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作者

Nicolas G. Rosenthal

来源

JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY,Vol.48,Issue1,P.

语言

英文

关键字

作者单位

摘要

Abstract The experiences of Northwest Coast artists show how Indigenous peoples have confronted a past marked by conquest and the importance of urban areas for these purposes. Benefiting from the “Northwest Coast Renaissance” that emerged after World War II, Indigenous artists traveled to cities in British Columbia where they studied museum collections, attended art school, and entered the art market. These artists influenced the discourse over the meaning of Indigenous art by engaging in conversations with academics, collectors, curators, fellow artists, government officials, and tourists. Advocating for broader issues of cultural and political sovereignty, they also worked to “indigenize urban landscapes,” or to shape the cities of British Columbia during critical periods of urban growth. Despite significant limitations, such efforts have been built upon and are continued by the generation of Northwest Coast artists working today. A 2016 article in the “Travel” section of the New York Times extolled the pleasures of visiting Vancouver, British Columbia, by focusing on the city’s identity as an Indigenous place.1 It cited Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s efforts to increase ties to First Nations peoples, claiming that Indigenous communities in British Columbia were now working with renewed purpose to introduce residents and visitors alike to their cultures in ways that promoted understanding while also producing economic benefits. “Even people in Canada don’t know First Nations cultures,” commented Keith Henry, a former chief executive of the Aboriginal Tourism Association, which oversaw CAD 50 million in sales in 2015. “It’s doing a lot for reconciliation,” Henry continued, “People want to hear authentic stories of the history of the land and of the people.” The article went on to describe several attractions, noting that visitors to Vancouver can now gain a fuller appreciation for the area’s native people . . . by staying in the city’s only First Nations’ lodge, touring an expanded collection of native art, dining on First Nations cuisine and exploring the urban rain forest with a native guide.2 It is true that even a casual visitor to Vancouver cannot help but see that it is a city with an Indigenous presence. Arriving in Vancouver International Airport, tourists find the world’s most impressive public display of Indigenous art. Coast Salish artist Susan Point’s Musqueam Welcome Figures (1996), for instance, “extend a First Nations greeting to international and cross-border travelers” who have deplaned and entered the Canada Customs Hall. Visitors can also view a version of Haida artist Bill Reid’s iconic sculpture The Spirit of Haida Gwaii (1994); weavings by First Nations women artists that comment upon the repression of Indigenous culture, titled Out of the Silence (1996); innovative mixed-media installations meant to invoke the natural world, such as Haisla artist Lyle Wilson and John Nutter’s Orca Chief and Kelp Forest (2007); and several more pieces by First Nations artists, featured throughout every area and terminal of the airport.3 Venturing out into the city, tourists encounter museums and galleries specializing in Indigenous arts and culture among the area’s most touted attractions. There is also an Indigenous iconography that permeates everyday life, from Thunderbirds painted on highway underpasses, to Raven tattoos adorning the bodies of residents.4 Vancouver is a city that literally wears an Indigenous identity on its sleeve. Indigenous people have, in fact, established a major presence not just in Vancouver but in cities throughout North America, following more than a century of migration, the formation of urban communities, and the development of networks that link reserves and reservations, towns, and urban areas. Historians have sought to document and explore these trends in the past several years, arguing that cities should be considered one of the most prominent features of “Indian Country” in the twentieth century.5 Nonetheless, Indigenous people in cities often face the problem of invisibility. Government and tribal policies neglect the needs of urban communities, and broader cultural understandings still frame urban Indigenous people as anomalies.6 Places such as Vancouver and a few other cities might be considered exceptions in that they make a statement about the value of Indigenous cultures, yet even these cities have often reinforced anti-modern stereotypes. Historian Coll Thrush’s Native Seattle, for instance, demonstrated how city boosters in the early twentieth century came to rely on Native imagery rooted in an imagined past to build the city’s identity, while intentionally ignoring the claims of Native people who continued to live throughout the region. Promoters, according to Thrush, “recast [Native peoples] as stock characters in melodramatic stories about urban progress, representing both the inevitability of indigenous decline and the inexorable ascent of metropolitan Seattle.”7 Thus, today’s visitors and residents might encounter vibrant Indigenous cultures in Vancouver—or, likewise, in Seattle, Santa Fe, or Phoenix—but often in the shadow of well-established, anti-modern narratives that obscure the complexity of Indigenous people’s presence in contemporary society. Viewed through this historical lens, Vancouver’s promotion of its Indigenous presence reveals ongoing tensions between established patterns of colonization and cultural appropriation, Indigenous persistence and agency, and recent movements toward reconciliation.8 These dynamics will only become more common as Indigenous peoples around the globe continue to engage the social, cultural, political, and economic patterns that define the modern world. In Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century, anthropologist James Clifford argued that Indigenous peoples have emerged from generations of struggle, still negotiating settler-colonialism, but fully adapted to modernity and increasingly visible in regional, national, and international networks. Clifford showed how recent efforts at achieving political and cultural sovereignty have included Indigenous peoples grappling with how and where to define themselves and their cultures, which often includes the use of galleries, museums, casinos, and public spaces, among many other sites.9 Such adaptations are not entirely new, however, but are the latest iterations of processes going back many