NW Native Art • The Reading Shelf • Guide 1 of 8

Guide, Week 1. Seeing the Salish Sea

Start with this week’s Reading before diving into this Guide.

Three ways to use this guide. If you are in a live class, read before seminar and bring the questions with you. If you are working around a missed class, write your responses to the thinking questions and you have done the week. If you are fully self-guided, take the questions at your own pace. Nobody is grading your wondering.

Key terms

Salish Sea: the connected waters from south Puget Sound through the Strait of Georgia, including the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the geography that defines the course.
Coast Salish: a family of roughly two dozen related languages and, by extension, the peoples who speak them, from Lushootseed to Halkomelem to Northern Straits.
Circle, crescent, trigon, extended crescent: the four core elements of Coast Salish two-dimensional design, typically carved as negative space in low relief. The extended crescent resembles but is not the Northern U-form.
Trigon: the three-pointed wedge element. In one published family teaching, its fourth point lives inside the form.
Formline: the Northern (Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian) design system of ovoids and U-forms. It is a different visual language, not the standard by which Salish work is measured.
Spindle whorl: the carved disc flywheel of the spinner’s toolkit, and home to some of the most sophisticated surviving Salish imagery.
S'abadeb: “the gifts” (Lushootseed), the 2008 Seattle Art Museum exhibition that marked the mainstream recognition of Coast Salish art.
Welcome figure: the Salish monumental form, a human figure greeting arrivals. Contrast it with the Northern crest pole.

Thinking questions

The reading argues the spindle whorl reveals a theory of what art is for, made for a working woman’s tool, seen in motion, in use. What does your own community consider “real art,” and whose daily tools does that definition leave out?
Suttles argued that wealthy Salish families deliberately concealed images of their power sources. How does an art tradition built on selective invisibility get misjudged by outsiders who equate importance with display?
Seattle learned to see “Indian art” through a stolen Tlingit pole. Where else do you see one nation’s culture standing in for another’s? What work does it take to unlearn a first impression that arrived a century early?
Susan Point began working from the thin published record in 1981 and outlasted a market that wanted Northern Formline. What does her patience say about how art traditions actually recover? Is it individual genius, family duty, market change, or something else?
If Coast Salish design is a language of circles, crescents, and trigons, what would it mean to be literate in it? Find one Salish work online (a Point whorl print, a Peterson welcome figure) and try to name each element you can see, and each one you suspect you cannot.

If you carry Coast Salish heritage

[CO-AUTHOR: direct address paralleling the North guide's heritage block.]

Sources for deeper reading

Brotherton’s S'abadeb catalogue [AMAZON LINK], Suttles’s Coast Salish Essays [AMAZON LINK], and the Burke Museum’s Coast Salish art pages are the strongest doors out of this week.