“We’re all in the same lifeboat now,” said Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas as he addressed the audience at Simon Fraser University on Sept. 22, lighting up a windowless, institutional lecture hall with his eloquent and urgent words. “We’re in real trouble right now. This is not a time to be passive.”
Yahgulanaas, a Haida artist and Bowen Islander, has not lived a passive life. In Haida Gwaii, he worked for decades to protect the island’s biodiversity, to protect “a relationship we had experienced and developed with a particular landscape, being in a singular place for a long time.”
After 27 years of blockades, “making life difficult for British Columbia,” they successfully stood up to “those who would convert biodiversity into dollars and cents.”
Yahgulanaas was the second speaker in the President’s Dream Colloquium, Returning to the Teachings: Justice, Identity and Belonging in the 21st Century, a public lecture series that examines how reconciliation is taking form in higher education. The Colloquium, sponsored by SFU president, Andrew Petter, is the dream of another islander, Brenda Morrison, professor of criminology and director of SFU’s Centre for Restorative Justice. “As a Canadian institution we need to embrace and own our full history as Canadians,” said Morrison. “We can turn the tide of harm and injustice through reaching out and working across knowledge systems.”
As a visual artist, Yahgulanaas appreciates the “cosmological architecture” of a culture, how the houses, the modes of travel, the art come out of the deep beliefs and stories of a culture. The Haida are admired for their totem poles, many of which were removed and sold to galleries all over the world. “Even through those troubled times,” he said, “we all kept a little something, a little gift.”
Yahgulanaas’ gift? The ability to create through his art, through his whimsy, a world we would all want to live in, one that comes with responsibility. “The one at the top of the totem pole,” he reminds us, “has the greatest degree of responsibility.”
To engage more than just intellectual modes of learning, every talk in the series includes a ceremony. Yahgulanaas was welcomed by Musqueam Elders Thelma Stogan and Arthur Stogan, given a blanket to wear for protection and scrubbed clean of negative energy with cedar boughs.
“You’re gonna need a lot more cedar than that,” quipped Yahgulanaas.
Yahgulanaas is the creator of large sculptures, author of The Flight of the Hummingbird, and inventor of Haida Manga, merging Haida and Asian artistic influences.
His show, The Seriousness of Play continues until Sunday, Oct. 2 at the Bill Reid Gallery. Admission for that day is free and includes the opportunity to help create a Haida Manga mural. No time for passivity, says Yahgulanaas. “Participate. Get playful.”
The last talk in the Colloquium takes place on Nov. 24, with anthropologist, author and islander Wade Davis.
Pauline Le Bel is the author of Becoming Intimate with the Earth. Her book, Whale in the Door: Re-Imagining Howe Sound, will be published in 2017.
