30 December 2009

Laid Over to Cover

Coast Salish natives at New Westminster, British Columbia - 1887 William McFarlane Notman McCord Museum.

North Vancouver British Columbia - Throughout its gradual advance across Canada in the 1880s, the Canadian Pacific Railway helped in the creation of detailed inventories of documentary photography to advertise its transcontinental line and to further publicize its ambitious involvement within a wider scheme of exploration and development. Photographs taken by Benjamin Baltzly, John Hammond, and William Notman & Son within Interior and Coast Salish territories of British Columbia documented picturesque mountain scenery and landscape features, as well as tangible points of contact between aboriginal inhabitants and colonial intruders.
 
Functioning, as it did in an oral tradition without writing, the Salishan language, like the spiritual culture contained by it, could not become the subject of photographic absorption. Aboriginal traditions of cedar basket-making and ceremonial wool blanket production were similarly rendered unobservable. Laid Over to Cover interprets this pattern of persistent invisibility. It counters and reasserts the observable presence of Salishan culture previously omitted from western pictorial and written records by bringing together traditional Salishan weaving and early CPR photographs of British Columbia. Included in the exhibition are important examples of Coast and Interior Salish weaving, highlighted by the work of contemporary practitioners Melvin Williams of the Lil'wat Nation who lives in Mount Currie and Keith Nahanee of the Squamish Nation who lives in North Vancouver.
 
Public programs for Laid Over to Cover are produced in collaboration with the Eslha7an Learning Centre, the Squamish Lil'wat Cultural Centre, and the New Westminster Museums and Archives, and with the support of the North Vancouver Office of Cultural Affairs and the Audain Foundation.