Words of an Artist

I met Bill Reid only once, in Haida Gwaii (the Queen Charlotte Islands) in 1990. I was at the Copper River, on the northeast end of Moresby Island where the blueback—young, two-year-cycle sockeye salmon—were running, and Bill was walking along the trail bordering the estuary, where the gill nets strung across the many river channels of this traditional Skidegate Haida fishing site gleamed and undulated like great beaded necklaces in the Copper’s currents.

He was tall as a Douglas fir, and he wore gumboots like the rest of us, and jeans, and a Cowichan sweater to keep out the drizzle; and when he inched his way down a muddy little culvert from the trail to the sandy tidal flats, and I was inching my way up the same culvert, we nodded to each other. He looked serious and concentrated and, yes, regal. And the first thing that struck me was how, well, “white” he looked. I had not yet internalized the idea that there are many blue-eyed, blond, even going-on-white-haired...