Mouse Woman drawing by Luke J. Parnell


The Beat


A monthly newsletter about the art of

First Nations on Canada’s West Coast



Welcome to the sixth edition of The Beat, a monthly newsletter about the art of Canada’s First Nations on the Pacific Coast.

We respectfully acknowledge the Coast Salish Peoples, on whose traditional territories we live and work.

In this issue, news about

And more…


Welcoming T’xwelatse at the Museum of Anthropology

On March 1, a joyful public ceremony was held in Vancouver to honour the ancient stone ancestor of the Ts’elxweyeqw people of the Sto:lo nation of the Fraser River.

Centuries ago, the human T’xwelatse and his wife were arguing bitterly along the riverbank when a transformer spirit changed him into stone as a rebuke. The wife and their descendants were then given the responsibility of caring for the stone. For generations, the women of the family looked after their stone ancestor, whose story was told as a reminder to husbands to respect and honour their wives.

In 1892, Stone T’xwelatse was taken away and eventually acquired by the Burke Museum of the University of Washington in Seattle. Herb Joe of the Sto:lo nation, who holds the traditional name of T’xwelatse worked for fourteen years to bring the carved Stone home. In October 2006, 114 years after the loss of the life-size Stone, an unusual international repatriation took place and T’xwelatse was returned home. Until mid-May Stone T’xwelatse will be in Vancouver at the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology where high school students can learn about repatriation and the concept of T’xwelatse’s family’s dedication to remember and spread his lesson “to learn to live together in a good way”. After the MOA sojourn, the Sto:lo Nation plans to place him at the entrance to their new Ch-ihl-kway-uhk Healing and Wellness Centre, which is currently under construction on the Chilliwack River, very close to where T’xwelátse was first turned to stone.

Don’t miss the final performance in MOA’s Coastal First Nations Dance Festival on Sunday, March 16 at 3 pm with the Le la la Dancers, the Copper Maker Dancers (both Kwakwaka’wakw) and Gitksan Dancers of the Damelahamid .

Note also that a lecture series on repatriation, Global Dialogues , will be held at MOA in late April.

The exhibition Treasures of the Tsimshian from the Dundas Collection continues at MOA through June 7, 2008. A related program event, a panel discussion “What is Valued: Northwest Coast Art and its Markets” is on March 11 at 7 pm, at the museum.

More at the MOA website www.moa.ubc.ca

Rebecca Belmore at the Vancouver Art Gallery

The Vancouver Art Gallery is planning an of exhibit work by First Nations artist Rebecca Belmore this summer, from June 7 to October 5, 2008. Ms. Belmore represented Canada in the 2005 Venice Biennale with her internationally-praised work Fountain, a part-video, part-sculpture installation, described by a critic as “a technologically complex and exquisitely executed piece of art.”

The VAG show will include a number of works created between 1987 to 2008. Recurring themes of the bound figure, the struggling body, and the reclining figure create powerful images that reveal Belmore’s long commitment to the politics of identity and representation, issues of history and memory, and gestures that evoke a sense of place.



From the Haida Gwaii

The best source for news on issues on the Haida Gwai’i/Queen Charlotte Islands is the journal of the Council of the Haida Nation, Haida Laas , available on line at www.haidanation.ca

. The February issue describes two fascinating events:

Haida artist Robert Davidson’s exhibition Eagle of the Dawn: Northwest Coast Master continues at the C. N. Gorman Museum at the University of California, Davis, until June 11 th . More at http://gormanmuseum.ucdavis.edu


New Museums in BC Budget?

On February 19, 2008, the Minister of Finance of the government of the province of British Columbia tabled a budget for the coming year. The Government website quotes the Minister as promising “$3 million to support a new Aboriginal Art Gallery and a World Women’s History Museum.” At another point in the web version of the budget speech, the pledge seems to be modified to “$3 million to explore opportunities for an Aboriginal art gallery and a World Women’s History Museum.”

