A camera pans down slowly, following the progression of a fast-flowing waterfall in the Pacific Northwest. The first minute of A Wolf’s Way: Dempsey Bob (2023) is punctuated only by the sounds of nature, the rush of water, a raven’s call, and the quiet dripping of fat rain droplets in the still harbor. The introduction to this documentary, which was Bob’s debut as a co-director with Mathias Arroyo-Bégin, is slow and deliberate; it reflects the care and meticulousness that Dempsey Bob embodies as an artist.
Still from A Wolf’s Way: Dempsey Bob, courtesy of Dempsey Bob and Mathias Arroyo-Bégin.
Bob, who is of Talhtan and Tlingit heritage from the Pacific Northwest, has been sculpting and carving for more than fifty years. His family lived in the Stikine River area in Northern British Columbia, where his father was a trapper, but by 1952 the trapping trade had become an unsustainable way to support their family, so they moved that year to Port Edward, British Columbia, where work was available at the North Pacific Cannery. The cannery, which opened in 1889, was the longest-running cannery in the province’s history. It initially employed workers who were Japanese, Chinese, British, and from various First Nations groups in the area. By the 1950s, most employees were Indigenous people from First Nations around the British Columbia coast. The impact of the cannery is not easily visible when you look at most of Bob’s work, which often depicts traditional stories of the animals, spirits, and history of his people through wooden or metal sculptures. But in A Wolf’s Way, and in my subsequent conversations with the artist, he makes clear its influence. His efforts to revitalize traditional approaches to Tlinglit carving is rooted in his upbringing nearby and the cultural evolution of his people.
The North Pacific Cannery was central in Bob’s early life; he was only four years old when he moved there. Many of the scenes in A Wolf’s Way take place at the now-closed cannery, where Bob tells the story of his home and his people—not his long-lost ancestors but his immediate family and community, many of whom found work there. When I watched the film, I was curious about the artist’s choice to focus on the cannery. It called to mind something I often think about when reading or writing about Indigenous art and culture: the cannery itself was not an ancient, sacred place; it was, at its peak, a central, modern part of Indigenous lives in coastal British Columbia. Including the cannery in a film about his art was a subtle nod to the fact that Indigenous cultures are not static. We are modern, we exist and evolve, and so do our cultures.
Still from A Wolf’s Way: Dempsey Bob, courtesy of Dempsey Bob and Mathias Arroyo-Bégin.
A Wolf’s Way is beautifully filmed. While a lot of the cinematography focuses on the cannery, the film frequently moves through the land and surrounding waters, with Bob himself narrating. When he talks about the significance of wildlife, the directors show us what he means. For instance, when he talks about how he was taught not to swim in the sloughs and creeks during salmon-spawning seasons, to prevent disturbing their eggs, we see salmon swimming as the film cuts to one of his artworks that features a similar scene. The editing provides a fluid continuity between Bob’s words, his world, and his work.
Throughout the film, we see that the now-closed cannery was and remains quite remote, a place embedded in the wild, natural world of the Pacific Northwest, with towering trees, an abundance of wildlife, and surrounded by mountains and waterways that feed into the ocean. Bob reminisces about growing up nearby. Like many kids in the 1950s, he would look at the Sears catalogue and want all the toys—but as his community didn’t have access to them, he made his own. He began carving by making his own wooden guns and other toys at a young age. When Bob began his career as an artist after leaving the cannery in 1969, he started working on cedar totem poles, ceremonial bowls, and bentwood boxes. Bob joked that it was a good thing he didn’t know how much work it would be to become an artist, or he may not have started. He notes that the key to his accomplishments was in learning by doing. Everything else is abstraction.
Dempsey Bob, Bear Mother, 2012. Digital © UBC Museum of Anthropology.
Dempsey Bob, Bear Mother, 2012. Digital © UBC Museum of Anthropology.
