Haida Beaver

Haida artist Yalthgwaawiis — Francis Williams — carved a niche for himself as a maker of bracelets, rings and other metalwork. He was also much admired for his technical mastery in hand-engraving and for his generous mentorship of other First Nations artists of the Pacific Northwest. “I want to become known as the Master of Cross-Hatching,” he used to say with his huge smile, and few would dispute that he earned that title. He was a jewelry maker, first and foremost. Yet he also translated some of his finely rendered motifs into serigraphy (silkscreen printing), occasionally playing with colour and scale in a process of cutting shapes and pressing inks to create an image on paper, rather than pushing his graver (engraving tool) into silver and gold. 

In Haida Beaver, Williams uses the colours characteristic of traditional Haida painting. A bold, black formline outlines the beaver’s head, ears and upturned tail. Arms and legs are depicted in red, their details defined in relation to the white negative space. Other forms represent the beaver’s ears, facial features and elements inside the scaly tail; as in Williams’ jewelry, the cross-hatched area provides texture and relief. The small face inside the tail hints at the human aspect of all animals in the Haida pantheon: when animals cross the boundary between the human world and their own, they take off their skins and live in their houses as people do.  

Curiously, the beaver is a something of a newcomer to Haida territory, the islands of Haida Gwaii off the northern coast of British Columbia. Introduced from the mainland for fur trapping in the mid-20^th century, the industrious creature had nevertheless already held its place for many generations in Haida oral narratives and as one of the major crests, or emblems, owned as property by the Haida Eagle clan. Symbolic of particular family histories, privileges and connections, the beaver continues to be represented by Haida artists on ceremonial regalia and totem poles, feast dishes and silver bracelets, for community use and — like this print — for the larger art world.  

Williams himself was a kind of newcomer to Haida Gwaii when, in the mid-1960s, he returned to his birthplace of Old Massett, British Columbia, after spending much of his youth living away from his family in hospitals and institutions, undergoing treatment for tuberculosis of the hip. Learning silver engraving with elder Arthur Adams set him on a path of comprehending what Haida art was and still could become. Like other young artists of his generation, however, Williams had to search out evidence of the historical carvings and paintings in books and urban museums. So many of the ancestral artworks — his potential teachers — had been removed from Haida Gwaii. He left to undertake formal art studies in Victoria, and became one of a new generation of Indigenous artists and activists who sought to once again build on the work of preceding generations, reclaiming the art and cultural practices that for eight decades had been suppressed as a result of federal Indian Act legislation and residential schools. Haida Beaver reflects something of that journey, whereby Francis Williams would contribute his own distinctive approach toward a new Haida art.

Karen Duffek is the Curator of Contemporary Visual Arts and Pacific Northwest at the Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia.