coast Salish are represented, nor is prehistoric stone art included.”

What does Shadbolt mean by “stylistic reasons”? That which Holm had no interest in classifying, or that which she did not like?

In January of this year, the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, under the guest curation of Charlotte Townsend-Gault, took a step towards addressing Shadbolt’s omission with Backstory: Nuuchaanulth Ceremonial Curtains and the Work of Ki-Ke-In, a show that featured numerous thliitsapilthim (portable curtain paintings of various sizes, each telling of the “episodes and exploits from family histories, conflicts, captures and alliances”), as well as drawings, photographs and other contextual materials.

My first impressions upon viewing the show concerned the scale of these thliitsapilthim, one of which measured 3-by-16 metres, making them the biggest paintings in the world. As for the painting, I agree with Shadbolt: though many of these works include coastal motifs, the works are neither elegant nor flamboyant but crudely drawn, largely figurative, with evidence of modern situations. This is not to say that Shadbolt was right to omit the work, only that its inclusion would have complicated the exhibition, making it not so neat and compact, which, to my mind, is never a reason to not do something.

Little more than a month after the Belkin opening, artist Phillip McCrum approached Reid Shier and I and asked if we might show some photos he took during his time in Belfast, Northern Ireland at a multi-media installation we were curating for the 2010 Cultural Olympiad, called the Candahar Bar. Because the bar was built around a functioning Northern Irish pub (a project of Derry-based artist Theo Sims, called The Candahar), we consented.

While I have been to Belfast and seen the house murals there, it was not until McCrum’s images began looping across the screen that I was reminded of the murals in Ki-Ke-In’s show, less for content than style. Of that style, I had a further thought: that maybe these thliitsapilthim owe as much to residential school art classes than what was, like the Troubles in Northern Ireland, handed down by elders.

As far as I know Claude Levi-Strauss never visited Haida Gwaii (the Queen Charlotte Islands), though we know he was familiar with the work of Haida artist Bill Reid, at least enough to write a second edition “Preface” to a book of Reid’s retellings of Haida legends and myths, or “mere glancing versions," as Reid put it.

The Raven Steals the Light (1988) is a curious project. Inside are nine “stories”, each prefaced by a Reid drawing, each attributed to Reid and Robert Bringhurst, a poet, typographer and something of a gadfly when it comes to Haida literature.

Bringhurst’s role is strange in light of comments made by Levi-Strauss and Reid.

In dedicating this book to Haida storyteller Henry Young, Reid wrote:

“I wish I had had more patience and had spent the tiny part of my life he requested, to learn something of the wonderful language he spoke so resonantly and well, and to learn more of the stories of all the mythcreatures whose many adventures instructed, informed and entertained the Haidas during their long history.”

So there it is: Reid did not know the Haida language. But he knew English, and was throughout the 1950s a writer-broadcaster at CBC radio. So how does that explain Bringhurst’s contribution?

Nowhere in The Raven Steals the Light does it say how the Reid-Bringhurst co-authorship came about, or why it exists. The only direct attribution to Bringhurst is a 174-word italicization entitled Haida Gwaii (also italicized), which, though it appears on the contents page, is, unlike Levi-Strauss’s “Preface” and Reid’s “Prologue”, unascribed (only after we read the piece do we see that Bringhurst wrote it). As for the content of the piece, we learn that “Haida Gwaii, the Islands of the People, lies equidistant from Luxor, Machu Pichu, Ninevah and Timbuktu,” and that the islands’ namesake is “a woman who never saw them” – Sophie Charlotte Von Meckenburg-Strelitz, who married “the Mad King of England, George III.” If this tour of ancient civilizations should not suffice, Bringhurst concludes with the influence of trickster Raven, and not European colonialism, on why “Haidas and outsiders alike” refer to these islands by their imperial name.

Levi-Strauss tells a different story. At the beginning of his “Preface” we are treated to an anecdote that, inadvertently or otherwise, makes a mess of Reid’s achievement, particularly in light of Reid’s admission: that he does not know the Haida language.

