I have created the Raven in my own image over the years and insist that mine is the version of this personality that is correct – well, at least it is correct as far as I am concerned.
I think the Northwest Coast style of art is an absolutely unique product, one of the crowning achievements of the whole human experience. I just don’t want the whole thing swept under the carpet without someone paying attention to it.
I’ve never felt that I was doing something for my people, except what I could to bring the accomplishments of the old ones to the attention of the world.
I consider myself one of the most fortunate of men, to have lived at a time when some of the old Haidas and their peers among the Northwest Coast peoples were still alive, and to have had the privilege of knowing them.
I have a sort of waking nightmare: to get this thing just about completed, and the last day to discover one little part that doesn’t quite fit with the adjacent part.
I certainly and deliberately introduced a great deal of variety into the people in the clamshell, which I suppose grows out of growing up in an individualistic society we profess to have.
But I didn’t think about this beforehand. I just went ahead and did it, and that’s the way it turned out. So I guess there are lots of paradoxes which I’ll leave for other people to unscramble.
