The Hour is Blue

Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas — An Artist in the Spaces Between

In this conversation, I speak with Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, a contemporary artist, author, and political activist of Haida and Nordic ancestry. Born in 1954 and raised in Delkatla on Haida Gwaii, he is a descendant of the celebrated Haida artists Isabella and Charles Edenshaw. His artistic practice encompasses drawing, painting, sculpture, graphic literature, monumental murals, and public installations. His work is held in international collections, including the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, and the Musée du quai Branly in Paris.

Rather than introducing Michael myself, I invited him to tell his own story. He describes his family history, his early artistic influences, and the approximately two decades he spent working with the Council of the Haida Nation during a period of cultural resurgence and political resistance. He reflects on his encounters with Cantonese brush painting and the history of Indigenous seal hunters who found refuge in Japan during the late nineteenth century. These experiences helped shape his decision to create Haida Manga, an artistic genre bringing together North Pacific Indigenous visual traditions and Asian graphic storytelling.

Our conversation offers an opportunity to consider the relationship between artistic expression, cultural history, and political resistance, and the possibilities that emerge when different artistic traditions meet. We also discuss his latest book, The Lost Haida Manga: A Compendium (Douglas & McIntyre, 2026), which brings together more than four decades of his drawings and visual narratives.

CiTR 101.9 FM / The Blue Hour

Recorded in person on November 8, 2026, in Whistler, British Columbia, during the Whistler Writers Festival.

Listen: CiTR | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube

The Blue Hour, hosted by Farha Guerrero, airs live every Tuesday at 2 p.m. PT on CiTR 101.9 FM at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

Transcript

Transcript lightly edited for clarity and readability while preserving the substance, individual voices, and natural rhythm of the conversation.

Farha: Welcome to The Blue Hour. I am Farha Guerrero. Before we begin, I would like to acknowledge that we are recording in Whistler on the shared traditional and unceded territories of the Squamish and Lil'wat Nations.

My guest today is Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas. He is here with me in the sound booth at the Whistler Public Library. He's just had a wonderful morning event here in Whistler at the Whistler Writers Festival.

It's been a privilege to have him here in our part of the world, but certainly a privilege for me, because I speak about his art very regularly at the Audain Museum in Whistler, and I love talking about it. So I have the privilege of having this one-on-one moment with him. I've asked him if he would kindly introduce himself.

Michael: I'm Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas. I was born in 1954 and raised in Delkatla on Haida Gwaii, a small slough located close to the village of Masset.

I'm a contemporary artist of Haida and Nordic ancestry, an author, political activist, and I have an artistic practice that spans drawing, painting, sculpture, monumental murals, graphic literature, and public installations.

My family: I'm descended from Isabella Yáxch'inaas Edenshaw and her husband Charles. I've studied with a number of prominent Haida artists, including Chief 7idansuu James Hart, Robert Davidson, and others.

I've spent approximately two decades working as part of the Council of the Haida Nation during a period of major cultural resurgence and political resistance, which continues in a very positive and accomplished manner.

In the late 1990s, I had a brief stint studying with Cai Ben Kwon from Canton, and he was teaching me a little bit about brush painting. I never learned as much as he was offering, but I learned to relax with the tool.

I decided, after these decades of political practice, to return to my passion, which is art. I decided that I wanted to create an art genre that really welcomed and nourished, revitalized, and remembered the history when Japan was a place of refuge for people in my own family and indeed along the West Coast of North America.

This would be during the late 1800s as part of the pelagic fur seal trade, where men could escape the rather caustic embrace of the proto-Canadians and be treated like full humans in Japan.

My work is held in major international collections, including the British Museum in London, where it's been on display since 2005, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, more recently the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, and even more recently at the Musée du quai Branly in Paris.

Also in British Columbia at the Museum of Anthropology, the Vancouver Art Gallery, and a public piece of artwork outside Thunderbird Stadium, another one at YVR international airport, and finally what might be the largest physical art structure in Vancouver at 33rd and Knight.

I'm really happy to be here today, just coming out of the Whistler Writers Festival, celebrating my latest book by Douglas & McIntyre.

It's called The Lost Haida Manga, a compendium of more than four decades of my scribbles, drawings, and visual narratives.

And I think I'm going to pass this back to Farha so that I can just relax and answer rather than questioning myself.

Farha: I guess that's a good idea. I should be the host, although it was really nice to listen to you talk like that.

I don't mind just giving you the mic, my goodness. I'm sure there was a lot of that today. People felt that certainly at the Writers Festival.

You've introduced yourself as an artist, and I have this beautiful book called The Lost Haida Manga, which you very lovingly signed with a paintbrush.

Michael: A brush pen.

Farha: A brush pen, yes. It's like a piece of artwork right on the page of the book. How lovely.

But what's really important, and I'm going to throw this out because I'm a writer, is that you are a man of words.

