Alaskan bard, musician, storyteller, mariner, environmental activist, wilderness guide, former commercial fisherman and wandering fool, David Lynn Grimes has howled with wolves, run from bears and co-habitated with killer whales. As one of the archetypal artist-activists following the 1989 Good Friday Exxon Valdez oil spill, epicentered in his home waters of Prince William Sound at the northern end of America\'s coastal temperate rainforest, David has worked and played to help protect and restore wild ecosystems such as the Sound and the Copper River Delta, which he believes are organs of the earth and fundamental to our personal health.
David\'s songs are on a musical axis between Ireland and Brasil, with American folk, jazz, hillbilly and blues influences. Frequent themes are those of sacrifice and resurrection, and the pervading presence of the Trickster Fool--who appears in many cultures in the guise of Raven, Coyote, Br\'er Rabbit, Reynard the Fox, Tanuki the Raccoon Dog, or High John de Conquer, and is able, in the words of Zora Neale Hurston, to \"make a way out of no way and hit a straight lick with a crooked stick.\" Against all odds is the odds the Trickster likes. Leaping out of winter into spring, the Trickster Fool bridges the sacred and profane, making art out of drama. This is the powerful magic that shows up in dangerous times, the secret of our song and laughter, the blossoming of egalitarian culture.
David is an adopted member of the Eyak Indian tribe whose honorary chief and last speaker of the Eyak language, Marie Smith Jones, died January 21, 2008 at the age of 89. Marie believed her language wouldn\'t truly go extinct when she died since \"the language comes from the land, and as long as the land and water and creatures are alive, the people will learn the language of the land.\" In 1994 David was adopted into the Eyak tribe\'s Eagle moiety, but believes he is actually a Raven disguised as an Eagle. Chief Marie gave David his Eyak name, \"YaxadiliSayaxinh\", which translates as \"The Thinker\", or more literally, \"He who causes his mind to involuntarily roam in an indeterminate direction.\"
As a writer, David\'s essays have appeared in a number of anthologies including Ascent, Prairie Schooner, and From the Island\'s Edge, and David produced the 1989 citizen\'s oil spill video \"Voices of the Sound\". As a film guide, David has worked on films concerning killer whales, sea otters, wild habitat protection, and the oil spill for National Geographic, Survival Anglia, the Sierra Club, and the Cousteau Society. David has participated in projects in Alaska, Spain and Israel with the Artists for Nature Foundation--a Netherlands-based group that organizes wildlife and nature artists from around the world to visit threatened natural ecosystems, and by using art as a universal language, help empower local people and decision makers with the importance of beauty and natural diversity in the health of human cultures.
David has been profiled in a number of books including John Keeble\'s \"Out of the Channel\", Grant Sim\'s \"Leaving Alaska\" and Art Davidson\'s \"In the Wake of the Exxon Valdez\". He has also been reported on in Rolling Stone, the New York Times, Audubon, Outside, Amicus Journal, Sierra, and Ranger Rick. David currently has two CD\'s of music--\"Raven River\" and \"Raised on Rabbit\". While working on a third CD, David is also writing a book tentatively entitled \"Escapades, Larks and Adventures: being Tales of Human Redemption thought Synchronistic Reconnection with the Rest of the Creation\".
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