The Hour is Blue

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.

Transcript

Transcript lightly edited for clarity while preserving the natural rhythm of the live conversation.

Farha: Welcome. We are broadcasting from the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Musqueam people.

This is an important day for me because I'm speaking with someone who is going to ground this land acknowledgement even more. To begin with, long before museums and universities, and even radio like today, these lands were places of learning, storytelling, artistic expression, and careful listening. It is an honour and privilege to gather here in that same spirit of listening.

The Musqueam people, I've learned, consider the Museum of Anthropology their museum, which is located right here on the campus of the University of British Columbia.

MOA, as it's often called, has welcomed works that affirm this place as living Musqueam territory. Among them are works by some very renowned artists, including Musqueam artist Susan Point, whose contemporary Coast Salish practice draws upon ancestral forms while speaking confidently to the present. Her work reminds us that Indigenous art is not simply preserved within museums. It continues to live and breathe and evolve and shape the communities from which it comes. I think it's a fitting place to begin today's conversation.

I'm very honoured to have Jennifer Kramer on my show today.

Jennifer: Thank you. It's wonderful to be here with you.

Farha: What I would like to do before we jump into the Nuxalk exhibition, which I'm really hoping we can spend most of our conversation on today, is to tell us a little bit about where you're coming from.

MOA, the Museum of Anthropology, has a lot of childhood memories for me, but this is a very beautiful museum in many senses. You did your graduate work at Columbia University in New York. There is someone that's dear to me by the name of Kenneth Frampton, who is an architectural historian who really believed in the idea of grounding architecture within the local landscape. Arthur Erickson, who designed MOA, was certainly on the same side of that, which I think is a neat connection.

MOA also went through a huge renovation and seismic upgrade.

If you don't mind, can you bring us into MOA for a moment. Talk about what it looks like, what we're going to see, and what we can imagine, and then we will move a little bit up the coast, if you will.

Jennifer: Sure. It's a long history. The Museum of Anthropology was founded in the late 1940s by Harry Hawthorn, who was the first professor in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology. He came, lucky for us, with his wife, Audrey Hawthorn, who was the first curator at MOA.

They were in the basement of what's now the Irving K. Barber building here at UBC, but was then the main administration building and then a library. We moved to that iconic structure by Erickson in 1976.

Farha: There was a real need to preserve not only this incredible architecture, but also to ensure that the collection, as valuable as it is in terms of its cultural heritage and importance, received an upgrade. This has to do with the seismic world that we live with here in BC.

Jennifer: I should say that we had just completed a very large renewal project called A Partnership of Peoples: A New Infrastructure for Collaborative Research at MOA. It began when I started in 2003 and continued through to 2010. We were all ready to do new things when we were told that we had received funding to seismically upgrade the Great Hall.

From the curatorial perspective, that meant that all of the totem poles, monumental architecture, and monuments that were there needed to be carefully pulled down and put to sleep, to rest horizontally, with the permission of the rights holders who have ongoing rights.

It allowed us to work with our world communities, but mostly our Pacific Northwest communities, which are the peoples you see in the Great Hall. You enter on the ramp, go down to what we call the crossroads, to where the platforms are, and then to the Great Hall with the soaring glass.

The curators worked with each individual monumental piece. You could call them artworks or belongings, because they had these ongoing connections to people, with ongoing work to do. We said that we were going to take these down in order to add what's known as base isolation to the museum space.

I'm not an engineer, but I learned from speaking with engineers and architects that, if we put in base isolation and redid the mounts in culturally respectful ways, when the next big one hit, and we are very overdue on the Northwest Coast for that, the P-waves and S-waves would shake sideways but not take down the building. Their energy would flow sideways.

For that reason, the Great Hall was closed to the public for 18 months while we did this work. But it was fortuitous because it allowed us to work with an Indigenous advisory committee on re-narrativizing and reinterpreting the entire entrance to what we now call the Pacific Northwest Galleries, as well as physically protecting these treasures, these belongings.

At the same time, before we closed the building, we put up an exhibit called Shake Up: Preserving What We Value, which was about not only preserving these physical treasures, but also the thousands of years of Indigenous knowledge that goes into making them.

