Vision Control
by Charlotte Townsend-Gault
Art objects have long been the acceptable interface of colonialism, and shaped transcultural relationships. The “Northwest Coast”, isomorphically associated with the idea that ‘art’ represents a ‘culture’, has filled museums, been good for the market, and branded Vancouver’s International Airport with spectacular Northwest Coast Indigenous art: accurate if opportunistic. Yet for most of the twentieth century the Native peoples of Canada were kept out of public view. In view were totem poles and ‘objects’ classified according to museum manners. The narrative was dominated by the visual while Native children were culturally cleansed, out of sight. Looking without understanding is a special kind of invasion. Ways of controlling vision, who may see what, when and where, does something to correct the balance.
The cultures of the Northwest Coast – northern Tlingit to southernmost Coast Salish – are clever about vision: the seen a disguise, or protection against the unseen. For all their brilliant visual display, sight can be invasive, seeing is not knowing, power depends on controlling vision. Differences in seeing and knowing are entangled in the cultural differences that define colonialism, while the relationship between seeing and knowing has preoccupied the ‘western’ philosophical tradition at least since Plato. The politics of art, museums, media, of decolonization itself, are embedded in the politics of vision. “The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled” John Berger wrote in Ways of Seeing (1972). Jessica Horton, in Art for an Undivided Earth (2017), suggests that humanity is only divided by ‘ways of seeing’ which cannot be disentangled from colonial relations. In the fifty years between these two accounts of how ‘art’ works Indigenous protectionism has been a growing response to “panopticonic voyeurism”, as David Garneau tags colonial desire: some things should remain irreconcilable (2016). Dylan Robinson has important things to say about tensions in seeing/reading/understanding across and between cultures (2016). Protection keeps the forms of ‘Northwest Coast art’, essentially forms of meaning, from making concessions, from “reconciliation”. For more than two hundred years the rush to judgement, based on first impressions of how things look, has had devastating consequences. Fear of the unseen, suspicion of what might lie behind the visible, covetousness, have led to the vengeful treatment of the visible. Against this toxic blend of fear and desire, vision control is resistance.
The power of sight, the need to protect it, and to protect against it, are closely connected to ‘power’. With colonisation, ‘the Northwest Coast’ slipped into general usage helped by its ‘look’, aka its ‘art’: space filled with ambiguous lines, static and dynamic, making form and protecting meaning, distinguishing between those who can or cannot ‘see’ it clearly. The colonial history of the Northwest Coast startles the eyes of “panopticonic voyeurs”, to borrow Garneau’s potent tag. It might look like an open invitation. The eye-form, the power of sight, is ubiquitous in the visualisation of the passage between human and non-human worlds. The move from looking to ‘seeing’, with visionary connotations as a route to the subconscious or the spirit world for some, is embodied in the eyes and eye forms (the term ‘ovoid’ is widely used) of Northwest Coast art, historical and contemporary. Their prominence is central to the visual culture of the entire region: carved, woven, painted, on petroglyphs, food vessels, storage boxes, house facades, totem poles, and on Thliitsapilthim, the large painted ceremonial curtains of the Nuu-chah-nuulth.
Eye forms are marked features of the small carved bone figures, thousands of years old, that have been found under the Fraser delta. Prominent ringed eyes are the dominant features of the little ivory duck, perhaps an amulet, that was given in 1774 by Haida people to Juan Perez, commander of the first European sailing ship seen on their waters. Looking the other way, from outside, the history of encounter on the Northwest Coast records explorers, traders, missionaries, administrators, Indian Agents, impressed by, and fearful of, its visually spectacular cultures. And so, a troubled relationship was marked by things good to look at: received as gifts, stolen as curiosities, coveted as ‘art’, confiscated or burned as fearsome threats to shaky colonial authority. Stan Douglas’ video installation Nu:tka (1996) pictures the selective limitation of what the Spanish and English captains could or would actually see when they found themselves in Nuu-chah-nuulth territory, what their vision so effortlessly overlooked. ‘The dark years’, in Gloria Cranmer Webster’s term (2017), led to the current restoration. It is risky, however, to rely on visual understanding in the absence of shared language. In schematic form, ‘ovoids’, in Bill Holm’s terminology (1965)—the powers of sight—have become the ‘Northwest Coast’s’ omnipresent public facade at every scale from business cards to totem poles, from wedding rings to web design. The logo for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics ‘Four Host First Nations’ reprised the power of the eyes, ensuring Native surveillance at an event that took place on unceded Native territory with a calamitous history.
