While in Vancouver earlier this month, the first museum I chose to visit was the Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art. Although Bill Reid is now “celebrated as one of the most significant Northwest Coast artists of the late twentieth century” (1), his path to celebrating and representing Indigenous artistry wasn’t smooth.
And it’s a little-known fact that he chose to make his home here in Montréal, and might well have spent much of his adult life in my hometown had he not been struck with Parkinson’s Disease in his early fifties. But first, some of his family history.
After marrying a non-Indigenous man, his mother’s “Indian status” was revoked under the punitive Canadian laws, so Bill and his siblings grew up without learning their maternal Haida cultural traditions or language.
“No artist has undergone as critical an assessment of their Indigenous identity as Bill Reid. His being and becoming Haida is significant. His career was a journey from his origins as “Bill Reid” to becoming lljuwas, Kihlguulins, and Yalth-Sgwansang, as he joined the complicated political and cultural transformation of those he accepted as his people, the Haida.
He lived at a point of intersection, within a contentious contact zone, and the development and reception of his artistic practice reflect these conditions of cultural entanglement.” (1)
In 1939, at nineteen, he got a job as a radio announcer in Kelowna, British Columbia after volunteering at a school radio station, then made a pilgrimage to visit “his ancestral home of Skidegate for the first time since he was a baby.” (1)
In Skidegate, he connected with his mother’s father, Charles Gladstone; “a traditional Haida silversmith who had learned from his uncle, Reid’s great-great uncle, the renowned artist Daxhiigang. For the first time, Reid had the opportunity to see and handle Daxhiigang’s personalized engraving tools.” (1)
In 1944 he was drafted into the Canadian Army for a year, and by 1948 had joined the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in Toronto, while studying jewelry-making and design at the Ryerson Institute of Technology.
When he participated as an Indigenous artist in the 1967 International and Universal Exposition, Montréal’s “Expo 67”, he fell under the spell of this city’s progressive arts scene – and its more European culture than elsewhere in Canada.
After a jewelry-art fellowship in London (England) through the Canada Council for the Arts in 1968-69, he moved to Montréal to set up a new jewelry workshop.
Unfortunately, by 1973 he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. He then chose to return to Vancouver, where he lived until he passed away in 1998.
During those later Vancouver years in particular, he became a much stronger voice for Haida and Northwest Coast Indigenous art and its place in the world.
Because of his connection to Montréal, I’d become interested in his art in childhood, then – as an adult nature-lover – followed his career from afar as he explored the animal forms and linework of the Haida traditions.
What that struck me most at this museum, as an artist considered “Disabled”, were the wire sculptures or “doodles” created by Bill Reid after Parkinson’s Disease had made it impossible for him to hold a carving tool, paintbrush, or pencil…
“As illness progressed, sketching became more difficult and he started to doodle in wire. According to Martine Reid, Bill Reid could often be seen holding his “knitting kit” – a spool of wire and a pair of pliers – conjuring lively, whimsical creatures from a single wire and space.” (2)
He remained an artist, still creating and imagining. For me, that message is both hopeful and inspirational.
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References:
(1) Gerald McMaster. Iljuwas Bill Reid: Life & Work. Art Canada Institute. 2022.
https://www.aci-iac.ca/art-books/iljuwas-bill-reid/biography/
(2) Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art. “Bill Reid. Wolf, 1988. Wire. Loan from Cindy and George Febiger”; detail of a display description, Nov 2025.
https://www.billreidgallery.ca/pages/about-bill-reid