years. Indeed, this study of Northwest Coast artists illustrates the ways that Indigenous peoples have relied upon cities as they have confronted a past marked by conquest, population decline, land loss, forced assimilation, and cultural appropriation. Furthermore, it argues for new directions in scholarship on urban Indigenous history by probing deeper into how Indigenous peoples have shaped cities throughout North America and the rest of the world, particularly through arts and culture. In this case, Indigenous people traveled to urban centers in British Columbia after the Second World War and engaged institutions that supported their becoming working artists, including universities, art schools, galleries, museums, and tourist sites.10 Through their art, they helped define these cities and their identities as Indigenous places during critical periods of urban growth and development, often while advocating for broader political, social, and cultural concerns. This included taking more control over the depiction and meaning of Indigenous cultures, asserting the presence of Indigenous peoples, and using art to pursue wider claims and causes, such as land and treaty rights, the need for sustainable environmental policies, conditions on both reserves and in urban areas, and resistance to ongoing processes of settler-colonialism. Their efforts were always in tension with a tourist economy and city boosterism that leaned toward the appropriation of Indigenous history and culture for urban, regional, and national narratives, as well as an art market that could reproduce existing social and cultural hierarchies. Nonetheless, this work by Northwest Coast artists to “indigenize urban landscapes,” or to shape the cities of British Columbia, has been built upon and furthered by the generation of Northwest Coast artists working today. Both Canadian and U.S. governments during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries enacted assimilation policies that sought to absorb Indigenous peoples and their lands into expanding nation–states. This project took many forms, including the development of the reserve and reservation systems, the establishment of residential and boarding schools, and specific legislation, all of which was meant to suppress Indigenous cultures and allow for further encroachments on their lands and resources. In Canada, for example, the 1876 Indian Act created bureaucracy to undermine tribal and band government and divide reserves into individual lots. Both in Canada and the United States, federal Indian schools sought to eliminate Indigenous cultures by removing children from tribal communities for institutions that emphasized Christianity, English, and manual trades.11 Such practices combined with the repression of cultural traditions and tribal life on reserves and reservations. Canada’s 1885 amendments to the Indian Act, known as the Potlatch Ban, called for imprisoning participants in traditional ceremonies and the confiscation of ceremonial objects.12 Two years later, the United States passed the Dawes Act, which allotted Indian lands to encourage individual farming and open acreage to non-Indians.13 Such policies had profound implications for Indigenous communities that reverberated through the experiences of subsequent generations. The Haida, for instance, living mostly on Haida Gwaii, an archipelago off the Pacific Coast of what would become Canada, numbered more than ten thousand and as many as thirty thousand before European disease brought by fur traders and gold miners reduced their population to fewer than nine hundred by the 1880s. Missionaries arrived around the same time as the Indian Act, followed by the drafting of children into the residential school system. Haida culture was then forced to operate covertly or in narrowly prescribed ways.14 These conditions framed the life of Charles Edenshaw, who was born around 1839 in Skidegate village, survived the 1862 smallpox epidemic, and was baptized by missionaries in 1885. Edenshaw made a living as an ethnographic informant and carver and jeweler producing bracelets, bentwood boxes, and other pieces in gold, silver, wood, and argillite for tourists and museums, but by the terms of the Potlatch Ban was forbidden from keeping these items for community ceremonies and activities.15 Many cultural traditions had been suppressed by the time Edenshaw’s great-grandson Robert Davidson was born in the village of Old Massett in 1946. Davidson’s family and a few local men taught him to carve in argillite, but much of what they knew was from drawings and photos in anthropology books, and there was little discussion about Haida ways of life. “For all the 12 years of my school education,” he remembered, “there wasn’t one mention of Haida. There wasn’t any singing or dancing, no carving, no headdresses, no totem poles, nothing.”16 After moving to Vancouver in 1965, Davidson returned to Old Massett and noted the “sadness” of the elders. “Our village felt like it had been emptied,” Davidson said, “where once there stood totem poles now stood telephone poles. In fact, on one of my trips home I knocked on every door in Massett looking for any artwork from our glorious past, and only found one storage box.”17 The period of the late-nineteenth and first-half of the twentieth century was clearly one in which the legacies of European conquest and disease combined with the intensification of assimilation efforts placed sharp limits on Haida cultural sovereignty. Edenshaw’s career as an ethnographic informant and artist nonetheless hints at broader trends in which the growth of both anthropology and the tourist market created spaces for Indigenous people to adapt cultural practices, albeit often through a market economy that was not entirely under their control. In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, anthropologists and collectors began assembling Indigenous art in museums, and the tourist industry incorporated Indigenous cultures into the telling of regional and national histories. These projects placed considerable value on Indigenous art and culture, but only as reminders of a romantic past meant to contrast sharply with the modern world. In British Columbia, for instance, Vancouver’s Stanley Park came to feature a totem pole site, the Canadian National Railway erected a series of restored poles along the Skeena River Rail line, and the National Gallery of Art featured the 1929 Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art: Native and Modern. Similar developments occurred in the American Southwest, where the Union Pacific Railway line, Fred Harvey Company hotels, and numerous