The largest Japanese language newspaper in Vancouver- Vancouver Shinpo interviewed me this morning. The interview will appear in their June issue.

Haida Manga!

I grab at words and images chasing them across paper or plucking them out of a screen of light turning them first this way and then that. A biologist examining his own soul hoping to engineer a miraculous return to a theoretical state of nobled savagery as laid out on the elemental chart.

As a fisherman must be a biologist and an engineer so must an illustrator be a writer and a dreamer and so must the Indian be poet and politician.

In 1977 I stood with carving blade in hand in front of my entire community . Under the tower of carved cedar tree I told the tale of how he pursued Skaana the whale and his captured lover deep under the seas. My journeys into carving always seemed buried under the weight of water. It felt so static. Like capturing an image in a flash of a camera and printed up over an editor’s caption that only tells us who wasn’t there. An image in a box on a page isolated from any before or after. There were too many assumptions about how natural it was that Haidas should be carvers. Like might is always right or like an injury becomes a disability. Expectations according to ability but ability according to expectations.

Carving and raising Totem Poles worked better in the village than at the flashy estate. One is the solemn and stiff stance of a wooden Indian trading values measured in someone else’s currency. At least in the village we could be good friends laughing over well worn jokes. But I wanted to hear new jokes and new ways to look at old situations. Sometime it seemed it was simply a matter that if it was already done I was much interested, but now I understand it as the need to step up and peer out over the edge of the walls we are all crouching behind. I saw that our carved cedar walls were tinged with flickering blue. My eyes slip so easily down into the television set. How can I wonder about old stories or even hear them over the flash and jazz of someone else’ voice blowing in with color, hype and canned fashions. Would the blue flickering walls become our ceiling?

So then I began to sing story and while that attracted applause, the audience always sits far across the spread of an empty space and our contact disappears when my lips seal and their palms still. Trying to talking about the voice and not the word feels like a performance piece in front of a classroom or a self help workshop. Feast halls, gymnasiums, classrooms, winter Olympics in Calgary,the Vancouver Orpheum or a hall in Kyoto all become variations of the same blue tinged box.

I began slowly in 1977 by finding contemporary story and wrapping Haida imagery into cartoon format. I was hesitant wondering if the sacred was offended by my insolence. It never seemed to strike me down and over the last few years my comfort with the marriage of Haida narrative and contemporary medium has grown. Perhaps I simply don’t give a damn about the confusion between sacred and profane. There are so many stories and so little time that I throw myself into the sheer joy of dusting off ancient icons and watching the brush-lines and typed words dance and wiggle across the page and out over the wall we are safely hidden behind. I can hardly wait for them to all come back and tell me stories.

So here it is another search for an alternative to a Canadian moose drinking maple syrup and eating smoked salmon.