This book is full of words and stories, and there's the Haida language as well embedded very deeply into this book. The transcription, in the International Phonetic Alphabet, that is still being worked out to transcribe these extraordinary sounds, is in the book.

Just listening to you introduce yourself, Michael, I feel like you're a writer as well. Am I right?

Michael: Well, I try to avoid words. I mean, I like words.

I really love words. If I hear a new word, I'll spend time wondering, where does that word come from? What are its roots? Who is using it?

So I'm attracted to words, but I also feel, as someone who's unsure of whether I graduated Grade 12, did some courses at UBC, but I sort of felt that when I left behind decades of political activism in Haida Gwaii, which incidentally, a plug for the National Film Board, I would encourage people to go to the nfb.ca website and look at a film called The Stand, which documents a pivotal moment in the history.

Farha: And I've watched it.

Michael: It's a primer on how to be in disagreement and not allow it to become conflict.

After doing that for so much of my life, I just needed to turn to art. The process of finding art was finding the inner joy, the things that really make me wake up in the morning.

It's almost obsessive. But it's this great space, because it's an empty space that's filled with something else.

I imagine myself, and I think artists generally would understand, that we find ourselves to be tools.

It's almost like we're not creating anything, we're allowing something to percolate to the surface.

It's liberating to have that, and it's self-nourishing. That's what I find myself doing for these last 25 years.

And I forgot your question.

Farha: Words, being a writer, are potent. I agree with you. But it's hard to define them in any specific way.

Storyteller, maybe that's a better word than writer to describe you, because you are telling a lot of stories. This also goes back to traditions of the Haida people.

You can speak in images as well, and James Hart says that.

Looking at this book, because it's called The Lost Haida Manga, someone like my younger son, who loves Japanese manga, was really drawn to this, but drawn to the words as much as the images.

They do work together, and the images speak, but the words as well. They're fun and playful and kind of mischievous, I would say.

That definitely made me feel that we can call you an artist, but you're more than that.

Maybe just talking to you, I feel like you're a philosopher a little bit too.

Michael: Well, I've been accused of being a philosopher of the brush in the latest issue of BC BookWorld. I chuckled.

Farha: You said, "Accused."

Michael: I like to think about some things in very curious and unusual ways.

As my stepfather once said to me, when I was a young child, "You can never do things the way they're supposed to be done. You're always trying to find a different way to do it."

I suppose a happy way to say that is maybe a philosophical bent.

Whether it be words or song, just a couple of weeks ago, one of the things that I wanted to do, I was able to do in Paris, a live improv with Werner Herzog's cellist, Ernst Reijseger.

Farha: Are you serious?

Michael: Oh, yes. But it wasn't serious at all. It was just a tremendous amount of fun.

Farha: I would have loved to have been there. I didn't know.

Michael: Well, we do a newsletter. You can sign up at the website.

Farha: Everyone sign up. I will post it on my blog.

Michael: There's more news coming, but I don't like to release the news until it's really happening.

As a much younger man, I learned some songs. I like to sing. I learned Haida songs.

Grace Wilson DeWitt taught me a song, which is quite a sad, powerful song, about a man, an old man on the hillside looking down the slopes, and he's watching a man-of-war, a ship, a sailing ship, not sure if it's American or British, bombing the village.

People are getting killed. The cannonballs are shattering wood and shattering bones, and he can't do anything about it.

We sing that song. We know that song at home.

But for me, there was something I wanted to add to that song that I had never really explored. And that was just to wail, to really feel what does it feel like to be in Gaza? What does it feel like to be in Ukraine or Somalia?

What does it feel like to just allow myself to flow into it?

I'd always felt that this was something I could do with a Western-trained musician, that we were using more than a drum or a flute or sound, vocals.

I was supposed to do this with Cris Derksen, who's a cellist who unfortunately passed away recently. She passed away just before we were doing this performance/improvisation at the Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac in Paris.

So I called my good friend Simon, who loves music, and I said, "Simon, I need a cellist in Europe. What do you know?"

And he said, "Oh, there's this guy, Ernst Reijseger."

So I contacted the museum in Paris, who were quite concerned that the cellist was not going to be there for us to do this improvisation.

And by the way, if you go to my website, you can actually see a cello performance that Cris and I did.

So I said to the museum, "Ernst Reijseger."

And they said, "Well, do you know him?"

And I said, "No. But right now, there's zero chance that he's going to do this. If we ask him, we can probably get a 50-50. It's either going to be yes or no. But we've dramatically increased our chances."

So they asked, and Ernst said yes.

The one conversation that Ernst and I had before this event, and I don't know Ernst, I know his music, he's worked on about 15 soundscapes with Werner Herzog. He's a great musician. He's just so much fun.

He said to me, "Well, we'll find each other on the stage."

And we walked into that moment, really not working together previously, me not being able to read music or anything.

So I took this old song.

I discovered something about the stage that I never knew.

When you're on the stage, and the audience is in the dark, they disappear. And that very public space becomes a deeply personal, private space.

I had no idea. I didn't know that was coming. I really didn't even know that it happened until after it happened.

So I wailed that song. I felt that guy on the hill. And with Ernst's cello playing, it was really good.

Now, I'm not sure if we've got the audio track. We're going to find out in a few days.

Farha: If we can find it, I'll put it on my blog or a link to it.

You're talking to the right person, because the first instrument that I ever tried to learn in my life was the cello. And that was last year.

I'm going to be bringing my violoncello, the way you say it in Italian, to my home in Italy, because I feel like it belongs there.

There's a cello school just up the street from the place, and there's no cello school where I live here in Whistler.

It's one of my most favourite instruments. They say that the cello is the closest instrument that mimics the range of the human voice. Have you heard that?

Michael: No, I'm ignorant. Which means I don't know the rules.

Farha: But it's interesting, because if you think about this fusion of Haida song with cello, that's fabulous.

Michael: It worked very well.

Farha: I can imagine.

Michael: So maybe you can get hold of Ernst and use some of his music, even if the audio tape doesn't come through. We do have videotape. We had four cameras going.

So while we're on stage together for the hour-and-a-half performance, two performances, one camera is overhead, and I'm drawing and Ernst is playing.

So there'll be something there. We'll have something to play with. Again, where's the question.

Farha: We had a really good diversion, but you're just my kind of guy.

One of the things that you describe yourself as, and you use the word hybrid.

Michael: Yes.

Farha: Is hybridity a sort of philosophical position?

The idea that by embracing hybridity, you've allowed different histories, artistic traditions, and ways of seeing to interact. And it's a kind of positive force for maybe a third space for critical engagement.

When I went to your site, and I first saw that description of you, I was really drawn to it.

We were speaking about this before we started to record this, that identities can be so much more than the boxes that we are put into. It's very difficult to escape those boxes.

As we are introduced on stage, sometimes those boxes appear and you can't really say, "Well, no, I'm more than that," right?

Michael: No, you can. The boxes are there, but they're challengeable.

The distinction there is, am I a passive observer? Or am I a participant in my own life?

If we make that decision, we can make those boxes disappear, or if we want, we can keep them, whatever we choose.

Farha: Whatever we choose.

Michael: But you have to make the choice.

Farha: But it's hard, though, when people define who you are versus how you define yourself.

As an artist, do you think it's easier for you as an artist? Because art is everything, art is not definable.

Michael: Okay, there's a lot in that.

So if someone else, or some situation, describes us, we aren't, there's always exceptions, but we aren't duty-bound to follow that.

But what it does, it gives us a set of information about this other perspective. This is how the lay of the land is seen by this person or this institution.

We can work around it because then we have some geography.

You want to climb the mountain? Go ahead.

You want to walk through the valley and take the shortcut? Sure.

It just gives us a set of information and instructions. We're all sovereign, and we shouldn't relinquish our sovereignty so easily.

The problem, one of the problems, is that in North America, we are a democracy, and hallelujah for that.

But we are working with what we inherited from Europe, which is a feudal structure, where there's somebody in charge at the top. And they can oppress us to the extent that we allow them to get away with.

Compared to an Indigenous perspective of power structure, which is your power is based on your ability to mother the people, to have the people love you.

And that's how you get the real force behind you.

That's why in Haida, what we say in English, the chief of the village, that's a very poor translation of 7laanaasuu, which is that position, which means town mother.

So the highest rank that a man can achieve in the political structure is to be called a mother.

Farha: I didn't know that.

Michael: There's still room to be an elite, there's still room to amass physical property, but it's based on your ability to share it.

It's not based on your ability to compel.

What worries me about the common governmental structures that we have in North America is that it is based on compelling behaviour and punishment.

But it requires the sovereignty of the individual to be diminished, to buy into the bigger structure without questioning it.

To me, Q&A is not question and answer. It's question authority.

But how do you question authority?

You don't have to go out there and be a brute about it. You don't have to be insulting. You don't have to imagine the absolute worst of a person or a situation.

You can evolve to having a more loving starting point, which doesn't mean you sacrifice your ideals.

Again, National Film Board, that movie shows you how you can be in conflict, and policemen will cry because they're so embarrassed.

Because we're humans.

Farha: Because we're human. It's so nice to hear you speak.

One thing that I feel strongly about, and it was a person who was on one of my tours who encountered your art for the first time, at least the painting, this is one of the 27 Daalkaatlii Diaries paintings, one of which we have at the Audain, and nine of which are in Paris, as you said.

This man knew about you from a much earlier period, and he had a few collections of the Haida manga that you were producing in very simple forms, that were being distributed amongst communities and regular people who may not enter a museum for whatever reason.