museums drew upon Native arts and culture. In the 1930s, philanthropic and state-sponsored organizations such as the British Columbia Arts & Welfare Society and the U.S. Indian Arts & Crafts Board continued to promote “traditional” arts.18 Despite many limitations, Indigenous artists welcomed the growing interest in Indigenous art to resist assimilation and argue for the validity of their cultures.19 This Indigenous arts movement expanded dramatically after World War II, which, in Canada, was due in part to the lifting of the Potlatch Ban in 1951, but also as artists found new opportunities for studying art, reengaging suppressed cultural traditions, and producing and exhibiting their work, especially in the growing urban centers of British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest. This became known as the “Northwest Coast Renaissance” and was influenced by two figures whose careers intertwined: the Haida artist Bill Reid, and University of Washington anthropologist Bill Holm. Reid, a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio announcer, began exploring his Haida heritage and the work of Edenshaw, his great-great uncle. In the 1950s, Reid moved to Vancouver where he opened a studio to create jewelry, poles, and other works. Reid worked closely with Holm, who took up the study of Northwest Coast art focusing on structural analysis of two-dimensional design common in the northern part of the region that he identified as “formline.” His Northwest Coast Indian Art: An Analysis of Form (1965) became the foundational scholarly work for Northwest Coast Art and a handbook for many artists seeking cultural information suppressed by years of assimilation policy.20 While often understood as a study of “pre-contact” art, much of Holm’s analysis was derived from his examination of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century objects collected in museums, “salvaged” by anthropologists, produced by artists like Edenshaw, and confiscated by government officials.21 Reid’s work and Holm’s influence were embraced by a Canadian society that was continuing to frame Indigenous cultures as central to its national identity, especially within the cities that became major sites for the nation’s growth and development.22 Several museums played key roles in this project by curating major exhibitions and commissioning works in ways that gave Indigenous arts a new visibility on the emerging urban landscape, including the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Museum of Anthropology (MOA) at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG), and the Royal BC Museum (RBCM) in Victoria. Kwakwaka’wakw carvers Ellen Neel and Mungo Martin, for example, restored, repainted, and in Martin’s case carved poles for a MOA-sponsored totem park on the UBC campus in 1950-1952. Martin went on to spend ten years as the RBCM chief carver, during which he and several other Indigenous artists replicated and carved new poles and Martin built Wawatilda, a longhouse that opened in 1953 with the first public Potlatch since the lifting of the ban. Similarly, in 1958, MOA hired Reid and Kwakwaka’wakw carver Doug Cranmer to build a Haida village on the museum property. High-profile exhibitions focusing mostly on historical objects also helped Northwest Coast art make the transition in the art world from “primitive” to “fine” art, including the 1967 Arts of the Raven: Masterworks of the Northwest Coast at VAG, followed by The Legacy: Tradition and Innovation in Northwest Coast Indian Art at RBCM.23 Several galleries specializing in Northwest Coast Art opened in this period catering to an increasing tourist trade, including, in Vancouver, Children of the Raven, Bent Box, Canadian Native Prints, Potlatch Arts, and Tempo Canadian; in Victoria, Arts of the Raven, Quest, Longhouse, and Open Pacific Graphics; and Legacy in Seattle.24 Overall, the postwar decades saw the recognition of Northwest Coast Art as one of the world’s great art forms, focusing on the “revival” of a “canon” believed to be forged before significant outsider influence. It was showcased through galleries, museums, and public sites located within the region’s growing urban centers, thereby elevating these institutions and the narratives they promoted regarding Indigenous peoples’ foundational role in the region’s history. This was the context for a next generation of Northwest Coast artists that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. Benefiting from the sense of a “Northwest Coast Renaissance,” this generation found the urban areas of British Columbia to be crucial sites where they could access cultural information that had been suppressed within their communities, attend art school and otherwise learn new skills, and enter the art market. As they became working artists, they engaged in discussions with academics, collectors, curators, fellow artists, government officials, and tourists, thereby influencing a new discourse over the meaning of Indigenous art. They also carried further efforts to “indigenize urban landscapes,” or to shape the growing cities of British Columbia, by exhibiting innovative work that declared the presence and continuing vitality of Indigenous peoples and communities. Robert Davidson’s broader life and career illustrate these connections between the new interest in Northwest Coast art, emergent urban areas, and Indigenous agency. Upon arriving in Vancouver from the village of Old Massett at age nineteen, Davidson found work demonstrating argillite carving for Eaton’s department store. There, he met Bill Reid, who invited Davidson to live and work in his studio. This began a period in which Davidson immersed himself in the study of Haida art while broadening his skills and building his professional networks. One day, Davidson “wandered” into the City Museum and was “blown away” by the Haida art on display. According to Davidson, it was “art beyond my wildest dreams, art done by my ancestors, art I did not know how to relate to, and [art that] shows purpose and meaning I knew nothing about.” This experience led him to explore the collections of Haida art at MOA, where he became acquainted with curator Audrey Hawthorne and UBC anthropologist Wilson Duff. Davidson also enrolled at the Vancouver School of Art for classes in design, painting, pottery, and sculpture. It was during these years that Davidson was struck by the contrast between the rich cultural traditions he was discovering and conditions back home. “When I came to the city,” Davidson remembered, “I saw all the totem poles, I saw Bill Reid’s Haida Village at the University of British Columbia, I