Art

A stunning retrospective highlighting the playfulness, power, and subversive spirit of Northwest Coast Indigenous artist Sonny Assu.

Through large-scale installation, sculpture, photography, printmaking, and painting, Sonny Assu merges the aesthetics of Indigenous iconography with a pop-art sensibility. This stunning retrospective spans over a decade of Assu’s career, highlighting more than 120 full-colour works, including several never-before-exhibited pieces.

Through analytical essays and personal narratives, Richard Van Camp, Marianne Nicolson, Candice Hopkins, and Ellyn Walker provide brilliant commentary on Assu’s practice, its meaning in the context of contemporary art, and its wider significance in the struggle for Indigenous cultural and political autonomy. Exploring themes of Indigenous rights, consumerism, branding, humour, and the ways in which history informs contemporary ideas and identities, Sonny Assu: A Selective History is the first major full-scale book to pay tribute to this important, prolific, and vibrant figure in the Canadian contemporary art world.

Reviews
"Educators and students will find numerous access points and opportunities to examine our nation's beliefs, actions, words, and legislation. [This book] also invites readers to knowledgeably and compassionately consider how we can reconcile all that has been with all that can be"—Canadian Indigenous Books for Schools 2018-2019

"Framed by contributions from some of our brightest Indigenous intellectuals, Sonny Assu’s canvas is more than an examination of how Indigenous Peoples respond to the Canadian experience. His witty and gentle hand offers Canada a mirror to consider its own scarred identity."—Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas

“This brilliant book not only provides readers with an overview of the career of one of Canada’s most important artists but also links his development to the contemporary creative practices of First Nations artists in BC politics and history—the intersection of stories with visual expression. All this unveils historical truths and artistic insights that elevate Sonny Assu to greatness." —Dr. Ron Burnett, Order of Canada, Order of BC. President and vice-chancellor, Emily Carr University of Art and Design

Educator Information
Recommended for Grades 9-12 for these subjects: Art Education, Social Justice, Social Studies.

Additional Information
224 pages | 8.50" x 10.00"

Salish Blankets presents a new perspective on Salish weaving through technical and anthropological lenses. Worn as ceremonial robes, the blankets are complex objects said to preexist in the supernatural realm and made manifest in the natural world through ancestral guidance. The blankets are protective garments that at times of great life changes—birth, marriage, death—offer emotional strength and mental focus. A blanket can help establish the owner’s standing in the community and demonstrate a weaver’s technical expertise and artistic vision. The object, the maker, the wearer, and the community are bound and transformed through the creation and use of the blanket.

Drawing on first-person accounts of Salish community members, object analysis, and earlier ethnographic sources, the authors offer a wide-ranging material culture study of Coast Salish lifeways. Salish Blankets explores the design, color/pigmentation, meaning, materials, and process of weaving and examines its historical and cultural contexts.

Violence against Indigenous women in Canada is an ongoing crisis, with roots deep in the nation’s colonial history. Despite numerous policies and programs developed to address the issue, Indigenous women continue to be targeted for violence at disproportionate rates. What insights can literature contribute where dominant anti-violence initiatives have failed? Centring the voices of contemporary Indigenous women writers, this book argues for the important role that literature and storytelling can play in response to gendered colonial violence.

Indigenous communities have been organizing against violence since newcomers first arrived, but the cases of missing and murdered women have only recently garnered broad public attention. Violence Against Indigenous Women joins the conversation by analyzing the socially interventionist work of Indigenous women poets, playwrights, filmmakers, and fiction-writers. Organized as a series of case studies that pair literary interventions with recent sites of activism and policy-critique, the book puts literature in dialogue with anti-violence debate to illuminate new pathways toward action.

With the advent of provincial and national inquiries into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, a larger public conversation is now underway. Indigenous women’s literature is a critical site of knowledge-making and critique. Violence Against Indigenous Women provides a foundation for reading this literature in the context of Indigenous feminist scholarship and activism and the ongoing intellectual history of Indigenous women’s resistance.