These are the folks of Vancouver, let's say, who encountered your work, and they were able to access it and enjoy it.

That was always important to you, that art is something that you want accessible.

Not just something for a privileged person who may have the background and the desire to go into a museum or an art institution or library, or wherever art can be.

Even in public spaces, when you've got an installation that people can enjoy, there's no barrier.

But these comics, I actually saw one at the Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, in the cedar plank house that I know James Hart worked on as well. There was a little glass box with one of your comics.

In there, Did you know that?

Michael: No, I didn't.

Farha: It was fun to find that. But it was nice, because I remembered what the man was saying.

This book in my hands is beautiful, but can you tell us about that legacy? Because you've been doing this for a long time.

Michael: Well, yes. I've always been drawing. That's just the thing in my life. The walls of my bedroom were covered, the door was covered, just any surface.

So it was really important to me. And it was encouraged in a community that, even if it wasn't so active in that period in terms of the production of classic Haida form, Haida art, there was an appreciation for the role of the artist.

It wasn't anything to be shunted away or decried.

Then I worked as a forest surveyor for a number of years, which means I was part of a team, and then ultimately had my own team, to go into 14,000-year-old forests on the hillside and calculate where we would put the logging road, where we would log, and how much we would harvest out of that area.

And then after the harvest, to go back and say, well, how did we do in terms of waste?

I spent three months in one, what we call the cutblock. I had my lunches in there.

I wandered, I knew the creeks, I knew the land, that tree in the light sort of looks lavender instead of grey, and all sorts of really deep experiences.

I finished my job, and I was really proud of it, mapped it out, and I felt really good about it.

And they went in and felled the trees, built the road, logged it.

A few months later, I was sent back to do the assessment.

How much wood did we waste? Which is market-driven. It's not driven by any ecological principles. It's, did we leave something we could have sold?

So I went back, and it was like, I don't know quite the words. It was like the big Monty Python thumb came out of the sky, broke through the clouds, and pressed my brain into the ground.

I didn't know where I was. I had no idea. There was nothing there that told me that this was a place I knew.

That place had vanished entirely.

And that was a moment of a challenge, a crisis, perhaps.

I did manage to present to John Valentine Clyne, the chairman of MacMillan Bloedel, this idea that I was going to leave, but maybe in the next couple of months, Haida, MacMillan Bloedel, and the province would combine to put a team together.

We would go into the forest and start to document the presence of Haida archaeological sites, old canoes, and forest utilization harvesting sites.

So I did that. And then I left.

Then I joined up with other people in the community. At that point, I could interpret a logging plan, I could read a map, forest surveys, these were known to me.

Then I spent the next, it's hard to say when you start, when you finish, but about 17 years working against the wholesale industrial clear-cutting of this 14,000-year-old forest.

With a great team of people in the community, it was part of a movement that challenged it.

But again, we challenged it in a way that was really respectful. So respectful that when we did the blockades in 1985, the first people in the world outside the Haida Nation who supported our blockade of a logging company were loggers.

That was another profound moment where I realized that there is more support and commonality between citizens, regardless of ethnicity, and that together we actually were able to curtail the industrial, governmental, economically driven purpose as if there is nothing else that exists.

Today, these forests are still standing and growing.

Part of that process of working with the community was to take my artistic inclination and try to explain graphically some of the complex jargon that hides the mask over the skeleton, that sole economic principle. It's a dangerous thing.

That sole economic principle is a dangerous myth. It's okay if you blend it in with ecological sensibilities and other values, and it's morally based, it works.

But when it just becomes the only thing, it crushes and kills.

So comics became a vehicle of playing with this whole notion, and the magazine was called SpruceRoots. It went for many years.

That was all to make sure that we were all informed of the situation, so that when it did come to move into action, not that it was planned years in advance, it was actually a measure of our exhaustion with trying to convince people using their own arguments that the rate you're logging, you're going to run out of old-growth timber, and then you're going to be selling stuff that's just the same second-growth or third-growth crap that everyone else is selling.

And you're destroying something. You don't even know what you're destroying.

To get to that point, we had to be all informed. So comics became part of that.

Then I slipped quietly into doing what we call fine arts and other things, but all artistically driven, as a communication tool, not an indoctrination, not a teaching tool so much as the magic of art is not the object that's hanging on the wall.

It's the space between the object on the wall and the observer. That's where the magic is.

It's not in the hard positive form, it's in the negative form. It's in the space in music, it's in the invisible, liberating space that has more power than the beat.

That's the magic of art.

It doesn't work on the wall unless someone is looking at it and using their brains, or using their heart, and having an integration, observing and interpreting.

It's engagement.

Farha: As a docent, we have a lot of pieces at the Audain Museum, and I make a joke on my tours that I'm on Italian time, but it's actually really that we spend a lot of time with slow looking.