These physical treasures are like legal representations. They're legal documents that attest to such long-standing relationships to the lands and waters in this place.

Farha: I will mention that base isolation had never before been used in a museum in Canada. So MOA is the first. It is a new form of engineering that is coming into this country.

It's quite special and it's wonderful that the funds were there because, at the end of the day, you want to protect what you said, are treasures. We're going to talk about what's in your collection in different words, but let's walk through it for a moment.

As you walk into this Great Hall, you are walking up the coast in some ways. You are going through the very diverse communities of this province and looking at the beauty and what the Musqueam people like to call their belongings. These are very special to these communities. You can experience, in some ways, that feeling of going up the coast, where you may end up as far as Haida Gwaii or maybe the Tlingit people. It goes all the way through.

That is where we're going to go. To fast-forward a little, as you go up the coast in this province, you will get to a place called the Bella Coola River Valley, or Bella Coola lands. This is really the crux of what the exhibition Nuxalk Strong is about.

Before we even talk about the exhibition, I thought it would be lovely if you could give us a visual. Now we're outside of MOA and onto the land where the Nuxalk people come from. I will quickly say that this was the first time in history, am I right, that a Nuxalk exhibition of that kind was ever on display in the world?

Jennifer: Yes.

Farha: That's very special. But let's go to Bella Coola for a moment.

Jennifer: Sure. If you haven't been to Bella Coola, it is an incredibly special place. Picture it. It takes about, I like to say, maybe 350 or 400 kilometres as the raven flies from Vancouver to Bella Coola proper, but you can't drive directly because there are the Coast Mountains in your way.

Unless you are taking a plane there, it's going to take about 12 hours to get to the Bella Coola Valley. You come in from the plateau, which is a very different area, and descend down these switchbacks into a rainforest.

This rainforest has soaring 6,000-foot mountains covered with snow and glaciers, with the Bella Coola River running right through it. It would take about an hour and a half or two hours to drive from the base of the switchbacks, which people call the Hill, to where the inlet of the Pacific Ocean reaches the community of Bella Coola.

It is a place filled with bald eagles, bears, and salmon. It's a place where the Nuxalk have lived for, we know, 14,000 years. That is before the Ice Age, before the ice retreated from what we now call British Columbia.

Farha: That was really beautiful, Jennifer. We can imagine this now. We're going to see this beautiful exhibition in our mind's eye because we can't see it. It's now been tucked away. Maybe it will move on somewhere else. You can tell me that.

Nuxalk Strong is what it was called, which, if I'm not mistaken, was coming from a movement in the 1990s. Is that right? It was amongst leaders and people in the community who were fighting against clear-cutting at the time?

Jennifer: Yes. In the late 1980s and the 1990s, the Nuxalk Nation was involved in protecting an area of their territory. Well, all areas of their territory, not just the Bella Coola Valley, were being clear-cut logged.

They ended up working with the Forest Action Network and eventually Greenpeace to protect their hereditary lands from clear-cut logging. At that time, the cry was "Nuxalk Strong," and so we redeployed that cry.

It's interesting because it isn't just a contemporary political idea of First Nationhood, which really only came about for the Nuxalk in the 1980s and 1990s. Dancing Down the Eyelashes of the Sun is the other side. It refers to when the Nuxalk came down from Nusmata, from above, from the heavens, following the eyelashes of the sun, which was the creator Alhkw'ntam in the guise of the sun.

They landed on the mountaintops, took off these cloaks, which we call those crests, bear, raven, and eagle, turned back into their human form, built their villages, and put up their fishweirs. That's what became their ancestral territory.

Retelling those Smayusta, those origin stories, brings us back to Nuxalk sovereignty on those lands and waters.

We had both in this exhibition. We had that contemporary political energy that happened in the 1990s, and then all the way back to time immemorial.

Farha: What makes this exhibition special, but also what makes MOA special, is really important. This is a continuation of the legacy of MOA.

