Old Crow, New World
To restore or recycle in the age of reconciliation? A historic highway-side landmark awaits its fate.
Unarmed —Carved 65 years before sports teams names had to be changed and colonialist statues were defiled or torn down, Old Crow went on up. His missing arm is in safekeeping though. Jeff Pew Photo
"He could do anything, except make a lot of money,” Karen Barraclough recalls of her neighbour, the artist Bud Amy. “He rented a big house, had five kids to feed, yet couldn’t afford groceries. Artists didn’t make a lot of money back then,” she says over the phone from Skookumchuck, B.C.
Barraclough is a rancher and the owner of B-E Ranch, located 42 kilometres north of Kimberley. Her family has a long history in the area, dating back to 1944 when her dad bought the cattle ranch. “I’ve lived here since Bud carved that statue,” she says, referring to what locals had called “The Indian” since the late ‘50s. According to Barraclough, Amy traded the eight-foot-tall statue on the side of Highway 95 to gas station, garage, and grocery store owner Mel Cowie for $500 worth of groceries.
This was a time of Cigar Store Indians: the storefront carvings crudely attempting the likeness of an Indigenous person, used to advertise tobacconists. A time of black-and-white westerns, with white actors cast in stereotypical “Indian” roles; a time when children would drive through Skookumchuck in the back of their parents’ station wagons, extend their arms, mirroring the statue, and say, “How.”
This was 65 years before the process of Truth and Reconciliation began, long before sports teams’ names were changed and statues of violent colonialists were torn down.
Geordie Driscoll grew up in Tata Creek, 16 kilometres south of the statue, and he remembers seeing its broken arm at his parents’ house in 1986 as his dad and a family friend repaired and painted it. “The statue was called ‘Old Crow,’” Driscoll recalls, “and his right arm, extended in greeting, was repeatedly vandalized.” The statue was fixed again in 1997 by Grant Howse, a friend of Bud Amy’s, but what remains of Old Crow now, Driscoll explains, “is a result of woodpeckers, rot, and vandals.”
Old Crow has seen better days. When you drive by, the fibreglass veneer of his blanket is faded and cracked, and his right arm has been missing for years. Fabienne Groen of Kootenay Tack, and the current owner of the Skookumchuck property, says the missing arm is safely inside her shop. “People would hang off it to take photos,” she says. She believes the current fibreglass coating is trapping moisture and causing wood rot inside the statue. Despite offers to purchase the statue, Groen says it’ll remain in the current location, at least until her property is sold.
What will become of Skookumchuck’s familiar landmark? Some consider it a significant Kootenay artifact that deserves to be restored, while others feel it’s a kitschy caricature of First Nations people that should quietly disappear so nature can reclaim it, so it can become one with the earth again.
~ Jeff Pew
Find this full-length story and more in The Trench’s Spring + Summer 2024 edition: