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Distributed for University of British Columbia Press

Native Art of the Northwest Coast

A History of Changing Ideas

The Northwest Coast of North America has long been recognized as one of the world’s canonical art zones. This volume records and scrutinizes the history of how and why this has come about. A work of critical historiography, it makes accessible for the first time in one place a broad selection of the 250 years of writing on Northwest Coast art. The contributors – leading scholars, writers, and artists – provide perspectives on the diverse intellectual traditions that have influenced, stimulated, and clashed with each other. In unsettling the conventions that have shaped the idea of Northwest Coast Native art, this book joins the lively, often heated, and now global, debates about what constitutes Native art and who should decide.

1,120 pages | © 2013


Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction: The Idea of Northwest Coast Native Art / Charlotte Townsend-Gault, Jennifer Kramer, and ?i-?e-in

1 Interpreting Cultural Symbols of the People from the Shore / Daisy Sewid-Smith

2 Hilth Hiitinkis -- From the Beach / ?i-?e-in

3 Haida Cosmic / Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas

4 From Explorers to Ethnographers, 1770-1870 / Ira Jacknis

5 Thresholds of Meaning: Voice, Time, and Epistemology in the Archaeological Consideration of Northwest Coast Art / Andrew Martindale

6 Objects and Knowledge: Early Accounts from Ethnographers, and Their Written Records and Collecting Practices, ca. 1880-1930 / Andrea Laforet

7 “That Which Was Most Important”: Louis Shotridge on Crest Art and Clan History / Judith Berman

8 Anthropology of Art: Shifting Paradigms and Practices, 1870s-1950 / Bruce Granville Miller

9 Going by the Book: Missionary Perspectives / John Barker

10 The Dark Years / Gloria Cranmer Webster

11 Surrealists and the New York Avant-Garde, 1920-60 / Marie Mauzé

12 Northwest Coast Art and Canadian National Identity, 1900-50 / Leslie Dawn

13 Art/Craft in the Early Twentieth Century / Scott Watson

14 Welfare Politics, Late Salvage, and Indigenous (In)Visiblity, 1930-60 / Ronald W. Hawker

15Form First, Function Follows: The Use of Formal Analysis in Northwest Coast Art History / Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse

16 Democratization and Northwest Coast Art in the Modern Period: Native Emissaries, Non-Native Connoisseurship, and Consumption / Judith Ostrowitz

17 History and Critique of the “Renaissance” Discourse / Aaron Glass

18 Starting from the Beginning / Marianne Nicolson

19 Shifting Theory, Shifting Publics: The Anthropology of Northwest Coas

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