Bill Reid: A Trickster's Life
In an new biography, Maria Tippett examines the dichotomy whereby some people think Reid saved West Coast Native art
from its demise, and others consider him a big phoney
Michael Scott
Vancouver Sun
Saturday, November 08, 2003
By any conventional standard, Bill Reid was no saint. The West Coast artist who died in 1998 had profoundly mixed
feelings about his native heritage and often had condescending things to say about aboriginal people. At times he
comported himself like a grandee and failed to give sufficient credit to the studio assistants who actually did the
work on his most famous projects. Manic depression made a tangle of his personal life. His mercurial nature was hard on
friends and business associates, and his celebrated philandering was hard on his wife.
And yet, as Maria Tippett argues in her persuasive new biography, Bill Reid might indeed have been a saint of sorts: a
patron saint of people who struggle with their identity. In Bill Reid: The Making of an Indian, Tippett presents
considerable evidence that Reid spent much of his life perplexed by who he was, never at ease as an Indian, but never
quite satisfied to be an urbane white man, either.
Tippett does what so few of us who knew Bill Reid ever bothered to do: she acknowledges the mythic wrapper around the
man before discarding it in favour of her own diligent research. Bill Reid himself -- not to mention legions of
supporters -- loved to say that he breathed life into a dying art form, saving Haida visual culture for posterity. No
less an arbiter than Claude Lévi-Strauss once wrote, presumably with a straight face, "we are indebted to Bill Reid,
that incomparable artist, for having tended and revived a flame that was so close to dying ... Thanks to [him], the art
of the Indians of the Pacific coast makes its entry upon the great stage of the world; it begins to converse with the
whole of mankind."
As Reid's many praise-filled obituaries made clear, there were few people in British Columbia who didn't believe that
to be true by the time he died. I myself wrote at the time that Reid's talent "was all the breath needed to fan the
last dying embers of Haida art back to life ... [helping to] restore a feeling of pride to Native communities up and
down the Pacific coast."
What Lévi-Strauss and the rest of us failed to scruple over was the fact -- carefully documented by Tippett -- that
Northwest coast Native culture was resurgent long before Reid came along. Bill Reid was only one of many artists,
including Mungo Martin, Daniel and Doug Cranmer, Tony Hunt, Robert Davidson and many others, who were exploring and
extending Native-themed fine art.
This realization makes it all the more disturbing to hear Reid (with a mere two years of training to be a contemporary
jeweller in Toronto and a total of 10 days as an apprentice to Mungo Martin on a totem pole carving project) telling
the president of the University of British Columbia in 1955 that Northwest coast Native culture was dead and the
remaining Native artists could "produce nothing more of artistic interest, except for the work of a couple of slate
carvers and one other individual, myself." Maybe it was the 15 years he spent as a radio journalist with the CBC that
made Reid such a clever mythologist.
He liked to tell people that he was well into his teens before he became aware of his mother's Haida roots. That story
presents a romantic snapshot of the tall, soft-spoken white boy who "discovers" his Haida heritage and his famous Haida
artist ancestors. But it is not true. Tippett proves that Reid had travelled to Haida Gwaii as a young child, and that
his mother's full-blooded Haida relatives were in and out of the family home in Victoria on a weekly basis. Reid knew
he was half-Indian, but hid the fact for many years. And then after he found there was a certain cachet in artistic
circles to being part-Haida, he used that to craft a new identity.
But that new identity was a fragile shell. Every time that Reid's blood ties to the Haida failed to advance his career -
- when a Native-themed project fell through, or an exhibition bombed -- he would put aside his interest in Northwest
coast Native motifs as being anachronistic, and turn to contemporary design instead. He lived away, in Montreal and
London, England, for several years in the late 1960s and early '70s, a 50-year-old depressive struggling to come to
terms with who he was.
The work he produced at this time, while studying at London's Central School of Art and Design on a Canada Council
grant, was modernist in style. And what native-style pieces he produced, he frequently disparaged as being "artifakes."
While he was away, there was an explosion in academic and commercial interest in the art being made by aboriginal
artists -- not as curios or handicrafts, but as fine art. When Reid returned to Vancouver in 1973 it was to find
himself a hero of sorts, a "Native" artist who was adapting and extending Western contemporary art. He was immediately
taken up by Vancouver's elite. Within a year of his return, he had won himself a solo retrospective at the Vancouver
Art Gallery, an exhibition that established him once and for all as a Native artist.
He told his friend Sherry Grauer, "I used to be an assimilationist, but I now see that the way to go is to keep this
[Native art] alive.