It is something that might be termed academically as collaborative museology, but really it's the idea that this exhibition, like so many exhibitions at MOA, was created in collaboration with the Nuxalk Nation, as well as with a co-curator, a young man, as I've learned, named Clyde Tallio.

He is a director of culture, a very important person among the Nuxalk people, and a self-taught person of the language. Tell me about this partnership that you've had, but also the relationship that you've had for some time.

Jennifer: When I first went to Bella Coola, Clyde was just a young man, and I didn't meet him. It wasn't until about 15 years later that I met Clyde for the first time.

His energy, his passion, he was trained to be a leader for his people - a speaker. By speaker, it means the person who shares the laws and protocols, the guidance from the chiefs and matriarchs, and speaks at potlatches for the work.

He's called upon to represent his nation in all different kinds of ways, from government and health care to tourists, youth who are going through initiations, and dancers who are learning Indigenous ceremony.

I would never have done this exhibition without him. It wouldn't have been possible.

It really goes back to a basic human right, which is 'nothing about us without us'. It goes to British Columbia's Truth and Reconciliation Commission Calls to Action. It goes back to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

This is foundational. People have the right to present how they want to be identified to a public. You have the right to share what you want to share and to keep private what you want to keep private.

Not only was Clyde the co-curator, but, and I have only heard of this happening one other time on the Northwest Coast, we had a Nuxalk artist, Anuximana-Jade Hanuse, as a design intern, doing the graphics with our own in-house graphic designer.

All of my relationships really come down to the people I've known in Bella Coola, whether they're weavers, teachers, language speakers, elders, or Stataltmc, who are chiefs. So many people were involved in creating the labels and telling the stories of what's going on in Bella Coola today in Nuxalk.

Farha: Tell us how that collaboration works. This is really the crux, I think, of what may not be known to a lot of people, not only about what MOA has done for a long time, and perhaps we take this for granted because it has always been embedded in how you show work, but also about how it has been transformative over time.

The more you have these collaborations with Indigenous Peoples, the more things can change, even physically, within the museum.

Give us a sense of what this type of collaboration looks like. I know there was a lot of travel involved as you tried to locate many things around the world that belong to the Nuxalk people. There was a lot of discovery and probably a lot of emotion.

How long did that take, and how did it all come together? Of course, we also have to talk about how the exhibition was inaugurated, because that was very momentous for the community.

Jennifer: It's really hard. People ask, "Well, how long did it take?" It's really hard to put a start date and an end date on it because I feel like the collaborations and the work have never ended. They really began the minute I was allowed to spend my first year in Bella Coola, way before I met Snxakila, Clyde Tallio.

One of the things Clyde and I talk about a lot is that one project we do perhaps starts with a museum-type treasure, a raven rattle, a specific mask, or a family-owned treasure, but then morphs into new and different things.

It's very hard to put nice, neat guardrails around it because this is really about relationships and people. The exhibit becomes just one moment that perhaps freezes that relationship in time, even though we try to embed a lot of language and song in Nuxalk, in the Nuxalk language, as well as video and contemporary material.

We really mix the historical with the contemporary because, of course, we want to show that future-focused perspective.

When Clyde and I first met, we started visiting museum collections together and have really gone across North America. We've been to the Field Museum, the American Museum of Natural History, the Royal British Columbia Museum, and the Royal Ontario Museum. I'm sure I'm missing some. We went to all the ones in Washington, D.C. Various grants.

Farha: You didn't go to the British Museum.

Jennifer: We haven't been to the British Museum together. I have been to the British Museum, the Cambridge Museum, and the Pitt Rivers Museum to look at Nuxalk collections.

Farha: I was going to say, because they are there.

Jennifer: They are there. We are now in the process of planning trips to Norway, Sweden, and Germany. Germany has a very early Nuxalk collection by Adrian Jacobsen.

These journeys are really interesting. People think, what do museum curators do? They look at physical objects and track the materiality of that object, the provenance, and how it got there. That's part of the story.

But really it's about figuring out whose treasures these are and how most of them were sold, not stolen per se. There may be a feeling that there were forces against people to rid themselves of them, and there certainly were, like the anti-potlatch law. But most of these were sold, whether under duress or not.

