Bill Reid's monumental sculpture, The Raven and the First Men, began as a miniature boxwood carving inspired by a number of works that Charles Edenshaw, a 19th Century Haida carver, had produced.
Vancouver industrialist Walter Koerner, a strong supporter of the arts and sciences, commissioned Reid in 1973 to create a larger version of this miniature for the new Museum of Anthropology then being designed.
Doris Shadbolt, in her biography of Bill Reid, writes that his sculpture "...has stepped out of the ancestor's frame of arrested time into real time where events take place and creatures move in dramatic interaction ...the composition moves and twists from within ..."(l986:141).