"Switchbacks: Art, Ownership, and Nuxalk National Identity in Bella Coola, British Columbia" by Jennifer Kramer

Jennifer Kramer

Deposited 2003

Abstract
This dissertation explores how the Nuxalk of Bella Coola, British Columbia negotiate such complex issues as: Who owns culture? What constitutes “authentic” or “traditional” cultural production? How should cultural practices be transmitted to future generations? Where does selling and buying Nuxalk art fit into attempts to regain control of heritage? Why is theft a common concern among the Nuxalk?

To answer these questions I employed the anthropological method of participant-observation at Nuxalk artists' studios, in the Nuxalk-run band school's cultural education classes, and during the activities of everyday Nuxalk in their homes. These field sites afforded me the opportunity to study the rhetoric, reality and results of claiming cultural objects and knowledge as stolen. I charted the fluid character of material culture (such as masks and other regalia) and non-material culture (such as songs and dances) as they moved in and out of the cultural education curriculum, the Western art market and the Western legal system. Overall, I analyzed Nuxalk ambivalent reactions to both ownership and appropriation of Nuxalk culture. This movement of cultural heritage is likened to “switchbacks” on a mountain road, where the Nuxalk oscillate between essential stances and through these recurrent movements create, re-create and validate contemporary Nuxalk identity.

I demonstrate that loss of cultural objects proves Nuxalk culture is valuable through external affirmation. In this way, the Nuxalk use their cultural patrimony to assert their collective national identity. At stake is not only definitions of alienable and inalienable property, but the fact that a unified national identity affords the Nuxalk a strong position from whence to reclaim traditional territory and regain self-determination in British Columbia. While ownership is a state of having that can never be fully resolved, the act of proving ownership is part of the work of making culture and doing cultural revival.