Where the People Gather: Carving a Totem Pole

Patricia Morley is a professor of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University, an associate fellow of the Simone de Beauvoir
Institute, and author of Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home.

This is a story of community and tradition as well as of skilled
craftsmanship, beauty, and the human spirit. Celebration and bonding
stand at the core of this unusual book, the first to document the entire
process of carving a pole.

Writer, teacher, and photographer Vickie Jensen lived and worked with
her husband for 10 years on Native reserves on the Northwest Coast. Her
collaboration with renowned Nisga’s artist Norman Tait and his crew
allows the reader to share this experience. As Tait puts it, the book
“takes you behind the scenes, into the carving shed. It’s almost
like being there . . . it’s the printed experience of a totem pole
coming to life.”

Jensen’s sensitive text and 125 photographs (chosen from thousands of
negatives) capture the flavor of the individual carver’s speech, the
difficulties and tensions, the teamwork. Where the People Gather is a
story of a people’s present and past, as well as of a pole: a unique
contribution to Native studies and to indigenous art.