A Totem Pole History: The Work of Lummi Carver Joe Hillaire

6 Coast Salish Carving: Our Work Is Our Identity

68 6 Coast Salish Carving Our Work Is Our Identity Felix Solomon I came into carving around 1997. I started off carving masks and bentwood boxes. With the help of master carvers who have taken me under their wings—they’ll teach you if they see that you’re a doer and not just a talker—there’s absolutely nothing that these master carvers will not share with you. It is a blessing of mentorship, and now I’m in a position where I can teach and I can pass on this art form and teach protocol: how to bring a canoe to life, how to bring a mask to life, how to carve a spoon. You have to practice what you’re taught. You can’t just learn it or read about it; you have to do it. You have to have wood. You have to have tools. And you have to feel the form, you have to feel the carve. You have to know how the wood is going to act and react. Each piece of wood is different. Whether you carve identical spoons or two identical masks, each one is totally different. You’re never done learning the process of the carve, relationships with people, your relationships with tools, your relationships with your spirit and your ancestors. It just goes on and on, and it gets deeper and deeper as you get into your art form. Coast Salish Carving 69 In Coast Salish work there is just a very small number of pieces, so we’re limited on what we can study. But I think that’s a good thing, because it really gives us focus on who we are, and what we are, through our art. It’s a different style of art than people are used to. People are used to seeing Northern work, the big totem animals, they’re called nowadays. Coast Salish is a different style; it’s a more three-dimensional style. It’s something that came to my attention with having the opportunity to restore Joe Hillaire’s work. Nobody is carving the Coast Salish style as in Joe Hillaire’s work, or Morrie Alexander’s work, or Al Charles’s work. These carvers were very prolific artists from Lummi. Their work was carved at Fish Point, Lummi; it was carved on Portage Island. That’s as Lummi and Coast Salish as you can get, and it has a specific style. These three carvers have a specific style to their work, and I want to bring this back to life, along with the canoes that were used by our river people. Our Coast Salish people, from the Fraser River all the way to the Columbia River and every river tributary in between, had shovelnose canoes, and these shovelnose canoes were specifically Coast Salish style. This is very important to bring back, because they were overlooked. When canoes were brought back for the Canoe Journeys, starting with Paddle to Seattle in 1989, they brought back the ocean canoes, the big, wide ocean canoes that were steam bent, with the big prows on the front, and beautifully carved. And they brought back the racing canoes that were sleek and long and fast. They focused on these two types of canoes, but they overlooked the shovelnose canoe. That was one thing that I got a research grant for through the Whatcom Museum in 2003. So finding out about these shovelnose canoes opened my eyes to really wanting to carve this type of canoe and keeping this style of Lummi, Coast Salish art alive that Joe Hillaire carved. And you’ll see that in the totem pole that I’m carving now in my studio. It’s a three-dimensional form: the animals and the humans and the canoes are more lifelike. It’s not two dimensional; it’s a log that’s carved in three dimensions, all the way around, to get the form of it. I’m also carving a shovelnose canoe as we speak. I started April 3rd of 2011. Today is July 1st, so it’s roughly three months so far. I’m steaming it tomorrow, and then I have about another three weeks to a month of 70 Felix Solomon carving after that. It’s a thirty-foot, steam-bent, shovelnose canoe for the Sauk-Suiattle Tribe. Last year I carved the first one. It was for Stillaguamish...