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FOREWORD

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THIS FOREWORD WAS TRANSCRIBED from a taped conversation between Robert Davidson (RD) and Margaret Blackman (MB) on 17 August 1992, specifically on the subject of Raven’s Cry by Christie Harris. The transcript was edited for publication, and the edited version was amended and approved by both participants.

MB Tell me, when did you first read Raven’s Cry?
RD I first read it when the book came out in 1966. It filled a gap in my life as a Haida person, in that when I was going to school in Massett, I kept searching through social studies books, trying to find information on Haida people. At one point in my youth, I started to hear the word Haida more and more. I didn’t realize that I was Haida, and when I started to realize I was Haida, then I wanted to know more about Haida. And so this book helped in starting to fill that gap.
MB I first read it when I was in graduate school, around 1969. I read it because I was studying some historical photographs of Haida villages (including several of Chief 7wii•aa’s house) and was looking for more sources of information. What struck me was that so much research had gone into the writing of the story. Even more importantly, behind this story lay the original documents, which I as an anthropologist and ethnohistorian could consult for the information I was interested in. I was struck by all of the research that had gone into the book, and reading it made me hungry for more.
RD I was really impressed with the sincerity and the feeling Christie Harris portrayed. It’s a very good attempt at trying to look at history from a native point of view. For myself, being a native, it helped to give me an idea of why we are such a devastated people, spiritually and culturally.
MB I give Christie Harris a lot of credit for trying to portray the history of Haida contact with the outside world through the eyes of the Haida. I can’t comment on how successfully she did that, not being a Haida nor living at that particular period of time, but it was a very important step to try to portray history from the native point of view. At the same time, she aimed her book at a general audience, so I think it filled a big need.
RD One of the things that I also found is that Raven’s Cry was easy to read. The names of people mentioned in it are now becoming more familiar to me, since I’ve started to dig deeper into history and learn more about the background, philosophy and ideas of Haida culture.
MB For me the book really marked the beginning of a quest. It sent me to the Queen Charlotte Islands to document the historical photographs that I was collecting. It led me to people like Chief William Matthews, who told the side of the story that is alluded to briefly in the book, the account of Chief 7wii•aa, his father and his lineage. Raven’s Cry launched my career as a student of Haida history, but it can also be read as a children’s story. I’ve read it to my daughter.
RD I see this book as a beginning for a novice who wants to look at the background and history of the Haida. In high school I really wanted to know more about my background. But in our homes, there was nothing mentioned—my parents didn’t speak Haida in front of me, though my grandparents spoke Haida—and that was a real setback for me, when I finally realized I was Haida.
In school we talked about Hannibal, we talked about Cleopatra, Alexander the Great, and all the romanticism that went with those people. Later, I was to realize we had our own culture and our own heroes such as Albert Edward Edenshaw, Charles Edenshaw—but there was no information anywhere so that I could relate to them.
MB I think, given the time at which Raven’s Cry was published, it said something else worth noting. It was particularly important that in the 1960s there was an outsider who was interested in the Haida point of view and in presenting that point of view to a wide readership. It makes a statement when someone from the outside comes in and says, “Hey, this is important history, and this has a right to be heard as well.” Granted, Harris took a stab in the dark in trying to articulate Haida emotions and reactions, and how successful she was at that I can’t really say. Perhaps some older generation Haida speakers could evaluate that.
RD There are some ideas in the book that I found very anglicized, but they didn’t bother me. I felt there was a person making known some of the tragedies that happened to the Haida people. It gives you an idea about where the alcoholism, the drug abuse, the child abuse, all those native difficulties, are coming from.
MB I think, too, that the book was ahead of its time, because the Haida people in Raven’s Cry are not the “Other” encountered by the maritime traders and explorers. Rather, the Haida people are the central actors in this book; the story revolves around them. And that makes a real difference. This is the very thing that is being said today, that we need histories from the perspective of the native people, and that is what Christie Harris attempted more than twenty-five years ago.
RD For the time period it was good documentation. I was very impressed, and it really moved me when I read it. And the illustrations are also, I feel, ahead of their time. When I first saw the illustrations, I was impressed by the emotions that Bill Reid put into them. You could feel the smallpox epidemic. You could feel the storm.
MB To someone who didn’t know anything about contemporary native art, which at that time was really just in its beginning stages, Bill Reid’s drawings made clear that there’s an art here that’s very much alive. The richness that Raven’s Cry pointed to both in terms of historical documentation and artistic legacy was particularly impressive.
Do you think Raven’s Cry will stand as an inspiration for native people to do their own history? I don’t know what effect it has had among native people.
RD People are aware of it. When the book was first published, it was read. It was a book people knew about. It’s certainly a book I would keep on the shelf as a reference. In this part of my life I’m really going into depth on Haida history and Haida ideas. I’m learning the lineages, the lineage system, the importance of Haida kinship. We have to know our history before we can move on, and this book provides elementary and easy-to-read insights.
MB I do think the book has to be read as one family’s perspective on Haida history, because it’s very much the story of the Edenshaw lineage. Chief 7idansuu’s rivals, Chief 7wii•aa and his family, are not portrayed particularly favorably in this book because events are seen through the eyes of the Edenshaw family. So it should not be viewed as a Haida history. Probably Haida history was always viewed through the eyes of particular actors and their respective lineages.
RD It’s really interesting to work with you, because you have a different approach and you’re educated in a different way. Just to be off the subject a little—some of the information that’s in your book on my grandmother, During My Time, she had said to me or I’d overheard her say to someone, but she’d never explained why. Your book makes those things clear.
