The Legacy: Tradition and Innovation in Northwest Coast Indian Art

David Mattison is a librarian with the B.C. Provincial Archives and
Records Services Library.

Originally published in 1980 by the British Columbia Provincial Museum, this catalogue to the exhibition of the same name has acquired a status of its own as an authoritative overview of often moving and powerful Northwest Coast native art. The authors are curators in the Ethnology Division of the Museum, and thus speak from cumulative long years of study of the artists, their crafts, and their cultures. The Museum has been not only a home to works by the ancestors of present-day carvers and weavers, but also a sponsor of new designs. The Museum, far from being simply a sterile environment in which what are rightly called treasures are guarded, is also a catalyst and transformer of creative spirits.

The background of Northwest Coast societies is sketched in an introductory chapter. Two-dimensional design is discussed in terms of northern and southern styles, while sculpture is handled on the basis of the major tribes. The impact and synthesis of foreign elements into native art is detailed in a fourth chapter, while the last chapter covers important contemporary artists such as Bill Holm and Robert Davidson (both Haida), Norman Tate (Nishga), and Henry Hunt (Southern Kwakiutl), to name but a few.

Many of the artifacts are clearly reproduced in colour; all have been included as black-and-white images arranged by catalogue number with extended captions. These latter photographs have not been cross-referenced back to the colour plates, although the reverse has been done. Photographs of all but one of the artists have been published along with short biographies. A bibliography rounds out the catalogue. An index would have been a useful aid. This is an extremely worthwhile introduction to one of the major historic and current art forms on the continent.