saw painted boxes and other carvings at the museums. I wanted Massett to experience what I saw.” Davidson worked with Reid, Duff, and Hawthorne to secure a BC Cultural Fund grant, then returned to Old Massett and carved Bear Mother, a 40-foot pole. It had been almost ninety years since there had been a pole-raising on Haida Gwaii, but several elders remembered stories and advised Davidson on the protocol, dances, songs, and regalia required for the ceremony. More than six hundred people attended the pole-raising and Potlatch in August 1969, which then sparked a broader cultural revival at Old Massett and throughout Haida Gwaii.25 Following this momentous event, Davidson returned to the city, where he continued to engage its institutions and develop his career as an artist while shaping the urban landscape in Vancouver and the other cities to which he increasingly traveled. Davidson enrolled again at the Vancouver School of Art for jewelry design and silkscreening, then over the next several years, showed in solo and group exhibitions, won major commissions for public works, helped organize a Northwest Coast Indian Artists Guild, and participated in carving, painting, and printmaking demonstrations throughout Canada and Europe. This included his first solo show at the Vancouver Centennial Museum and Planetarium, painting a mural for the entrance to the Indian and Eskimo Art of Canada exhibition at the National Gallery in Ottawa, demonstrating carving at the Man and His World Pavilion during Expo 67 in Montreal, serving as the Canadian delegate to the World Council of Craftsmen conference in Dublin, Ireland, and carving demonstrations in Bern, Switzerland, after which he traveled to Germany to study Haida art in the country’s museums.26 Clearly, Davidson’s career benefited from his arriving on the scene at a particular moment, when there was an interest in Northwest Coast art and artists, dealers, policymakers, and scholars were working to promote it, especially from urban centers. Indeed, Vancouver and other cities had become both repositories of Haida art and sites for the networks, markets, and training so crucial to Davidson’s rise as an artist working in Northwest Coast traditions. Moreover, cities played a central role in Davidson’s ability to revive artistic and cultural traditions back home, as evidenced by his carving of Bear Mother and how Old Massett rallied around its raising and carried on a cultural resurgence. Over time, this work transformed the galleries, museums, and public spaces of Vancouver and other cities into places that showcased art reflecting Indigenous perspectives. Other Northwest Coast artists of this period followed similar paths, in which their engagement with urban areas spurred explorations of their cultural heritage and development into both working artists and figures of broader cultural influence and authority. Susan Point, a Coast Salish artist, was born in 1952 and grew up on the Musqueam Indian Reserve near the edge of Vancouver’s city limits, at the mouth of the Fraser River. The family traveled annually for the salmon runs at River’s Inlet, 250 miles to the north, where her father worked as a commercial fisherman and her mother in the canneries. At home, Point and her siblings helped make cedar-root baskets, spin and weave wool, harvest and preserve berries, smoke salmon, and otherwise process the plants and animals their parents hunted, harvested, and fished for throughout the area. While Point enjoyed drawing, she was neither exposed to Indigenous art nor received any formal training until 1981, when on maternity leave, she took a course in jewelry making for First Nations artists at Vancouver Community College. Point began working in the dominant Northwest Coast formline style, but after seeing an exhibit at a downtown Vancouver gallery by Coast Salish artist Stan Greene, she got in touch with the husband of her aunt, UBC anthropologist Michael Kew, who introduced her to the collections at MOA. “Wow,” Point recalled of that first visit, I was captivated. Salish art is beautiful in a way that I’d never experienced. I want to bring this back, I thought. I want to revive my people’s art, continue their story, so others know that it existed, that northern style was not the only art form. Point’s research on Coast Salish art at MOA and then RBCM in Victoria drew her to spindle whorls, decorated wooden disks traditionally used for spinning mountain goat wool into yarn for weaving. “Every spindle whorl I saw intrigued me,” she remembered. This motif became Point’s signature over the next several years while she established a reputation as a printmaker and the premiere artist working in Coast Salish traditions. By training with master artisans in Vancouver, Victoria, and Seattle, Point also developed new skills, and her work expanded into sculpture and objects made of glass, concrete, bronze, and other materials. Furthermore, Point won commissions to design and produce prints, posters, logos, murals, house posts, sculptures, and architectural elements of buildings throughout the region.27 Davidson and Point are prominent examples, but several more Northwest Coast artists followed similar patterns of gravitating to the urban areas of British Columbia in this period, where they found resources and opportunities for exploring their cultural heritage, building their careers, and taking a more prominent role in developing the urban landscape.28 Central to such efforts were the unique and transformative perspectives on Indigenous history and culture so carefully developed and promoted by Davidson, Point, and others of their generation. These artists benefited from the narratives that had come to celebrate Indigenous cultures as a foundation for Canadian society and built on the previous generation’s attempts to reclaim cultural sovereignty for Indigenous peoples. Specifically, through the exploration, interpretation, and promotion of Northwest Coast art, these artists animated the cultural information they discovered and brought it to a wider audience. Davidson, like many Northwest Coast artists in this period, had come to the realization that “a whole generation was removed from [cultural] knowledge,” and believed that “his generation’s challenge is to close the gap.”29 He did this by first versing himself in the formal designs adorning the pieces that he studied in museums and libraries, then adapting them for limited edition prints and art cards. Beaver (1974), for instance, reproduced a figure pictured on leather dance leggings in the seminal book by Franz Boas, Primitive Art (1927). It featured a figure identified