"The maritime art of these mostly anonymous Kwakiutl, Haida, and Tsimshian craftsmen appeared to me to grow directly from their observation of the play of light on the sea. ...What I found, touring the museums, was an art in thrall to ripples and reflections.
The simplest way of retrieving order from chaos is to hold a mirror to it....In the sheltered inlets of the Northwest, the Indians faced constant daily evidence of the mirror of the sea as it is doubled and patterned their untidy world; and it's no wonder that their art is possessed by the rage for symmetry. It's full of spatchcocked animals - ravens, wolves, whales - sliced down the middle and laid out flat so the left half of the creature is an exact reflection of the right. ...(A)n invisible seam runs from the top to the bottom down the center of the composition, the two sides mirroring each other like a butterfly's wings. Totem poles, at least viewed from the front, have the same rigid, reflective symmetry.
Sometimes, especially in the early morning, the water of the inlets is as still as a pool of maple syrup, its surface tension unblemished by wind or tide: then it holds a reflection with eerie fidelity, with no visible edge or fold along the waterline. Capturing the Indian sea in this mood, my amateur photographic efforts were a lot more successful....
Turned sideways, the photographs showed precisely what I had seen: a pillar of strange faces. Doubled, every random feature of the bank took on meaning and expression. The curved root became a pair of eyebrows; the narrow wedge of rock, lodged slantwise in the earth, turned into a grinning mouth; a stone was the flared nostril. In a few yards of crumbled bank one saw a jostling crowd of gargoyles.
Raban J. Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meaning. New York: Pantheon Books, 1999 (pp. 205-7)