“Regalia in Relation: Northwest Coast Arts and Ties to Territory”

Ceremonial clothing means more than just being dressed appropriately for the occasion. Button blankets, aprons, robes, and masks are essential to ongoing expressions of inherited rights and privileges. Shifting the scholarly focus from the carved traditions in Northwest Coast art, this talk recenters the textile arts within a holistic culturally-focused context while addressing issues of gender, the effects of colonial practices, and the damage wrought by salvage anthropology as it fragmented cultural information across archives. Northwest Coast women’s artistic productions embody long-held technical and aesthetic knowledge connected to oral histories and cultural practices. The materials, iconography, and kinesthetic aspects of regalia reflect Indigenous relationships between people and trade as well as territory and governance.

Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse, PhD is curator of Northwest Native art and director of the Bill Holm Center at the Burke Museum, and associate professor of art history at the University of Washington. Her most recent book is Unsettling Native Art Histories on the Northwest Coast, edited with Aldona Jonaitis, (UW Press, 2020). Other publications focus on 19th-century Northwest Coast body adornment, women’s art on the Northwest Coast, and the filmic history of the Kwakwaka’wakw. In her role as curator, she collaborates with First Nations communities and artists to identify research priorities and to activate the Burke Museum’s holdings in ways that are responsive to cultural revitalization efforts.

Olin Hall auditorium