The visitors on my tours may not see a lot of pieces, but they see pieces at a much slower pace.

When we look at your painting, we're not walking away in a minute or two. We're there, we're talking about it, and we're looking at it.

I'm very deeply into something that is called in different ways, but formline, especially Northwest Coast formline. Robert Davidson has taught me a lot about it.

Michael: Try this word out.

Farha: What's your word?

Michael: Well, the problem with formline is when we see a form, when we discern the physicality of an object, we make assumptions about the object.

Like if we see a big fancy car in front of your house, I'm going to assume, oh, you're doing all right economically. You've got a bank account, look at that fancy car you've got.

And if I look at your neighbour's place, and they've got a beat-up old vehicle, I will make different assumptions.

Both those assumptions may be totally false, and it's based only on this physical information that's presented to me. The form. There is a danger in that.

There is this sense of, I know what's going on because I see it. I see the form.

I use the word frameline, frame, because a frame is that object that surrounds a doorway or a window, and it says, here's some information about a wall or the presence of a wall, but you can perforate it.

You can break through it. You can see through that window to life out there that's happening.

That doorway, you can open the doorway and walk through it.

And the reason why I use frame is because you and I are more similar to each other than you or I to our great-grandparents.

What we share in common is more intimate and real than what we do to some past romantic era that we have constructed and reconstructed.

It's not to take anything away from that traditional viewpoint. But what I argue is for the tradition of innovation. Make it real, make it work today for living people.

I don't know what it was like to be my great-great-grandfather.

I have that song that I sang with Ernst, which is my interpretation of that moment, my emotional interpretation, but I don't know.

I know more about your life, you living people on this radio, than I do about my great-great-grandfathers.

And the same for you, the listener. We've got to come to that place where this is a living moment. This is a reality.

The history is mythic. It's reconstructed and reinterpreted for the purpose of serving the living. And sometimes it's done in a wicked way.

But I just feel that we have to be less sure of ourselves and more open to questioning ourselves, and more of being a good skeptic and not a cynic, of making judgment calls based on the information given to us, but not standing on some sort of dais and saying, just a minute, I have a newsflash coming in for my great-great-grandfather.

And I'll do my four sacred directions and bring out the stuff that says to me legitimacy and authenticity.

No, I'm a living person doing an interpretation. And I will argue for my interpretation.

I do in my books and in my art, I argue for my interpretation. But I am not saying that this is the only way to look at it.

This is my way to look at it.

And as far as it resonates with you and makes us more familiar with each other as members of the same species, and more akin to a loving relationship than going to war, hallelujah, that's working.

So I just say, frameline is a way to be less sure of ourselves and to know that through art, we can see something else that we can imagine what it is, we can enjoy what it is.

But we can also, I guess in summary, accept that we don't know everything.

Farha: One thing that I know about formline, if I use that word again, is that the negative spaces are as important as the positive. In fact, the negative is equally part of it.

So maybe philosophically, what you just said with frameline, which if I have your permission, I'll steal on my tours, that could be very interesting.

Because then you open up the discussion that you're right, you are not just focused on the lines, you're focused on what else is beyond that.

Farha: I like that.

Michael: Yes, it's perforated, it's an opening, it's an opportunity.

And if you look at Northwest Coast design, and not just Haida design, you look at Tsimshian or Nisga'a, we're all dealing, and other peoples, we're all dealing with the same construction.

There is no beginning and there is no end in a good piece of work. It's a continuous line.

Farha: I find it like calligraphy.

Michael: It's not a draftsman. This is not a surveyor's map of a subdivision.

Farha: I know Robert Davidson has called it an alphabet in some ways. He talked about his daughter. I just watched a lecture of his, and he says his daughter, when she was learning the alphabet, he started to connect formline to that.

Going back to speaking in images, as a writer, I can't help it, but I was always drawn to the calligraphy of that.

When I look at your work, I see that beauty of that movement in the lines.

Michael: Yes. The way that I approach the line, and I love quoting something I just learned, which was Paul Klee says, "I'm taking the line for a walk."

For me, Haida manga is saying, "Where?"

It's not a statement of saying, yes, we're going here. It's saying, where? Where are we going?

But for me, it's a map of a way to look at the cosmos. The design, these framelines are constantly shifting and moving.

They're not fixed. They're not geometric, empty spaces in a comic book, which says the only thing that's important in the comic book is the narrative that's happening inside the frameline, and we're going to depict time and space to the next point in our narrative as an empty space.

And to me, that's so egotistical. It pretends that life is like this, and life is not like that.

It's a dangerous theory that reflects the European theory of the land is vacant, terra nullius, coming to this land and dismissing 14-plus thousand years of civilizations for their hunger, their desperate desire, because they'd been so mistreated in Europe.

They came here and were willing to do wicked things.