The teaching about sight specific to the intense display of ‘eye’ forms is summarised by the Coast Salish seated stone figures whose prominent eyes look both inward and outward, as those who treasure them see it. Revered as embodying visionary power, they are amongst the earliest surviving exemplars of a continuous expressive mode that extends throughout the region. In so far as these stone Salishan eyes embody an Indigenous teaching about sight, start with them. Exposed rib-cage and vertebrae indicate that their own penetrating gaze sees through bodies, an idea shared by cultures with shamanic beliefs in the Arctic, Hungary, and Central Asia (Duff 1975; Jilek 1982; Humphrey 1994, 1996). These figures inhabited their territory along the Fraser River for thousands of years and are synonymous with what Coast Salish people know, or perhaps know that they cannot know, about ‘powers’, and what they choose to share of that knowledge. The figures have been victims of the total disruption of lives and land threatening to sever them from their reasons for being. Reticence surrounds them. From glimpses offered in A Stó:lo-Coast Salish Historical Atlas (2006) and the film Stone Txwèlatse (2007), protection of their powers makes them plausible metaphors for the wider cultural ontologies guarded by the sight, and the taking back control of vision wherever the uncomprehending gaze of others has trespassed.
In the two centuries of turmoil as Salishan lands were overrun by settlers, the connecting links between the figures and those who revered their powers were threatened but not destroyed. Now their significance is communicated by the way they are revered, perhaps a teaching about sight, and the paradox of the spectacular, but guarded, displays inseparable from the cultural restoration now happening on the Northwest Coast. Evidence of the power, visible, or perhaps not, to outside observers, lies in the way the figures are treated and continue to be assiduously protected by Coast Salish people (Levi-Strauss 1982; Suttles 1987; Kew 1980; Carlson 2001; Roy 2002; Miller 2011). Amongst the exhibits in S’Abadeb, the Gifts: Pacific Coast Salish Art and Artists at the Seattle Art Museum in 2008, stood well-lit but empty plinths displaying precisely nothing, neither object nor image nor explanation. Visitors were invited to consider what it was that they could not, or should not, see. Other ways of showing what is not being shown because it should not be seen include the following examples. The guarded, partial reveal of the Sxwaixwe mask in the permanent collection display at the Museum of Anthropology. During c̓əsnaʔəm: The City Before the City at the Museum of Vancouver in 2016 one of the several surviving stone figures was exposed to public view, but only one, and only as a concession, as the accompanying text made apparent. The stone figure of T’xwelátse, as the uninitiated learn in the film made of its return to the family, Man Turned to Stone: T’xwelátse (2011), is carefully protected by being robed, fed and covered at night, out of sight. In the Musqueam Cultural Centre treasured ‘belongings’ are displayed against the light refracted off the wide waters of the Fraser flowing outside. They are protected by being difficult to see. These little stone figures have tended to be overlooked in the construction of canonical ‘Northwest Coast Native art’, perhaps because they are about seeing, about vision, rather than because they are good to look at.
Those who protect them know their powers. For the rest of us they act as metaphors for the power of vision, both inward and outward. Amongst the earliest surviving versions of a continuous expressive mode at work throughout the region, they simultaneously project power and are reticent about it. This ambivalence has inspired many: artists Andre Breton, Wolfgang Paalen, and Emily Carr; the psychologist Wolfgang Jilek (1982); social anthropologists such as Wilson Duff, a prescient outlier in the NWC literature who pushed the boundaries of academic writing in Images, Stone, BC. (1975), and Michael Kew who chose not to publish very much of what he had learned from the family he married into at Musqueam (1980). It recurs in La Voie des Masques (1982) where Claude Levi-Strauss gave himself the permissions afforded by modernism’s unlicensed looking and saw what he wanted to find in Sxwaixwe and Dzunuḵ̓wa masks. It is there in the ethnographies of Wayne Suttles (1971), Crisca Bierwert (1999), Susan Roy (2002, 2008), and Bruce Miller (2011). The powers and dangers inherent in Salish sites and belongings are implied in these analyses. What follows tries to exercise vision self-control, to avoid invasive incomprehension.
