Art of the Northwest Coast. Aldona Jonaitis. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006. 322pp.Reviewed by Jennifer KramerArt of the Northwest Coast
provides a much-needed compendium on the Native art traditions of this
area and fills a long-standing lacuna in the literature. Aldona
Jonaitis, a distinguished scholar of Northwest Coast art, takes on the
challenge of summarizing the breadth and significance of this
well-known and valued art style, while grounding her conclusions in
rich historical and ethnographic detail. Teachers of Native American
art will be pleased to assign this engaging and portable textbook,
which cogently organizes the extensive history of this complicated
topic into digestible portions that are both descriptive and critical.
The book is enriched by 63 black and white and 89 full color
illustrations with lengthy captions that provide informed
contextualization. For the student, a useful bibliographic essay
reviews and categorizes the pertinent literature.
The
text is divided into nine chapters that trace: 1) the prehistoric
archaeological record, 2) the effects of European and American
explorers and maritime and land fur-traders on Native art production,
3-5) 19th century art traditions in the south, central, and north
regions of the coast, 6) the history of colonization, missionization,
and Euro-Canadian and American settlement, 7) non-Native awareness of
Northwest Coast art through tourism, photography, film, museum
collecting and world’s fairs, 8) the persistence of art traditions from
1900-1960, and 9) contemporary post-canonic art and identity politics
including repatriation, collaboration with museums, and reflective
changes in Native Northwest Coast art scholarship.
Jonaitis
tackles some of the major theoretical hurdles in the field by offering
deconstructions of ideology that have endured despite scholarship to
the contrary. These ideological holdovers include: the purist Boasian
salvage anthropology paradigm that assumes Native Northwest Coast art
is authentic only if made before contact with Europeans; the
evolutionary model of style that uses a language of innovative
nascence, classical maturity, and decadent decline adopted by those who
recognized a Northwest Coast art ‘Renaissance’ in the 1960s; and the
tendency to use the 19th century northern Northwest Coast formline
canon, exemplified by Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian art, as the
standard from which to compare central or southern art styles.
A
prominent agenda in the text is to rectify the imbalance of scholarly
recognition traditionally given to Coast Salish and other southern
Native Northwest Coast art. Jonaitis’ intentions are made apparent from
her dedication of the book to noted and now-deceased anthropologist of
Salish art and culture, Wayne Suttles. This concerted stance to give
equal recognition to marginalized positions is evident in Jonaitis’
efforts to recognize the arts of women and arts made for sale,
especially those often devalued as ‘tourist souvenirs.’
While
Jonaitis makes significant inroads to correct the privileging of the
typically male media of carving and painting wood, stone, and ivory by
emphasizing the typically female media of textiles and weaving, she
reifies this division by leaving unmarked her descriptions of masks and
totem poles while subtitling two of her sections on baskets and button
blankets as “Women’s art.” This inadvertently normalizes male art
production and marginalizes female art production. Given Jonaitis’
intention to emphasize typically de-valued art forms, it seems strange
that beading, especially Tlingit beading, is barely mentioned except in
a photo caption on page 186 about octopus bags. However, it is easy to
complain about what is not here when so much is vying for attention in
a book of this genre.
A
text that defines a geographical region, which encompasses varied
cultures and time-periods, will be inherently wanting for the author is
compelled to dance between specifics of time, place, and cultural style
while making larger generalizations about categories and patterns.
Given the impossibility of producing such a classificatory text without
being reductive, Jonaitis effectively conveys broadly shared traditions
while emphasizing the distinctiveness of various peoples and their
resulting art. Although she achieves a subtle balancing act, I wished
that she had discussed the difficulties of this endeavor. For it is a
central irony, un-remarked upon by Jonaitis, that while she deflects
the emphasis on a northern Northwest Coast canon and the supremacy of
19th century ‘classic’ art in the scholarly and aesthetic realms, she
does not reflect on how this book itself produces a standardizing
canon, a powerful creation with historical and political implications.
Jonaitis
does make the important point that permission must be asked of
appropriate Native individuals or tribes when publishing images of
sacred pieces. She states with frankness and illumination:Although
I regret some of these omissions, I am in full sympathy with those
Native people who insist on having control over their cultural
heritage. Indeed, this is the logical extension of the efforts to
obtain a voice in representations of Native culture, and the absence of
certain images tells an important part of the ongoing history of the
Northwest Coast art (p. 294).
However,
I would have liked to read more about growing Native concerns around
cultural appropriation and resulting Native pressure to gain control
over cultural representations, often resulting in strategies of
secrecy. One extension of this prominent and vocal argument for
heritage boundary maintenance is opposition to non-Native people
writing about Native Northwest Coast culture and art production. As
this issue is so much a part of the contested, intercultural history of
the recognition of Native Northwest Coast art, it should be examined.
In
this critical scholarly reading, Jonaitis merges an art historical,
stylistic analysis articulated in Bill Holm’s formline language with an
anthropological understanding of identity work accomplished through art
production and display. Without directly stating it, Jonaitis conveys
the vital message that aesthetic value judgments of Native Northwest
Coast art always stem from a political and historical process that are
predicated on the context from which the reading emerges. Sometimes
Jonaitis’ own enthusiasm for what she terms the “considerable aesthetic
merit” of this art style leads her to naively exceed her own crucial
contextualizations and make universal and a-temporal assumptions about
quality. Even so, I appreciate her candor and willingness to publicly
wrestle with the uncertainty around valuing this art form.
I
actually find this discontinuity refreshing. Jonaitis is known for
being forthright and for producing research that is multi-faceted, yet
transparent. Jonaitis does not fall victim to overly jargonizing the
field of Native Northwest Coast art, nor does she retreat from squarely
facing some of the central paradoxes of this discipline. I recommend
this book for successfully accomplishing what it sets out to achieve.Jennifer
Kramer holds a joint position at the University of British Columbia as
Curator of Northwest Coast Ethnology at the Museum of Anthropology and
as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology. She has
contributed to the Journal of Material Culture and is the author of Switchbacks: Art, Ownership, and Nuxalk National Identity (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006).