Leaving aside the perplexing nature of the proposed “World Women’s History Museum”, what is actually going on with the project of a gallery of aboriginal art?

Over half a million dollars has already been spent developing a proposal for a gallery of First Nations art in Vancouver. The site originally promised to the promoters of the project now appears to be slated for the new Vancouver Art Gallery. Where, what and when will we see a gallery/centre dedicated to the collection, display and study of aboriginal art?


2010 Olympic Games Benefit First Nations

A meeting on February 28 attended by the International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge, the Vancouver Organizing Committee and the Four Host Nations Secretariat (representing the Musqueam, Tseil-Waututh, Squamish and Lil’wat bands) concluded with an agreement to ensure that the best and most authentic of First Nations art and design will be presented to the public and sold under the Olympic brand in connection with the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games. First Nations artists from across the country will be invited to participate. Half of the royalties will fund national aboriginal youth programs for art, culture, sports and skills development. The other half will be paid to the Four Host Nations Secretariat. The official announcement will be made on Wednesday, March 5, according to the Vancouver Sun newspaper.


The Kwakwaka’wakw Nation and Edward S. Curtis, American Photographer

In 1914 an American photographer and film-maker produced the first feature-length film to exclusively star a First Nations cast. In the Land of the Head Hunters, a filmed story set in British Columbia among the Kwakwaka’wakw, was nearly lost, but has been restored and will be presented in a new, enhanced format across North America in 2008. The Vancouver debut is set for June 22. More in our next issue.

A very different Curtis Project is taking place at North Vancouver’s Presentation House Theatre. A theatrical and photographic installation about Curtis’ life and relationship with North American First Nations, his life-long subjects, will premier in 2009. The artistic team is headed by playwright Marie Clements , whose play Copper Thunderbird about the late Norval Morrisseau was recently re-broadcast on CBC television (see The Beat January 2008). Vancouver’s Arts Partners in Creative Development has provided a $175,000 grant for the project.

Edward Curtis’ controversial movies and books, very popular in their day, have been critiqued and re-evaluated intensively in the last few decades by First Nations and other scholars. Presentation House itself had an exhibition Shadowy Evidence: The Photography of Edward S. Curtis and His Contemporaries, in 1991.

Are Curtis’ films documentaries or entertainment? We will have valuable opportunities to consider the questions around his work with the presentation of both projects.



Marianne Nicholson

The exhibition catalogue for artist Marianne Nicholson’s 2007-2008 show at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria The Return of Abundance has appeared and is available at the AGGV’s shop for $14.95. The 37-page publication includes essays by Charlotte Townsend-Gault and curator Lisa Baldassara. More at http://aggv.bc.ca/

AGGV Chief Curator Mary Jo Hughes has been quoted as stating that over the next year, the Victoria Gallery will be giving priority to collecting works by Coast Salish artists.


As mentioned in the February issue of The Beat, the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver has invited Toronto AGO curator Gerald McMaster to speak on contemporary First Nations art on Friday, March 14. The subject is: “The Double Entendre of Re-enactment: From Catlin to Monkman”. The 3 pm lecture in the Theatre Room (Room 301) will be followed by a reception in the Concourse Gallery, where an Aboriginal Student Art Exhibition runs from March 10 to 16 th


Mythic Messengers Comes to Downtown Vancouver

Take out a Canadian $20 bill, and turn it over. A frieze of entwined animal figures appears in the upper right corner of the banknote in a collage of Bill Reid’s masterpieces. This represents his Mythic Messengers, a huge bronze sculpture in high relief.

Originally commissioned by Teleglobe Canada for its Vancouver office building, the sculpture was donated to the Bill Reid Foundation in 2002, and hung in the Vancouver International Airport for several years while the Foundation sought a suitable exhibition space for its large collection of Reid’s work. Now beautifully situated at 639 Hornby Street, the frieze will be an arresting feature in the Bill Reid Gallery which will open to the public on May 10, 2008.