Despite geographical and historical distance there are teachings that connect the Salishan stone figures and Nuu-chah-nulth thliitsapilthim. These large painted ‘curtains’ are always under protection, whether hanging at a ‘do’, or stored away safely out of sight. Potlatches and other ‘dos’ could be, and were, kept quiet, hidden from ‘the authorities’, the family thliitsapilthim protected by being hidden from sight. Over time many family’s narratives were transferred from cedar panels to canvas which could be rolled up quickly and hidden – excellent materialist protection against settler looting (because they might be ‘valuable’), or burning (because they were dangerously incomprehensible). The protocols were relaxed for a spell of unprecedented exposure at the University of British Columbia’s Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery in 2010. For all the visual delight to be derived from the curtains it had to be explained to the visitor that there is a behind where the ‘work is done, and they must not go, and that therefore there is a teaching that they cannot properly comprehend. Nuu-chah-nulth ownership and control of the power of the thliitsapilthim was on display because access to that power, or participation in it, was controlled. Standing in front of a curtain, what you see is all that you, non-Nuu-chah-nulth, know. It all depends on who you are. Nevertheless, by being hung flat against the walls of the gallery to be looked at they can only do part of their work. This might look like making the curtains conform to modernist protocols for displaying large painted rectangles, and to modernism’s separation of history and ethics from aesthetics. It might look as though they are being assimilated into the art system, against Ki-ke-in’s insistence that they are not ‘art’. They are not art because they are political and legal documents for the Nuu-chah-nulth and can act as such in settlements or land claims. They did so at the signing of the Maa-nulth Treaty on April 9, 2009. In the Athletic Hall in Port Alberni, five families had allowed their curtains to be hung against the back wall during the ceremony.
These ‘paintings’ both announce and protect something. What happens in front differs from, but is implicated in, the inaccessible action behind, ultimately screened from it. If, in front of thliitsapilthim you have to ask ‘what do I not know?’ it is then that looking relations morph to social relations: The viewer-as-outsider is brought face to face with not knowing. The spectator is halted at the alluring material surface, looking at what she cannot understand. There may be a reprimand in this restriction. But equally the very materiality of the no-go sign puts the emphasis back onto looking relations, voyeurism and covetousness. Positioned firmly in front, the uninitiated eye scans these surfaces looking for connections, for ways of linking or relating the components that would get around stylistic disjunctures. To the uninitiated eye it is not clear what they mean nor how they are connected. A house may be small, a halibut large, and a frog extremely large, but scale and western compositional norms are not the point in these transpositions of worlds. In front thlitsapilthim act as charts, archives, legal documents with potential to redress the political backstory. But behind they are not for anyone to buy into, or requisition, or appropriate, assimilate to their own purposes, etc. Nuu-chah-nulth people continue to struggle against the historical odds of dispossession. Their protection: limited disclosure. Like the Coast Salish figures, they are jealously guarded precisely so they should not be rolled into some global image commons, let alone some vague idea of ‘nativeness’. The owners’ words show them to be protected accounts of interaction between the human and non-human, but also shareable fables about a bad history and hard-nosed politics. Disparate subject positions looking at thliitsapilthim are paradoxical, perhaps in the end irreconcilable.
Looking without seeing characterises colonisation. John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972) argues that holding a monopoly over seeing is one of the delusions of power. It combines with “the seduction of the visible” (2002), Walter Benjamin’s term for modernity’s great ploy, and is sharply critiqued by Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), a foundational text for art’s counter colonial struggle, developed further by Nicholas Thomas and Diane Losche in Double Vision (1999) and Elizabeth Povinelli in The Cunning of Recognition (2003). Good Looking (1996) and Visual Analogy (1999) by Barbara Stafford advocate the profundities of looking as do contributors to Vision and Visuality (Foster 1988). The Visual in Social Theory (2001) by Anthony Woodiwiss shows how sight is a social and historical construct. The need to control vision on the Northwest Coast confirms all of this. The struggle continues. But ‘modernized’ Western visual arts were already self-reflexive, dominated by critiques of representation and anxiously dependent on looking, on sight. In The Optical Unconscious (1993) art historian Rosalind Krauss’ sceptical interrogation of modernism’s privileging of sight as the route to understanding, could be taken as an uncanny restatement of the teaching embodied in the Salishan eyes. It is visible not scripted.
