Haida give Trudeau’s raven tattoo qualified approval
Adapted design by celebrated artist Robert Davidson
While Haida leaders may not be pleased every time a white guy gets a tattoo based on one of their designs, the large stylized raven on the shoulder of prime ministerdesignate Justin Trudeau gets a pass.
“The fact that the prime minister has Haida art on him … of course we’re proud of that,” said Peter Lantin, president of the Council of the Haida Nation.
The tattoo, which Trudeau got just before he became Liberal leader in 2013, adapts a design by Robert Davidson, one of Canada’s most celebrated Haida artists.
“My tattoo is planet Earth inside a Haida raven,” Trudeau tweeted in 2012. “The globe I got when I was 23; the Robert Davidson raven for my 40th birthday.”
Davidson said he did not know one of his designs adorned Trudeau’s arm until Tuesday.
“There’s a lot of people using my designs and I’m usually honoured, but maybe I shouldn’t say that because then everybody will do it,” he said.
For Trudeau, the choice of Davidson was likely no accident.
At the age of four, he attended the ceremony at which Davidson’s grandmother Florence “adopted” Pierre Trudeau into their family clan, an honour typically reserved for non-Haida who marry in.
The occasion was the 1976 visit of the then-prime minister to what was then known as the Queen Charlotte Islands.
“She gave him the name ‘Kihl gulaans,’ which translates to ‘his voice is as good as gold,’ ” said Davidson, who was also present at the ceremony.
The elder Trudeau, notably, did not have the best reputation among First Nations.
As was often noted often in the recent election campaign, one of Pierre Trudeau’s first actions as prime minister was the 1969 White Paper, a reviled plan to eliminate “Indian” as a distinct legal status.
Although his record on the Aboriginal file was “pretty deplorable,” said Lantin, he was welcomed regardless, as a gesture of reconciliation.
But just as Plains First Nations object to non-Aboriginals wearing headdresses to music festivals, B.C. First Nations can be similarly upset at seeing Pacific coast designs adapted for body art.
Haida art is often specific to clans. Trish Collison, a Haida anthropologist, has described her reaction to seeing her great-great-uncle’s designs tacked up in a Seattle, Wash., tattoo parlour.
“It’s ripping off someone else’s lineage, someone else’s art. Those designs are only supposed to exist within my family,” she said in 2004 comments to Windspeaker, a Canadian Aboriginal news source.
Davidson says he often sees his designs inked onto strangers and is not always pleased.
“I used to be very upset, but it also stifles my creativity when I do that, because I’m so busy hanging onto something,” he said.
Lantin said there are times when he would call a use of Haida art as “cultural appropriation,” but when Justin Trudeau visited the islands again in 2013, he seemed to take an interest in the culture and, of course, his father was technically family.
“He went about it the right way,” said Lantin.