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

The Future of Coast Salish Art

The generation that put the whorl in the airport and the welcome figure back on the waterfront, the collectors and museums that finally caught up, and what it means to be a good ancestor, and a good guest, in a tradition’s future.

Eight weeks ago this course claimed that Coast Salish art was never missing, only working out of sight and out of the market. This last reading is the receipts. The living artists, named, with dates, who made the recognition happen, and the movements carrying it forward.

The one who would not switch

Every revival has a hinge. For Coast Salish art it is Susan Point, Musqueam, born 1952. She began in 1981 with a jewelry course and a problem. Almost nothing about Salish design had been published, and the galleries wanted Northern Formline from every Native artist on the coast (The Canadian Encyclopedia, n.d.). She worked from the old spindle whorls and refused to switch grammars. Fourteen years later her Flight, a spindle whorl of carved red cedar nearly sixteen feet across, went up as the centerpiece of Vancouver International Airport’s arrivals hall, with Musqueam house posts and her weaving colleagues’ blankets around it (Vancouver International Airport, n.d.). Millions of travelers a year now enter Canada through a Coast Salish spinning tool. The spinner’s private object, from Week 1, scaled to civic architecture. That inversion, inward art learning to speak outward on its own terms, is the story of the whole generation. Point became an Officer of the Order of Canada, and the critical literature on her is now a book-length affair (Watt, 2019).

The public turn

Around and after her, the public space movement gathered. Marvin Oliver, Quinault and Isleta Pueblo, longtime University of Washington professor, put a twenty-six-foot bronze orca fin in a Seattle park and a glass-and-steel spirit canoe over the heads of sick children at Seattle Children’s Hospital before his death in 2019 (University of Washington, 2019). Note his heritage precisely. He was not Coast Salish by descent, but a builder of the tradition’s institutions and teacher of its artists for forty-five years.

Shaun Peterson, Qwalsius, Puyallup, born 1975, carved the first story pole raised on Puyallup land in over half a century while still in his twenties, then in 2010 installed the cedar welcome figure that now stands in Tollefson Plaza, Tacoma, a Salish woman twenty-four feet tall, arms open, on the site of an ancestral village (Farr, 2015). Read his own framing: Seattle is named after our Coast Salish Chief, and Native art is not static; we are part of the present (Farr, 2015). The welcome figure, you know from Week 4, is the Salish monument that always faced outward. The public turn did not borrow the North’s pole. It scaled up the South’s own form.

Across the border the print and serigraph world did parallel work. There is lessLIE, Cowichan, born 1973, whose very name is a decolonizing act. There is Maynard Johnny Jr., Coast Salish and Kwakwaka’wakw, whose designs now ride a BC ferry. And there is Dylan Thomas, Lyackson, born 1986, who builds Salish geometry into mandala-like symmetries, proof the grammar can absorb mathematics and come out still Salish (Salish Weave, n.d.).

The weavers, again

No future-of-the-art reading is honest here without returning to the loom, because the weaving revival is the future arriving fastest. Debra Sparrow and her sisters rebuilt Musqueam weaving from museum pieces beginning in the mid-1980s. Janice George and Buddy Joseph have taught thousands at Squamish and beyond since 2003. Blankets stand openly at ceremonies again (Montecristo Magazine, 2017; Museum of Anthropology at UBC, 2023). When the woolly dog genome was published in Science in 2023, Coast Salish weavers were co-authors, not subjects (Lin et al., 2023). Watch that grammar shift, from being studied to signing the study.

The infrastructure of recognition

Artists made the work, and a new infrastructure carried it. The 2008 S'abadeb exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum, over 175 works, traveling internationally, gave the tradition its scholarly landmark (Brotherton, 2008). The Salish Weave Collection, built by George and Christiane Smyth from 2000 onward specifically to support artists reviving the tradition, has since seeded the National Gallery of Canada, universities, and public galleries with contemporary Salish work (Salish Weave, n.d.; National Gallery of Canada, n.d.). Museums began, unevenly, to honor Salish law about what may be shown, as Week 7 described. And the Canoe Journeys, revived from the 1989 Paddle to Seattle through the 1993 gathering at Bella Bella, now bring thousands together each summer, including the 2019 Paddle to Lummi that some of this course’s readers will remember from their own beach (HistoryLink, n.d.; Northwest Treaty Tribes, 2016). The canoe carries the art, the languages, the protocols, and the young people, all at once.

The unfinished ledger

Do not let the arc read as finished. The appropriation economy persists. Week 5’s Cowichan sweater fight was 2010, not 1910. Most museum baskets still lack their makers’ names. The reef net fleet is a handful of permits. Coast Salish tattoo revival is barely documented. Language programs race demography. Every one of those sentences is an opening where a person now in this course could spend a life. The elders in these readings, Fran James in Lummi country, Julia Jacob behind Ed Carriere, the last weavers behind Debra Sparrow, were exactly that once, one person deciding the thread would not stop with them.

For the guests

And if you are not Coast Salish, this course’s final teaching is about your seat. Buy from the artists, named and living, and from tribal enterprises. Credit the specific nation, never a generic “Salish-inspired.” When the door of Week 7 holds, let it. When a welcome figure opens its arms over a city plaza, understand you are being offered relationship, not merchandise. The South’s art faced inward for millennia, and its turn outward is an act of enormous trust. Be worth it.

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

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