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Review

Marianne Nicolson (Tayagila’ogwa) is Dzawada’enuxw First Nation from Kingcome Inlet and of Scottish descent. Her artwork has been exhibited locally, nationally and internationally and she holds a PhD from the University of Victoria in Linguistics and Anthropology.

> _“WITNESS: I want the Commission to tell us the one that sold it, and they should remember that the Indians have a law among themselves just as the whitemen have – and no one is allowed to take another man’s land without first finding out who the land belongs to.”_

> — Kwakwaka’wakw Testimony to the McKenna-McBride Royal Commission ( June 1914)

In June 1914, the head chiefs of the Kwakwaka’wakw Nations gathered in Alert Bay in order to testify to the McKenna-McBride Royal Commission. This commission was the culmination of decades of unresolved questions around Indigenous Land jurisdiction and the encroachment and imposition of colonial land needs and desires. It was a process that sought to dispossess Indigenous Nations of their lands and to impose severe limitations through the establishment of small “reserves.”

The photo below shows the Gigigame’ chiefs wearing all their regalia and standing inside their ceremonial house – note the remnants of the fire in the foreground. While the blankets and headdresses do indeed create a colourful and artistic display, their real meaning and importance was internal recognition of land title and rights. For instance, no chief could wear that to which he was not entitled, and the sanction was the public acceptance and validation of those rights. Each crest and image existed not only for simple display and beauty but also as a direct link to the histories telling of how each lineage came to be _in the land_. On the far left, the _kolus_ headdress worn by ‘Maxwa’kutłala, Chief Johnny Scow of the Kwikwasut’inuxw, tells of his descent from the great thunderbird Udzista’lis (or, A’udzistalaga’lis) who at the beginning of time came down at K’axadakwi (“Split-in-Two Mountain”) in Xakwikan (“Thompson Sound”). In order to affirm both ancestral rights and land rights, he would have been obligated to display these privileges publicly before the rest of the Kwakwaka’wakw, who as witnesses bore testimony to its legitimacy through the potlatch system. It is only in enacting this process that he is able to legally wear the headdress that connects to the history and place of the Kwikwasut’inuxw of whom he became head chief. This is true of all the Kwakwaka’wakw chiefs who accompany him in this photo. During the McKenna-McBride Royal Commission, these chiefs testified to their great discontent and alarm at being allocated only tiny reserves within lands that they considered theirs through great lineages established “since light first came into our world.” Mostly oblivious to their concerns, the McKenna-McBride Royal Commission carried on allocating tiny postage-stamp-sized reserves on the coast and ultimately swindling away the most valuable reserve lands for more, but less valuable, lands. They did this by recommending the removal of approximately 47,000 acres valued at $13– 15 million and the addition of 87,000 acres valued at less than $500,000.[^1]

To complete the slight-of-hand transformation of Indigenous Lands into Crown Lands, the colonial authorities outlawed Kwakwaka’wakw traditional law and governance by banning the potlatch from 1893–1951\. Though hard to prosecute by 1921, the Kwakwaka’wakw Indian Agent, William Hailliday, was successful in charging with an illegal offence many of the head Kwakwaka’wakw for potlatching. Those who wished to avoid jail time were given the option of giving up their regalia. With great sorrow they brought these things to Halliday, who put them on display in the Alert Bay Community Hall and charged a quarter to people who wished to view them. For the Kwakwaka’wakw, this was a tremendous humiliation. Once sold to the major museum institutions of colonial society, Halliday paid out paltry sums, thus imitating the coercive tactics of the McKenna-McBride Royal Commission in transforming that which was worth “beyond measure” to the Kwakwaka’wakw into next to nothing.

> _“I am returning to you cheque No.3799 for $22.00 in favor of Abraham which he refuses to accept for his paraphernalia as he say the sum is absolutely too small for the paraphernalia he surrendered. He wants to tell you he would rather give them to you for nothing than accept $22.00 for them.”_

> —Letter from Kwawkewlth Agency, Alert Bay, BC to Department of Indian Affairs (May 1st, 1922)

I cannot help but think of these things today when I see the great treasures of the Kwakwaka’wakw and other great nations within the great storehouses of colonization. Even today, the display maintains the illusion that these things are there to educate and illuminate the general public of our greatness. It is only with sorrow that I can see how captured they are and how trained we have become to view them as within their natural state, when the authority and relationship with land they were originally meant to express remains as disregarded and desecrated as they were in 1914 and again in 1921\. I think this while knowing that the great fish runs that so sustained the Kwikwasut’inuxw since time immemorial are also desecrated and diseased and our way of life is under such threat that our young people are occupying fish farms in our territory in order to protest them while John Horgan, the new Premier of British Columbia, reiterates to us that Norwegian- and Japanese-owned fish farms “…now \[generate\] $800 million in annual value…”

[^1]: Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs (UBCIC), “Our Homes are Bleeding” ([ourhomesarebleeding.ubcic.bc.ca/index.html](“ourhomesarebleeding.ubcic.bc.ca/index.html)

Writer

Site/ation

issue-136-p58-60.pdf

Marianne Nicolson explores the history of the Kwakwak’wakw Nations and the McKenna-McBride Royal Commission, and how Kwakwak’wakw chief regalia came to be put on display.

