Whess Harman

October 27, 2021 Dear Simon/e, It’s been a year since I wrote you my last letter. And I received your response to it in January of this year. That is not, however, a record in terms of my tardiness on a writing project. I’ve had a steep learning curve this year, some of which I’ve been writing about on my Substack newsletter, Unsettle: Indigenous Affairs, Cultural Politics & (De)Colonization. That learning curve involved getting and recovering (as far as I can tell) from Covid-19 in December 2020.

These Gitxsan siblings create impermanent artworks from objects they find along the Skeena River. Driving along Highway 16 up from the BC coast, you’ll wind along a wide river through the curved, misty peaks of slow mountains densely populated by cedar, spruce, fir, hemlock, and alder. This river, the Skeena, has tides up until about Terrace, from where it begins to lose its memory of the ocean.