Many Indigenous artists have used their ‘vision’ to replace a privileged colonial gaze with their own: Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun Letslo:tseitun’s ‘ovoidism’ reclaims the stolen landscape; picturing cosmology on intricate bookmarks Chuuckamalthnii (Ki-Ke-In Ron Hamilton) has silently inserted hundreds of Nuu-chah-nulth truths into literary powerhouses, which is ongoing; Marianne Nicolson’s The House of the Ghosts (2008) at night projected Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw visual power onto the neo-classical facade of the Vancouver Art Gallery, reclaiming the former provincial Court House from where the Indian Act’s punitive measures were enforced. Connected, narrative ovoids were in action during Sakahan: International Indigenous Art where Corey Bulpitt and Larissa Healey’s Salmon Cycle – The Spirit Within (2013) painted graffiti-powered ovoids on the wall outside the National Gallery in Ottawa.
The ubiquitous eye-forms of the Northwest Coast enmeshed in formline, somewhat impenetrable, even when corrupted and commercialized, are yet ‘good to think with’. They may themselves be wielding the power of surveillance. The dialectical tension between the use of sight to control and to reveal is evident in new generations of thinkers, amongst them Jolene Rickard (2011), Richard Hill (2017), Jessica Horton (2017) and Audra Simpson (2014). The production of Native ‘art’ by Native people meets with its reception by non-Native people somewhere here. Positive or guarded about the power of sight, of vision and its control, this tension is of the essence of the encounter between Native and non-Native on Canada’s west coast, its challenge if not its problem. Something, but not everything, about its power translates across cultural boundaries. Difference, separation, protectionism, and non-disclosure are the inescapable and paradoxical features of the extreme visibility of Indigenous arts of the Northwest Coast. Contemporary thinking about Northwest Coast art must contend with vision and its control, with restrictions on ‘relational aesthetics’, Bourriaud’ useful term (2002). Relational because any definition of Indigenous art is inseparable from its audience: who it is for, who can see what, and who decides. Persistent issues have always been about knowing, being, and translating: epistemological, ontological, and economic, about power.
The earliest surviving accounts from the late 18th century record reactions to the visual as the principal medium of encounter. Jacques Maquet recorded the foundational outsider insight into the universal aesthetic credentials for Northwest Coast art when he wrote in the journal of the voyage in 1783: “Art everywhere, everywhere sculpture, amongst a race of fishermen and hunters”. Visual spectacle, the bright panoply of display, has long been coterminous with Northwest Coast art where ‘art’ is a volatile, contested term, as well as a marketing force (Roth 2018), simultaneously condemned as a ‘western’ imposition, mined for its prestige, and widely acknowledged as a dominant presence in the region. It has had the consequence of propelling totem poles to international stardom – according to the neutralizing, de-contextualizing, de-localizing, universalizing and internationalizing tendencies of modernity. Visual display, both screening and making accessible the invisible, is everywhere apparent. It is inseparable from works crucial in the restoration of Northwest Coast visual culture by many artists, amongst them Doug Cranmer, Robert Davidson, Marianne Nicolson, Susan Point, Michael Nicol Yahgulanaas. Various in scale, style and reach their displays, showing much but not telling everything, are not full disclosures: Dorothy Grant working with Davidson’s designs, the Four Host First Nations logo for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, or the mass-produced, commercialised, versions of the mode (Townsend-Gault 2001, Roth 2018). Because they do not advertise their meaning, and are far from self-explanatory these manifestations of the eye form still work as metaphors for sight and what should not be seen. They resonate with enduring beliefs about the spiritual danger that comes with outsider incursions.
Indigenous art now, its definitions and directions, depends more than ever on who it is for. The self-reflexivity that postmodernism stirred up in the conflicted contemporary art field, introduced identity politics and attempts at the restitution of powers, but it remains trapped in a professionalized international discourse where the translatability of cultural specifics is an unsettled argument (Townsend-Gault 1997; Fisher 2003; Lippard 2000; Hill 2012). The parts that seem to translate most easily are the visible, and looking may look like translating, if not comprehending. At a significant moment the critique of vision merges with calls for decolonisation of vision (Rickard 2011, Horton 2017). For native epistemologies and ontologies have been uncomprehendingly controlled under settler colonialism, the mis-categorisations and exclusions of the Indian Act.
