The Elders Are Watching

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta and
author of Calling Texas.

The real interest in The Elders Are Watching lies in the pictures by
Vickers, a Native artist whose work presents traditional images with a
contemporary feeling. There are some sentimental images of totem poles,
but Vickers generally depicts the landscapes of his Pacific Northwest
with an austere simplicity dominated by strong colors. Rain, omnipresent
in the Northwest, is abundant and well evoked by great diagonal lines.
The occasional images of city skylines work as well.

The text is accompanied by poems written by Vancouver author Dave
Bouchard, who has worked with Ken Lonechild on a children’s book.
While Bouchard clearly has sympathy and enthusiasm for Native art and
life, his four-line poems for each of Vickers’s images are sentimental
and banal, with rhymes that reduce the quatrains to doggerel. This
beautifully produced book is worth acquiring for the pictures.
Fortunately, the poems are printed in light grey on facing pages and can
easily be disregarded.