Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas’ art has many incarnations including Haida manga, sculpture, painting, mixed media, ceramics or long murals made on Japanese paper. Yahgulanaas has exhibited in public spaces, museums, galleries and seen in private collections across the globe, and is in such renowned collections as the British Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Seattle Art Museum, Museum of Anthropology, Denver Art Museum, the Vancouver Art Gallery and more. His large outdoor sculptural works can be seen on permanent display at Vancouver International Airport, City of Vancouver, the City of Kamloops and the University of British Columbia. Yahgulanaas’ highly successful books include Flight of the Hummingbird, Red; A Haida Manga, War of the Blink and Carpe Fin. Flight of the Hummingbird was commissioned as an operetta. The libretto written by Yahgulanaas is being translated into German by Oper Frankfurt. Yahgulanaas pulls from his twenty years serving on the Council of the Haida Nation to travel the world speaking to businesses, institutions and communities about social justice, community building, communication and change management.

After working for decades in the Haida Nation’s celebrated campaign to protect its bio-cultural diversity Yahgulanaas began to play as a full-time artist. A descendant of the renowned artists Isabella Edenshaw, Charles Edenshaw and Delores Churchill, Yahgulanaas’ apprenticed under exceptional creators and master carvers of talented lineage. In the late 1990s after an exposure to Chinese brush techniques studying under Cai Ben Kwon, and influenced by Edo period ukiyo-e and Japanese graphics, Yahgulanaas began to merge Haida and Asian artistic influences into a self-taught and innovative new hybrid art form called “Haida Manga”.

Haida Manga blends North Pacific Indigenous iconographies and frame-lines with the graphic dynamism of Asian Manga. It is committed to hybridity as a positive force that opens a third space for critical engagement and is weaved through his art, books and speeches. Haida Manga offers an empowering and playful way of viewing and engaging with social issues as it seeks participation, dialogue, reflection and action. Yahgulanaas’ visual practice encompasses a variety of different art forms including large-scale public art projects, mixed media sculptures and canvases, re-purposed automobile parts, acrylics, watercolours, ink drawings, ceramics and illustrated publications. Exploring themes of identity, environmentalism and the human condition he uses art and speaking opportunities to communicate a world view that while particular to Haida Gwaii – his ancestral North Pacific archipelago – is also relevant to a contemporary and internationally-engaged audience . Influenced by both the tradition of Haida iconography and contemporary Asian visual culture, Yahgulanaas has created a practice that is celebrated for its vitality, relevancy and originality. Kyiv Child (2022) aneditioned print created after a 2019 visit to Ukraine, is modelled after a ZAZ-AA03 Slavuta  car hood and the child is based on an old stone carving in St, Machael’s Cathedral in Kiev. The editioned image helped to raise funds for those enduring limb loss due to the war in Ukraine. (https://www.malaspinaprintmakers.com/kyiv-child.html)

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Michael Yahgulanaas Artist in studio (Photo courtesy the artist)

John K. Grande: Michael so good to know you, and Charlie Edenshaw is one of your ancestors, so you have family connections to the arts….

Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas: Yes. I am one of Charlie Edenshaw’s numerous descendants though he died long before I was born. Art was a central part of his life as it is mine. Art was one of the very few spaces in which indigenous expression was welcomed or perhaps tolerated and reconfigured but not assaulted by Canada. This raises questions about what Art means when its formative cultural context is so violently shifted.

My family was one of many lineages using the art to record an ancient way of being in the world. Think of this as notes in the margins of a textbook. There were relationships formed between my family and the few foreigners that appeared to have a less consumptive interest in our civilization and property. Specifically, the German anthropologist Fran’s Boas comes to mind.

JKG: And you learned carving from Robert Davidson, Jimmie Hart, Don Yeomans and others… Rivers a public art piece produced for Kamloops, like so much of your work innovates with traditions, rather than merely repeating them…

MNY: One important teacher for me was a painter from Canton. He spoke no English and I no Cantonese. It wasn’t that he taught me how to use a brush or see color in black ink. My brush skills are clumsy and black looks black. I am a poor student, but what Teacher Choi demonstrated was that Art doesn’t recognize all boundaries, it has the ultimate passport.

It is perhaps misleading to say I learned carving. Certainly, then as now we continue to examine and reapply the complexity of our inherited art theories. During my years of exposure to carving at that monumental scale which is typical of Totem poles I had already worked as a forest engineer for a logging company deep in the planets most threatened forest type, the 14,000 year temperate rain forest. No amount of respectful behavior could erase the humbling personal understanding of the distance between tree and log. Yet I saw that the template and its application to a 3-Dimensional structure. The success of the template is how it fits such a broad array of conditions and applications. Yes John, I take water from the same stream but brew up a different type of tea.