We can track back these lineages and determine which families they belong to. This is active work that's happening in the nation now, as families are re-engaging with what we call their Nuslhiixwta treasure boxes.

In those treasure boxes are the masks, regalia, and blankets that tell that Smayusta about how that individual family came down from above and where they landed, giving them rights to resources and rights to live on the lands and waters, but also responsibilities to those lands and waters.

In a funny way, going to these museum collections sounds as if it's about the past, archives, or academic research, but it's really about plotting the future sovereign moves of families today as they're potlatching more, bringing out more dance initiatives with their youth, and teaching their youth about their responsibilities in this place.

Farha: Maybe it is important to give people a sense of what MOA has done. One example is really beautiful because you have someone like Mungo Martin, who I once heard someone at my local museum call the Michelangelo of Canada, and rightfully so.

He was a very important carver in this country’s history. If I’m not mistaken, he was a big part of initially bringing some of these treasures from the Kwakwaka’wakw people into MOA.

As you say, there was this process of things being sold, but he saw the museum as a wonderful place for these pieces to be preserved and kept safe, certainly under the right conditions. So many of these things, and I know that you don’t like the word artifact, and that museums are trying to move away from that word, are precious. They need to be cared for.

Museums, depending on the Category A status they may have, can maintain the right temperatures and climate control. Mungo Martin, at least in my understanding, saw that vision, which has been part of the long history of MOA.

But that doesn’t mean that the peoples don’t have access to these treasures. They do. They sometimes come to you to study them, look at them, or for whatever they need. It’s a real collaboration.

Jennifer: I call it a reunion when community members come to MOA to see their belongings and treasures. It's a very emotional, bittersweet moment.

There is so much excitement because you're meeting the hands of your ancestors. You're meeting what your relatives created, and their life force is embodied in that. Or it might be your family's treasure and you don't know who made it, but it has that long-standing ancestral connection to you.

There's this feeling, a lot of tears, often a lot of pride, and a lot of learning from connecting with the incredible technologies of production that you find, whether it's weaving or something else.

People celebrate the carving on the Northwest Coast, and it is incredible, but one of the things we've worked to put more front and centre is weaving in cedar bark, cedar root, and wool, because it takes an incredible amount of time to do that exquisite work.

MOA has really tried to be as accessible and welcoming as possible because we figure that we are the caretakers of these belongings. We have the museum's Category A ability to keep the air at a certain temperature. We have conservators on staff.

But what MOA is doing more and more, and what is starting to happen around the museum world, is paying attention to the Indigenous owners' protocols for how to care for these belongings.

Some of these belongings are not objects. They are ancestors. Some are imbued with sacred meaning and can only be seen, witnessed, or danced by certain people at certain times. Others need to be fed.

What I would say about the Nuxalk in general, even though we try to be as open and inviting as possible to many communities, and we have small grants to bring communities to us, we're trying more and more to bring these belongings home.

We don't use the language of a loan because that sounds so Western in terms of ownership. It's a visit home.

The more we bring belongings home for ceremony, replication, or simply to be near them, the more we're finding that communities don't necessarily want the physical treasure.

It's not that we're against sending the physical treasure home. They should go home if that's the work it needs to do. But we're finding that people see the respect we're giving to their stewardship and don't always want the physical responsibility of the actual belonging.

Farha: We need to talk about the idea of what could potentially be a museum in Bella Coola and how that would look. I want to get there, but you mentioned weaving, and I think that's really important because one thing you had in this exhibition, and I cannot pronounce it...

Jennifer: Yakyanlh.

Farha: Yes, a robe. A lot of weavers from, say, the Tlingit Nation are very skilled. They create the very beautiful textiles we call Chilkat blankets. I mentioned this in my interview with Curtis Collins from the Audain Art Museum last week.

But this is a robe that is not as well known, also because the practice of weaving was severely interrupted. There is a revitalization of that among women weavers. Maybe you can speak about the actual robe.

Jennifer: Yes, absolutely. Nuxalk weaving is completely distinct and unique from northern Chilkat or Raven's Tail weaving, and also from the more southern Salish wool-woven blankets. It's its own thing.

