A Tale of Two Shamans

Keith Thor Carlson is an assistant professor of history at the
University of Saskatchewan.

“The strength of owning a thing is often expressed as a right to share
it,” writes Haida artist and storyteller Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas in
the introduction to his humble, yet powerful retelling of the ancient
Haida story, A Tale of Two Shamans. Yahgulanaas and a team of
professionals associated with the Haida Gwaii Museum have joined forces
to create a genuinely new rendition of an old story that is derived in
large part from the writings of early anthropologists, but informed by
Yahgulanaas’s personal experience, cultural insights, and artistic
visions.

Yahgulanaas innovatively shares three distinct but integrated accounts
of the ancient and provocative story of a Haida shaman who dies as a
result of abusing his power and position, but whose skin is subsequently
stolen from its grave by an evil competing shaman only to be rescued and
restored to life by the combined efforts of the first shaman’s friend
and the female spirit known as “Dangerous to Offend.” The main body
of text consists of cryptic poetry-like verse that seldom exceeds 20
words per page. This approach works not only because Yahgulanaas’s
prose has been skilfully designed to convey a sense of the tale’s
original orality, but because his accompanying 33 black-and-white
watercolor images provide the narrative with both substance and context.

Following Yahgulanaas’s integrated text and illustrations are an
additional 10 pages of dense interlinear text translations that are
perhaps only fully accessible to a linguist or other expert in Haida
language, but which nonetheless provide even a general reader with a
reference point against which Yahgulanaas’s recreations can be
assessed for historical and cultural integrity. Taken together, these
three versions of the same story constitute what is one of the most
honest, if somewhat opaque, popular renditions of an Aboriginal oral
narrative available in print.