JKG: And you have talked about your feeling of being in the middle somewhere in between cultural viewpoints. It is something I can relate to… Does it provide a model for integration, creativity that draws on and respects traditions while evolving them…  Was it hard to develop new models for your work?

MNY: The model was always apparent. I was raised in that space.

There were two grandfathers in my life. Both grandfathers were kind and generous with their love and presented me with artistic inspirations. My paternal grandfather was a Scottish immigrant and apparently a ranking member of Masonic Lodge #1 in Glasgow. He once gave me a British comic book. Comic books art at that time of my young life were rare. The colors were vivid and strange and seemed physically weighty as well as conceptually significant.

My other Grandfather was the 7laanaasuu of my home village. A “7laanaasuu” is the town mother, a title now typically called a village chief. His lineage was the first to carve a totem pole and that was just before the last great flood that covered the archipelago with around 200 meters of ocean water. A freshwater spring immediately next to my bedroom plays a significant geo historical marker in the carving of this first ever heraldic column.

Perhaps because my early years were spent mostly in the company of women, rougher edges were rounded and I came to understand that in life it is not necessary to name for or wish one team to be winner and the other loser. Objectively there didn’t need to be a bad guy and a good guy. The game, the process and the movement of the dance is the collective achievement. The scoreboard is a distraction. The desire for a duality only making sense when understood as a functional part of a greater whole, as together they become symmetrical and create a greater multi dimensional phenomena.

Tell Tile, Michael Nicoll Yagulanaas (Photo courtesy of the artist)

JKG: You have developed a fascinating visual language of painting, and using the Japanese Manga style but yours is uniquely west coast…  Haida Manga…

MNY: Manga or manwha is a huge word translated as ‘pictures without borders’ from the Korean or Japanese and perhaps even where it has its roots in China. Forty per cent of publications in Japan are Manga driven, obviously a significant genre in visual literacy. The connection between Asia and the west coast of North America, or, as I often see as the East Coast of the Pacific Ocean, is historical and personal.  During the younger years of Canada, family members travelled across the Ocean on sealing fleets and returned with accounts of their moments of sanctuary and personhood in Japan. In contrast to state policy of internment and legislated racism and theft during World War Two, stories of that sanctuary in Japan persisted amongst us. I didn’t want to create a body of work that was grafted on to an injured root. No this was never just a comic book.  The process became a reflection, a reminder that the Haida manga was in service of sanctuary.

JKG: It is a great hybridity you have developed Haida Manga, not European at all, quite surprising…

MNY: The challenge of creating visual dialect is not so different than other ways that strangers become friends. We find emotionally safe opportunities to share story. Early North American thought leaders built on an inherited Eurocentric notion of elitism where personal value was solely based on physical property. This created a terrible, self-serving wickedness requiring mythic fabrication and factual distortion as justification for the killing of millions of humans and seizure of their assets.

Inoculation against repeating such morally stunted genetic pruning might be a biological necessity. Prevention of genocide requires that living individuals develop a more honest emotive understanding of the common humanity and personhood of all. Like jazz rising out of the merger of Euro and African musical theory in a new social petri dish Haida manga is inevitable not surprising. Estuaries where two types of water meet are always fertile places. Diversity springs out of such transitional zones. New dialects arise in dynamic spaces.

JKG: And there is no hierarchy in Manga, which is refreshing. The hummingbird has many symbolic connections in ancient cultures, your Flight of the Hummingbird is a fable about the environment… Can you tell me something about this…

MNY: The hierarchy that isn’t seemingly apparent in Haida manga reflects the almost overwhelming dominance and chaotic aggression found in a wide range of contemporary cultural expression.This parable reminds us that action is the best measure of a lived life. It doesn’t tell us life has a scoreboard or that action “A” will result in “B” but rather that life is engagement and that each of us makes choices including when we run away.

It is seductive to imagine an ending to this short parable in which a small bird stops a forest fire. The parable does not say that. It ends before we know whether the hummingbird extinguished the fire or is carbonized in a failed effort.  The core message is not that the bird won or lost, failed or achieved but that it tried. This is not the implied exhaustion of  “I do all I can” but rather “I do what I can”.

JKG: Is it a story of global warming as well?

MNY: Yes, the Fight of the Hummingbird is easily applied to global warming. Regardless of the challenge living individuals will continue to be the hummingbirds … or not.

JKG: And you worked on the digital totem for the American Museum of Natural History…

MNY: Likely all people who live in one place for long periods of time there may be an increased value placed on remembering relationships. If there are two willing minds, such relationships are well nourished. Haida and the AMNH are both linked back to a time when Franz Boas and our own Charles Edenshaw were friends.  I was the American Museum of Natural History’s first ever artist in residence the same time as they revealed the digital totem. I was fortunate to be there but didn’t make any distinct contribution to its continued success.