Even in the 1990s, when I was learning about Nuxalk culture and being in the community, there were none of these blankets present and being used by the community. They were using button blankets.

These were originally mountain-goat-wool woven blankets. What's interesting is that they were woven and then embroidered with those crests, those Smayusta, the stories about how the Nuxalk came down from Nusmata.

Collaborative exhibits always have two functions. There is showing the public who you are and teaching them about something they might not know anything about. Then there is what the exhibit can do for the community and nation, helping them learn and do what they want to do.

Bringing back these yakyanlh and finding them in museum collections was very important to the Nuxalk. They had only recently started working with a master Tsimshian weaver, William White, about four or five years ago, to bring back Nuxalk weaving.

William had been to all of these museums and had seen Nuxalk weaving. It blew his mind. He thought, we have to get this happening again in Bella Coola.

We were able to bring in, for example, a very special robe from a specific family, Staltmc Anulhkw’ikmlayc-Tallio-Hans, who was a chief whose son inherited this blanket, perhaps in the 1940s or 1950s. It might even have been a little earlier.

He made the difficult decision to put this yakyanlh, this robe, in a museum for safekeeping, along the same lines as when Mungo Martin told people among the Kwakwaka'wakw to send their treasures to MOA for safekeeping.

It ended up at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary. But, as happens in families when you inherit anything or histories get forgotten, people had forgotten which museum it went to and forgotten that this choice had been made. It had become disconnected.

We were able to borrow that yakyanlh for the exhibit, and it is incredibly beautiful. It has a very powerful story.

One of the other things that came out of the exhibit was that we co-obtained a grant with the Nuxalk Nation from the First Peoples' Cultural Council to bring weavers together with historical yakyanlh that were in museum collections.

We had two at MOA and this one that we borrowed from the Glenbow Museum for the exhibit. The Royal British Columbia Museum brought four yakyanlh robes and aprons, and the Canadian Museum of History sent two.

We brought them together for an intense three days of study with, it's true, mostly female weavers in Bella Coola.

Farha: We don't know. This is the other thing. Even with carvers, I've learned that there can be female carvers and male weavers. We don't know what was really lost, and sometimes we don't even know the names of these weavers from the past.

But you mentioned study, and this is really important when we think of a museum like MOA. What's special about it, I think, is that it is also an institution of learning.

It is a university museum, so you have people who are well connected with all the different kinds of connections, whether they're coming from a department like yours or from history, for example.

Then you have people from communities who come to study these belongings, and that is really important. I would go even further. You have facilities that allow carvers to come in and sometimes work on site.

I know a little bit of inside information about how some pieces may have come down from the north to MOA and then moved further on, but you have that space.

Why do you think that's so important? Do you feel, in some ways, that you're sometimes working in more of a community hub than a museum in its traditional sense?

Jennifer: Absolutely. The time to come and see MOA and the Great Hall, for which we are known, is when that space is filled with dancers and weavers, when it is having a contemporary fashion show, a debate, or bringing knowledge holders together.

It's alive. People think of museums as places where objects are behind glass, and I really push back on that idea. Objects have functions and they need to be alive. MOA tries to make spaces where people can be in relationship with their belongings.

Sometimes the belongings go home for visits to be replicated. The Tallio-Hans blanket, for example, was allowed to remain with us longer by the Glenbow Museum after the exhibit came down, so that we could figure out a way to get it home for the memorial of the wife of William Hans, who had owned it.

There are all kinds of ways of activating this space. It's absolutely future-focused, and this is how we thought about it in Nuxalk Strong as well.

Clyde talked about the elders always talking about clearing the path for the success of those now and those future yet unborn.

It was always about thinking about how to guarantee ongoing wealth, not material wealth in dollars, but wealth as connection and knowledge, to the land, to your past, but also to your future.

The fact that MOA was able to work with Nuxalk weavers to reconnect them with these treasures, so that they could learn from the hands of their ancestors, was truly exciting.

There was a moment when each of the women put on one of those yakyanlh and danced and sang. They talked about having this spiritual, supernatural, time-stopped experience. They were able both to connect to the past and to become excited about what they were making.

