Before the lights go out...
A few years ago I asked my son if I could take him for a walk through the Royal BC Museum in Victoria before the museum was to close for renovations, before the lights go out. Decolonizing museums was a hot topic and we, like to many other visitors loved the Old Town and the Indigenous history that lined the walls as the stories found a way into our hearts.
As you weave your way in and out of the exhibits, you will travel through time past old ships that once landed on the shores of North Vancouver Island, you can look for gold like the miners once did in Barkerville... Stories and photos bring us back to the way things used to be. A province full of compromise... big dreams and new ideas. Walking through the Indigenous exhibit, we stopped in front of a floor to ceiling black and white photo exhibit of three Haida Chiefs. Thinking about all of my previous trips to Haida Gwaii, these faces looked familiar to me...
As my son stood in front of me, he pointed to the signature on the bottom right corner of the images, E. Curtis. "Hey mom, who is that?" "I don't know", I replied. I held up my iPhone to capture the signature and turned around to notice the images of three equally striking women behind me. As I looked at them, I didn't initially recognize them. Once again I held up my phone to document the moment.
Later that evening when I was sitting at my computer, I went to the google toolbar and typed in E.Curtis, Haida Gwaii. As the images and stories filled my screen of Chiefs and Matriarchs, children and teepees from across North America it took my breath away. How could one man have created such a body of work? How did he do this when planes and cars weren't a thing? Did he really strap chemicals and glass plates onto horses and negotiate trails and the sea? As I dug through the references, I came across the book, Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher... This should help I thought. What's the story here...
Sitting shifting my body from side to side in my desk chair, I noticed one more image that looked familiar. A girl with dark eyes, large abalone earrings and a cape woven of cedar. I looked through my phone at the images from earlier in the day. She was in the middle of the other two women... wait a second.. I turned to look up at the drum that hung beside my desk. I had bought this drum in Osoyoos at the Spirit Ridge Lodge the day I had become a driving instructor. It was different than any other drum I had seen before. Horse hair fell out of the edges, ribbons and embroidery hung from the bottom. In the middle of the drum was an image of a girl. The same girl as the museum, from Edward Curtis. She had been with me all along.
Who was she though?
In the months that followed, she would follow too. She would make herself known in presentations, in Bella Bella, in my truck in Bella Coola... The life and the stories of Edward Curtis... The Shadow Catcher as called by Chief Black Elk would soon become interwoven with my own.
To the oft-asked question, "What camera or lens do you use?" I can only reply, "I couldn't tell you to save my soul - it is enough for me to know that I have something that will make pictures and is in working order." Edward Curtis ~
