So this blog post is not an assignment, but I felt compelled to respond to several points of consideration while reading the lesson. Mostly this will be for my own sense of organization, and indeed it began as such in my notebook but part way through I thought that I would also post it as it draws in topics from my Art History 377 class (Northwest Coast Art – The South).

To backtrack a bit, my first note that I paused to consider concerned Dr. Paterson’s note that “the first stories were property — they belonged to the peoples who told them” and Thom’s point that “each community owns a distinct myth of origin and accompanying it are unique rights and privileges over resource areas” (7). Both these comments explain what happens in my Art History class when a First Nations student shares a more personal connection to an image, object, place, etc. by standing up and explaining (for example) that “I am a part of the Gitksan nation, and have inherited this title from my family, and thus I have the right to share this story of our history with you”. As a non-Native person, the only instances where I am privy to this type of sharing really reside within a classroom, and this is one of the difficulties that Dr. Paterson outlines in this lesson; that not everyone has the right to access origin stories because you have to have someone who knows the story tell you. In other words, I am not a person in the know.

Where this lead for me was the disruption of the Potlatch ban and Indian residential schools (this whole movie is available on Netflix too!) via the Indian Act and how disrupted family lines = disrupted chains of people in the know. Of course, I have to be careful in saying this so succinctly because it perpetuates the idea that the “Indian” (to use Dr. Paterson’s distinction) is a Western construction of a peoples of the past. This is completely not the case. As Gloria Cranmer Webster asserts so powerfully in a chapter from Native Art of the Northwest Coast:  A History of Changing Ideas, the First Nations people did not die out, they did not vanish, they did not stop creating. Instead the ceremonies went underground and “persisted and resisted all the negative influences during the Dark Years” (Cranmer Webster 269). What might be useful to others learning how “not in the know” we are would be a explanation that the Potlatch ceremony is one in which the host gives away his wealth to his guests as a representation of his wealth. To state this more clearly, the more wealth one has to give away, the wealthier one is. Wealth is also not limited to material wealth, but draws upon access. Access to both resources and knowledge. Dr. Paterson mentions the important connection of stories to land, and this is a key example of this touchstone.

This is part of my answer to Dr. Paterson’s question:

Here we need to stop and ask, why? What precipitated such acts of violence against the First Nations? Outlawing the potlatch on the west coast and other similar First Nations institutions across the country was much like burning all the books, the theatres, the churches, and the courthouses. Taking children from their families is a horribly cruel punishment. Indeed, the UN Convention on the Definition and the Prevention of Genocide includes “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” as an act of genocide.

What I have learned in my Art History courses where we focus on the physical aspects of First Nations creative and cultural output (sorry, the term ‘art’ is problematic!) is that the Potlatch ceremony was scary to Western colonizers. Western culture relies upon obtaining wealth and maintaining it, not giving it away. One of the key differences between the Native culture existing pre-contact AND currently and Western culture is the tangibility of wealth. And that difference led missionaries interested in “civilizing the heathen” (Cranmer Webster 265) to attempt to “save” (266) the people of a different belief system. They kind of just wanted to kill that belief system because it was not the same as their own. A great real-life example of Gloria Cranmer Webster’s assertions about continuous creative output and resistance is something that I happened to come across while at work. I mentioned in my welcome post that I am a picture framer, and recently I came across a print being framed advertising a Potlatch. I couldn’t tell whether it was for a real event or rather an aestheticized example of Northwest Coast culture, specifically Kwakwaka’wakw since the print mentioned the Kwak Sisters and Hamatsa (I believe they show this video at MOA as well in the Multiversity Galleries). I wanted to ask the owner about the print’s story but unfortunately I was not able to interact with him. Whether a real event or a “fake” aesthetic statement, the print exemplifies that point the Potlatches still occur, will occur, and did occur even during their ban. I’m killing myself for not taking a photo.

A final point I’ll note about my experience reading this lesson is about the “missing stories” of ethnographic collections. Just so you know, I have not read the Wickwire introduction yet so I may be reiterating what she says, but I think it’s worthwhile to take a second to consider how my textbook (Native Art of the Northwest Coast: A History of Changing Ideas) on changing ideas about Northwest Coast Art (and I realize that First Nations literature concerning Canada goes beyond the scope of BC) contains excerpts of ethnographic material from Franz Boas, Juan Crespi, and James Cook to name a few, there are no written excerpts of First Nations involved on the other half of the first contact interactions. Rather obvious as we’ve already discussed because First Nations culture and history is shared via oral traditions and objects, not books.

References

In Search of the Hamat’sa: A Tale of Headhunting. Dir. Aaron Glass. Documentary Education Resources, 2002. DVD.

Paterson, Erika. “Lesson 2:2.” ENGL 470A Canadian Studies Canadian Literary Genres. University of British Columbia,. Web. 09 Feb. 2014. <https://blogs.ubc.ca/engl470/unit-2/lesson-2-2/>.

“The Kwakʼwala Speaking Tribes.” U’mista Cultural Society. Web. 09 Feb. 2014. <http://www.umista.org/kwakwakawakw/index.php>.

Townsend-Gault, Charlotte, Jennifer Kramer, and Ḳi-ḳe-in. Native Art of the Northwest Coast: A History of Changing Ideas. Toronto: UBC, 2013. Print.

We Were Children. Dir. Tim Wolochatiuk. Perf. Rene Batson, Tanya Dawn Ayotte Bourns and Alice Dano. Eagle Vision, 2012. DVD.