The Shaman Who Came in From the Ocean: Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas’s Visual Narratives

Abstract

Between 2001 and 2023, Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas recovered many of the traditions of the Haida nation in the North-Western Pacific coast, creating hybrid narratives halfway between the textual and the pictorial. Yahgulanaas used different adaptations of the ancestral figure of the shaman to express the journey his people have gone through. Yahgulanaas’s shamans are usually elements of confrontation between the static world of the Haidas and the external world, being the last barrier of defense against the destruction of the natural and social context in which the stories are held and told. The objective of this article is to focus on Yahgulanaas’s so-called “Haida mangas” in order to explore how his shamans (his transcendent characters) can heal society and history through a deep connection with the spiritual world of the Haidas and through a deep understanding of how the supernatural is connected to them.