JKG: And the characters in your graphic novel, War of the Blink, tells an ancient Haida story from the precolonial era.  The fusion of Northwest coast art and the graphic Japanese manga format is exciting, of interest to anyone, for it is not trapped by tradition but instead informed by a tradition that enables great imaginative and visual leaps of consciousness… The reading is non-linear, like the way we seem to think these days…

Michael Nicholl Yahgulanaas, illustration from War of the Blink (Haida Manga publication)
Locarno Press, 2017

MNY: The graphic novel does present as a linear tool as page dutifully follows page. If you toss the Haida manga title up in the air each time you have finished reading one page and then only read the newly exposed page you will have challenged linearity within that bound universe. Fortunately, there is an easier way for the reader to overturn linearity.

War of the Blink and RED, A Haida Manga and The Carpenter’s Fin all start out as large murals painted over numerous separate paper sheets. Carpenter’s Fin, commissioned by the Seattle Art Museum comprises a single six meter long and two-meter high image. I discovered that as I followed my narrative script in the painting of the mural, surprising new visual and narrative patterns appeared. I encourage readers to cut up two copies and re-construct the larger work by re-joining the pages together either duplicating my layout premise of creating their own. Armed with knife and glue the reader loses the sanctuary of the observer and becomes complicate in the creativity reimagining.

JKG: … and the sea, the traditions of the Haida people figure in your art, and the great storytelling traditions of your people. The environmental sense is strong in your work… You worked in Japan on environmental projects…. Can you tell me about your projects involving the environment??

SEI, 2015
Materials: stainless steel, copper, granite, weight: 12 tons, length: 12 meters, width variable
Permanent collection of the Vancouver International Airport
Photo: Robert Keziere

MNY: I have seen so many small groups of people overturn challenges that appeared vast, over resourced, influential and powerful that the Biblical account of David and Goliath seems not to be the exception, but a rule.

When the willingness to be actively engaged combines with the awareness that knowledge and wisdom is not proprietary much is possible. This boldness encouraged me to adopt a similar strategy in Art.

JKG: You have said that Haida art is about restrictions, an alphabet of symbols. How did this language transform your art into what it is now?

MNY: Haida art theory does set up a seemingly rigid and constrained set of regulations. At one scale these are a dance between compression and expansion where the changing relationship opens up spatial and conceptual opportunities for new transitions. The tension captured in a successful expression reflects the line between the two dynamic forces. There may appear as oppositional but that relationship is the poetry. We all recognize that “cutting corners” is a strategy to increase some desired outcome. We also know that there can be collisions with these corners so judgment about the distant between the innovation and the reference should be reasonably well informed.

JKG: For you, is art part of nature – inseparable?

MNY: Art is the way we talk with nature. Without these two creative forces, humans would not have lives.

JKG: We are a part of nature, and storytelling – its rebirth may be essential for our cultural survival…  Is transformation a part of this tradition, endless innovation and transformation….

MNY: What rebirth? Isn’t rebirth just about good sex and babies? Diversity in coupling holds the best promise of survival. Cultural transformation is adaptation to variables. Variables are change markers. They function like waves of deep space radiation moving through our very being. If our traditional practice is to walk up the mountain, but the mountain is now a sand beach, the tradition will be changed. Pretending I am ascending while walking level is a failure of observation, or a deeper reflection on the core value of a tradition. If the mountain is firmly held to be the tradition then the practice on walking on the grains of mountain scattered on the beach may not be appreciated as adherence. Tradition is how we observe the mountain. It is an orientation tool. Tradition that doesn’t absorb the energy of change is King Canute with wet feet.

Art is not a noun, it is verb.  But that might not be at all helpful considering that at a cosmological significant scale there may be no noun. Everything is a verb. I asked my father-in-law ‘How fast are we moving?’. He made a calculation based on the rotation of the planet, then another incorporating the revolution around the sun. Finally, he considered the galactic motion which required he create an imagined referential state of zero. Then he said ‘Everything is moving’.

Kyiv Child (2022) image courtesy the artist

JKG:  Kyiv Child (2022) was inspired by a centuries-old stone carving of a warrior on horseback carrying a spear from St. Michael’s Cathedral in Ukraine’s capital city. On that carving, a warrior on horseback carries a spear. And you subsequently made a print edition with Malaspina Printmakers to raise funds for prostheses for crippled people in Ukraine, and it was a great success. Congratulations!

