Kwagiulth Hawkman Rattle on Frog Stand

Stan Hunt

#Kwagiulth (#Kwakiutul ) #totempole #NorthWestCoast #Ottawa #Indigenous #art #carving #sculpture #Wood (at Confederation Park)

More perspectives in this article. Daniel Wagner spoke to several Indigenous artists about the mask and the issues of appropriation. 

According to Eliot White-Hill, Kwulasultun, a Coast Salish artist and storyteller from the Snuneymuxw First Nation, the issue is not that Holtby wants to use Indigenous art on his mask, but that it was not done by an Indigenous artist.

“The appropriation of Indigenous art is harmful,” said White-Hill. “I think of the potential for respect and representation to be shown and how much it would mean to see that done in a meaningful way, and what that would mean for future generations seeing themselves represented. So it makes it very frustrating when there are opportunities and interest for respecting and holding up Indigenous cultures and art and instead of doing that and going to the source, the choice is made not to and instead to use methods that are appropriative.”

“I appreciate that Braden Holtby felt it important to connect with the regional Indigenous culture here in B.C. and that he wanted to celebrate and honour it with his mask,” said White-Hill. “That is important and I am glad for that. I hope that this can be a good learning experience, and I hope we continue to see opportunities to celebrate Indigenous culture in the NHL.”

The Canucks play on the unceded territory of the Coast Salish peoples — the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, and Musqueam Nations — so incorporating Coast Salish art would be appropriate. That’s not what appeared on Holtby’s mask, however. “The design is not Coast Salish. It’s a Kwakiutl or Kwagiulth totem pole design,” said Xwalacktun, an artist and carver with Squamish and Kwakwaka'wakw ancestry. “We just want to make it authentic.”

“I think it could be a collaboration,” said Xwalacktun. “It’s making that connection with First Nations artists. If he wanted to use his artist, he could just collaborate with a First Nations artist to help design it, then he can put it on the helmet. Then it wouldn’t be an issue, as long as the other artist has been acknowledged.”

With the prevalence of the Anthropocene as a conceptual “building” within which stories are being told, it is important to query which  humans or human systems are driving the environmental change the Anthropocene is meant to describe. [...] And, finally, who is dominating the conversations about how to change the state of things? 

I am not alone in questioning the Euro-Western academy’s current approach to human-environmental relationships. A number of other scholars have critiqued current popular trends in the Euro-Western humanities: posthumanism and the ontological turn have all been queried and challenged as Eurocentric. These critiques re-centre the locus of thought, offering a reconfiguration of understandings of human-environmental relations towar  praxis that acknowledges the central importance of land, bodies, movement, race, colonialism and sexuality. 

Human geographer Juanita Sundberg, for example, takes posthumanism to task for its erasure of non-European ontologies. She writes, “the literature continuously refers to a foundational ontological split between nature and culture as if it is universal,” and points out that posthumanist theories tend to erase both location and Indigenous epistemologies. Sundberg urges scholars to enact the “pluriverse” as a decolonial tool, in her case drawing on Zapatista principles of “walking the world into being,” as one locus of thought and praxis to decolonize posthumanist scholarship and geographies. As Sundberg notes, “the Zapatista movement theorizes walking as an important practice in building the pluriverse, a world in which many worlds fit.” For Sundberg, walking and movement are necessary to bring a decolonizing methodology to fruition because, “As we humans move, work, play, and narrate with a multiplicity of beings in place, we enact historically contingent and radically distinct worlds/ontologies.” 

This methodology of decolonization through walking worlds into being aligns very closely with geographer Sarah Hunt’s (Kwakwaka’wakw, Kwagiulth) discussion of dance at a Potlatch as a mode through which Indigenous ontologies -- she specifically describes her own experience of engaging with Kwakwaka’wakw ontology -- are brought to life. Hunt outlines the epistemic violence  inherent in Euro-Western academic treatments of Indigenous knowledge, specifically by analyzing the ways that Indigenous ontologies are reified and distorted in the ongoing colonial structures of the European and North American academy. In fact, she notes that “the potential for Indigenous ontologies to unsettle dominant ontologies can be easily neutralized as a triviality, as a case study or a trinket, as powerful institutions work as self-legitimating systems that uphold broader dynamics of (neo)colonial power.”

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Zoe Todd. “Indigenizing the Anthropocene.” 2015. [Emphasis mine.]

A Community Panel Project is taking place at Marpole/Oakridge Community Center from April-September 2022! Jimmy Joseph (Kwagiulth fourth generation Master Carver from Alert Bay) and Lisa g (Iris Film Collective member) will host drop-in workshops to design and paint a 3-panel carved wood triptych. 🦋🌞🌜 Community members can also help document and edit a short film that will show the whole process! 🎥🎬📽 Check out the schedule and blog updates online: https://communitypanelproject.wordpress.com/

A Community Panel Project is taking place at Marpole/Oakridge Community Center from April-September 2022! Jimmy Joseph (Kwagiulth fourth generation Master Carver from Alert Bay) and Lisa g (Iris Film Collective member) will host drop-in workshops to design and paint a 3-panel carved wood triptych. 🦋🌞🌜 Community members can also help document and edit a short film that will show the whole process! 🎥🎬📽 Check out the schedule and blog updates online: https://communitypanelproject.wordpress.com/

1. Kwagiulth Owl Mask by Tony Hunt Jr. 2. Northwest Coast Native Owl Mask (carver unknown)

#SuperbOwl

Audain professor makes history again with Witness Blanket

A monumental art installation by Kwagiulth and Coast Salish artist Carey Newman, who is currently teaching at the University of Victoria, was today the ...

Frog Mask

Charlie Johnson

First Nations artist and ambassador Tony Hunt Sr. has died at 75

VICTORIA — Tony Hunt Sr., a hereditary chief of the north Island Kwagiulth people, world-renowned artist, champion and ambassador of traditional Aboriginal knowledge, died Friday in hospital in Campbell River surrounded by loved ones. He was 75. “He was such a big cultural person in... https://goo.gl/K3zLd3

‘Power of inspiration’: Kwagiulth artist’s Orange Shirt Day design sells out fast

Carey Newman is the Kwagiulth artist who created the design, which was printed on more than 1,000 T-shirts. He says most of them sold in less than 48 hours.

Original Story: http://ift.tt/2wK8Vi8

from Blogger http://ift.tt/2wcRv9T

'Power of inspiration': Kwagiulth artist's Orange Shirt Day design sells out fast

Carey Newman is the Kwagiulth artist who created the design, which was printed on more than 1,000 T-shirts. He says most of them sold in less than 48 hours.

Original Story: http://ift.tt/2wK8Vi8

eagle bracelet, Curtis Joe (Kwagiulth)

Octopus Paddle 

Ross Henderson

Enforcer of Potlatch Systems Mask

Charlie Johnson

Frog Paddle 

Ross Henderson