That theory is encapsulated in comic books that use these empty framelines and call them gutters.

For me, Haida map says outside our own experience, which is in the Haida manga books, inside the negative space is the narrative.

It doesn't diminish the narrative, but it says the narrative has an intimate relationship with other things that are happening simultaneously, or before or after, all within one coherent container, which is this black line that undulates.

Sometimes the black line is so heavy and thick that it pushes down on us.

We wake up in the morning, we kick the cat and we mutter at our spouse, and we stumble out into the day. We're just feeling compressed by that cosmos around us.

But be reassured that that line will retract, and it will become thin and will give us room to expand and to be happy and to feed the cat and to love our spouse.

Farha: I love how you just said how it thins out. I love that. There's room for it.

Michael: It's not fixed. It's dancing with us. And our role as a living human right now is to dance with it.

The revolution begins now, the evolution begins now, this very moment, not next week, not last week, right this very moment.

This is the life moment that we have right now. And what we do with it is a measure of how well we fit into the cosmos.

Farha: And it is a cultural renaissance now, not in the past. It's always continuing, right?

Michael: Yes. That's my point. It's alive.

Farha: It's not that it was in the '60s and '70s. There are chapters, and we know with someone like Robert Davidson and Bill Reid putting poles up in this beautiful archipelago of Haida Gwaii after so many years, to see all these wonderful gatherings of people finally seeing poles being raised, that was like, you could say, a cultural renaissance.

But on my tours, I'm like, this is a cultural renaissance everywhere.

When I look at what the artists are doing, it's so incredible. It's a continuum. We can't say that it was this, and then it's, it just feels evolving all the time.

I feel like it's very special to see what you artists are doing all the time, and there seems to be no limit.

Michael: I'm struggling with the word renaissance, because it almost suggests there had to be a death.

Farha: Maybe that's not the word.

Michael: For me, art responds to the moment, to the context.

And the art that we now see and say that is art, because it has a signature at the bottom right-hand side or something, or it's presented as art, is a way to reflect on the moment.

There was a time when the disarray, the clash of the caustic embrace of proto-Canada and Canada with Indigenous peoples was too strong.

Yes, there are terrible tragedies that continue, and millions of people, 13 million people, I think is one figure, since the last 500 years that have been lost here.

Huge death, 90% of Haidas in the three plagues that we experienced, to bring us down to numbers. Lots of death, not to take anything away from that.

But in that situation, how do you live a full performative life, expressing yourself in all facets?

You don't.

You become an acorn. You become a seed in the ground.

But it's not like you're dead. You're still there. The seed is still there in the ground.

And when the conditions are right, when the springtime comes, the seed will grow.

It's not so much a renaissance. It's a continuum.

It's that expanding and contracting line that says we are here and always will be here and will continue, even if it's some sort of atomic structure, if our love of the climatic revenge era continues, who knows where we're going to end up.

But as much as I'm saying live in the moment, I really do appreciate that from an art curatorial point of view, people lay out the themes and they identify the waves that have happened in history where art shifted and politics shifted and relationships shifted, the rise and fall of empires.

That's interesting stuff, and it informs how we react to the current situation.

So it's not to diminish history, but it's a tool for how we live in the living moment.

And the living moment is the measure of our worth and our contribution.

Farha: Well, I remember saying to James Hart in Haida Gwaii earlier this spring, when he launched the book 7IDANsuu James Hart: A Monumental Practice, which the Audain was a big part of, and he wanted to launch the book in his community.

I spoke out in front of many of his community members, saying that every time I speak about his work, I get people crying, even just yesterday on my tour.

And he responded, he's not a man with a lot of words. I feel like he just says a few words and they're so potent.

He said, "Well, it sounds like the art is doing its job."

The art is doing its job.

You mentioned Hart. We look, we feel the art, but what I sense even in a museum like the Audain is the works that we can walk around and look at and see.

I agree, maybe renaissance is not the word.

But what is fascinating to me is, I'll say this. I would have never imagined when I did a Native Studies degree at Trent University, when I finished in '98, it was the first program in Canada to offer Native Studies, that in '98 I would imagine what I'm seeing today.

What Indigenous artists and musicians and writers and playwrights are doing, and the kinds of things like this beautiful Haida manga.

We have Don Yeomans' piece, which is this raven on a Celtic cross, with Celtic knots. So Haida raven with Celtic knots.

Then we have James Hart's dance screen, which is also called The Scream Too, because Edvard Munch, the beaver is embedded there.

I would have never imagined this kind of, for me it's really cool, because Canada, this country, this land, is full of, we are so many things, we're all connected.

We have so many different backgrounds, and I just feel there's a lot of power. That comes out in the art. The art speaks if you spend time with it.

And certainly this beautiful book, which I know you spoke about, but it's gorgeous.

There were some nudes in here. I was surprised to see that.

Michael: Some sexuality.

