Button Blanket depicting Eagle, c. 1980
by Hazel Wilson Simeon (1941-2016), Haida First Nation
wool melton cloth, plastic and metal buttons
58" high x 66" wide
Hazel Wilson Simeon was born in 1941 in Tiiyaan, a small village on the west coast of Graham Island in the Queen Charlotte Islands of British Columbia, Canada. Known as Jut-ke-Nay in her native Haida language, she was a member of Duugwaa St’Langng 7laanaas clan on the Raven side.
When Wilson was 14, she was selected to become a maker of appliqued button blankets-ceremonial robes created from melton cloth and decorated with pieces of abalone, copper and pearl buttons. A master of her craft, Wilson went on to make countless robes for friends and relatives. In the early 1970s, she moved with her children to Vancouver, where she continued to create robes both for family members and for the southern market. In 2006, her work was featured in Raven Travelling, a major 200-year retrospective of Haida art presented by the Vancouver Art Gallery. Wilson continued to live and work in Vancouver until her death in 2016.
For the first three decades of her artistic career, Wilson concentrated on making blankets with various family crests, such as frogs and ravens. Although traditional in conception, Wilson’s interpretation of this traditional subject matter was nonetheless distinctive: in addition to buttons, she attached a range of materials to her robes, including pieces of brass, shells from the sea and beadwork.
In more recent years, Wilson extended her art to include narrative forms that touch on a range of contemporary concerns. In 2005, she completed a major cycle of 17 blankets chronicling the life and death of the sacred Golden Spruce Tree (K’iid K’iyaas). In 2006, she began work on an even larger series of narrative blankets that record the modern and pre-modern history of the Haida people. Comprising 50 blankets in all, this series of button blankets addresses such politically charged themes as large-scale logging on Haida Gwaii and the devasting impact of small pox in the post-contact era.