MB I guess as an anthropologist and as an outsider, I always demanded the why, whereas if you’re part of the family you don’t necessarily demand it. You also made the point several years ago that there’s a lot to be learned through doing. I could talk with your grandmother, Florence Davidson, and ask her about a certain mask and a certain dance, but that’s very different thing from you, with your dance group, the Rainbow Creek Dancers, getting instruction from her in preparing to perform a dance. Putting on a potlatch and receiving advice and instruction from your grandmother is very different from me asking, “Tell me about potlatches.”
RD The experience of having hosted several potlatches has made me realize that the potlatch was always in transition. It was always developing. One of my favorite stories came out of one of the meetings to plan a potlatch that I was hosting. The questions overflowed the answers or the ideas or the information or the knowledge, and so one elder said, “You do it. You know how to do it. You’ve been doing potlatching for years. We’ll follow you.” And that gave me a licence to be creative.
My grandmother would explain certain things to me, like a particular song, and I would say to her, “How should I carve the mask?” She’d say, “Make it smile.” And then in singing the song over and over and over again, and finally connecting the song with the mask, the song is saying, “7eeyaa aa mee.” 7eeyaa means “I’m in awe,” and so I said, “Wow, that’s why you can make this mask smile, because it’s portraying another expression of that idea.” And so in learning some of those values and ideas, we’re able to add to the development of those songs and dances and also to give meaning to those old songs, those old dances. It was really exciting to discover that.
In doing the songs and dances over and over again, we started to gain confidence. We also felt a little bored, because we’d done them before, so we started challenging ourselves to come up with new ideas, new dances, new masks and so on. And that is no different from how things were back in 1790 or 1450. It’s no different because every generation goes through change. Now I feel we have to go through a redefinition of who we are because some of the old ideas don’t work. When we start to redefine ourselves, it is no different from a hundred or two hundred years ago when people also went through redefinition.
MB I think that’s true with any culture, that there’s a constant definition and redefinition of who you are as things change. Culture is always being created. And it’s people who create culture. Why can’t you create and define traditions for today and tomorrow, drawing upon what you want from the past and what seems meaningful for the present as well?
RD There were three strong forces that helped to change the pattern. First, there were the epidemics that wiped out eighty-eight per cent of the Haida, and then there were the missionaries who instilled their values which are still affecting people today, and then there were the anthropologists. I feel these are the obstacles I had to overcome to become a creative person within Haida culture. I had to confront Christianity. I had to confront the anthropological view of Haida. I had to confront the devastation of the epidemics, because my dad was a product of that. My grandmother was a product of that. Their parents were a product of that. And so those bruises were handed down from generation to generation.
MB We should take up the topic of the anthropological view of things, because that’s interesting.
RD When I first came to Vancouver, I met an incredible barrage of anthropologists. I regarded them as people who held the knowledge, and so I was afraid to say anything in front of them for fear of saying the wrong thing. I was intimidated, and it took me years to break through that barrier so I could challenge and also start to be creative within those cultural ideas.
For example, a friend of mine was doing an archaeological dig in Massett, and they found these bone tools. They spent hours and days trying to figure out what these tools were for, what they were. One day we visited a basket weaver, and this basket weaver was still using that same tool. They didn’t think to go to the village and say, “Hey, what’s this tool?” It’s like they held themselves above the native people, like they didn’t think we knew anything. I see that happening quite often.
Another example is when I was at the Royal British Columbia Museum. I saw this instrument and I knew what it was for, but I asked, “What is this for?” They said they didn’t know. And so I put it together and told them what it was for. I said, “Why don’t you people ask us once in a while?”
MB “Cultural representation”—who has the authority to represent a culture—is becoming more and more of an issue in anthropology among native peoples. There is a long history of cultural representation being the domain of academic experts.
RD Well, maybe it’s time for us to hold a conference and invite all the anthropologists so they can hear what we have to say. It’s time for us to start breaking our own trail.
MB I think it is. Some of the best conferences happen when you bring together anthropologists and native experts to listen to one another and to learn from one another as equals with different realms of knowledge and different ways of approaching things.
RD That’s another thing. We have our own scholars, but they don’t have a piece of paper to prove that they are scholars. For instance, Uncle Alfred to my mind would have been a scholar, but he didn’t have that piece of paper so he wouldn’t be invited to a conference.
I feel that the potlatch is the ultimate. It’s like your doctoral dissertation, where you are in front of the public, where you are in front of the elders, where you are making statements. And in order to do that, you have to do a lot of research and planning to make sure everything goes right. It is the ultimate test.
MB Learning through potlatching. It’s like taking your Ph.D. qualifying exams, I suppose.
RD Absolutely. That’s what I was referring to.
MB I think it is exciting now that more and more native people are starting to write their own history. Someday there may be something along the line of what Christie Harris has done, perhaps documenting another family, written by a Haida. I think that would be really good.
RD Yes. A big change has to take place in order for that to happen. You’ve probably heard the story of the two buckets of crabs: one belonged to a native, one to a white. The crabs from the white man’s bucket kept climbing out of the bucket, and finally the native guy said, “How come your crabs are always climbing out of the bucket and mine aren’t?” The white man started watching. Every time one of the crabs started climbing out of the native’s bucket, all the other crabs started pulling him down. That’s a very common and very popular story amongst natives, to warn we don’t encourage enough. We have to start acknowledging our accomplishments more. Give more encouragement to those who are doing a great job.
Now that we know about this, what are we going to do about it? That’s my question. Where do we start? What can we do about it? We can’t just sit around and complain. It’s time to start saying, “Hey, let’s get started. Let’s start repairing ourselves.” This can only come from understanding our history. Now that we have access to our own history, we must take responsibility and chart our own direction.
This book gives a little insight into the tragedies that we as a nation went through since the arrival of the white man. Now is the time to overcome those tragedies. The recovery can only come from our efforts.
Raven's Cry

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