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

Guide, Week 8. The Future of Coast Salish Art

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, you made it. Take the last questions somewhere with a view of the water.

Key terms

Susan Point (Musqueam, b. 1952): the hinge of the revival, who refused to switch to Northern Formline. Flight is her ~16-foot cedar spindle whorl at Vancouver International Airport.
The public turn: inward-facing art learning to speak outward on its own terms, with welcome figures, house posts, and whorls as civic architecture.
Qwalsius, Shaun Peterson (Puyallup, b. 1975): the Tacoma welcome figure (2010) and “Native art is not static.”
Marvin Oliver (1946–2019): Quinault/Isleta Pueblo professor-artist who built the institutions. Precision about heritage matters.
lessLIE, Maynard Johnny Jr., Dylan Thomas: the print generation. A name as decolonizing act, designs on a ferry, Salish geometry meeting mathematics.
S'abadeb (2008): the landmark exhibition. Salish Weave is the collection built to fund the revival.
Canoe Journeys: from the 1989 Paddle to Seattle to the 2019 Paddle to Lummi. The canoe is the tradition’s moving infrastructure.
The unfinished ledger: appropriation, unnamed baskets, a handful of reef net permits, undocumented tattoo revival, language urgency. These are the openings this course leaves you.

Thinking questions

Point’s Flight puts a woman’s spinning tool sixteen feet wide over an international arrivals hall. Trace the object’s journey across this course, Week 1 to Week 8. What had to change in the world, and what refused to change in the design, for that installation to exist?
Peterson scaled up the welcome figure, not the crest pole. Why does it matter that the public turn used the South’s own outward-facing form? What is the equivalent mistake he avoided, and where have you seen other communities make it?
From studied to signing the study, weavers stood as co-authors on the woolly dog paper. Where else in these eight weeks did you watch authority migrate back toward the community? Name three instances and what carried each one.
The reading insists on precision about heritage (Oliver, Johnny, Thomas). Why is precise attribution a form of respect rather than gatekeeping? When does the distinction protect artists, and when could it be weaponized against them?
The unfinished ledger lists openings a student could spend a life on. Pick one. Sketch the first three steps a person in your community could actually take toward it this year.
Here is the last question of the course, both tracks. What does being a good ancestor require of you, and what does being a good guest require, and how will you know which one a given moment is asking for?

If you carry Coast Salish heritage

[CO-AUTHOR block: the send-off. The last words of the course belong to a Coast Salish voice.]

Sources for deeper reading

People Among the People [AMAZON LINK], the S'abadeb catalogue [AMAZON LINK], Contemporary Coast Salish Art [AMAZON LINK], salishweave.com, and the artists’ own sites. Then coastsalish.art, when it opens its doors, for learning the design language hands-on.