MNY:  For my adaptation of this work, the ‘stone’ is now the hood of a ZAZ-AA03 Slavuta car manufactured in a post-Soviet Ukraine. And the warrior is replaced by a mother and child travelling over a plain gilded in gold and silver. I hope that when Ukraine is again a free country, Kyiv Child (2022) will be exhibited back in her home. The violent assault in Indigenous Peoples is not a unique experience. A murdering strategy isn’t triggered by ethnic or cultural diversity but is a decision that requires the presence of a profoundly discordant mutation. Societies that have or are experiencing state sanctioned violence are faced with a choice. Passive acceptance is one pathway. The other is resistance. A third challenge arises when we witness an assault on some other person. Do you accept that this other will, or must also become a victim, or do you choose to be actively engaged in stopping the assault.

Must we as survivors of trauma become violent ourselves, or does the trauma made us stronger. Have you been tested?  How do you know if you have passed or failed?

For some Peoples, and I include Haida and Indigenous Peoples on the North- Eastern coasts of the Pacific, the results appear to be clear. These survivors of a prolonged assault are not reduced or defeated. Rather they appear to be strong societies committed to a moral code that has vanished in some Nation states.   A moral protocol includes empathy.  Ukraine needed to know how we answered that question. I wanted to contribute an answer.

JKG: The JAJ mural in Berlin tells the story of a young Norwegian explorer Johan Adrian Jacobsen (1853-1947) who was hired by the Director of Berlin’s Ethnological Museum to travel to the Pacific coast. He returned with over 1,000 artifacts, some from your’ own great grandparent’s family on Haida Gwaii… Your JAJ mural, now at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, evolved into a graphic novel about being collected and the collectors – a book about the players and the nature of collections and collecting.…

JAJ Mural Berlin Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas – watercolour and ink on Kozo. washi paper Colllection of Humboldt Forum, Berlin

MNY: The Haida Manga murals are few in number, as each focused attention and took a minimum of 2 years to complete. My murals are also intended to be published as stand-alone books. The Berlin mural, and its subsequent publication JAJ, is a graphic novel conversation between the collected and collectors about collections. Earlier murals like RED, A Head Manga in the collection of the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, Canada were commemorated with a Postage stamp by Canada Post in November 2025.  

Michael Yahgulanaas artist at work Photo courtesy of the artist

The murals range in size from 6 to 7 square meters in size. These spatial, and the financial requirements are typically outside the reach of most households. The murals are then at risk of becoming isolated in the rarified atmosphere of public and private institutional collections. Haida Manga address reoccurring themes; the value and presence of diversity, the power of cooperation over the imposition of failed judgment and shallow reactive assault requires contemplation and deep thinking amongst all citizens.

Hence a grand mural should become a good book.

JAJ Mural, Berlin (photo courtesy of the artist)

A Haida manga mural is designed challenge perspective. The mural hints at a narrative but defies the observer to articulate a coherent story line structure. Indeed, the observers’ degree of confidence fails the closer the observer comes to the artworks’ surface. Individual elements are clear to see and they remind the observer that indeed there is a story here. But the observer doesn’t have enough information to understand what the story is. Stepping back from the mural the observer can sees that there is a structure, a physical thread that weaves throughout the entire universe of the mural but there isn’t enough information to identify specifics. The message of the mural is that all narrative elements exist in a complex and inclusive cosmology.

A completed Haida manga mural contains 108 unique story panels. The panel is also constructed as a page and published as a graphic novel.

This book allows space. These books offer time and contemplation.

Holding a book the observer changes into a reader. The reader is no longer hostage or subservient to the large complex mural that has successfully defied interpretation. The reader is now sovereign over the mural.

In November 2025, the Vancouver Art Gallery unveiled Clan Hat. This mural is 6 sq meters of water-colour, inks and graphite on hand made sheets of mulberry paper. It is also the first chapter of a possible three mural story. Should additional commissions be found the second and third chapters will be created. Clan Hat  now in the permanent collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, will then become the first part of an 18 square metre artwork, one of the largest watercolours in existence. Clan Hat will then be published as a graphic novel. The race against the mortality of the aging artist has begun.

JKG: I recently read that some of the doyens of Silicon Valley have forbidden their own children to use the media, encouraging greater involvement with the physical environment… Is new media a threat to our communities?

MNY: I wandered pushing words and thoughts around the page like unloved vegetables in a bowl of broth. It seemed that I was trying to be too clever fumbling with definitions of community (a quality of feeling) or an aspirational state or at best a transitional phase. Community in Silicon Valley is distinct from a community at home. I do some work in such urban settings where time rushes so quickly you are saying goodbye before you can say hello. Closer to the rain and the wind slows people down. It makes us understand how insignificant we are. Humans are not the latest elegant hardware or the updated app. We are the bugs. Best to love bugs.

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https://mny.ca/

https://www.johnkgrande.cz/

Art, Creativity, Culture, Installation, Sculpture