Terri-Lynn Williams Davidson (Gid7ahl-G̲udsllaay Lalaxaaygans) is an author, musician, artist, activist, scholar and lawyer. She is a member of the Raven Clan of the Haida Nation.
For her latest book, A Haida Wedding, she collaborated with her husband, world-renowned artist Robert Davidson, to chronicle the planning process and ceremonial details of their traditional Haida wedding in 1996.
Interviewed by Rebeca Dunn-Krahn
Rebeca Dunn-Krahn (RDK): Reading A Haida Wedding is like being a special guest at a warm, carefully planned, sacred ceremony that not only brings together two people, but also honours extended families, clans, communities, and ancestors. The photos in the book convey the beauty of the ceremonial objects, clothing, and setting. And the words help us imagine the sounds, smells, and tastes of the experience. So, Terry-Lynn, first of all, thank you for inviting us, the readers, to your wedding.
You married in 1996 and published A Haida Wedding in 2024. What made you decide to share this story now?
Terri-Lynn Williams-Davidson (TLWD): It’s a great question. It wasn’t a case of extreme procrastination, but just our thinking about the value of engaging in a ceremony like this, and wanting other people to also have Haida weddings, traditional Haida weddings, even combinations or hybrid kinds of Haida weddings. We wanted to see more of those, so we thought it was a good time to share the story, to encourage those kinds of ceremonies to take place.
RDK: In order to hold your traditional wedding, you actually had to do a significant amount of research to find out what the elements of a Haida wedding are. Can you please tell us about your research process, and explain why it was necessary?
TLWD: I’m a lawyer, so I do a lot of research, and so it was a natural thing to engage in the ethnographic record, which I was already familiar with from my work. And I found quite a few different sources that covered details about Haida weddings. Some of them were conflicting, or had nuances I wasn’t familiar with, so after I compiled all the different sources, we then reviewed that with our family to reach agreement on which elements we would adopt and use in our wedding.
So it was a somewhat lengthy process. I started first with my mom, and then we met with my clan, and we did the same with Robert’s clan. His parents were no longer alive, so we talked to his aunt, his mother’s sister and his father’s sisters, and reached agreement on how we’d proceed with the wedding.
And it was necessary because, well, my mother – she was born in 1922 and she hadn’t witnessed a traditional Haida wedding in her lifetime. But she had played at Haida wedding ceremonies on the beach, just like we do today as young girls pretending to get married, and she did that with her friends. They had heard about weddings. So we were able to use those elements, and that also contributed to the process.
We didn’t have a person alive who could say, this is how you do a wedding. We didn’t have a definitive guide. And no one had witnessed one, so that was why we needed to go back to the ethnographic record and you know, most ethnographic records are a bit skewed by the person who wrote the record. So that’s why it was important to also review it with our clans and with our families to arrive at something that worked for us. So that was the whole process. It might have been a couple of months of working through the different elements, and then also adding new elements, like the canoe ceremony that my brother-in-law orchestrated. My husband’s brother, Reg Davidson.
It was a very creative time and a very creative process with our family and clans.
RDK: As well as being a pleasure to read, a beautiful artifact, and the winner of the 2025 Community History Award from the British Columbia Historical Federation, A Haida Wedding, as you mentioned, can also be used as a blueprint for people that would like to have a traditional ceremony. Do you know of anyone who’s done that yet?
TLWD: There were a couple of hybrid weddings that occurred after our wedding: one in Masset, one in Skidegate, and then also a wedding in Alaska, and I sent my big, long document to this couple in Alaska who wanted to know more about the Haida wedding process.
Our wedding was quite elaborate. We really want people to pick elements that will work for them in the same way that we did. We didn’t leave out any elements, we felt it was important to do it all.
I think the two weddings that were held were a great opportunity to revisit these ceremonies and the elements that work for them.
I’m not certain if those weddings were only validated under Haida law. One thing that was unique in our wedding ceremony is we felt it was really important to only have Haida law validate our coming together. We didn’t have a religious ceremony, or a ceremony with the Justice of the Peace.
RDK: Can you say more about why that’s so important to you?
TLWD: It is important because that’s the field I work in. I’m a Haida lawyer, a lawyer for the Council of the Haida Nation.
There’s a growing movement across Canada today to return back to Indigenous laws. At the University of Victoria, they now offer a joint program in Canadian law and Indigenous law. It’s a relatively new, growing field.
But before this movement, that started with people like John Borrows, people didn’t believe that Indigenous peoples had laws. In fact, a lot of the early case law, when they looked at Aboriginal rights and title, the sentiment was that we were too primitive to have our own laws, that we weren’t capable of governing our lands or territories, and that was used to exclude us from management or ownership of lands and territories.
So we really wanted to privilege Haida law, and the beauty of these ceremonies, and the value and strength of them in how they apply to couples and families.
RDK: I’m reminded of a part in the book where someone – I believe it was your mother or another relative – had a concern that your wedding wouldn’t be valid.
TLWD: Yes, and so I was able to cite an 1867 case from Ontario where they had recognized what they called a customary marriage.
So, once they knew that so-called customary marriages, or marriages under Haida law, would also be viewed as legal, then they felt better about that. And of course we could also be viewed as being married under common law after the certain waiting period.
I think they were just concerned that they’d be putting all this effort in and it wouldn’t be recognized.
We have a whole-scale change in Haida Gwaii as of this year, with recognition of Haida title and rights. We’re in a transition period to have Haida laws govern the territory, so these weddings [will] be recognized with even greater strength than before.
