Bill Reid’s celebrated art brought Haida values into the national spotlight
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Bill Reid’s final resting place was chosen with great care. The artist’s ashes were taken by canoe and laid to rest at Quadusgaa, a former village in Haida Gwaii close to Tanu where Reid’s grandmother was born.
When he died on March 13, 1998, he was 78 years old and one of the country’s most celebrated artists. His work continues to be seen by thousands of people every day.
At the Museum of Anthropology at UBC, there is Reid’s The Raven And The First Men, which depicts in cedar the Haida creation story. At the Vancouver Aquarium, Chief Of The Undersea World is a breaching killer whale in bronze.
At the Vancouver International Airport, the Spirit Of Haida Gwaii, the monumental bronze sculpture also known as The Jade Canoe, is prominently located in the International Terminal. Between 2004 and 2012, it was on the $20 bill. Plus, there is the Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art in downtown Vancouver where Reid’s works, including jewelry, are on permanent display.
“Once we discard our ethnocentric, hierarchical ideas of how the world works, we will find that one basic quality unites all the works of mankind that speak to us in human, recognizable voices across the barrier of time, culture and space, ” he once wrote. “The simple quality of being well made.”
Reid was born in Victoria and raised an Anglican. He carved and whittled as a youngster, but there was no indication he would become the dominant indigenous artist of his era. It wasn’t until his late teens that he became aware that his mother was Haida.
As an adult in the 1950s, his voice was heard across the country as a broadcaster for the CBC. While in Toronto, he studied jewelry making at Ryerson Polytechnic Institute.
In 1954, he made a trip to Haida Gwaii that changed him forever. He saw a pair of bracelets carved by his great-great uncle, the master artist Charles Edenshaw.
After that encounter, “the world was not the same,” he said.
Although he believed colonialism had seriously damaged Haida culture, Reid created an estimated 1,500 works in the Haida tradition during the next 50 years. They ranged in size from small pieces of jewelry to big public sculptures.
Before he died, Reid said all the different figures in The Jade Canoe were a long way from their home in Haida Gwaii. They were still squabbling and vying for position in the canoe.
“Is the tall figure who may or may not be the Spirit of Haida Gwaii leading us, for we are all in the same boat, to a sheltered beach beyond the rim of the world as he seems to be, or is he lost in a dream of his own dreamings?” Reid wrote. “The boat moves on, forever anchored in the same place.”