As Tippett argues, Reid's social and commercial success had a lot to do with his being a very white kind of Indian.
Because of his "late" discovery of his ancestral link to the Haida, members of the white arts community "could
congratulate themselves that the cultivation, support, and promotion of Bill Reid's knowledge of Native culture had
come through their institutions -- the University of British Columbia, the Canada Council, the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation, the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Provincial Museum -- and through white technology -- the Ryerson
Institute in Toronto and the Central School of Art and Design in London... Reid was an acceptable Native" who did not
carry the unwelcome baggage of strident politics, poverty, social ineptness or substance abuse.
Not surprisingly, Reid's newfound commitment to Native culture didn't immediately endear him to his aboriginal
countrymen. When he set up shop in Skidegate in 1976 to carve and raise a totem pole in honour of his family, people
there were offended by his condescending attitude. ("I almost had to tell the Natives which end of the hammer to hold,"
he told a Vancouver newspaper.) And it was an essential part of the Reid myth, never dispelled by him, that that pole
was the first to be raised in Haida Gwaii in modern times. Tippett easily proves that there had been several post-war
poles raised in the Charlottes, including one in Skidegate, which had subsequently been "salvaged" by southern museums
(i.e. cut down and removed to distant institutions). Reid himself had been part of those so-called salvage operations
in the 1950s, while he was still working as a CBC announcer.
It seems true that our lives, as Salman Rushdie observes, teach us who we are. With the diagnosis of Parkinson's
disease in the early 1970s, and the steadying presence of his intelligent and urbane French-born wife Martine, who he
married in 1981, Reid became more focused and organized in his artmaking. The praise for his Native worldview brought
its own discipline: Reid no longer needed to be perplexed about which way to proceed -- the path was unfurling in front
of him.
In the final decade of his life, as his projects grew grander and his physical strength diminished, Reid found himself
drawn into more serious levels of commitment to his Haida heritage. When Western Forest Products set out to log old-
growth timber from the south slope of Lyell Island in 1985, Reid seemed at first unwilling to involve himself in the
resulting blockade. But hereditary chief Miles Richardson called Reid at his Granville Island studio and told the 65-
year-old artist he had two days to get up there, or he would never be "allowed to come back."
Reid went and sat the blockade in the rain, whittling.
Northwest coast artist Robert Davidson has said that there are two kinds of Native artist: those who sell their work
and those who sell themselves. Bill Reid, it seems, did both. "He produced stunning work that appealed to a non-Native
public," writes Tippett, "and he practised the tricks of the self-marketing trade. He gracefully accepted being the
focus of attention, then entertained his clients with clever but casual conversation. He possessed a gift for ironic
self-mockery. He got a gleeful thrill out of knocking established conventions -- and getting away with it."
Vancouver jeweler Toni Cavelti, a friend of Reid's for 40 years, once observed that Bill Reid never quite knew where he
belonged. "He never gave the impression of being primarily a jeweller, or a carver, or a writer, or a printer, or an
intellectual."
But he was all those things at one time or another, shifting and feinting like a tribal dancer in a transformation
mask. We know, thanks to Tippett's dogged research for this book, that he did not single-handedly rescue Northwest
coast art from oblivion. But what he did do was introduce the concept that Native artists might command important
commissions and consort with important patrons. (Reid's sale of the green-patined version of Spirit of Haida Gwaii to
the Vancouver International Airport in 1996 for $3 million remains the highest price ever paid to a living Canadian
artist.)
Susan Point's ability, later, to place a monumental Salish spindle whorl at the airport, or Jim Hart's ability to make
a huge bronze cast of a totem pole for Vancouver businessman Michael Audain, are the direct results of Reid's polished
interactions with an earlier generation of art patrons such as the Koerners and the de Menils.
Tippett invokes Benjamin Disraeli, who once called himself "the blank page between the Old Testament and the New," in
attempting to summarize Reid's accomplishments. He was "the linchpin between artifact and art," she writes, "between
salvage and revival, between art and politics, and between the Native and non-Native communities.
"The dialogue between me as an urban 20th-century product of this particular culture and this 19th-century thing has
produced some quite remarkable pieces," Reid told arts writer Max Wyman in 1990. "What they symbolize or what their
significance is, I don't know.
"They're just nice things -- and that's all they have to be."
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Michael Scott is the Vancouver Sun arts editor.
SOURCE: The Vancouver Sun, Canada
http://tinyurl.com/u9h1
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