Museum of Anthropology at UBC

This guide to the Museum of Anthropology at UBC in Vancouver follows Haida carver Bill Reid through two years of work on a monumental cedar sculpture, laminated from donated beams after his original block kept splitting. It traces the piece back to a small boxwood carving that caught timber baron Walter Koerner's eye, and to the Haida story it tells: Raven prying open a clamshell on a beach at Haida Gwaii, coaxing the frightened beings curled inside toward the light. Reid began carving in earnest in the fall of 1978, in a locked room above this very museum.