Bill Reid was born in Victoria, B.C., in 1920. Although in his early years unaware of his Haida ancestry, he was to become perhaps the single most important figure in the late twentieth century renaissance of Haida culture -- a culture almost destroyed after the European colonization of the Haida homeland on the Northwest Coast. To describe him as a "Haida artist" is, however, not to refer to his ethnic background so much as it is to indicate the school of tradition within which he worked.

  Reid's own upbringing was cross-cultural. His father William, an American of Scottish-German parentage, followed the newly-built railroad into northern British Columbia, where he ran a hotel in Smithers. His mother Sophie was a Haida but with an Anglican education and consequently anglophile cultural values that led her to hide from Bill his Native descent (nor did his father ever mention it). Shortly after William and Sophie married, he transferred his hotel business to Hyder, B.C., on the Alaska border while she set up house in Victoria, B.C., and made a living as a dressmaker, designing fashionable clothes for upper-crust families of the city. For some years the family moved back and forth between the two locations; Reid received his education in a variety of schools as a result. It was in school, twelve years old and bored, that he made his first forays into craft work: carving miniature shapes out of blackboard chalk, including a totem pole and a Viking boat.

  He was not conscious of his Haida heritage until his teens. However, gold and silver jewelery bearing Haida designs, worn by his aunts when they visited Sophie, introduced him unknowingly to the art of his ancestors. Years later, at age 23, he visited his mother's home village, Skidegate, where he met Sophie's father, Charles Gladstone, and other older members of the community who still had some sense of Haida tradition. Reid learned that his grandfather had been a carver of argillite and an engraver of silver bracelets; Gladstone had probably learned these skills from his uncle, the great nineteenth-century Haida sculptor Charles Edenshaw, whose tools he inherited, and whom Reid subsequently adopted as his culture-hero.