They're making headbands, aprons, potlatch bags, and eventually robes, and these are going to be danced. It's that ongoing connection into the future.

Farha: This is beautiful. It paints a picture of what this type of 'study' looks like. Study also sounds like a lab, but it's not. People are coming in and engaging with the art in a very real and deep way.

And protocol; protocol is a word I remember from way back when I studied Native Studies at Trent University. It's still very important because it dictates a lot of things that you do at MOA. As you said, it may change even how things are physically presented.

This is, I think, an exciting time because we're seeing this not just at MOA, but around the country. Indigenous peoples are a big part of exhibitions when their art, craft, beautiful weaving, and textiles are on display. They are telling the stories as much as the curators.

I think that is really special, and I certainly talked about that with Curtis last week from the Audain Art Museum.

You mentioned something quite beautiful. I didn't have the privilege of seeing this exhibition at MOA, but you said that it was designed in a way that captured the geography of the region. Can you tell us what that looked like?

Jennifer: Yes. I was happy that the exhibition Nuxalk Strong happened in what we call the O'Brien Gallery. This is an old space that was there when the museum opened in 1976.

It's a long, skinny space that wraps around the back of where The Raven and the First Men by Bill Reid is located. It has this wiggly, valley-like structure, and I thought, this is perfect.

When people entered this space, at what we called the front, they were welcomed by this giant Thunder being. They are known as the Valley of Thunder. It's their own supernatural being that no other nation has.

The doors opened and you walked in, and you were welcomed by Staltmc Nuximlayc-Noel Pootlass, who is the chief of Q'umk'uts, where they all live now.

You're hugged by the mountains, but instead you're hugged by the walls of the exhibit. It's as if you've paddled in from the Pacific, coming from another place. You've come into the inlet and estuary, and you're about to go up the Bella Coola River to Q'umk'uts, which is the traditional name of the village where Bella Coola is now.

Even the colours and designs of the cases came from MOA's 3D designer, Joshua Doherty, and its 2D graphic designer, Cody Rocko, who are incredible artists and designers.

We were able to bring both of them to Bella Coola, hosted by Anuximana-Jade Hanuse, this incredible artist. She took them to the land, forest, petroglyphs, and water, and showed them what this space looks and feels like, its colours, people, and carvers.

We had curtains that replicated the way clouds sit on top of the mountains. When they blow away, suddenly the sun pierces down. We had this orb like the sun. Of course, as we know, the title is Dancing Down the Eyelashes of the Sun.

We also had this beautiful drone video taken by a local community member, showing what it's like to fly through the valley and see these snow-topped mountains with the Bella Coola River down below.

You're hugged by this place, and the place communicates that this is the home of the Nuxalk Nation.

Farha: I have special memories of being in Bella Coola. As I told you, it's a really beautiful place. It's hard to describe, but you've described it wonderfully well.

Even imagining how you could incorporate that into the exhibition shows why it would be so important. When we talk about Indigenous peoples, we cannot forget the land that influences their art, identity, and cultural understanding of the world.

It was only by physically going to Haida Gwaii that I began to understand some of the Haida artists I love, and I recommend that anyone do that. It's no different than going to Rome because you want to know about Bernini. You understand when you're there. It's almost the same experience.

I want to talk about what may come from this exhibition, because this is not something that you wanted to pack away. You wanted it to continue.

Just by hearing the way you're speaking about it, I get a sense that this is maybe only the beginning of a longer continuation with the people.

Maybe it's time now to talk about what the Nuxalk people are planning in terms of the big house, as well as a possible museum that could exist on Nuxalk territories.

Jennifer: Just to back up a little bit, it's absolutely true that the Nuxalk have been planning a big house. Clyde Tallio, the director of language and culture, has already created guidelines for bringing back their rites of passage for young people, these secret-society initiations.

That makes it sound very different from you or me, but the Nuxalk don't celebrate anything different from anybody else. A rite of passage happens when a young girl becomes a woman.

