Christie Harris
| Christie Harris | |
|---|---|
| Born |
November 21, 1907 Newark, New Jersey, U.S. |
| Died | January 5, 2002 (aged 94) |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Nationality | Canadian |
| Period | 1957–1994 |
| Genre | Children's literature |
Christie Lucy Harris, CM (November 21, 1907 – January 5, 2002) was a Canadian children's writer. She is best known for her portrayal of Haida First Nations culture in the 1966 novel Raven's Cry.
Harris was born in Newark, New Jersey, and moved to British Columbia, Canada, with her family as a child.
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. 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. 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.
Harris and illustrator Douglas Tait created at least eight books published from 1972 to 1982. One is The Trouble with Princesses (1980), which "retells stories about Northwest Coast princesses and compares them with similar Old World princesses". For that collaboration she won the annual CCCLP prize for English-language writing (now the Governor General's Award for English-language children's literature) and he won the CLA award for children's book illustration, the 1981 Amelia Frances Howard-Gibbon Illustrator's Award.
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