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Gwaai Edenshaw | Jeweler

Gwaai Edenshaw is a contemporary Haida jeweler and carver bridging ancient formline traditions with modern practice, preserving stories, language, and identity through jewelry, sculpture, and film as resistance.
In the archipelago of Haida Gwaii, off the westernmost edge of British Columbia, the art of the northern Northwest Coast has been evolving over millennia, and has a distinct style that remains as majestic and mysterious as the lands are remote.
Gwaai Edenshaw (Hluugiitgaa) is a contemporary jeweler, pole carver, and scholar of the Haida culture. He is a storyteller, in a distant setting where oral histories have been repeated since the beginning of Haida history, with the arrival of the primordial ancestresses of the Haida matrilineage—Foam Woman (SGuuluu Jaad), Creek Woman (Jiila Kuns), and Ice Woman (KalGa Jaad) in the glacial age around 11,150 BCE.

With widespread forests of red cedar appearing 6,000 years ago came the development of a sophisticated Haida society centered around the coastal “tree of life,” and the artistic manifestation of massive carved cedar monuments and poles.
Centuries of creative expression, fostering a unique lexicon of symbols and artistic architecture, have barely survived the ravages of time, with disease killing off 90% of the indigenous population (smallpox, 1862), and the outlawing of Native ceremonies and the Christianization of the Haida people (1884). By 1900, most of the art and cultural treasures had been plundered, poles cut down, leaving the indigenous people disconnected from their great lands, which were also taken from them.
The full story appears in the new issue of the magazine: Cabana Issue 25.
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Words by Peter Speliopoulos
Images by Gwaai Edenshaw, Peter Lattimer, Farah Nosh, Desiree Wilson and Marni Yor