The Raven and the First Men - Bill Reid - Canada, Vancouver - 1980

A hunched raven leans over a clamshell, his blunt beak lowered toward small human faces gripping the rim from inside. One face turns toward the light. Another keeps its eyes shut. A third, at the far end, refuses to come out at all. This is The Raven and the First Men, carved in yellow cedar by Haida artist Bill Reid and completed in 1980. It tells the Haida story of how people came into the world after the great flood, when the Raven — trickster, meddler, bringer of change — found a clamshell of frightened creatures on the beach at Rose Spit and talked them into existence. ### The old grammar on a new form Look at the eye: a swelling rounded rectangle tapering at its ends. That shape is the ovoid, the fundamental unit of Northwest Coast formline design, used for eyes, joints and hollows for centuries. Reid learned it from the old masters — especially his great-uncle, the Haida carver Charles Edenshaw — and here the ancient two-dimensional language wraps around a fully three-dimensional head. The wings carry carved U-shapes and bands like tattooing over a body, holding two traditions in one object. ### A very human moment of creation Reid described his Raven bluntly as a self-centred, uninvolved bringer of change — humanity created not by design, but because someone restless got bored on a beach. The faces inside the shell carry the whole spectrum: the eager, the uncertain, the one still turned away. Human hands come up over the rim, fingers spread, pushing or hesitating, right where your eye travels between creator and created. The shell is not a single tree — 106 beams of yellow cedar, over four thousand kilograms, glued and carved as if solid over seven years with a team of carvers including Guujaaw and Jim Hart. It rests on sand from Rose Spit itself, in the Bill Reid Rotunda at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC. For more narrated art shorts in this format, or another story behind the painting, follow the trail of details.