About 25 years ago I was visiting Haida Quaii (former Queen Charlotte Islands) with my family on a camping vacation. While sightseeing on the islands, we visited the local Haida museum where many pieces of Haida art such as wooden masks and bowls, Argillite carvings and war canoes were on display. There were also quite a few open-air sites where new totem poles had been erected by the Haida First Nations people. I really liked the Haida carving style.

When I found a yellow cedar log washed up on the beach I hacked off 2 half meter pieces with my camping axe and took them with me back home to Edmonton. I carved 2 masks and a bowl from these 2 pieces of Yellow Cedar, using pictures from books and post cards which allowed me to imitate the Haida style. Later on I bought a Red Cedar post from a local wood supplier here in Edmonton and carved a miniature totem pole. In the spring of 2013 I did 2 relief carvings in the Haida style, one is a stylized salmon and the other is a copy of Bill Reid’s farewell screen for which I found a pattern in a book I bought.

My latest First Nations style carving is a bust of a First Nations Person. I started this project when attending the International Wood Carvers Congress in Iowa in June 2015, when I signed up for a course in carving a human bust. The wood is Butternut, which is a tree that grows in the southern U.S.