“Luck Has Nothing to Do with It”

The Haida Gwaii Lesson

At the northernmost point of the northernmost village on a remote North Pacific island I sat one blustery afternoon and watched Jim Hart, a hereditary Haida clan chief and his son, Gwalega, carve a gigantic breaching killer whale from a solid block of red cedar. The final product would be another legendary piece of Haida sculpture that almost certainly will, like so many before it, find its way into a prestigious museum…
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by: Mark Dowie – Autumn 2015

What’s in a Name?

A few years back, while researching a book called Conservation Refugees about Native peoples who had been evicted from their lands to make way for parks or preserves, I was interviewing an Ojibway woman named Bertha Petiquan in a remote region of northern Canada. Petiquan spoke no English so her daughter, Alyse, offered to translate. photo by Robert Linsdell, on FlickrAurora as seen in Manitoba. When I used the ‘W’ word in…
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by: Mark Dowie – Autumn 2014