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

Seeing the Salish Sea: What Coast Salish Art Really Is

How to look before you look. The peoples of the Salish Sea, a visual language of circles and crescents, and the long insult of being called “less.”

Start with the water. The Salish Sea runs from Olympia at the bottom of Puget Sound to the top of the Strait of Georgia, taking in the San Juan and Gulf Islands and the Strait of Juan de Fuca on the way. The peoples of this course have lived around it for more than ten thousand years (Burke Museum, n.d.-a). If you live anywhere within sight of these waters, look out the window. That is the classroom.

“Coast Salish” is first a language grouping, a family of roughly two dozen related languages with many dialects, and by extension the peoples who speak them. Lushootseed around Puget Sound. Halkomelem on the Fraser and across the Gulf Islands, including Musqueam and Cowichan. Northern Straits Salish along the border waters, whose dialects include Saanich, Samish, Songhees, and Lummi, the Xwlemi Chosen [ORTHO] of the Lhaq'temish, the People of the Sea. Klallam across the Strait. Squamish, Sechelt, Nooksack, Twana, Comox, and more (Burke Museum, n.d.-a). One caution before we go further. Many of the tribal names on modern maps, Tulalip and Muckleshoot among them, name reservations where several distinct peoples were consolidated after the treaties, not single ancient tribes. Each people has its own name for itself. Learn the name a community uses, and use it.

A different visual language, not a lesser one

The North (Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian) builds its art from the Formline system, continuous swelling and tapering lines organized into ovoids and U-forms. If you have done the Northern track’s first reading, you know that grammar already.

Coast Salish design is a different language with its own grammar. Its core vocabulary is four elements. The circle (and oval). The crescent. The trigon, a three-pointed wedge form. And the extended crescent, the long curved element that resembles but is not the North’s U-form (Burke Museum, n.d.-b; University of Victoria Legacy Art Galleries, 2015). This is how the Puyallup artist Shaun Peterson (Qwalsius) teaches the system, and it is how this course will use it. Where Northern Formline draws the eye along an unbroken positive line, Salish design works by removal. The historic style is low-relief carving in wood, bone, antler, and stone, where the carver cuts away the crescents and trigons and the image is what remains. The elements you “see” are very often the negative spaces. Peterson offers a picture worth keeping. Imagine a calm body of water and drop a pebble in, and the elements are the ripples carrying outward from the center (University of Victoria Legacy Art Galleries, 2015).

Carriers of the tradition also teach the meanings the elements can hold. D. Michael Pavel (Skokomish/Twana), writing in the S'abadeb exhibition catalogue, relays his uncle’s teaching that the outline brings the whole together, the circle is unity, the crescent is history, and the trigon is completion, its fourth point living inside the form (Brotherton, 2008). Hold that the way it is offered. These meanings are a family’s teaching, published with permission, not a code chart that unlocks every carving on the coast. [CO-AUTHOR: whether to foreground, reframe, or replace this teaching.]

The spindle whorl

Every visual tradition has an object that concentrates it. In the North it might be the bentwood box or the Chilkat robe. In the South it is the spindle whorl, a carved disc of wood or bone that a spinner slid onto her spindle shaft as a flywheel while she spun mountain goat and dog wool into yarn. Some of the most sophisticated Coast Salish images that survive from the nineteenth century live on spindle whorls, and the carvings faced the spinner, revolving before her as she worked. Scholars suggest the imagery brought power to the woman spinning and to those who would wear what she made (Burke Museum, n.d.-b). Notice what that tells you about this tradition. Some of its greatest art was made for a woman’s working tool, to be seen by her, in motion, in use. Art was not separate from work, and much of it was not made for public display at all.

That last point matters more here than almost anywhere on the coast. Wayne Suttles, the anthropologist who spent his career with Coast Salish communities, argued that the South produced comparatively less carving and painting partly because wealthy families deliberately concealed the sources of their spiritual power, including images of them (Suttles, 1987). Where a Northern house shouted its crests from a fifty-foot pole, a Salish family’s most important possessions might never be seen by outsiders at all. Keep this in your pocket. It returns in Week 7, and it explains more about this course than any other single fact.

The long insult

Now the uncomfortable part. For most of the twentieth century, museums, collectors, and more than a few scholars treated Coast Salish art as a poor cousin, less flamboyant than Kwakwaka’wakw theatre, less refined than Haida formline, barely worth collecting. The S'abadeb catalogue and the scholarship around it document the dismissal and take it apart (Brotherton, 2008; Jonaitis, 2009). Suttles’s essay in that catalogue, “The Recognition of Coast Salish Art,” traces how the very idea of one “Northwest Coast art style,” measured on Northern terms, guaranteed the South would be graded as a deficient version of somebody else’s grammar (Brotherton, 2008).

Seattle itself is a case study. The totem pole that went up in Pioneer Square in 1899 was a Tlingit pole, stolen from an Alaskan village, raised in a Coast Salish city that never carved crest totem poles at all. The Salish monumental forms were different. Think carved interior house posts, grave figures, and welcome figures standing at the beach with arms open to arriving canoes (Burke Museum, n.d.-b; Farr, 2015). A century of tourists learned to see “Indian art” in Seattle through an imported Northern object, while the local tradition sat unrecognized in plain sight. When you notice a “totem pole” in a Puget Sound town today, ask it the first question of this course. Whose visual language are you actually speaking?

The turn

The correction arrived in living memory, led by the artists themselves. In the early 1980s, a young Musqueam artist named Susan Point sat down with what little published research existed and began making work in strict Coast Salish design at a moment when galleries wanted Northern Formline or nothing (The Canadian Encyclopedia, n.d.). She kept at it until the market and museums both moved. In 2008 the Seattle Art Museum mounted S'abadeb, The Gifts, the first major exhibition devoted to Coast Salish art, over 175 works, traveling to Phoenix and Victoria (Brotherton, 2008; Jonaitis, 2009). Private collections like Salish Weave were built specifically to support artists reviving the tradition (Salish Weave, n.d.). By Week 8 you will meet the generation that grew up inside that turn.

Here is the through-line to carry for eight weeks. Coast Salish art was never missing. It was working: spinning wool, holding up houses, welcoming canoes, marking graves, and keeping its most powerful images deliberately out of sight. A tradition that does not perform for strangers is easy for strangers to underestimate. Do not repeat their mistake.

If you are Coast Salish and starting from a single thread

Looking ahead: Next week the canvas is the body itself. Heads shaped in the cradle, labrets worn in the lip, and what those marks said about who a person was.

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

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