Christie Harris

Christie Lucy Harris, CM (November 21, 1907 – January 5, 2002)^[1] was a Canadian children's author. She is best known for her portrayal of Haida First Nations culture in the 1966 novel Raven's Cry.^[2]

She was led to investigate Northwest Coast cultures after moving to Prince Rupert, British Columbia, in 1958 and writing a series of CBC dramas on First Nations topics.^[1] She received a Canada Council grant to work with the Haida artist Bill Reid in researching the life and context of the great Haida carver Charles Edenshaw. In this she worked closely with Wilson Duff and, in Masset, B.C., with Edenshaw's daughter Florence Davidson.

Her 1975 book Sky Man on the Totem Pole? applies the "ancient astronaut" theories of Erich von Däniken to Northwest Coast oral histories.

In 1980, she was made a Member of the Order of Canada.^[3] In 1973, she was awarded the Vicky Metcalf Award.

Three months after her death, the Christie Harris Illustrated Children's Literature Prize was announced as a new BC Book Prize category.^[4]

Selected bibliography

• Cariboo Trail (1957)
• Once Upon a Totem (1963)
• You Have to Draw the Line Somewhere (1964)
• West with the White Chiefs (1965)
• Raven's Cry (1966; reissued 1992)
• Confessions of a Toe-Hanger (1967)
• Forbidden Frontier (1968)
• Let X Be Excitement (1969)
• Figleafing Through History: The Dynamics of Dress (1971, with Moira Johnston)
• Secret in the Stlalakum Wild (1972)
• Mule Lib (1972, with Tom Harris)
• Sky Man on the Totem Pole? (1975)
• Mouse Woman and the Mischief Makers (1977)
• Mouse Woman and the Muddle-heads (1979)
• The Trouble with Adventurers (1982)
• Something Weird Is Going On (1994)

References