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Accumulated labours : First Nations art in British Columbia, 1922-1961

University of British Columbia

In this dissertation, I chart the conflicting and shifting assertions of meaning for Northwest Coast objects in Canada through a series of representational projects implemented between 1922 and 1961, beginning in January 1922, with the prosecution by the Department of Indian Affairs of participants in the Cranmer potlatch. The intersection between the concept of the 'fatal impact' or death of First Nations societies under European modernization, federal assimilationist policies, the government's exercise of disciplinary control, and the expansion of public museum collections was explicitly illustrated when the Lekwiltok, Mamalillikulla, and the Nimpkish peoples surrendered over seventeen cases of ceremonial objects in exchange for suspended sentences for violating the potlatch ban. The dissertation concludes by examining the Gitanyow agreement, engineered between 1958 and 1961, in which Gitanyow laws, histories and territories would be published by the government of British Columbia in exchange for the removal and replication of four crest poles. The raising of the poles' replicas in 1961 coincided with Canadian parliament's approval of the enfranchisement of First Nations people, the theoretical end to the era of assimilation in Canada. These events bookend a period in which representation continued to be entwined with politica and social conditions created by the Indian Act that depended on promulgating views that First Nations lifeways were vanishing. However, production of Northwest Coast objects retained significance throughout this period, such objects playing complex and multifaceted roles. Because of the symbolic and financial value many Euro-Canadians attached to First Nations objects, "art" proved an avenue for communicating First Nations-related social, political and economic issues. The objects produced or displayed between 1922 and 1961 operated through the projects I describe in the intertwined transformative processes of identity construction and boundary marking among individual First Nations groups and within Canadian national identity. Through these projects, important steps were taken in formulating two major characteristics of the post-1960 period: 1. a burgeoning market in Northwest Coast objects constructed as "traditional;" and 2. First Nations activism for land claims and self-determination using "tradition" and "art" as a platform in activism for land claims and self-determination.

Thesis/Dissertation

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2009-06-19

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/9487

Fine Arts

University of British Columbia

UBCV

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