The size of the sculpture presented some formidable problems when it was moved on February 25. It is 27 feet long and weighs 3000 pounds. With its frame and backing it weighs 5000 pounds, or 2300 kg. Now it is firmly in place and more easily viewed than in any of its previous homes. From the left, the huge sculpture depicts several Haida stories: the Bear family, a human woman married to the Bear Prince, and their twin cubs, Nanatsinget, his wife, and her Killer Whale abductor, the Sea Wolf who kills and devours three whales a day, the Dogfish Woman and her mythic dogfish, and the Eagle Prince.


Continuum : Vision and Creativity on the Northwest Coast, an exhibition of contemporary First Nations artists at the Bill Reid Gallery, is being developed with consultation and forums for discussion now being planned to take place in Alert Bay, Vancouver, Terrace, Skidegate and other communities in British Columbia. Continuum draws attention to the false dichotomy that places traditional or classical style in opposition to contemporary art. The exhibition will open in spring 2009.

To see photographs of Mythic Messengers and learn more about Continuum , go to www.billreidfoundation.org



Flight of the Hummingbird: A Parable for the Environment

Haida artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas is launching a new 64-page book about his environmental concerns at the Campbell River Writers’ Fest in May 2008. More information at the publisher’s website www.douglas-mcintyre.com

A Yahgulanaas work, Bone Box, was recently purchased by the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver. This interactive work was created as one of three installations collectively titled Meddling in the Museum which opened there in June 2007.


Seattle Events Connect to Northwest Coast Art

Stonington Gallery at 119 S. Jackson St. in Seattle is offering an exhibition of contemporary Northwest art, featuring an argillite Wasco bowl with inlay and a fitted dorsal fin lid, created by prominent Haida artist Christian White , at a price of $22,000.

Woven hats and baskets by Haida artist Isabel Rorick are also featured.

A major exhibit of art by Coast Salish peoples will open at the Seattle Art Museum in October 2008. S’Abadeb (The Gifts): Coast Salish Art and Artists will feature more than 150 works of art from national and international collections that offer a glimpse into the daily and ceremonial lives of the 35 groups that make up the Coast Salish. The project is a collaboration of Salish representatives, humanities experts and museum staff. “S’Abadeb will [have] the Salish people define who they are, providing a counterpoint to long-held misconceptions of territorial and cultural classifications,” says Barbara Brotherton, SAM’s curator of Native American Art. More at www.seattleartmuseum.org

Also in Seattle at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture , the Bill Holm Center’s Spring Lecture series will begin on March 4 at the Henry Gallery Auditorium, University of Washington. Robin K. Wright, professor and curator, will discuss why she attributes the famous Chicago settee to the Haida artist Zacharias . On April 15, Emily Moore will speak about “Chilkat Tunics: Form, Figure and Function” and on April 22, Katie Bunn-Marcuse will discuss styles of 19 th -century Haida silversmiths. More information available at www.washington.edu/burkemuseum/


Call for Work from BC First Nation, Aboriginal & Métis Artists
Canada ’ s National Arts Centre invites BC First Nation, Aboriginal and Métis artists and arts and culture organizations to submit their work in performing, visual, media and literary arts for inclusion in the BC Scene, a multidisciplinary festival of contemporary B.C. artists, produced by the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, from April 21 to May 3, 2009. Deadline for submissions is April 25, 2008. See www.bcscene.ca for more.

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Thanks to those who assisted with this issue of The Beat, among them Herb Auerbach, David Dumaresq, Trinity Bissett and Martin Landmann .

Comments, news and new subscribers are welcomed. Please write to: editor@coastalartbeat.ca

Past issues are available at our website www.coastalartbeat.ca


The Beat is an independent, not-for-profit project written and published in Vancouver Canada by Ann Cameron. Copyright 2008 Ann Cameron.