When I first entered the Museum of Anthropology’s Gallery of Northwest Coast Masterworks, the amazing pieces in the “Indigenizing” exhibition caught my eyes. The work consists of three pieces, the winged angel, the shotgun, and the silver bracelets with carvings of the American eagle. The wooden angel named txaldzap’am nagyeda laxa (1886) exhibited in the middle is holding a black urn in his left arm, while the shotgun named jiiguu (1870) with delicate carving is on his left. The serious looking in the angel’s face and the well-designed straight-down cracks in the face and the body of the angel interested me as they don’t seem to fit with the identity of an angel in most western cultures, who is considered to be in bright colors and with a smiley face. The description of the artworks states that the three exhibited pieces in this work act as speakers of “conflict and violence”. As the artists turn their own experiences of colonization into artworks with creativity, the three pieces are given meaningful values as a whole to convey the message of native people’s resistance toward violence in colonization.
The “Indigenizing” is surrounded by other two works of collections named “Converging” and “Expanding”, each consists of seven single pieces of work. It is very interesting that the museum’s curatorial staff decide to form a whole artwork with so many little pieces. Onebig similarity of the three works is that as the artists all experienced the colonization, they all chose a perspective on colonization to tell “stories” about the impacts of colonization with art. In addition, the three works all contain different visual symbols, for example, the American eagle in “Indigenizing”, the raven in “Converging” and the thunderbird in “Expanding”; which are the cultural focus of the native Northwest coast people. However, artists in “Converging” focus more on reflecting on the convergence of cultures, and in “Expanding” artists purposed to expand the reach of their artworks for economic exchange, while in “Indigenizing”, the three pieces as a whole convey the message about anger towards “conflicts and violence”. With a realistically modeled winged angle with seriouslooking in the middle, the “Indigenizing” is more lively than the other two works.
As a viewer, although I have my own understanding of the artworks “Indigenizing”, still I think a higher degree of knowledge is required in order to interpret the work more detailedly. In “Indigenizing”, the American eagle motif carved on the silver bracelets called xiigaa xahl k’iidayaa (1870) is a fascinating symbol for me. I wonder if the meaning of the carved eagle can be different from my own interpretation of “Freedom”, especially as the work was created by Northwest coast artist in a different time period other than mine.