In 1974, while the Levi-Strausses are waiting for a ferry to Alert Bay, Levi-Strauss strikes up a conversation with a “young-looking Indian man in a pink tracksuit.” The man, a decorated athlete, tells the anthropologist that he is returning to his Kwakiutl home, to take up sculpture, which, he adds, will be “difficult,” because he will have to learn the language. “His words seem very revealing,” writes Levi-Strauss, “since the traditional arts of the Indians of the Northwest Coast are indissolubly linked to legends and myths.”

And if you do not know the language in which those legends and myths are told, what might that sculpture look like?

At the conclusion of his “Preface”, Levi-Strauss, while acknowledging Reid’s language deficit, insists that evidence of the artist’s “intimate knowledge” of Haida legends and myths lies in the presence of his “masterworks.” This is an odd assertion, the same "logic" that was noted by my teacher’s teacher, Stanley Diamond, who, also in 1974 (In Search of the Primitive), attacked Levi-Strauss for his a priori reasoning and insistence on the universality of underlying binary structures in determining a culture's shape. Which leads me to wonder, What would Bringhurst make of this?

Stare at our map long enough and eventually things take shape. For me, shape begins at the perimeter and travels inward, dissolving provincial and territorial boundaries until the mainland emerges as a great blank slate, expressionless, leaving only our islands in its wake. Blink, and all but two of them disappear. Canada’s Tasmanias, earrings on the face of the nation: Newfoundland and Haida Gwaii.

Geography will always have a hand in what our country looks like, but it is social relations that fuel my transformation of it -- the best evidence being a televised poll conducted six years ago, where the CBC asked, Who is the “greatest Canadian”? That it came down to an athlete running across the country on a prosthetic limb, and a preacher who championed a system whereby the athlete could afford his limb, proved the real “winner”. If only the poll had stopped there.

Newfoundland and Haida Gwaii are unique not only in geography but in history – and this, I believe, is why my adventures in map-staring always produce the same result. I am fascinated by these places, less by their physical isolation than their relationship to Canada and each other. Newfoundland joined Confederation in 1949, out of economic necessity (said Joey Smallwood); sixty years later, at the instigation of the British Columbia provincial government, the Queen Charlotte Islands shed their “slave name” and became Haida Gwaii, a move that afforded the Haida Nation symbolic power, as opposed to the more sustainable political-economic variety.

Not to stop there. Newfoundland is generally seen as one of Canada’s oldest settlements, but only to those whose conception of Canada begins with contact, a situation that lead to the elimination of one of the island’s indigenous populations, the Beothuks, extinct by 1823. Haida Gwaii, with its “new” name, is little over a month old, yet many continue to think of Canada’s First Nations peoples as belonging to time immemorial, just as many think of Haida Gwaii as a series of islands comprised wholly of Haida. What better way to further subjugate a people than to reduce their histories to an immutable essence. I say this with the knowledge that although the rights of Canada’s First Nations peoples are entrenched in our constitution, they remain conveniently undefined.

Everything I have written thus far has been written in advance of Pacific Coastline’s July 30th 8:20AM flight to Masset, Haida Gwaii, where I have been invited by the islands’ arts council to read -- first at Howler’s Pub, in Queen Charlotte City, then at the Tllel Fall Fair. Arts organizers have told me that I can go “all out” at Howlers, but that Tlell’s negative thematic (“no sex, no drugs, no alcohol”) implies a family atmosphere. Already I sense the arts council’s disappointment, for the material I want to bring with me is neither incendiary nor kid-friendly. Perhaps I will write something once there.

“Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen," said Albert Einstein

“Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense," said Gertrude Stein.

Twenty years after writing his imagist "In a Station of the Metro", Pound, who was by then living in Italy, presented Mussolini with a copy of his XXX Cantos, to which the dictator said, “How amusing.”

But Pound must have made an impression, for nine years later, with the United States a full-patch member of the Second World War, Mussolini asked the poet if he might try his hand at radio.

Below is what you might have heard during an Ezra Pound broadcast (note the Gertrude Stein influence):

"Every man of common sense, including the odd British MP, knows that every man of common sense prefers Fascism to Communism, from the moment that he learns a few concrete facts about both of them."

I have taken the Paris Metro. During my first visit, in October 1980, it was not the train to St. Cyr I was looking for, but this:

IN A STATION OF THE METRO
(Ezra Pound)

The apparition of these faces in the crowd ;
Petals on a wet, black bough.