Reviews
“This book makes an important – indeed, urgent – contribution to knowledge about violence against Indigenous women that ought to become required reading for politicians, activists, policy-makers, scholars, writers, and artists engaged in responding to this ongoing crisis.”
— Amber Dean, McMaster University, author of Remembering Vancouver’s Disappeared Women: Settler Colonialism and the Difficulty of Inheritance

"Hargreaves ... examines how stories of individual tragedies have been memorialized in venues such as human rights reports, poems, films, and plays. She convincingly explains that statistics and research projects produced with the best intentions may serve to reinforce the very colonial power dynamics that prevent the emergence of transformative solutions in the struggle to end violence against Indigenous women. ... For those in the field of comparative narrative criticism, it’s a work sure to inspire much discussion, debate, and reflection."
— Publisher's Weekly

Educator Information
This book would be useful for Indigenous Studies, Women's Studies, Literary Criticism, and Canadian Literature courses, or courses where activism is a key theme.

Additional Information
296 pages | 6.00" x 9.00"

Arts of Engagement focuses on the role that music, film, visual art, and Indigenous cultural practices play in and beyond Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools. Contributors here examine the impact of aesthetic and sensory experience in residential school history, at TRC national and community events, and in artwork and exhibitions not affiliated with the TRC. Using the framework of “aesthetic action,” the essays expand the frame of aesthetics to include visual, aural, and kinetic sensory experience, and question the ways in which key components of reconciliation such as apology and witnessing have social and political effects for residential school survivors, intergenerational survivors, and settler publics.

This volume makes an important contribution to the discourse on reconciliation in Canada by examining how aesthetic and sensory interventions offer alternative forms of political action and healing. These forms of aesthetic action encompass both sensory appeals to empathize and invitations to join together in alliance and new relationships as well as refusals to follow the normative scripts of reconciliation. Such refusals are important in their assertion of new terms for conciliation, terms that resist the imperatives of reconciliation as a form of resolution.

This collection charts new ground by detailing the aesthetic grammars of reconciliation and conciliation. The authors document the efficacies of the TRC for the various Indigenous and settler publics it has addressed, and consider the future aesthetic actions that must be taken in order to move beyond what many have identified as the TRC’s political limitations.

Educator Information
This book would be useful for Art, Art & Politics, Social Science, and Indigenous Studies courses.

Additional Information
382 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | 24 colour illustrations, 2 printed music items

Edited by Dylan Robinson and Keavy Martin

The Haida are islanders first and foremost - a people apart. Discover the source of their distinctive culture and the inspirations for their arts.

The Mi’kmaq of Atlantic Canada were here for thousands of years before the arrival of European peoples. Niniskamijinaqik / Ancestral Images: The Mi’kmaq in Art and Photography presents their unique culture and way of life through the remarkable and sometime complex lives of individuals, as depicted in artwork or photography.

The opening images in this collection were created by the Mi’kmaq themselves: portrayals of human beings carved into the rock formations of Nova Scotia. Then there are the earliest surviving European depictions of Mi’kmaq, decorations on the maps of Samuel de Champlain. Finally we see portraits of Mi’kmaw individuals, ancestors in whom we see their “humanity frozen in the stillness of a photograph,” as the writers of the book’s foreword describe.

Niniskamijinaqik / Ancestral Images includes 94 compelling pieces of art and photography, chosen from more than a thousand extant portraits in different media, that show the Mi’kmaw people. Each image is an entry point to deeply personal history, a small moment or single person transformed into vivid immediacy for the reader.

Additional Information
128 pages | 10.00" x 8.00" | b&w photographs

The Land We Are is a stunning collection of writing and art that interrogates the current era of reconciliation in Canada. Using visual, poetic, and theoretical language, the contributors approach reconciliation as a problematic narrative about Indigenous-settler relations, but also as a site where conversations about a just future must occur. The result of a four-year collaboration between artists and scholars engaged in resurgence and decolonization, The Land We Are is a moving dialogue that blurs the boundaries between activism, research, and the arts.

The contributors to this book include leading artists and scholars engaged in questions of resurgence, restitution, and decolonization.

Contributors: Jordan Abel, Leah Decter, Jonathan Dewar, David Garneau, Ayumi Goto, Allison Hargreaves, Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill, Jaimie Isaac, David Jefferess, Layli Long Soldier, The New BC Indian Art and Welfare Society Collective, Sophie McCall, Peter Morin, Skeena Reece, Dylan Robinson, Sandra Semchuk, Adrian Stimson, Clement Yeh, and Keren Zaiontz.