by its incisor teeth and cross-hatched tail, with a face suggesting human associations (Figure 1).30 By marketing these and other works, Davidson believed that he had a found “a way of getting a better understanding” with the non-Indigenous world. “We were always treated as curios,” he continued. “My biggest goal is that [Haida art] is recognized as artistic expression.”31 Other artists similarly used works on paper as part of a broader effort to revive and promote historical Northwest Coast forms, especially because of the relative ease in which artists could produce them and their accessibility to tourists through local galleries and museum gift shops.32 At the beginning of her career, Point set out to popularize traditional Coast Salish designs in this way, stating, “I felt a calling to make people aware of our art, to let them know that it had almost been lost altogether.”33 This led her to focus on reproductions of historical objects, such as her first serigraph design, Man and Sea Otters (1981), of which she said, “I was more or less copying, straight from [a spindle] whorl,” found in the RCPM collections (Figure 2).34 For all of these artists, a “revival” of older forms was especially personal because of how cognizant they were of past struggles and the sense of purpose that they found in the discovery of their artistic traditions. The enthusiastic reception they received, in the form of institutional support for exhibitions and scholarly and critical acclaim, helped them begin to shift the perception of their art from serving as remnants of an idyllic past to expressions of artists and communities representing living and vibrant cultures.35 Figure 1. Robert Davidson (Haida), Beaver, 1974. Used by permission of the artist. Figure 2. Susan Point (Coast Salish), Man and Sea Otters, 1981. Used by permission of the artist. Over time, these artists carried on this project by developing their approaches in ways that confronted the presumption at the foundation of the public’s fascination with Indigenous art: that it was authentic because it was timeless, ahistorical, and a contrast to the complexities of modern society. They did so by maturing into contemporary artists who began with traditional forms and then created their own unique “visual languages,” thereby claiming space for Indigenous peoples in the present. Davidson, for instance, soon found the boundaries of formline as defined by Holm and Reid to be limiting and became an advocate for learning tradition but also innovating, believing that the “challenge is to go beyond recycled ideas and create a new vocabulary for myself.” He elaborated by saying, The vocabulary I’ve been working comes from old pieces by Charles Edenshaw and other masters, it has come from my dad’s teaching, from my grandfather’s teachings, from Bill Reid’s teachings. I’m continually challenging myself to expand from that knowledge. . . . I feel that every artist reaches a point in their creative lifetime where they want to have their own story, their own signature. By the 1970s, some of Davidson’s works began to show elements of abstraction, asymmetry, and movement. A turning point for Davidson came in the early 1980s, when he discovered a set of nineteenth-century Northwest Coast bentwood dishes decorated with abstract imagery on black fields. Davidson admired the creativity displayed by the unidentified artist and concluded that such work “laid the foundation for my generation, for artists who are willing to explore beyond the formline.” With this inspiration, Davidson created a series of prints that reworked traditional Haida imagery associated with supernatural beings by experimenting further with asymmetry and abstraction.36 Davidson continued to be in conversation with the vocabulary and recognizable elements of formline even as he significantly departed from it, such as in Canoe Breaker: Southeast Wind’s Brother (2010), which invoked a story about Haida people battling rough weather on the ocean. In it, Davidson represented Southeast Wind by an image of a killer whale with a humanlike nose and eye to symbolize its ability to become human when on land. Shapes recognizable to Northwest Coast art were present, such as the large ovoid head and the black u-shapes with red ovals to represent pectoral and dorsal fins, yet Davidson placed them in ways specific to his aesthetic and style (Figure 3).37 This unique “visual language” (a term Davidson has regularly used) marks him as a contemporary artist while suggesting both Indigenous persistence and an embrace of modernity. Figure 3. Robert Davidson (Haida), Canoe Breaker (Southeast Wind’s Brother), 2010. Used by permission of the artist. Point’s work similarly moved from diligent research and reproduction of historical forms to the contemporary artist’s prerogative of interpretation, in ways that disrupted preconceptions about Indigenous peoples by asserting their presence in the current moment. This was something that Point sensed was possible early on, noting, I was amazed at the freedom of my ancestral legacy! The pieces [discovered through libraries and museums] taught me traditional Salish design elements and use of positive and negative space that I have continued to explore . . . which is evident in the evolution of my work and various approaches to style.38 For her first solo exhibition at MOA in 1986, Point described a recent print, Sturgeon (1985), which featured women transforming into fish, by explaining, the design is swaying away from traditional Salish art. It is free-flowing, and the figure of the woman inside the sturgeon was my own invention. I think Indian artists shouldn’t be restricted to doing traditional pieces all the time. It’s time to move on.39 A few years later, Point clarified her thinking on the relationship between the importance of both traditional forms and artistic innovation, stating, “I do work as a Coast Salish artist; consciously using traditional iconography, bringing new life to the designs and reviving their history.”40 Over time, Point came to reflect this sensibility through a variety of other mediums. Common Thread (2000), for instance, Point produced in both serigraph and glass house post, the latter a variation on a traditional Coast Salish object. By including celestial bodies and human and animal forms in Coast Salish style, Point made the argument that “all life on earth and no doubt, the universe, is connected,” while featuring a figure suggestive of a spindle whorl (Figure 4).41 Like Davidson’s work and that of many other Northwest Coast artists, Point built on the legacies of past artists and moved Indigenous representations into the contemporary period. Such efforts significantly complicated ideas about Indigenous peoples, by demonstrating in powerful ways their identities as modern peoples.42 Figure 4. Susan Point (Coast Salish), Common Thread, 2000. Used by permission of the artist. This contemporary sensibility and its power to influence popular ideas about Indigenous peoples throughout the urban landscape was furthered by the willingness of some artists to more explicitly engage broader social and political issues. Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, an artist of Coast Salish and Okanagan descent, grew up in the cities of Kamloops, Richmond, and Vancouver, then attended Vancouver’s Emily Carr University of Art and Design, graduating in 1983. For the next decade, Yuxweluptun exhibited both in and beyond the region, then achieved new visibility in the 1990s, punctuated by Born to Live and Die on Your Colonialist Reservations, a solo exhibition at UBC’s Belkin Gallery in 1995. This show highlighted the premise behind much of Yuxweluptun’s work, namely, that a history of colonization shapes Indigenous peoples’ contemporary experiences.43 Combining recognizable formline elements, Coast Salish cosmology, and influences ranging from surrealism to landscape painting, Yuxweluptun exposed and confronted the sources and consequences of colonial policies. For example, his paintings Red Man Watching White Man Trying to Fix Hole in the Sky (1990) and Scorched Earth, Clear-Cut Logging on Native Sovereign Land. Shaman Coming to Fix (1991) provided commentary on environmental crises resulting from the dominance of western capitalism, while reserving for Indigenous peoples a sense of moral authority and the possibility of environmental redemption.44 Other works spoke to additional issues affecting Indigenous peoples, such as conditions in urban areas, land rights, and life on Indigenous reserves.45 Down Town Vancouver (1988), for instance, highlighted the problems disproportionately faced by Indigenous peoples in cities, which Yuxweluptun elaborated in a description for an exhibition catalog: “Life in the city, prostitutes on the side walk, in downtown Vancouver on Skid Row. Even the poster on the wall is solicitous . . . Just another poster. That is part of the Indian world, here in downtown Vancouver.” (Figure 5)46 Indigenous artists who established themselves prior to Yuxweluptun, at times, ventured into social commentary, even if it was not the focus of their work. Davidson’s Occupied (2007), for example, used a play on words to suggest deeper political meaning, by featuring an abstract image of octopi compressed together that then become “occupied,” a reference to the colonial experience for Indigenous peoples.47 Moreover, more subtle political commentary was a feature of earlier generations of Northwest Coast artists, including those who worked producing art for tourists during the years of the Potlatch Ban.48 Yuxweluptun and others, however, by the 1980s and into the next decades, came to be much more explicit social critics. They drew upon a legacy of Northwest Coast art, took inspiration from the innovations pioneered by their predecessors, and developed their own styles that took Northwest Coast art in still new and reorienting directions by directly challenging urban, regional, and national narratives of progress and asserting the authority and relevance of Indigenous perspectives.49 Figure 5. Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun (Coast Salish/Okanagan), Down Town Vancouver (1988). Used by permission of the artist. Down Town Vancouver also speaks to the ways that Northwest Coast artists made space for Indigenous perspectives in the present by specifically placing Indigenous peoples on the urban landscape. While some of these works are critical, others can be read as autobiographical, or reflective of Northwest Coast artists’ own identities and experiences and how they themselves were shaped by the cities of British Columbia. This point is illustrated by the work of Tsimshian/Haida/Heiltsuk artist Roy Henry Vickers, who followed a path much like other Northwest Coast artists of his generation. Born in Laxqaltsʼap village in 1946, Vickers lived in the villages of Kitkatla and Hazelton, then moved to Victoria at age sixteen and discovered the Indigenous art collections at the RBCM. This led to art school and a move to Vancouver in the 1970s, where he had his first solo exhibition at MOA and became a primary figure in the Northwest Coast Artist Guild. Reflecting on the early part of his career, Vickers wrote, I knew I was not a traditional Northwest Coast Indian . . . I was a contemporary artist who knew academically of the old Indian culture and carried part of that culture within me. The beginning of my artistic expression then, was fraught with the desire to be original and relevant to the world I lived in.50 Several pieces by Vickers highlight the complexity of these multiple influences and experiences, including the series Five Views of Victoria, which was meant to revisit the conflicted feelings Vickers had as a teenager new to the city. One print, Where is Kitkatla? (1987), depicted a solitary figure on a bench overlooking the ocean and the Olympic Mountains on the horizon, to invoke where Vickers himself sat “so many times . . . wondering who I was and why in the world I was in this city. . . . I felt so lost, so alone and extremely nostalgic.” By the time that he produced the piece, however, Vickers had accumulated the experience and developed the sense of self to write, Today when I visit Victoria, as I often do, I realize that Kitkatla is always with me. My self portrayal is of a man in contemplation, sitting on a park bench in Victoria, with feet firmly fixed in the village of Kitkatla.51 A series on Vancouver played on similar themes, such as the print Vancouver (1988), featuring a view of the city’s modern skyline against a backdrop of totem poles. Vickers explained the work as inspired by a visit to Stanley Park, during which he thought about the long history of Indigenous people moving to the area, including his grandparents, and the many changes over the years (Figure 6). Another print in the Vancouver series, U.B.C.