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RAVEN AND THE FIRST MAN.... 
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This is Bill Reid, the Haida artist who created this sculpture.....Yesterday was his birthday....He would have been 102...... Raven is creator, magician, jokester, narrator, dancer........He loves clams...picks them up from the beach, flies high in the sky and drops it, to give himself access to the delicious meat. That's where the first Humans came from.....Raven opened the clamshell, and they climbed out....... It's carved from Yellow Cedar.....Several of the carvers that worked on it are old buddies of mine....The same team carved a Yellow Cedar wall behind the altar in the small church in the First Nations village on this island.......Gorgeous, sensuous work....... Raven and the First Man resides in the rotunda at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC.......
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Magickal Birds Crows live together in families but Ravens fly alone. Abracadabra 
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Interesting side-note...... When I lived there, on Haida Gwaii, I was taught to gather Chitons... They clung to the steep rock walls that were exposed at low tide....the tide fluctuates as much as 27 feet up there......We gathered the Chitons from small boats, which is very tricky until you master the technique. The Chitons are 6-8 inches long and 4 wide....their whole undercarriage is a muscular suction cup. They are very sensitive to any vibration, so you have to pounce quickly, or they grasp the rock and are impossible to budge. I was 19 when I was initiated.....They are called Yantz in Haida....At the time, I didn't know that the word meant Vulva in Haida......I was being initiated by a middle-aged friend and his two teenage daughters.....they were prone to the giggles anyways, so their father's innuendos didn't register.....Then I noticed that every time he successfully plucked a Yantz off the rock, he would kiss the fleshy bright pink side that had been attached to the rock......before he dropped it into the boat.......I asked him why and he said..."because they deserve it".....with an enigmatic smile....and turned back to his work.....Then the older daughter told me to take a good look at the Yantz and I probably blushed as I saw that it looked exactly like a Human vulva....even the colour was perfect........ That long Yantz story is to give depth to the story of the first men.......The Raven saw that there were only men in the clam....and noticed that after a while, the men were longing for a woman, so he probed deeper into the clam-shell and found a Chiton and turned it into a Human woman......
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I always admired Bill Reid's work. One particular piece of his is at Vancouver YVR. whch is the jade canoe. Another piece of his is the Canadian Embassy in Washington , DC.
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I always admired Bill Reid's work. One particular piece of his is at Vancouver YVR. whch is the jade canoe. Another piece of his is the Canadian Embassy in Washington , DC.
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The Yellow cedar wall he did for our church was carved in sections in Vancouver and shipped here.....It's two huge salmon, about 10 ft tall, head to tail in a circle...reminds me of a Ying-Yang sign......
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THAT STATUE IS NEW TO ME AS IS THE LEGEND. HOW VERY INTERESTING.
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What a wonderful piece of art.
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It's been shut down because of Covid, but Maybe someone has a decent photo of it......
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Interesting, and new to me. I did a little research and saw the sculpture that Shartaun mentioned. How very intricate and impressive. Be a prism, spreading God's light and love, not a mirror reflecting the world's hatred.
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