Multimedia

The To Speak With a Golden Voice: Speaker Series was an integral component of the exhibition of the same name at the Bill Red Gallery for Northwest Coast Studies that ran from from July 16, 2020 to September 5, 2021, and was guest curated by Gwaai Edenshaw.

The series consisted of five public talks by influential artists and cultural experts who knew, worked with, and/or studied under Bill Reid. Held during the fall of 2020, the talks took place at the Bill Reid Gallery as part of the exhibition programming, but were also featured as guest lectures in the credt course INDG 222: To Speak with a Golden Voice at SFU.

Introduction to Fiction: Canadian Aboriginal Literature is an English 101 course taught at SFU by Dr. Deanna Reder. The course examines Canadian Aboriginal authors’ adoption of short story and novel forms, and how they have adapted them to Indigenous storytelling conventions. On October 21, 2015, award-winning visual and contemporary artist and author Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas addressed the class as a guest speaker. He discussed Red: A Haida Manga and Sei, a public installation at YVR airport, and shared much more regarding his own personal journey as an artist/activist.

This video, created using stills and video shot by the artist, was done in suport of a Bill Reid Gallery's summer 2014 exhibition, AKOS. AKOS presents the monumental works of spray can art by Haida artist, Corey Bulpitt. It is a remarkable fusion between Hip Hop and Haida cultures.

In support of Ts'msysen Transfroming: Morgan Green, the BRC produced this short educational piece to introduce gallery visitors to the Ts'ymsen Community of Lax Kwalaams. Morgan's lineage descends form Lax Kw'alaams, which is well known for the monumental totem poles and house front paintings created there during the latter part of the 19th Century.

In March 2011 and January 2014, the BRC worked with the Songhees Nation to locate heritage images and artifacts held in museums and archives around the world. The Centre located and transferred over 1000 digital images and associated research to the Songhees, which are now being used by the community for various purposes. Some of these images adorn the Songhees Wellness Centre which opened in 2014 in Esquimalt, B.C., and many others were used in the community publication titled Songhees.

This short recounting of the 1874 potlatch held in Victoria was created as a part of the Bill Reid’s Centre’s work with the Songhees. It draws on historical images of the event and supplements them with information provided by Grant Keddie in his 2003 work, Songhees Pictorial: A History of the Songhees People as seen by Outsiders, 1790-1912.

In support of the Bill Reid Gallery exhibition, Bill Reid and the Haida Canoe, the Bill Reid Centre created a 20 minute slide show based on a donation of slides by Carrey Linde. The Linde slides document the paddling of Bill Reid's canoe, Lootas, up the Seine River to Paris in 1989. The canoe was then installed in the Musée de l'Homme. The images capture the Haida delegation that traveled with the canoe and the various ceremonies and cultual performance they engaged in.

In these powerful black and white photos taken by New York photographer Adelaide de Menil in the 1960s, we see the last standing place for many poles before their removal by museums or their return to the earth. The photographs address the dilemma of collecting poles, and for some, the parallel dilemma of allowing the poles to go back to the earth.