My time on the island was too short. It was a 4 1/2 hour drive from Nanaimo (including a wrong turn it Courtney – don’t take the second exit unless you want the cow-path tour). The day was supposed to be a downpour, but turned-out to be clear and hot. It was a race to get lunch at the store and get over to the Big House to see the dance performance once the ferry docked. It’s a 1.5 km walk, so if you ever do the trip, bear that in mind or you will be running and eating at the same time like I was.

The dances were really well done, focusing on a cast of young peformers, the littlest of whom was 3. The last number was the “happy dance” were everyone in the crowd was invited by the dancers to join in. It ended with the kids wading into the crowd, shaking everyone’s hands and thanking them for coming.

The former St. Michael’s Residential School adjoins the U’mista Cultural Center on the water front. It stands-out in its decrepit state, weathering away like an old stump – the site of much pain and suffering in the community.

As I slowly worked my way back to town, the image of my cousin running towards me in the distance cued me to the fact that the ferry was leaving earlier than I thought. I didn’t get a chance to visit the town this trip. Next time, it will be an overnight trip.

I am so impressed with the village and the Namgis First Nation. The people that I met were friendly and helpful. The speakers at the dance performance genuinely connected with the visitors and explained issues important to the Kwakwaka’wakw people, the environment and their relationship to non-Natives. The last picture I took was a mural painted on the side of a building which read, “Share, Connect, Create, Soul.” That summed-up my experience perfectly.

Special thanks to Barb Cranmer for granting permission for the pictures from the Big House to be posted on this site.

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The upcoming 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver and attempts of VANOC to focus on First Nations culture as an organizing focus makes this paper an interesting read. Below is the conclusion:
Kitsilano Secondary School’s perceived “connection” to the Native community has always been an awkward description for identity reinforcement through the promotion of “Indianness” as a mascot. This has been accomplished by celebrating the school’s name and its Native signifiers. Nicholas Thomas observed that “objects are not what they were made to be, but what they become” (Hawker 13). At Kits, Native art and Native-referenced art, like everything in the school have become the background set to doughnut sales, break-ups, musicals and the daily push of students crowding in and out of the front foyer toward the exits. When needed, the school uses them to assert its identity, albeit a re-circulated, nostalgic and uninformed identity. Meanings and attitudes attached to these pieces have changed over time in some ways. In others, they have remained the same or even slipped back into the discredited government policies of assimilation and revival.

Herein lies the danger of presenting art attached to culture through an educational setting in a contextual vacuum. With no dialogue informing its meaning, and little inclination to use it as entry points for broader discussions of Native issues, students and staff are left to glean meaning from old attitudes and stereotypes. It is a perpetual cycle, yet somewhere beyond the hurdles of bulging curricula and government exams that turn courses into surveys, lies the opportunity to examine what Hawker calls “the profound entanglement of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal societies” and a chance to raise our understanding of “the processes that inform the conflicting, and constantly shifting discourses that speak through and around them” (179).

Rejecting the meaning of the school’s Native art as mascot and tradition identifier, and shifting it to the broader societal challenges faced through the decades and into the future, involving the Native/non-Native relationships, is an exciting prospect. With seismic upgrading, and the possibility of the construction of a new school on the horizon, the opportunity to build new spaces for existing and future art will further help to define constructive meanings for these pieces. To do nothing perpetuates ignorance and denies students and staff a means to meaningful and necessary engagement in issues concerning the common future of Natives and non-Natives.

Hawker, Ronald W. Tales of Ghosts: First Nations Art in British Columbia,
1922-61. Vancouver: U.B.C. Press, 2003.