Seeing You and Looking Back: Display as Land Rights and Title

Column

Toby Katrine Lawrence is a curator, writer and researcher based between Kelowna and Gabriola Island, in British Columbia, on the traditional lands of the Syilx and Snuneymuxw peoples. She has held curatorial and programming positions with the Vancouver Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and Nanaimo Art Gallery, and is currently curator of the Kelowna Art Gallery.

The teepee has been an ever-present feature of BUSH gallery; but it does not stand as the gallery. Erected two years ago, the structure has weathered, presented and housed many of the actions of BUSH gallery. At the BUSH gallery Writers Union retreat in August 2017, the structure was dismantled; the canvas too brittle to maintain its architectural function after having ripped apart in a windstorm earlier in the summer.

After travelling to BUSH gallery in Secwepemc territory from Vancouver, Tarah Hogue joined Tania Willard in dismantling the teepee, dragging its wooden poles to be stacked for future purposes. Tarah recounted a re-linking of body to land in the reverberations between body, land and wooden pole, activated through their preparatory performance of sorts and marking the beginning of the retreat.

_“The teepee poles are so dry and have deep cracks that run almost to the core of the poles at certain points, so when we dragged them across the ground, the sound of their being dragged was amplified. The sound was like a small echo chamber, hollow and almost electronic_.” (Hogue)

Following our Sunday afternoon convergence of friends and colleagues at the annual Kamloopa Pow-wow, Tarah, Tania, Peter Morin, Ashok Mathur and I gathered at Quaaout Lodge on Little Shuswap Lake, and then at BUSH gallery the next day. The pow-wow, as a shared point of departure, centred Indigeneity and located experience as material for making, performing and thinking together.[^1] At dinner, Tarah expressed her need to drag more poles – to utilize acts of labour to connect to place, to land, performance, situation. At breakfast, Peter asked us what it was we wanted to build. Though framed through colonial language, as Peter acknowledged, his question opened space for intellectual, textual, spatial and embodied restructuring of the ways in which Indigenous praxes, and more specifically Indigenous performance praxes, are approached in art writing and art galleries– and beyond.

Monday, we cut up the teepee. We laid out the teepee canvas. We intuitively assumed roles. Within this performative action, we marked the circumference of the canvas staking pink survey flags. Peter, with a blue raven rattle, and Tania, with tin can rattle, circumnavigated the canvas as Peter sang.

“\_Just as in our performance, we ripped long lengths of canvas fabric, so did the wind enact the inevitability of this temporary structure.\_” (Willard)

The canvas ripped easily along its weave and we made cuts to direct the tearing; the canvas pulled by two of our bodies in order to arrive at segments large enough for specific, repurposed functions. The largest uncompromised section was kept to be suspended in the trees as a movie screen (_Skinwalkers: The Navajo Mysteries. The Daughters of Dawn_. Netflix search: “Native American”). Smaller segments were used to produce solar prints and their edges finished with pinking shears; the excess made into ribbons. The remaining canvas segments were gathered for future uses. Enshrouded by the dense forest-fire smoke that permeated the region and crouched within the teepee’s flag outline, we cut ribbon and produced a series of solar prints out of rope, rattles, rocks, ribbons, collective writing, laser-cut “SITE/ation” text and toys. Ashok prepared bison meatballs, shish kebobs and Chilliwack corn.

Wednesday, when I returned, the flags had been removed. The activities were now concentrated around the forested area and the trees that supported the large piece of repurposed canvas. No longer in its distinguishable form, the tee-pee remained through abstraction. The screen became the conversational “tee-pee.” The location shifted along with the referent. Now in segments, the canvas marks as it is marked. Material for objects and surface for solar prints, lunar experiments, backdrop for movies, foreground for shadow play, hunting ground for insects…

In one of my trips back and forth from Kelowna to BUSH gallery, I was charged with transporting the 12 large Mylar panels produced for Ashok’s 2009 installation of _A Little Distillery in Nowgong_. Together, we hung them to weather and to remain in the trees at the edge of the forest with cord coloured the same pink as the survey flags. A twofold final installation. The final action of the BUSH gallery Writers Union retreat took shape through our collective curation of Ashok’s panels and as a collaborative performance by Ashok and Peter. Backed by the layering of _A Little Distillery in Nowgong_ and the teepee, illuminated by a work light, Ashok read aloud _Loveruage: A Dance in Three Parts_, accompanied by strategically timed drumming by Peter. The text from one of the Mylar panels was incidentally visible through the canvas. And we all listened.

Changed by and changing the actions of its inhabitants and guests, the architecture of the bush is reciprocal. The collective and individual actions under the auspices of BUSH gallery are the materials that form BUSH gallery. The ephemerality and the place-based conceptual space supports the fluid architecture of the teepee. As an Indigenous “sovereign display territor\[y\],”[^2] BUSH gallery functions beyond the systemized conventions of dominant culture exhibition spaces. In the Land.

[^1]: David Garneau, “Imaginary Spaces of Conciliation and Reconciliation: Art, Curation, and Healing,” in _Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action In and Beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada_, edited by Dylan Robinson and Keavy Martin (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016), 35.

Toby Katrine Lawrence reflects on the collaborative activities and performances that took place at the BUSH gallery Writers Union Retreat, especially the treatment and dismantling of the teepee that had been a feature of BUSH for two years.

Artefact: Architecture of the Bush

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