UWO - Hooding of Douglas Cardinal

276TH CONVOCATION, The UNIVERSITY of WESTERN ONTARIO
Tuesday, June 5th, 2001

CONFERRING OF THE HONORARY DEGREE
Professor G. Leckie, Faculty of Information and Media Studies,
will present the citation and request the Chancellor to confer the degree
Doctor of Laws, honoris causa, upon:

DOUGLAS CARDINAL
who will be hooded by Professor Emeritus D. Bratuz, Faculty of Music

In 1986 I was awarded a summer residency at the Layton Artists' Colony in Banff, Alberta, to work on my Bartók-Brancusi project. In the forest, eight cabins, each one designed by a prominent Canadian architect, offered to musicians, painters, writers, photographers and other artists, seclusion, silence, necessary equipment (in mine, a piano) and, from the large window, inspiration - the Rockies, the forest, passing deer, the white nights in June.

My cabin, the Cardinal Studio,  had been designed by Douglas Cardinal, celebrated Canadian/Native architect “with an international reputation for excellence in natural design.” The form of the cabin echoed that of a nautilus shell, and also of a teepee; it was built with cedar logs in Cardinal’s “curvilinear, organic, indigenous Canadian style of architecture.” It was a miniature of what I admired years later near Ottawa (in Hull, Quebec),  his extraordinary Canadian Museum of Civilization.

http://www.banffcentre.ca/leightoncolony/cardinal.asp