ABSTRACT
This first chapter is about paint and leather, the smell of cedar planks and of fishing lines, the texture of woven baskets, the stickiness of
pitch and the lusciousness of oil, the sharpness of blades and the brightness of polished metal. It is also about beauty - both that of the natural world and of art-forms - about the red skies above the sea, finely dressed youth, the white stripes on a whale, the animation of fine carving, the rightness of good design. Many story-tellers are quoted in the pages that follow, and sometimes a love of visual beauty seems to stand out in particular individuals. One is Walter McGregor, recorded by the ethnographer John Swanton at Skidegate in the Queen Charlotte Islands in 1900, and a teller of stories which are saturated with colour, full of detail, and alive to everything that makes art have value. They are among the most memorable poetic expressions from the Northwest Coast ever recorded, and I am going to start by discussing two of them. Inter alia, one is 'about' the story of the birth of a principal Supernatural Being and the other is 'about' how certain dances came to be. But they are also 'about' art, aesthetics and living beautifully.
