Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas

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The comics for­mat allows me to recom­bine sim­ple iconic forms to develop com­plex mean­ings — and instant access to read­ers drift­ing in time and space. I was drawn to comics as a way of talk­ing about com­plex things such as rela­tion­ships between indige­nous peo­ples and set­tler society.

I found manga attrac­tive because it is not part of the set­tler tra­di­tion of North America (like Archie or Marvel comics, for exam­ple) inso­far as manga has roots in the North Pacific, as does Haida art.

In colo­nial soci­ety a small space is reserved for the indige­nous per­son: a space defined as spir­i­tual and sacred, because those qual­i­ties are not seen to have much power invested in them: we can be sacred, we can be spir­i­tual, we can be shamanic, we can be artists. But the rela­tion­ship between indige­nous and colo­nial soci­ety is filled with a lot of fear most of the time. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau explained the dif­fer­ence between U.S. and Canadian poli­cies toward indige­nous peo­ples as “you … mur­dered them. We starved them to death.”

It is imper­a­tive that Haida manga incor­po­rate con­tem­po­rary social issues, that it speak to other people’s needs rather than merely to “mine.” Many of us are still stuck in the old game, the wooden Indian, the aban­doned vil­lage, the roman­tic image of the van­ish­ing peo­ple. There is a polit­i­cal mar­ket for that myth. But we’re here, alive if not always market-ready. The mar­ket value always depends on what is being sold. I don’t like the Cain and Abel episode where the mythic kills the liv­ing. But these days I am dis­cov­er­ing an appetite for explor­ing the new, find­ing new rela­tion­ships — new types of rela­tion­ships — and that is where the “prac­tice” of Haida manga has taken me.

The comics form encour­ages me to extract mean­ing and form where I find it, in the indige­nous and the set­tler cul­tures, and to flip them upside down, reverse them, recom­bine them, to allow new mean­ing to emerge in a renewed form.

BONE BOX

Archaeological bone col­lec­tion trays, col­lected, dec­o­rated and repur­posed on the prin­ci­ples of Haida manga, in the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. The wall can be manip­u­lated by the observer, who grasps a lever to flip the bone trays up and down, and to make them rat­tle. As the trays move, the museum exhibits behind the wall are revealed, and when the trays are wide open, the vista of the museum win­dows and the dis­tant con­struc­tions of sea and moun­tains can also be seen.

SHIELD

In Haida manga, objects, forms that appear to us one way, can be flipped around and rearranged to find new rela­tion­ships among the parts, and a new dimen­sion for the whole.

In a field of wrecked auto­mo­biles, I found evi­dence of an artis­tic tra­di­tion in what used to be the hood of a car. An appli­ca­tion of acid bath, plenty of flip­ping around, some refin­ish­ing, and a mem­ory of the tra­di­tional cop­per shields of the Haida, resulted in a con­tem­po­rary shield of greatly mixed heritage.

For the first part in this series, see RE ME MB ER.

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Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas

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From a dis­tance, RE ME MB ER can be seen as a sin­gle pow­er­ful image incor­po­rat­ing tra­di­tional Haida line and forms; up close it reads as a visual story in four pan­els. The sub­ject of the work as a whole is the con­nec­tion between mem­o­ries, or what seem to be mem­o­ries — of indi­vid­u­als, of a place, of an ancient civ­i­liza­tion — and the expe­ri­ence of loss, of long­ing, of anger, of judge­ment. What is the rela­tion­ship between mem­ory and dis­tance, and how does that dis­tance pre­vent us from aton­ing, com­plet­ing and resolv­ing? “I want to find a way to see mem­ory not as a dis­tance but as a post-it note,” Yahgulanaas writes, “a reminder to recover those dis­tance ele­ments. If it is long­ing, is there a way to revive that ele­ment and bring it to the liv­ing moment? If it is tragedy, what can I do about it here and now?”

FIRST PANEL

My grand­mother Selena Paratovitch was a mighty strong woman. She wore high heels in the woods. She was so strong that spe­cial pad­dles had to be made for her; the ordi­nary pad­dles would break under the force of her pow­er­ful stroke.

