NW Native Art • The Southern Shelf • Reading 7 of 8

What Is Not Shared: Ceremony, Privacy, and the Right to Silence

Every course on this coast reaches a door. This week is about the door. Who holds it, why it is closed, what it cost to keep it closed, and what an honest student does standing outside it.

If you did the Northern track, its seventh reading walked you through the ku.éex' and the masks in motion, because Tlingit tradition has developed public ways of sharing some of that knowledge. This reading will not do the Southern equivalent. Coast Salish communities protect their winter ceremonial life from public description, and this course honors that. But the protection itself, why it exists, how it works, what it survived, is a documented subject with a scholarship of its own, and understanding it may teach you more about Coast Salish art than any object could. Not-sharing is not a gap in the culture. It is a working institution.

Knowledge is property here

Begin with a legal fact that predates every archive on this coast. In Coast Salish law, knowledge is owned. The anthropologist Brian Thom, summarizing Hul'q'umi'num' categories, describes snew [ORTHO], private advice and inherited family knowledge covering everything from ritual to craft skill to the locations of food. He also describes ts'exwtén [ORTHO], inherited ritual property, and intangible House property, hereditary names, songs, and histories. Each comes with, in his words, very well-defined, well-respected criteria for the use, display and performance (Thom, 2003). Even craft knowledge was proprietary. The ethnographer Homer Barnett recorded that it was a serious personal offense to watch a canoe-maker at work (Barnett, 1955, via Thom, 2003).

So make the first correction in your own head. The boundary around ceremony is not shyness, trauma response, or superstition. It is intellectual property law, functioning, in a legal tradition older than the countries that surround it. You met the economic half of this system in Week 2 and Week 5. Witnesses at a naming are called, gifted, and paid, because they become the living record, obliged to remember and to testify (Thom, 2003). A society that pays its witnesses understands exactly what information is worth.

What secrecy protected, and what it survived

Wayne Suttles argued, and you have now met this idea three times, that wealthy Coast Salish families concealed the sources of their power, including images of them, and that this concealment shaped the whole profile of Salish art (Suttles, 1987). Pamela Amoss named it directly in a paper title, the power of secrecy among the Coast Salish (Amoss, 1977). Deliberate ambiguity of representation, so that a carving suggests without disclosing, is a described feature of the historic style.

Then secrecy acquired a second job. From 1885 to 1951, Canadian law criminalized the potlatch and the winter dance. The American assimilation apparatus did its own version, and Week 4 showed you a longhouse burned by a government agent (Cole & Chaikin, 1990). For three generations, practicing the central institutions of Coast Salish life was illegal. Communities kept them anyway, quietly. Understand what that means for the boundary you are standing at. The habit of not showing outsiders was reinforced by decades in which showing outsiders meant prosecution. Secrecy was survival twice over, spiritually by the tradition’s own law and literally under someone else’s.

The books that should not have been written, and the ones that found another way

Anthropology did not always honor the door. In the twentieth century, scholars published descriptions of Coast Salish winter ceremonial life. Amoss’s own 1978 monograph, psychiatric studies, detailed ethnographies. Those books exist. This course cites their existence and declines to mine them. Be fair to their era while being clear about it. Amoss worked with community contacts and was invited to witness what she saw, but she published in a time before OCAP, CARE, or any formal framework of community consent over circulation existed, and the communities never agreed that what was shared with one trusted guest belonged to every library patron forever. The later scholarship states the problem plainly. Thom, drawing on Crisca Bierwert, writes that anthropologists caused problems by publishing details shared with them, with little knowledge of how widely the material would circulate, and that the ideas of public domain and academic freedom come up against local concepts of intellectual property (Thom, 2003; Bierwert, 1999).

Bierwert’s own book is the counter-model, an ethnography that writes around protected knowledge, treating the longhouse as a social institution while refusing ritual exposition (Bierwert, 1999). Suttles himself published on the persistence of the winter dance, its health, its growth, without describing its content (Suttles, 1987). And Bruce Miller documents the scale of the living practice in exactly that outside-the-door register. As recently as twenty years ago winter spirit dancing drew few new participants, and today hundreds crowd into longhouses for extended nights of watching and supporting the dancers (Miller, 2007). The tradition is not fading. It is thriving, on its own terms, off the record. That sentence is the whole reading in miniature.

The living reality has even surfaced in a courtroom. In 1992 the British Columbia Supreme Court decided Thomas v. Norris, a suit brought by a man over a forced longhouse initiation. The court awarded damages and held that tradition does not license assault (Thomas v. Norris, 1992). This course cites the case for two facts only. The practice is alive enough to generate litigation, and communities argue internally about its edges, like every living legal order. The judgment’s descriptive passages stay where they are. [CO-AUTHOR: whether this paragraph stays at all.]

What is public, and who decides

The boundary is not a wall around everything. Communities decide, ceremony by ceremony, what is open, and watching those decisions is the real lesson.

The Lummi Nation’s First Salmon Ceremony has been held openly, hundreds of guests, the first salmon shared in small cups, the bones returned to the water in gratitude (Northwest Treaty Tribes, n.d.). Drive one river south and the calculus changes. Swinomish and Nooksack hold theirs for tribal members only (Northwest Treaty Tribes, n.d.). Same ceremony family, different sovereign choices. Canoe Journey protocols are performed in public by design, canoes pausing offshore, the speaker asking the host nation’s permission to come ashore, songs shared by permission in the evenings (Duwamish Tribe, n.d.). Naming ceremonies call public witnesses on purpose. That is what makes the name stick.

And the museums have begun to learn the grammar. Owners of certain masks have negotiated with institutions including the UBC Museum of Anthropology so that pieces in the collections are not displayed or otherwise inappropriately revealed (Thom, 2003, citing Bierwert). The Burke Museum maintains a Native American advisory board and an active repatriation program returning ceremonial objects to religious leaders who need them (Burke Museum, n.d.). A museum agreeing not to show something it owns is a remarkable event in Western institutional history, and it happened because Coast Salish communities insisted their law applied to their things.

Your own era has names for the general principle. One is OCAP, First Nations ownership, control, access, and possession of information about themselves. Another is the CARE principles for Indigenous data governance (First Nations Information Governance Centre, n.d.; Carroll et al., 2020). When you meet these frameworks in a data science or public health context someday, know that on this coast they are not new ethics. They are old law, finally translated.

Standing outside the door

So what does an honest student do? Three things.

Learn what is offered. The public record this course is built from, the scholarship, the artists’ own statements, the tribes’ own websites, is generous. Take it.

Do not pry at the rest. Not in the library, where the old extractive books sit. Not online. Not with Coast Salish classmates, who owe you nothing on this subject. If curiosity nags, notice that the North’s ceremony reading exists, where a tradition that shares differently shares what it chooses. The difference between the two readings is itself the curriculum.

And understand what you are looking at when you see the door hold. A people kept their central institutions through sixty-six years of criminalization, through the archives’ acquisitiveness, and through anthropology’s cataloguing century, and they did it partly by perfecting the art of not telling you. That is not the absence of heritage. On this coast, it may be heritage’s most accomplished form.

Looking ahead: The last week brings the artists working right now, the spindle whorl sixteen feet tall in an airport, and what it means to be a good guest in a tradition’s future.

For key terms and reflection questions, see this week’s Weekly Guide.

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