Dr. Jennifer Kramer on Nuxalk Strong: Dancing Down the Eyelashes of the Sun
In this conversation, I speak with Dr. Jennifer Kramer, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia and Curator of the Pacific Northwest at UBC’s Museum of Anthropology.
CiTR 101.9 FM / The Blue Hour
Recorded live on July 28, 2026
You can listen to the episode on CiTR.
It is also available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.
The Blue Hour, hosted by Farha Guerrero, airs live every Tuesday at 2 p.m. on CiTR 101.9 FM at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada and at citr.ca.
Jennifer Kramer holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University and has worked with the Nuxalk Nation since 1994.
For more than two decades, she has worked alongside Indigenous artists, knowledge keepers and communities, exploring how museums can become places of collaboration, cultural renewal and shared authority. Her scholarship focuses on the visual and material cultures of Northwest Coast First Nations, particularly the Nuxalk and Kwakwaka’wakw, and includes questions of representation, repatriation, cultural property, art-market economies and collaborative museology.
She is the author of Switchbacks: Art, Ownership, and Nuxalk National Identity and Kesu’: The Art and Life of Doug Cranmer, and co-editor of Native Art of the Northwest Coast: A History of Changing Ideas. Through her research, teaching and curatorial practice, she has helped reshape conversations about Northwest Coast Indigenous art, museum anthropology and the evolving relationship between museums and Indigenous communities.
Our conversation centres on one remarkable exhibition: Nuxalk Strong: Dancing Down the Eyelashes of the Sun. Co-curated by Snxakila–Clyde Tallio, Director of Culture and Language for the Nuxalk Nation, and Jennifer Kramer, it was the first exhibition devoted entirely to the Nuxalk Nation.
Bringing together more than sixty historic Nuxalk treasures from museum, private and family collections, the exhibition at UBC’s Museum of Anthropology demonstrated how language, governance, law, ceremony, artistic practice and community leadership remain deeply interconnected. It also showed how museums can become places of return, reconnection and renewed relationships, while affirming Nuxalk sovereignty and self-determination.
Jennifer is now co-authoring a forthcoming publication exploring the exhibition’s continuing impacts and legacies, tentatively titled Relations and Returns: Reconnecting Nuxalk Treasures and Kin.