Farha: I'm a writer, I like that kind of thing. Some eroticism here, some playfulness.

There was one drawing that reminded me of Dr. Seuss.

Michael: Oh, the Dr. Seuss trees.

Farha: There's a little bit of that. Has anyone said that to you?

Michael: Somebody said that.

But just put back the word renaissance, because I like the word renaissance. But it just made me think differently.

Farha: I think it's too loaded of a word. I shouldn't have used it.

Michael: No, no, it's good.

Farha: I really like what you said, because continuum is much better.

Michael: Okay, good. Here's a word that I have a problem with.

Farha: Okay.

Michael: Reconciliation.

Farha: Oh yes, we were going to talk about that.

Michael: Because reconciliation is something that happens after a single entity, like a marriage, has been ripped apart.

And then you reconcile the two opposing forces, but they were joined initially, and they have come together.

And it was Dr. Roberta Kramer, that conversation many years ago about this, and it's just resonated in my thinking.

We were never together.

We have never figured out how to merge. We're learning in Haida Gwaii how to merge the two ways of being, the two structures, one that we could say is proto-Canadian or Canadian or European, and the other Haida or Indigenous, if I can even say that.

We're learning. We're trying to figure out how to do it. But we're not reconciling, because it wasn't together.

And here's why it's important to understand the difference.

We are conciling.

The reason is, imagine when we lost our sexuality for the first time. And for some, it was probably fumbling in the backseat of a car, and it wasn't really well thought through.

And, oh my God, maybe it wasn't so great.

That was the first time, though. So what if we knew how important the first time was? Would we have planned it out a bit better? Would we have prepared? Would it be this lovely memory, this moment, this loving memorial to our movement into adultness?

And so I say to people, we are conciling, and remember that for all the tragedies that mark the relationship now and in the past, we have the opportunity to lose our virginity together.

We can do it for the first time ever. And why would we pass up that moment?

My God, we get to do it. Not our grandchildren, we get to do it now.

And that is happening in some places.

I need to, even in this aftermath of this provincial election, acknowledge the New Democratic government, David Eby and his associates, that they took that bold step to trust.

And when you trust, the fear evaporates. It's critical for us to move ahead in that moment of losing our virginity, to trust the moment and not to be afraid of it.

Fear will kill us.

And here's another little thing I'll put in, quite political, but some people have, without adequate information, talked about, "Oh my God, Aboriginal title, I'm going to lose my private property."

And I have two stories about it.

One is, if you think you own the private property, don't pay your land tax. And we'll talk in a year or two, and you tell me you still own it.

You don't own anything. You lease it. You give money to the King, to Parliament, in order to enjoy your land. You don't own it.

So once upon a time in a town called Queen Charlotte City, which no longer exists in that way, there was a group of people squatting, not paying land tax. They had built houses.

And I think for the most part they might have been American draft dodgers or hippies. They weren't embedded deeply into the community.

They didn't have an influential uncle or aunt in the council. They were kind of on the fringe.

And the good citizens of that town decided that that was very offensive. These people should be removed, because they're not paying taxes, I'm paying taxes. What are these people hanging around?

And the Skeena-Queen Charlotte Regional District agreed. This is wrong. This is an offence. These people need to be removed.

And the provincial government of British Columbia said, yes, yes, this is very offensive. Let's get rid of these people.

And so everyone was against them.

Except 7laanaasuu, the town mother, the chief of Skidegate, Dempsey Collison, and a couple of lads, I'm not exactly sure who I can applaud for there, but a couple of my colleagues.

They went down to these people on the beach, and they said, "You stay there. No one gets kicked out of their home."

Farha: Oh, that's powerful.

Michael: These people weren't married into the community. There was no gift or any sort of transactional element to it.

It was just so offensive to Haidas that anybody could be kicked out of their homes.

And so I say to the good people who live in fear, Aboriginal title and rights delivers the kind of security to everybody, regardless of ethnicity, regardless of class, regardless of language, within the Canadian nation, than any other single opportunity.

And it can be done without violence, without grief, without fear, without insulting people, without shooting people like is happening in so many places in the world.

It is this amazing box of treasures.

And what it requires is us not to live in fear, but to start trusting one another and start having conversations with one another about what is the world we want our children to live in.

And here's a tool. And it's a very mighty tool.

Aboriginal title and rights is constitutional. It impacts every aspect of our life as Canadians. There is no part of our life that is not connected somehow to that basic structure, which says Aboriginal title and rights exist.

And it's a box that hasn't been opened.

So let's get busy and start conciling and making our life better for everybody.

Farha: Wow. How do I even continue a question after that? That was so beautiful. Thank you.

This is lovely. Everything that I had prepared to talk about your art life, I think we've gotten into a...

Michael: A much better place. That's the foundation of the art.

Farha: That's what's inside the artist.