—The University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology (1988), paid tribute to the place of museums in preserving First Nations art and serving as a venue for contemporary Northwest Coast artists, as they had for Vickers and so many others.52 These works are both indicative of how much Northwest Coast artists have themselves been shaped by their interactions with the urban areas of British Columbia and function as a way to establish the presence of Indigenous peoples in modern, urban society.53 Figure 6. Roy Henry Vickers (Tsimshian/Haida/Heiltsuk), Vancouver, 1988. Used by permission of the artist. Regardless of differing approaches, subject matter, and interests, Northwest Coast artists of the late twentieth century fundamentally shaped—or indigenized—the emerging urban landscapes of British Columbia. Galleries and museums were places where Indigenous perspectives on North American history and contemporary social issues became part of the urban lexicon in cities such as Vancouver and Victoria, but this also occurred through public art, in ways that could permeate the consciousness of even those residents and visitors less inclined to engage the art world.54 As noted in the introduction, since the late 1990s, visitors to Vancouver International Airport have been met by a vast array of contemporary Indigenous art. This includes Point’s Flight (1994), a sixteen-foot spindle whorl made of red cedar hung in the International Arrival Terminal. Conscious of its installation, Point designed Flight as a greeting, but also to convey messages of Indigenous persistence and claims to the land, writing, Flight depicts two eagles, two human forms, salmon motifs, and the Moon, Sun, and Earth. The eagle, which is a symbol of great power, is designed around the image of a man whose arms are raised, welcoming and in a gesture of flight. The upper torsos of the human figures represent the Coast Salish people, whose traditional lands include the airport and the city of Vancouver. On their chests are salmon motifs that represent the fact that the Coast Salish still live and fish along the shores of the Fraser River. Salmon is the sustenance of life and a symbol of wealth for our people.55 Similarly, Point’s People Amongst the Peoples (2008), three carved and painted Salish gateways installed at the Brockton Point Totem Pole site in Stanley Park, serves as a corrective to how tourists have experienced the area since it was made a park in 1888. Originally a Coast Salish settlement, Stanley Park became known in the early twentieth century as a place to view Northwest Coast–style totem poles, so Point’s gateways were meant as a reclaiming of the area. Like Point’s other works, they showcased elements of Coast Salish art and life, with imagery that included a pod of killer whales, herring and salmon, a Salish dancer with a sacred mask, and textile and basket designs.56 Such striking, permanent installations on the urban landscape have made powerful statements about the presence of Indigenous peoples and their ongoing struggles for cultural and political sovereignty, in a way that reaches a wide audience.57 To be sure, there have been limits to the reshaping of urban spaces through Indigenous art, which despite the efforts of artists can still work to reinforce older and well-established hierarchical relationships. Public art, museum and gallery exhibitions, and art marketed to tourists often require some level of critical engagement to move past the tendency of seeing Indigenous culture as safely confined to a timeless past. Thus, a print purchased at a Vancouver art gallery may only serve its owners as a quaint reminder of a visit to a region that built its identity on the appropriation of Indigenous culture. Tsimshian-Haida scholar Marcia Crosby’s 2002 essay, “The Construction of the Imaginary Indian,” addresses such concerns by critiquing Canada’s embrace of the Northwest Coast Renaissance, arguing that it framed Bill Reid as savior for a “dying culture” and provided the country the ability to forgive itself, while doing little to address contemporary Indigenous issues.58 In other words, as much as Indigenous artists have worked to change perceptions about Indigenous peoples and advocate for their relevance in the modern world, these artists continue to be constrained by state-building and market forces that appropriate their work and ignore their concerns. Nonetheless, the ways that Indigenous art can be co-opted to reinforce rather than disrupt dominant power relations should not be grounds for dismissing the broader impact of Northwest Coast art over the past fifty years and its potential going into the future, nor should it obscure the historical importance of urban areas for this project. Cities in British Columbia have been important sites for Indigenous artists and communities recovering from generations of assimilation policy, as places where museums serve as cultural repositories, schools and instructors provide training, and exhibitions, commercial galleries, and public commissions expose the broader public to their work. Many museums throughout the region have recognized their crucial role and pushed forward this legacy by developing programs to bring Indigenous artists and communities to their vast collections, building on the connections established between artists and museum personnel in an earlier period.59 Galleries and museums also continue to host important exhibitions, like MOA’s 2016 Yuxweluptun retrospective, Unceded Territories, showcasing thirty years of the artist’s work and further highlighting his concerns with land rights and environmental issues.60 Yuxweluptun’s unique style and aesthetic draw on a longer history of Indigenous artists from the region that includes Davidson and Point, who sought cultural information through urban centers, began working in historical forms and designs, then forged their own ways as contemporary artists. All of this work has “indigenized” the urban landscape, making Indigenous perspectives and concerns more visible. It is now possible, in fact, to speak of a “next generation” of Northwest Coast artists who have built on this foundation, even as Davidson, Point, Yuxweluptun, Vickers, and others continue to do important work. Kwakwaka’wakw artist and scholar Marianne Nicolson, for instance, has developed a reputation as an innovative, multimedia artist whose work foregrounds Indigenous world views while providing thoughtful, complex commentary on colonial interactions. Her 2007-2008 exhibition at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, The Return of Abundance, featured immersive installations such as Bax’wanat’si—The Container for Souls (2006), comprised of glass, cedar, and light fixtures that engulfed the visitor in recognizable elements of formline design juxtaposed with photographic, modern images of Nicolson’s mother and aunt as teenagers gathering berries, all emanating from a variation on a Northwest Coast bentwood box.61 Similarly, Kwakwaka’wakw artist Sonny Assu ranges across mediums and