Even though the film offered a poetic primer on Bob’s art and sensibility, I still had questions. In particular, about the centering of the cannery in the film: I wasn’t clear about its influence on Bob’s artwork. Having seen the more traditional elements and style of his work, I wanted a clearer grasp on how his life at the cannery directly related to the subjects and focus of his creative expression, which to an outsider, embodies ancient storytelling and Indigenous values. During our conversation in April 2024, three weeks after I first saw the film, I asked him about his connection to tradition. He said, “Some people think that tradition should be just this, or just that. But if you look at art, even our art, it evolved. Because if art doesn’t evolve it dies.” Bob was always interested in the stories of his Elders. He grew up with grandparents and Elders who told stories that they were told by their Elders. Inspired by these stories, Bob describes the act of sculpting them as revitalization and resistance. His work The Story of Fog Woman and Raven (2007), which centers a creation story about the first salmon, is also an allegory about the importance of treating your wife with respect and how abuse can affect your relationship. Bob’s work keeps the old stories alive against the active destruction of Indigenous culture by colonial powers. During our conversations, he quoted the nineteenth century Métis resistance leader Louis Riel who said, “My people will sleep for one hundred years, but when they awake, it will be the artists who give them their spirit back.” You can see that spirit embodied in Bob’s work. His art is alive with purpose.
When Bob left the cannery, he sought out the tutelage of the Haida artist Freda Diesing, leading to what became a formative relationship. At the time, many young artists refused to work with Diesing because, according to traditional gender roles, women were not supposed to carve. But Bob recognized in her the meaningful change his people needed to move forward and revive their artistic practices. One glance at any sculpture in Bob’s extensive body of work reveals the deftness with which he carves away at the wood to find the story within.
Rendered most often in cedar, highlighted in black, red, and sometimes blue paints—material and colors common in Tlingit art—Bob’s works are bold and formidable. From the communicative eyes of his masks to the crouching bows of his frogs (a favorite subject for Bob), every choice evidences time. Wood faces as smooth as glass makes one long to run one’s fingers along the curves and creases. His work Bear Mother (2012), which depicts the story of a woman who disrespected the bears and was made to atone by marrying a grizzly, flows through its every curve, from the woman’s hair to the precise eyelids of the four figures, for whom Bob created subtle differences in their individual expressions. This commitment to craft is one of the key elements that makes his work, and work like his, so important. It is part of a bigger movement of revitalization that was taken on in BC by artists like the Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl) artist Tony Hunt and the Haida artist Robert Davidson, who were both active starting in the 1960s and who both taught Bob’s mentor Diesing early in her career. This artistic and cultural revival was important particularly during Bob’s childhood because it arose after the federal ban on First Nations potlatches and the forcible removal of Indigenous children to residential schools. Artists like Hunt, Davidson, and Diesing were fighting to keep their history and values alive while missionaries and colonial governments were outlawing Indigenous ways of being and taking away our history and our ability to learn and move forward in our own way. Bob told me, “Great art has to represent [its] time, that true artists live in truth and knowledge of whatever is happening at the time.” Art, he added, is “a rebellion against what they did to us … and how they treated our people.”
Still from A Wolf’s Way: Dempsey Bob, courtesy of Dempsey Bob and Mathias Arroyo-Bégin.
Today Bob is the Elder, the master carver, and he’s become freer to expand his creativity. Throughout the film we are introduced to Bob’s preteen granddaughter, Keely, who helps paint a sculpture in progress, running her hands along a totem pole and looking for rocks in the creek bed. Even as a living artist, Bob has seen the changing of his culture in real time. While cannery work was prevalent in his youth, it is now a relic of bygone days. In the film, Bob talks about a particular mountain cliff that he likes to look at. He sees a face in it, and the face is always changing due to the weather or the time of day. It’s a marker of a true sculptor that I’ve noticed after years of interviewing artists: the best carvers and sculptors always say the wood or stone tells them what to carve. Dempsey Bob takes it further. He feels that the best art comes from “self-realization,” as he puts it. You have to make the mistakes yourself and find out what works through hands-on experience, he told me. In doing so, he can connect viscerally to the ancestors who carved and express his people’s past and present with a full understanding of their experience.