A lot of artists, as you know, are shy. Some of them don't want, I learned this from Curtis Collins, our director at the Audain Museum, he said some of them can be shy. They want the art to speak and they just want to stay behind.

And you can see you are someone that, as I said at the start, you have a lot of words as well in your images. And that's beautiful.

Michael: For me, the flame was when I was growing up in Old Massett, for a time I was the only Caucasian-looking Haida in the whole community.

And then when we moved to New Masset, off the reserve to the community of New Masset, I saw that my relatives with beautiful black hair and dark eyes were treated differently than I was based on what they looked like.

And then years of guilt that I had to figure out, I had to calibrate, where do I fit in this? Why am I being treated better than my relatives?

And one of the ways I got through that morass was realizing I have two grandfathers.

One was 7laanaasuu in Masset, and the other was a member of Lodge No. 1 for the Masons in Glasgow. Kind of at opposite ends of the spectrum, might one argue.

They both treated me with love. They were both good people, good male role models in my life.

And I realized I don't have to pick.

I don't have to be like those people who say, "Well, this guy looks more like me, and that guy looks like a different person, so I like one better than the other."

I don't have to do that bullshit.

And so then it became hybridity, kind of informed by the world of diversity, the ecological world where diversity is a good thing.

And so I thought, okay, I'm going to celebrate this.

That's really become an important part of the art.

The reason why I do art is to celebrate diversity and to see it as a positive force for continual change.

Farha: I've had a few evolutionary biologists on my show the last little while, and I'm in touch with one in Italy, two actually in Italy, that I'll be interviewing in January.

It's so interesting when you go into evolutionary science and you have these discussions. They're very harmonious.

There is definitely a symbiosis there in the thinking, and how human beings are, and that diversity exists everywhere, as it does in our bodies.

Michael: Exactly. In our bodies.

This notion that we're godlike is just, somebody said, I can't remember the quote, it was something to the effect of humans built gods.

But when humans become gods, it's all over.

That is such a poor, I mean, it's this notion of elevating us to this place of high risk, extremely high risk, and the end of the show, curtain call is coming with that kind of attitude that we are dominant, and that everything else is in service of us.

Farha: Telmo Pievani, a man that I'll be interviewing, who is an evolutionary philosopher in Italy, I'll send you his quote. And I'll maybe put it on the blog of this.

You'll see what he describes as an evolutionist in terms of where we are, what sometimes we think we are.

But we are looking at the time, Michael, and so I'm going to end this show.

We might be able to do a little second segment, I would think, depending on your time.

I don't know if we'll have time to go to the Audain and look at your work together and talk about it.

And if not, then we can continue this discussion another time.

Where's full-time home for you?

Michael: It's all over the place. I've been on the road since the end of September.

Farha: But where is home really? Do you live in Haida Gwaii? Do you have a second home here?

Michael: Yes, I'm from Masset in Haida Gwaii, or Hadla Gwaii, which I love that one. Because Haida Gwaii is the people's island.

But the older name for this, Hadla Gwaii, which means coming out of concealment. So you can see where I've put my money on that one.

But anyway, I do have a home there. And that is my home.

I also live in the Lower Mainland, because leaving the world of politics, if I was going to make art work as a principal activity and a source of income, I needed to get closer to that world. So all over the place.

Farha: I just want to quickly, before I end the show here, you've got all of these incredible works all over the world.

I was really fascinated, drawn into the one in Berlin, this monumental mural of yours. That's something I was hoping we could talk about.

But I will put all of this on the blog. You mentioned some of the public sculptures, you've got this new book and other books.

Michael: Let me make a note about JAJ in Berlin, because that's really special.

It is the classic Haida manga murals, which are eight square metres of watercolours that are broken down into book form.

The book is called JAJ, J-A-J, which is a Hindi word meaning discernment.

Farha: So we'll end the show.

Here's my little outro.

My guest today has been Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas. Haida artist, philosopher, author, storyteller, dad, musician, singer.

These are funny words. But we have discussed so much, and I'm not going to put any more words because it was so nice to just listen to him.

You've been listening to The Blue Hour on CiTR 101.9 FM, the broadcasting voice of the University of British Columbia.

CiTR began as a student radio initiative in 1937 and gained a place on the FM dial in 1982.

And I love that this is FM radio. Someone driving around the Lower Mainland, maybe listening to this, and it surely has happened where we get an email, someone catches part of the interview with a guest, they want to know who it is.

I think what I like about radio is that it has no barriers.

It's not curated, it's not a playlist that someone's choosing, a podcast. It's far-reaching. And CiTR is far-reaching.

I looked at the map, and it has a very good radius all over the mainland, even in North Vancouver, if you wanted to know.

My name is Farha Guerrero. I'm the volunteer host and producer of The Blue Hour.

Thanks so much, Michael.

Michael: Thank you. That was fun.

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