styles in his effort to, according to fellow artist Nicolson, “work on the tenuous attachments to the past and the challenges of the future” for Indigenous peoples.62 Assu first achieved notice for Coke-Salish (2006), a lightbox that used the recognizable Coca-Cola advertisement and highlighted land issues by adapting its slogan to “Enjoy Coast-Salish Territory.”63 Like Nicolson, Assu plays upon the tensions in modern Indigenous experiences, forcing the audience to think beyond worn-out and tired clichés. One factor that differentiates artists from this current generation is that they are especially conscious of the dangers and even fundamental contradictions in seeking social change through a medium so influenced by the urban marketplace, yet they remain committed to its possibilities. This is, in part, because they have come of age, attended art schools and universities, and entered the art world during a period in which postcolonial studies problematizing such relationships became a more common subject of discourse and increasingly integrated into art practice. These artists also have preceding generations as examples, whose work they can build upon. Writing about Assu—who graduated from Vancouver’s Emily Carr University of Art and Design and cites Yuxweluptun as a major influence—Nicolson—who also holds a BFA from Emily Carr, as well as an MFA and PhD in Linguistics and Anthropology from the University of Victoria—notes that Assu’s work is tapping into the current resistance movements against the development aspiration of land access for oil and gas, fish farms, logging of forests, and damming of rivers. In an odd juxtaposition that exposes how far we still need to go, these works, which are attempts at resistance, are still firmly contained within the very system they critique. Nicolson expands on and attempts to reconcile this contradiction by arguing, This is not just Assu’s dilemma but that of all Kwakwaka’wakw artists who engage in a high art market, including myself. Under these conditions, we could say, however, that the value of the works lies not in their status as art objects valued under imposed colonial economies but in their meanings, which are attempts to express ideas within whatever spaces are still available after having experienced so much oppression.64 Despite their limitations, Nicolson seems to be saying, these spaces are essential venues for showcasing Indigenous perspectives and supporting artists as they develop their work and seek additional platforms. Thus, her generation’s deep investment in the structures and institutions of contemporary urban society is both built on that of the preceding generation of Indigenous migrants and artists and different in its engagement with the tensions that such commitments raise. The current generation of Northwest Coast artists has also embraced public art across the urban landscape to address and broadcast their concerns to a wide audience, but often in ways that reflect this critical stance and tone. Nicolson created A Prayer for the Return of Abundance (2007), an installation of cedar beams, glass, copper, stone, and other materials meant to resemble a fishing weir, amid housing developments in the town of Port Moody. Historically, the site has been used by the Musqueam for fishing, but in the late nineteenth century, it was chosen as the terminus of a railway line and industrialized over the next decades, then more recently became a Vancouver suburban community. Nicolson used this piece to advance Indigenous perspectives on notions of wealth and sustainability, later commenting, In the old days, if the salmon did not return, then we were really in dire straits. This piece can be thought of as a prayer for the return of an abundant run. . . . My question with the work is what is abundance and what are we experiencing right now in our modern ecosystem? Are we truly experiencing what we think of to be abundance? . . . I’m not just talking fish anymore. I’m talking about the state of the environment, the state of the world. The work takes that metaphor and expands it outwards.65 Installed at a site that has seen massive change, including its incorporation into an urban center, A Prayer for the Return of Abundance encourages the consideration of critical, fundamental questions about the past, present, and future of human society, especially as cities continue to grow and become the experience for increasing numbers of peoples around the world. Assu has also taken commissions as an opportunity to make bold statements in urban, public settings, such as his Reconciliation series featured on Vancouver bus shelters in 2014 in anticipation of the Canadian sesquicentennial. In eight separate installations, Assu combined Northwest Coast imagery with pointed messages such as “Lead,” “Rise,” and “Teach,” thereby pushing the idea of reconciliation further into the public consciousness and shaping its meaning (Figure 7).66 Referring to another of his works, Assu wrote, Reconciliation is the current favourite catch phrase of the colonial agenda. If we are truly ready to adopt “reconciliation” as something beyond lip-service, is the celebration of the last 150 years really it? As a Ligwilda’x_w/Kwakwaka’wakw person, indigenous to this colonized place, once an Indigenous settler in Vancouver, Canada 150 means something different to me. It isn’t about the celebration of how this country came to be and the supposed advancements we’ve made: it’s about acknowledging the colonial past and learning from it. It’s about understanding how this country was built and by whom. To make our society ready to engage in meaningful reconciliation, there is a lot of learning and healing to do.67 Figure 7. Sonny Assu (Kwakwaka’wakw), Reconciliation: Lead, 2014. For the City of Vancouver Public Art Program: Year of Reconciliation. Image copyright and courtesy of Sonny Assu. Photo credit: Lila Bujold Photography. Northwest Coast artists like Assu and Nicolson—and the generations of artists whose work theirs is built upon—have put art at the very center of this project. To do so, they have worked in cities, which will continue to have a central role in efforts by Indigenous people to influence issues of cultural and political sovereignty, within the context of broader regional, national, and global patterns.68 Historians and other scholars have only recently begun to explore how Indigenous peoples have engaged the defining features of the modern world, such as urbanization. Going forward, one path they should take is to probe the ways that Indigenous people, through art and other means, have worked to indigenize urban landscapes.