Reviews
"This beautifully produced, richly illustrated volume not only offers readers a visual journey into the featured artistic installations and performance pieces, but through its creative use of text and graphic design is itself an artistic statement on reconciliation." --Winnipeg Free Press

Educator Information
Recommended for students in grades 11 and 12, as well as at a college/university level.  

Additional Information
240 pages | 6.50" x 9.50"

When you visit southeast Alaska you encounter the Tlingit Indians and their very rich lands, diversified culture and wondrous art forms. You can visit from cruise ships, from the Alaska Ferry system, from private boats, from the air, or by following the highway systems though Hyder, Skagway or Haines.

The richness of the Tlingit culture flows from the incredible diversity and abundance of the surrounding seas: its fish, whales and sea life, the prolific clam beaches, and the incredible wealth from the spawning fish that feed the bears and eagles and nutrify the dense coniferous forest. The ease with which the natives could extract a good living provided much extra time to devote to developing an extraordinarily rich culture and a prolific art, as well as the warring and slave trading that set the northwest coast peoples apart from the other more food-deprived North American native peoples.

This book will give you a glimpse into the richess of their culture and art and afford you some understanding how the Tlingit evolved as part of this productive land.

On a winter’s day in 1889, Tsimshian Chief Arthur Wellington Clah went to Hannah and Richard Maynard’s photography studio in Victoria “to give myself likeness.” In Images from the Likeness House, Dan Savard explores the relationship between First Peoples in British Columbia, Alaska and Washington and the photographers who made images of them from the late 1850s to the 1920s. He gives examples of the great technological advancements that took place, from wet-glass-plate to nitrate-film negatives, showing the images in their original state, not cropped, corrected or retouched.

This is not only an important book about photography, but also a visual statement about perception (and misperception), cultural change and survival. Images from the Likeness House will appeal to ethnographers, photographers, art lovers and anyone interested in the history of BC, Alaska and Washington.

Additional Information
224 pages | 9.30" x 10.30"

A gorgeous retrospective on the transformation of Inuit art in the 20th century, mirroring the vast and poignant cultural changes in the North.

In response to a rapidly changing Arctic environment, Inuit have had to cope with the transition from a traditional lifestyle to the disturbing realities of globalization and climate change. Inuit art in the latter half of the 20th century reflects the reciprocal stimulus of contact with Euro-Canadians and embodies the evolution of a modern Inuit aesthetic that springs from an ancient cultural context, creating an exciting new hybridized art form. Inuit Modern: Art from the Samuel and Esther Sarick Collection situates modern Inuit art within a larger framework that reinterprets the Canadian Arctic.

Essays by leading Canadian scholars in the field including Ingo Hessel, Robert McGhee, Christine Laloude, Heather Igloliorte, Dorothy Eber and Bernadette Driscoll Engelstad examine the social, political and cultural transformation through the dynamic lens of colonial influence and agency. Inuit Modern also features interviews with David Ruben Piqtoukun and Zacharias Kunuk.

Reviews
"The work of Inuit artists has continually evolved in response to the industrialized, bureaucratic culture encroaching from the south. Inuit Modern, an opulent new coffee-table book, displays the astonishing results. The 175 pieces beautifully reproduced here span the last century." — Georgia Straight

"This book is full of treasures from one of the world's most comprehensive collections of Inuit art. With more than 175 works by Inuit artists, the reader is taken on a journey of the Inuit aesthetic as it evolves from its from traditional roots to a more contemporary and globalized art form." — Globe & Mail Top 100 for 2010

Additional Information
256 pages | 10.00" x 11.10"

The first book, Clearing a Path: New Ways of Seeing Traditional Indigenous Art, is edited by First Nations University of Canada scholar Carmen Robertson and noted Saskatchewan Métis artist and scholar, Sherry Farrell Racette.

"In 2005, as part of the province's centennial celebrations, the Saskatchewan Arts Board contracted Carmen Robertson and Sherry Farrell Racette to curate an exhibition which would bring together a diverse group of contemporary artists working in traditional Indigenous media," says Brian Mlazgar, publications manager of the CPRC. "When Clearing a Path opened in November of that year, few could have predicted the strength of its work. More than three years later, the exhibition continues to flourish and tour."

