People of the Cedar

      Joe David, Spirit Mask.

     Dempsey Bob, The Smart One.

 Tony Hunt, Bu-Quis with Cockle

Harold King, Monster Bird
(Cannibal Raven)

        
Fred Modeste, Sxwaixwe Mask

10 February – 23 April 2007  
PEOPLE OF THE CEDAR, First Nations art from the Northwest Coast of Canada

For  the First Nations people of Northwestern Canada, the tree possessed power and soul. For thousands of years, the region’s peoples have harvested the cedar’s aromatic and weather-defying wood to build houses and canoes, carve their tools and totem poles, and create cerimonial artworks that tell their stories.

People of the Cedar is an exhibition of vibrant contemporary artworks from First Nations people of the Northwest Coast of Canada. This superb collection of masks, paintings and works on paper represents a relearning of old techniques that until recent decades were fading.

It is a rare chance for New Zealanders to experience the power of Canada’s Indigenous art and culture – and to feel a local resonance with the First Nations people’s determination to reclaim their identity. The works are not only extraordinary pieces of art in themselves, but representations of beliefs and holders of traditions.

For many years, First Nations art and cultural expression were under threat, however, since the 1950s the First Nations groups have brought their culture in from the margins and ensured that the traditional arts can thrive.

Inspiration for Northwest Coast artists continues to come from their land, their heritage, the animals and the cedar tree. In First Nations mythology, the cedar growing through a hole in the sky was believed to be the axis of the world and pathway to the upper world. Builders and carvers used red and yellow cedar wood to make houses, canoes, containers, totem poles and ceremonial regalia. Women gathered the inner bark of red cedar and beat it into surprising softness for weaving into mats, blankets and clothes.

The 25 artists represented in People of the Cedar come from 11 different First Nations groups, including Gitxsan, Tsimshian, Haida, Nisga’a, Kwakwaka’wakw, Nuu-chah-nulth and Coast Salish – each with its own style and technique. Fittingly, the predominant material is cedar.

Most of the works were made at the Kitanmax School of Northwest Coast Indian Art, which was established in the historical village of ‘Ksan, British Columbia, in the 1970s. Kitanmax was the first school to give formal instruction in Northwest Coast native art, and has produced many acclaimed artists, including Dempsey Bob, Walter Harris, and the late Freda Diesing. The school still runs a four-year programme to ensure that knowledge is passed on.

Each artwork is a treasured link to the artist’s heritage and to ceremonial practice. In tradition, carvings drawn from human, animal and mythic worlds gained life through dance dramas.  At the potlatch, ceremonial art played a central role in showing a group’s authority, status and pride, and asserting order and lineage. Emblems and crests on head-dresses and blankets, lintels and totem poles were ways of expressing status and telling ancestral stories.

People of the Cedar was curated by the Canadian High Commission to Australia’s Inge Rumble and Canadian Northwest Coast art historian Rocque Berthiaume with the support of the Freda Diesing School of Northwest Coast Art.