Here is a picture of my favorite print and not surprisingly it is green. This print by Robert Bateman named Tsitika and Her Son is hanging beside my bed and I have the companion print, Potlatch Village, on the other side of the bed. I go to bed and get up each day seeing these calm, peaceful images.
Tsitika and Her Son
By Robert Bateman
"We heard the orcas before we saw them. On the boat's hydrophone their squeals, squeaks, whistles and sighs sounded as if they were echoing in a cavernous space. Finally the mist lifted a little and we saw a phalanx of black dorsal fins not too far off - a family pod. Then the mist swallowed them up again. Perhaps one of the pods we glimpsed on that magical day of whale watching belonged to a whale that researchers have named Tsitika, an orca matriarch whose life history has given me a glimpse into the orca world. Tsitika and her family belong to the northern resident population of British Columbia killer whales. They have a remarkable social system that we are just beginning to understand."
Potlatch Village
By Robert Bateman
"A few years ago, I had the privilege of visiting a now empty village on an island off the northeast coast of Vancouver Island. Because it was a foggy summer day, we were navigating by compass and radar over the glassy water, occasionally glimpsing the gray-green shoreline, barely aware of the muffled purring of the motor of our big, old wooden boat. First the houses on the village outskirts materialized from the mist, then the lonely outline of a frontal pole. It was all that remained of a traditional native house where a noble family would have lived and held its potlatch feasts, a ceremonial festival accompanied by ritual dancing and lavish gift-giving which the guests would later attempt to surpass.
Of all the aboriginal inhabitants of the northwest Pacific coast, the tribes of this area clung most tenaciously to the potlatch even after it was banned in 1885 by the Canadian government. Despite repeated attempts by local Indian agents to eliminate potlatching, which was regarded as immoral and wasteful, these feasts continued to be held quite openly into the second decade of the twentieth century. One of the biggest potlatches on the central coast took place in the winter of 1921-22 at this now-deserted village. By that time, however, the Indian government had decided to crack down hard on the potlatch using newly granted summary powers that enabled the Indian agent to act as both judge and jury. But the potlatch simply went underground.
As we explored the village that day, I thought of this wrong-headed attempt to suppress native culture and lamented how much had been irretrievably lost. In the mist, the deserted, decaying buildings seemed to echo with voices from a time when this was a vibrant community with ancient roots.
In addition to the two totem poles still standing (they have since fallen), three smaller poles lay close together in various stages of returning to nature. One of these - the least decayed - displayed a magnificent wolf carving, representing a mythical ancestor of the pole's owner. Interestingly, one west coast native group regards the wolf as the land equivalent of the orca, claiming that the first killer whale was a supernatural white wolf who transformed himself into a sea creature."
-Robert Bateman
My green dream would be to visit the spots depicted in these prints.
Bright Star Dreams
