Charlotte Townsend-Gault

Outside things inside: relative status on the Northwest coast

Abstract Indigenous people in Canada often bring attention to the continuities between their pasts and their presents. Such continuity is evident in the perpetual play of status concerns and their adaptation to relations between Native and non-Native. Status display remains active for new reasons and takes new forms in contemporary art. It is suggested that the relative status of the First Nations peoples in British Columbia, outsiders within the state which formed around them and defined them, plays out in paradoxical ways that deserve more attention. Pragmatically observable social facts are transformed into affective fields through culturally specific materials and ‘things’. In the attempt to evade race-based representations attention to culturally specific materials offers a way to pick up on continuities in the affective relationship between artist and audience.

Sea-lion whiskers and spray-crete: the affect of Indigenous status in contemporary British Columbia

Two materials, disparate by some reckonings, are considered for the ways in which both are imbricated in contemporary status display. It is suggested that the role of status hierarchies in the public address of the Indigenous societies in British Columbia has been overlooked and that, due to the affective response they invoke, materials that represent these hierarchies are implicated in the contradictory tensions between display and disguise that characterize current status relations.