When Haida sculptor Bill Reid died in 1998, he was more widely and more fervently admired than any other Native American artist. Reid attained his greatest fame in the visual arts, but words were his first professional medium. He made his living as a radio announcer and script writer until he received his first large carving commission, in 1958. Indeed, one of his several Haida names was Kihlguulins, "the one with the beautiful voice." His oratorical and literary gifts are rightly part of the Reid legend.
Despite that gift for words, much of what he wrote was published only in the fugitive domain of newspapers, magazines, and exhibition catalogues. Other works were broadcast or recorded as the voice-tracks of documentary films but never printed. Still others have waited until now to be released in any form.
This book collects, for the first time, the most important of these widely scattered writings: seminal statements on the art of the Northwest Coast, on the role of the Native American artist in a multicultural world, and on the quintessential role of both the artist and the environment in the survival of human culture.