Selena’s story is rep­re­sented in the first panel of RE ME MB ER, by the pad­dle in hand and the bro­ken pad­dle as well. She was descended from a man named Sam Davis, who was a rel­a­tive of George Washington — I don’t know how that came about. She was a girl of about fif­teen liv­ing in south­east Alaska when an elderly fel­low in Masset named Alfred Adams sent his man up to Alaska to talk to Selena’s grand­mother and to ask that Alfred be per­mit­ted to marry this girl Selena. The grand­mother said that Selena was too young. The next year the ser­vant went again, and this time the grand­mother said that Selena hadn’t learned to cook yet. The third year the man returned and said that Alfred didn’t care about the cook­ing: if she couldn’t cook, he would hire her a ser­vant. He really wanted to marry her. So the grand­mother said fine.

Selena got into a canoe and trav­elled across the forty miles of open ocean and went to Masset and asked some of her rel­a­tives who this guy Alfred was. Selena took a look at him and said, I’m not going to marry an old man. She went to an uncle, who arranged for her to sneak away in the morn­ing with a party that was leav­ing in his newly carved canoe. So there she is, a young woman in a new, unsea­soned canoe that hadn’t been out in rough water before. An older woman was sit­ting up near the bow of the canoe, and when they were out at the entrance to Dixon Sound the old woman said, My bum’s get­ting wet. A crack had formed in the bot­tom of the canoe and water was leak­ing in. They started stuff­ing moss and spruce pitch into the crack, but to no avail. The canoe con­tin­ued to split open. The pad­dlers started singing death songs. The old woman turned to Selena and said, When the canoe breaks up, take this young child and swim over to that island. You should be able to make it, and the rest of us will per­ish. Selena said, Dear god, if you save us, I’ll marry that old man. Then she climbed up to the prow of the canoe and wrapped her mighty arms and her mighty thighs around the canoe and held it together. It didn’t split apart, and they made it back to the island. And so she mar­ried Alfred, and the mar­riage worked out well. They made some great chil­dren. Alfred went on to found the Native Brotherhood of B.C.

SECOND PANEL

I can still see the stern face of the woman who appeared before me. Somewhere nearby flows the indigo water streaked with the last ascend­ing bub­bles of a descend­ing man. If he was falling here, his still­ness would be a water­colour pud­dle seep­ing into thick paper.

In the sec­ond panel, the canoe is flipped upside down, and you can see a per­son falling into the water. At this point I started inte­grat­ing bits of com­mu­nity his­tory, the rela­tion­ship between colo­nial soci­ety and indige­nous peo­ples, and the hor­rific ele­ments of that relationship.

THIRD PANEL

I sup­posed that as he was drift­ing about, he won­dered if his gods no longer loved him. But they hadn’t left him entirely. One of them was chew­ing on his ankle and the other one flew low and slowly away from his wrin­kling skin.

The third panel deals with a moment that I don’t know in a per­sonal way — I think of peo­ple who have endured famine or con­cen­tra­tion camps or res­i­den­tial schools or any hor­ri­fy­ing moment, the moment when we think we’ve been aban­doned by our gods, where there is no hope, there is noth­ing, no refuge. The end. In some respects, in a the­o­ret­i­cal sense, that moment occurs in drowning.

FOURTH PANEL

He knew that he would soon die, but didn’t real­ize that he would return after a brief sojourn by the lake some­where up on one of the ten worlds stacked on top of each other. He saw his mourn­ers in the lake and fell down between the roots of a tree and cried him­self to sleep. He awoke as a new­born child cush­ioned between his mother’s thighs. He remembered.

The last panel deals with the high con­cept of rebirth, which is akin to the Buddhist tenet that we are going to keep com­ing back until we fig­ure out how to do it right. This is rebirth of the child between the thighs of the mother, the ris­ing up of the land again, the recov­ery, the resilience, the sur­vival, the won­der­ful things that remind us that despite all those things that have hap­pened between us col­lec­tively, we have sur­vived and we’re not beholden to any past action. We don’t have to pack any­one else’s guilt, we have sur­vived, we are alive, we are here, we can do things, we can make up our own sto­ries and make new rela­tion­ships. That is a lot of what I’m try­ing to grap­ple with in Haida manga.

For more in this series, see Notes on Haida Manga.

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