Dear Stefano,

The series Haida Cosmology will appear in a French film sometime in 2010. As well, the University of British Columbia Press will publish a book including the Cosmology series later this year.

However, here is a quick response. Page three - along the top row, is a depiction of the inside of a house. The bottom figure is what we call the forehead of the house, that is the back wall. It is the place where the heads of the household will have their bedrooms. It is also the place where your most important guests would sit something like at the head of the banquet table. This is also the wall that is disassembled so a cadaver can be properly removed from the house. Note that the back wall is at the opposite end of the house from that wall with the entrance door.

Immediately above this image is an ovoid-shaped face that looks towards a doorway. While mostly a filler, an image to occupy space, it is also representative of the relative disconnection that something “contained” has to that which contains it. Think of a box with an object placed inside it. The container exists as something quite separate from the other object. The wine remains contained but separate from the bottle.

The image that arches above and fills the page from left to right. The main shape, which is relatively straight represents the timbers of the house. It will be useful to also imagine that the timbers are also limbs. Within that main shape you can see lower middle a doorway. Above the doorway and attached to it is a human body. From left to right is foot, leg with eye design, thigh and stomach connected to the doorway which is then also the birthing channel.

In rapid summary the entire Cosmology piece depicts elements of how the Haida world view functions. It includes positioning our world with a cosmology of simultaneously existing other worlds represented as levels. Birth is also shown. The physical house is also representative of our own meta/physical human lives. Village architecture is more than just a layout of water lines, sewer pipes and other contemporary municipal engineering, it is for the purposes of my depiction mostly a significant depiction of human relationships (i.e. we are all born the same way - so all houses face the ocean and all of us live together - so are all houses are placed side by side in rows. This is not to avoid or diminish the practicalities of municipal construction layouts even in a world before Canadian colonization, but to accentuate that all peoples have deeply embedded meanings and we shape our world according to those personalized beliefs.

The series also depicts death by drawing a distinction between how a regular corpse is treated differently from a person who has worked to develop their healing and caring capacities over their lifetime.

I hope that this brief commentary helps.

regards,

mny