The protection that ambiguity enables is an analytic staple of Northwest Coast style (Holm and Reid 1975; Mauze 2004; Glass 2011), much of it dependent on the verbatim reports gathered by George Hunt as he attended Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw potlatches in the late 19th century and listened to chiefly oratory. Franz Boas thought ambiguity defined chiefly assertions of power and authority (1995). The theme was elaborated by Bill Reid in conversation with Bill Holm (1975); speculated upon by Wilson Duff (1975); clarified by Doreen Jensen and Polly Sargent (1986); specified in his own painstaking emulation of old house facades by Lyle Wilson; explicated by Karen Duffek and Bill McLennan who worked with Wilson on their magnum opus The Transforming Image: Painted Arts of Northwest Coast First Nations (2000); and demonstrated by Augaitis et al in Charles Edenshaw (2013). The potential for protectively ambiguous readings of crest figures, made elusive by the fracturing and interpenetration of ‘formline’, and ‘ovoid’, is powerfully played out in Robert Davidson’s paintings (Duffek 2004). His work seems driven by constant interplay between representation and the disguise of abstraction, what is seen and what remains unseen, that seems to define Haida tradition. Disagreement on what ambivalence looks like has taken up more space in the literature than any disclosure of the reasons for it – ‘discursive accumulation’ indeed.
Chiefly oratory takes proud delight in spectacle, in the accumulation, and profusion designed to impress, to overawe rivals and allies alike (Boas, 1921; Inverarity, 1950; Jonaitis, 1991). Far from being a point of entry the visually arresting and ambivalent eye forms protect the invisible, and are metaphors for restricted, unseeable, knowledge. Thus ‘vision control,’ which is inseparable from visual display, means guardianship of vision. The apparent invitation to ‘share’ disguises a withholding of knowledge and power. If ‘knowledge is power’ then withholding knowledge is greater power.
The most demanding contemporary art made in Vancouver since the 1960s has an international reputation for unforgiving scrutiny rather than political correctness (Modigliani, 2018). It is distinguished by artists doing a form of visual anthropology to draw attention to what the city has repressed and obliterated. In the process many artists connected to Vancouver – Marian Penner Bancroft (VISIT: Site of Former Indian Residential School, Birtle, Manitoba, 2000), Ken Lum (Mohammed and the Totems, 1991), Jeff Wall (The Storyteller, 1986; Hotels, Carrall Street, Vancouver, Summer 2005, 2005), Christos Dikeakos (West End Panorama, 1992), Stan Douglas (Nut’ka, 1996, and Klatsassin, 2006) and Tania Willard (Protocol Anxiety (IBG), 2016) – have thrown up new ways to interrogate and picture the past in the present. “Vancouver has this really dark history that seeps into the ground. And people hear it on a certain level, and relive it, or are a part of it…It’s a dark city,” in the words of the N’laka’pamux/Secwepemc poet Chris Bose (2013). He is saying not so much that ‘the past is another country’ but rather that the past is this country. The Native past persists, actively concealed, even if overrun by settler cultures, suppressed by urban development, infiltrated by commerce.
Given this uneasily entangled heritage, and because protectionism is a critical link between historical cultural forms and contemporary art, the idea was tested in the experiment of Indigenous Acts. For one week in August 2014 a small group of people positioned itself within a current art mode – one of shared, collectivist, group action rather than individual expression – and then invited some others to join them. Indigenous Acts interacted with the Vancouver map to tear it up – the survey lines, the alien cartography which overlaid and fragmented Indigenous patterns of occupation and land use. Part lesson about overlapping land claims, part art tour, part dérive or art-as-walking that explores the affect of place and space, Indigenous Acts was a four day on-the-ground history lesson about the turmoil and displacements of the takeover of the land and waters on which Vancouver has grown. In well-known parts of the city, and apparently obscure ones, the physical consequences of history were registered by being there, or by not being there. Indigenous Acts was not about learning through looking, but about learning by remembering, in situ. Vision under control: the spectator was replaced by the implicated actor; art object by ‘situational aesthetics’; map by post-colonial psycho-geography.
