Terry Jackson

Terry Jackson was born in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada in 1955. Terry began passionately learning some of the amazing qualities of the last century's masters of Northwest Coast native art at the age of 16. With help and assistance from the Hunt family and other carvers, Terry slowly learned and became highly skilled at the nuances of the northern style of Northwest Coast art. Terry's parents came from the Canadian prairies. His mother, a Métis, came from the village of Plum Coulee, Manitoba, where Métis** and Europeans settled after the Riel resistances. With blood-lines to the original fur traders as well to the Cree and Sioux, Terry's people were an interesting mixture of culture and race. Terry Jackson has reached out to describe the Métis reality in the Twenty-first century. Carving and designing for over thirty years, he has taken his love of Northwest Coast Indian art, his Plains Indian heritage and his European heritage and successfully integrated or blended these disparate worlds. **The Métis are people descended from the original inter mixing of European fur traders and first nation women during the eighteenth century and nineteenth centuries. European fur traders without adequate survival skills and with economic desires to secure trading rights with the first nations moved into and lived with the native women. These women had the skills to teach their live-in men how to survive the harsher prairie and northern climate. The original artwork of the Métis is the beautiful floral beadwork. The first nation's people called the Métis, the 'flower beadwork people'.