RDK: Very exciting.
So, in addition to being an author, you’re a multidisciplinary artist, and a working lawyer. I’m wondering how these different modes of working integrate and support each other and how you decide what gets your focus at any given time.
TLWD: I don’t think of myself as an artist, because I’m married to a world-famous artist.
But I have noticed with him, that he works in different mediums very well: wood, metal, paintings, serigraphs and music. And I was inspired by his approach to art and realized that I could work in different mediums, too.
And really, all of these different mediums are ways to express Haida law.
The music that I write, this book, and Out of Concealment, my previous book, the children’s book Magical Beings of Haida Gwaii: those are all ways to highlight Haida law and our worldview. I feel like each one is really supportive of each other, and helps to reach different segments of the society to educate people more about the Haida worldview and about Haida laws.
As for how I choose which one, I think they’re kind of all juggling at once, but as an example, three albums ago, I wanted to write the album Grizzly Bear Town about female supernatural beings.
But I couldn’t really write the music unless I visualized it, so then that got me onto the project of writing Out of Concealment and visualizing female supernatural beings in Haida Gwaii, and that took precedence. I completed that project at the same time as working on the album, and I felt that each one strengthened the other. I was able to visualize each being, and therefore I was better able to sing music that I felt would be fitting for that supernatural being.
I’m also finishing a PhD in law right now and I finished my master’s degree a couple years ago. It was a framework for the analysis of Haida law. It’s based on the cedar tree, which is really Cedar Sister. And so that’s a theme that I’ve been exploring for a long time. In 2004 I told the Supreme Court of Canada about the cedar tree being an ancient sister to Haida people and Indigenous peoples on the coast.
So some of these themes are always running through all, through the music, through my art. One of the first images I created for Out of Concealment was Cedar Sister.
So they continue to influence me, and they’ll continue to influence the work that I do for the Haida Nation and the work I’m doing for my PhD.
RDK: You just released a new album, Edge of the World, in August. Can you tell us a bit about that and any other projects we should know about?
TLWD: Last Friday, we received a court order for a declaration to 100% of our territory. And so, part of marking that incredible victory, which is unprecedented in Canada and the world, really, is I’m getting a tattoo as we’re speaking.
RDK: That’s incredible!
TLWD: I’m working with this amazing artist, Danika Saunders, who’s doing a hand tattoo, so that’s why you’re not hearing a machine.
It’s a tattoo that my great-grandmother used on her cape. It represents a tree, the land, and the sea together, which is the work that I’ll continue to do with my PhD and the ongoing trial for the title case.
As for Edge of the World, I started working almost 13 years ago with Bill Henderson from the rock band Chilliwack, and his friend Claire Lawrence, who started Chilliwack in the 1960s. We created the album Grizzly Bear Town together, and that was an album that focused on supernatural beings.
Then we wanted to do a Christmas album, and we hope to release that album this fall. We called it Haida Solstice, because they’re not pure Christian songs, but are adaptations that incorporate the Haida worldview.
I often have inspiration for these songs from Haida Gwaii herself. She’s kind of like my co-composer. “Edge of the World” is a song that I composed when I was going around the southern tip of Haida Gwaii into Cape St. James, where it’s really wild, really primeval.
The Haida have a famous proverb that says the world is as sharp as the edge of a knife. It teaches us that we walk a very fine balance in our life, so we need to balance seemingly contradictory emotions, like pride or humility, in the walk that we take through life. That became the title track for the album.
I don’t know that I have any more music projects on the horizon. My focus will now be my PhD and preparing the trial for the title case. But I’m also weaving a traditional Raven’s Tail Naaxiin Robe as I write my PhD dissertation, because I like these different projects to influence each other. I think it helps expand my thinking about the law when I’m working on a creative project.
RDK: One of the things that struck me while reading A Haida Wedding was the project management aspect of what you did. You talked about a couple months of research, and the number of individuals you engaged to participate. It was beautiful and complex.
Yet many of the anecdotes have a humorous tone to them. And the photographs are full of laughter.
Have you considered becoming a professional wedding planner?
TLWD: (laughing) No, I have not. Of course I enjoyed planning our wedding, but it really didn’t fall on me. My brother-in-law, my husband’s brother, did all the canoe part of the ceremony. He came up with the creative aspects of building platforms for the masks to arrive, and I didn’t have to worry. I set a menu, but I didn’t have to worry about the food. There were all these capable people who stepped forward and were happy to do it. That really made it a community event and a success. It was more than me involved, and it really turned out to a beautiful day.
RDK: One of my favourite parts is the battle over the setting up of the chairs.
TLWD: That’s everybody’s favourite part.
RDK: You eventually gave in to the desires of the other organizer.
TLWD: I called her an auntie, but she’s actually a cousin. But I really stepped beyond by taking down the tables [she had set up] and putting up the chairs. I shouldn’t have done that, really. The second time it happened, we just said, okay, we’re not gonna fight this.
RDK: You mentioned that in Haida culture, a bossy woman is considered to be a powerful woman. It’s not negative.
TLWD: Yeah, high-ranking women are bossy in our culture. And I remember, I didn’t realize that it had negative connotations until my friend called someone bossy. She’s another Indigenous woman from another nation, and the person she called bossy was horrified and so upset. We realized, oh, this is a bad thing in other cultures. It’s a compliment in our cultures.