This action for the small invited group – Native and non-Native – drew on the meaning of ‘being there’ and of ‘being able to see’: the affective and the ethical. The movement of our bodies and the exercise of various kinds of power converged as we walked across land long intersected by train tracks and roads, spaces now occupied by industrial ruins, viaducts, bridges, museums, condos, big box stores. The walking was interspersed with storytelling, histories, dance, performance, soliloquies and readings. It was not difficult to see the consequences, tragic and absurd, of settling on to, and recalibrating, the old patterns of use and ownership. At the same time Indigenous Acts was trying to escape the strictures of established art forms, point to the assumptions conventionally embedded in their visual pleasures, and to enact metaphorically a protective ‘vision control’. Segments of the programme were flagged as “Open only to Indigenous participants”. Amongst the “irreconcilable” spaces on the programme was the ancient village site of Sen̓áḵw under the Burrard Street Bridge, a no-go zone for the non-Native participants, their exclusion perhaps to be taken metaphorically as sardonic taunt and stinging rebuke to the banality of the ubiquitous panacea ‘reconciliation’, a reference to David Garneau’s ‘Reconcile This’, (2011). On the ominously dominating pillars of the bridge, graffiti reclaim the space as ‘Senakw’.
The Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) project to transform the Sea to Sky Highway between Vancouver and Whistler also simultaneously discloses and withholds knowledge (Townsend-Gault, 2011). The Sḵwx̱wú7mesh intervened in its redesign to ensure that every driver knows that the highway drives through their territory. The Spirit Walk in North Vancouver is another deadly serious endeavour not to be dismissed as soft PR. Running along the shore of Burrard Inlet beneath the mountains that are the northern limit of the city, the pathway reopens access to the shoreline that industry, ship-building, maritime access, highways, bridges, shopping malls and all the usual urban paraphernalia that now occupies the territories of the səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh closed off, confining them to absurdly restricted reserves.
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Throughout the 20th century the recurrent eye form made Northwest Coast Native art a visual art. The history of looking on the Northwest Coast is the history of power politics deferred and displaced. It is clear though that claims made by Native artists about their work, or claims made about the exactitude of this knowledge of places, objects, and ideas by Native commentators, acquire their authority from spaces inaccessible to the non-Native. In the balance, paradoxically, is protection of culture’s power and the need to make it manifest in some powerful way. An historical correction is on display at the U’mista Cultural Centre in Alert Bay. After the 1921 raid on the Cranmer potlatch, the captured ‘illegal’ treasures were photographed in an un comprehending display of the visually striking, and much suspected, masks. Seeing can equal not noticing, being oblivious. Douglas’ Nutka is about this kind of colonizer blindness. Along with other confiscated treasures, the masks are now re-displayed at U’mista in an order that emulates their order of appearance in a potlatch, no longer a meaningless jumble.
For Indigenous societies of the Northwest Coast vision – when and where to restrict or control the power of seeing – depends on descent, gender, age, and group affiliation. Indigenous art, its purposes, definitions and directions, continues to depend on power and control over what is seen, and on whose terms. Whether reassertion of cultural boundaries, intercultural entanglement, or open access – the power has been changing hands. Canadian art galleries and museums act as theatres for this realignment articulated by Indigenous theorists who ask ‘whose theory? theory for whom?’ (Hill, 2012; Duffek and Wilson, 2018).
First Nations people often assert that Indigenous cultures had no word for ‘art’ but carvers working today call themselves artists, without apparent difficulty, and their work is sold as ‘art’, etc. Levi-Strauss raised the stakes with the claims made in The Way of the Masks (1982), their power as art depending on quite other powers, while in James Clifford’s The Predicament of Culture (1988), a book with enormous impact amongst those sympathetic to, if outside of, Indigenous struggles for autonomy, commended ‘art’ as an empowering designation.
Indigenous art historian Leslie Dawn finds only “doublethink” in early 20th century national exhibitions that acknowledged Native Art: “the mechanisms by which a national display of Native arts hides…current struggles over land rights and masks a violent colonial past” (2004). Dawn dissects the forces that had beaten their culture, their art, out of Indigenous people, the same who were now avid for it. Dawn does the scholarly work that parallels a significant aspect of on-going Native/non-Native relations. The Git Hayetsk Dancers perform the doublethink, mocking the contradictions of an uncomprehending visual obsession, when, in one of the dances in their repertoire a performer holds a camera insistently pointed back at the audience.
Yuxweluptun has for a long time been honouring/mocking ‘ovoidism’ in an ongoing series of vivid canvases that parody the obsession with the form even while revivifying it. Mordantly skeptical about the visual he revels in spectacle and exploits it in his taunting critique of colonial misdemeanors such as The Universe is So Big, the Whiteman Keeps Me on My Reservation (1987). Tania Willard writes: “Yuxweluptun’s subject is not how the land looks at a distance, as a “view”, but how it is inhabited and used, raising the issue of stolen territories, a history of broken treaties, private property, resource extraction – and the racism embedded in each of them” (2017). A solution for Willard is BUSH gallery on Secwépemc territory, which breaks conventions for viewing art altogether, and transfers them on to the land where relational aesthetics can find more fitting forms for taking back control.
Outsiders may acknowledge that actions or objects, ‘art’ through a process of trans-cultural mis-translation, are indeed powerful, but with a power not necessarily accessible. This was always native culture’s attraction for the Surrealists (Clifford, 1998; Mauze 2004). The theme re-emerges in a renewed interest in affective and embodied knowledge (Gregg and Seigworth 2010). Something, but not everything, about the power inherent in vision translates across cultural boundaries. It is the sensory presence of the Salishan figures, their affective power, that grounds the theorising superimposed on the places, the cultures and the people that colonising power overran and overturned. But whether stealing, collecting or displaying visible power, “It is not art as you know it but knowledge as we know it” in Musqueam weaver Debra Sparrow’s pithy summary.
This strategic protectionism has moved from the visual to a wider ‘affective protectionism’, controlling access – physical access, touch, and other senses. Strategic display might be the best form of concealment, concealment that shows itself for what it is, a mask for other forms of attachment, acting as a decoy, deflecting attention from what needs to be protected. Withholding translation, controlling the power of looking, of sight, or of vision, entails simultaneously a form of retaliation and a form of protection. As Shane Point told me in 2014 as we talked about the wider audience for the striking, but unidentified, crest forms that are the prerogatives of the Wei Wai Kai band, which adorn the big box stores of Discovery Harbour Plaza on Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw territory in Campbell River: “They need to know we are here, they can see that we are here, but they don’t need to know everything” (In conversation with the author, 2014).
The visible is still at the forefront of the colonial encounter. What could be creative ‘conciliation’ has often been catastrophe. Vision, and its control, are essential to Indigenous ‘art’, coterminous with it, because the visible continues to be only as significant as the invisible. The form of protectionism adopted on the Northwest Coast under colonial domination was, sometimes, permission to look but never to see in retaliation for the Indian Act’s prohibitions and persecutions. Interpretation is out of bounds. Here is the continuing authority of the ‘eyes’ on the T-shirt, or the oven gloves, or the ring. Vision control, revelation and protection, connects thliitsapilthim with the Salish stone figures, and both with the paradoxical compromise of relating the seen to the unseen, revelation with protection. Manifest in all their diversity, these are the teachings, the givens, perhaps the gifts.
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Charlotte Townsend-Gault, a distinguished art historian, professor emeritus, accomplished author, and curator, focuses her extensive research, teaching, and scholarship on contemporary visual and material cultures of Native American and First Nations peoples, with a particular emphasis on the Pacific Northwest region. Holding a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Sussex and a PhD in Social Anthropology from University College London (1988), she began her career as a curator at the Mezzanine Gallery of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) before pursuing her doctoral studies. Joining the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory (AHVA) at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in the late 1980s, she has made significant contributions to academia as an Associate faculty member (emeritus) in the Department of Anthropology at UBC and as an Honorary Professor in the Department of Anthropology at University College London. Townsend-Gault’s impactful publications include seminal works such as “Native Art of the Northwest Coast: A History of Changing Ideas” (2013) co-authored with Jennifer Kramer and Ki-Ke-In, “Bill Reid and Beyond: Expanding on Modern Native Art” (2004) co-authored with Karen Duffek, and “Rebecca Belmore: The Named and the Unnamed” (2003) co-authored with James Luna, among others, reflecting her profound commitment to advancing the understanding and appreciation of Indigenous art and culture.