The exhibition catalogue includes photographs of the works and brief biographies of the 21 participating artists. Artists' statements for many of the pieces provide unique insight into the artistic process and the artist's connection to his or her history and traditions. In two introductory essays, Robertson and Farrell Racette explore the history of traditional artists and their art: the criminalization of indigenous arts and ceremonies, the subsequent loss of culture through colonization and more recently, the struggle to have their work considered "art" rather than "handicraft."

THE BLOOD RESERVE (Canada's largest native reserve) is a land of wind, prairie, mountains, and rivers, a land of dramatic physical beauty. It is the setting for George Webber's stunning collection of black-and-white photographs, People of the Blood. From the spring of 1992 until the late summer of 2005, Webber journeyed to the reserve from his home in Calgary, documenting his experiences on film and with pen and paper.

People of the Blood is an intimate and compelling story of the reserve's people and stark, sweeping landscape told in black and white. In his quest to photograph and document hope and darkness in the western Canadian landscape, Webber has ceaselessly photographed the people, small communities, and the land for a quarter century. People of the Blood documents a photographic journey spanning over a decade, one that put Webber in contact with the strong people of the Blood, their spiritual practices, their hopes, their challenges, wins and losses.

With grace and compassion, Webber shows us the sweat lodge and the sun dance, the faces of hope and despair, rodeos and funerals, quiet kitchen conversations and heartbreaking devastation.

Never an interloper, Webber's quiet presence is that of a documentary photographer of the first order, which seeks to tell the stories of the people and the land in which they live. As it moves between the realms of the spiritual world and harsh reality, interspersed with the incredible beauty of the landscape, People of the Blood captures the light in the darkness, the hope that exists in the Blood people, who live in unforgiving landscapes and social circumstances. In his grainy, dark imagery, Webber continues to capture these sparks in what might seem to be barren surroundings.

William Beynon was born in 1888 in Victoria to a Welsh father and a Tsimshian mother. He was an accomplished ethnographer and had a long career documenting the traditions of the Tsimshian, Nisga'a, and Gitksan. In 1945 he attended and actively participated in five days of potlatches and totem pole raisings at Gitksan village of Gitsegukla. There he compiled four notebooks containing detailed and often verbatim information about the events he witnessed. For over 50 years these notebooks have seen limited circulation among specialists, who have long recognized them as the most perceptive and complete account of potlatching ever recorded.

In Potlatch at Gitsegukla the almost 200 pages of the notebooks are published for the first time. Sketches and a selection of photographs taken by Beynon are also included (augmented by photographs taken by Wilson Duff in 1952). In addition to meticulously transcribing and annotating the text of the notebooks, Margaret Anderson and Marjorie Halpin provide a comprehensive introduction that puts Beynon's account into a Gitskan cultural perspective, as well as extensive appendices listing names, places, and Gitskan terms in the notebooks. There is also an excellent timeline of key events in Gitskan history by James McDonald and Jennifer Joseph.

William Beynon's notebooks are among the most significant written records of Northwest coast potlatching and are an unsurpassed resource documenting these activities among the Gitskan. This rare, first-hand, ethnographic account of a potlatch reveals the wonderful complexities of the events that took place in Gitsegukla in 1945.

Additional Information
296 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Paperback 

The button blanket is eye-catching, prestigious and treasured -- one of the most spectacular embellishments to the Indian culture of the Northwest Coast and a unique form of graphic and narrative art. The traditional crest-style robe is the sister of the totem pole and, like the pole, proclaims hereditary rights, obligations and powers. Unlike the pole, about which countless books and papers have been written, the button blanket has had no chroniclers. This is not only the first major publication to focus on button blankets but also the first oral history about them and their place in the culture of the Northwest Coast. Those interviewed include speakers from six of the seven major Northwest Coast Indian groups. Elders, designers, blanket makers, and historians, each has a voice, but all do not conform to any one theory about the ceremonial robe. Rather, the book is a search for the truth about the historical and contemporary role and traditions of the blanket, as those relate to the past and present Indian way of life on the Pacific Northwest Coast.