What does it mean when you are not only giving this young lady a new name and teaching her what it means to be a young woman, but you have also gone to a museum, seen the traditional cedar-bark regalia these young women would have worn, and then brought it back for the first time?

So it's happening right now. They are bringing back things like apcwaakm, which is the recognition of babies when they've passed their first year, holding them up within their family and institutions, as well as rites of passage for both young women and young men.

They are also bringing back secret-society Kusyut dancing, the winter ceremonials.

I wanted to take a step back and say that Clyde Tallio thinks very strategically about how he speaks about the relationship, not just with their belongings, but with museums.

He sees that we can work together to support these future-focused goals of expressing Nuxalk sovereignty and revitalizing Nuxalk culture, and not just for the Nuxalk, obviously.

Many museums are colonial spaces. That's their history. But MOA and many other museums have been working at decolonizing these histories and Indigenizing them.

Clyde was the first to say that MOA could be our ally in following through on the foresight of our elders. They cleared the path for future generations by talking with academics, ethnobotanists, linguists, and ethnographers, and by recording our songs on wax cylinders.

When the nation was ready, after recovering from the four modern catastrophes: the smallpox epidemic, being put on reserves, Indian residential schools, and the anti-potlatch law, when we were ready, we would be able to reconnect.

He's celebrating that foresight, but he's also sharing that this isn't about going back to the way the Nuxalk were 300 years ago. This is about thinking about how they're going to continue now.

We're all in this together, settlers and Indigenous people, and how we can work together toward common goals.

Snxakila, Clyde Tallio, would say there's so much that settlers need to learn from Indigenous ways of being in relationship with the land.

One of the main values of that exhibit was something he called nuyayanlh. He'll laugh at my pronunciation, I'm sure, but it means reciprocal generosity, another way of saying paying it forward and thinking about generations beyond you.

But we're in this relationship together, and together we can do better.

Farha: That's a very good answer because it's not about reinstating something that was lost, but maybe reinventing something.

The other thing to think about in a community like Bella Coola, which has a population of about 2,000 or so, is whether community members want to put a lot of resources into a museum that could require infrastructure like those at MOA to protect these very important pieces.

I think it is a work in progress, and these discussions are happening all over the country. This is part of what you mentioned earlier about truth and reconciliation. It's all part of this idea of trying to understand things.

MOA, and what I think is happening with this exhibition, shows that there can be many ways forward.

Even if people have to come down south for a bit, or you go a little bit north, it can work both ways. That seems to be the way of the future.

The other thing I want to mention is the importance of this, if any Nuxalk people are listening.

I spent a little bit of time in Bella Coola and had very beautiful moments of my life in that gorgeous part of the world. When I see a mask that I often see in Whistler, which they call the earthquake mask, it is from the Nuxalk people.

It is, to be honest, one of my favourites. It's carved in such a beautiful way that it's hard to describe or compare it to some of the other carvers, and the colours are beautiful. This is from the 1800s, of course.

I tell people on my tours that this represents an understanding of seismology that these peoples had. This is scientific as well. It's not just related to myth or cultural practice, but certainly to seismology.

I feel privileged to see that. There is an importance for the average museum-goer in this country, and I should also say that museums are visited by people from all over the world.

This work needs to be on display and is worth showing because it connects us to a place we may never imagine we could go to. It connects us as human beings.

Like the Michelangelo and Mungo Martin comparison, these people who carved these things and wove these textiles should be shown on display because, rightfully so, this is a skill set of immense beauty.

Even when we talk about treasure, we can simply say art. This is creative art that only human beings, I think, and not AI, know how to do.

Jennifer: There is a Nuxalk word for that which I learned from Clyde Tallio. It's Anukw'ntniknm, and I think I pronounced that one correctly. It means inspirational creativity.

Clyde talks about how you can apply it to learning from museum collections and to new artists doing all these new things, whether it's carving for sale in a beautiful gallery or for someone's home, or making a mask to be danced at a potlatch.

He also talks about Anukw'ntniknm in relation to song composers, dancers, and even the food preparers who are making your beautiful meal.

It's all about the aesthetics and, as you put it, that humanity. It can't be done by an AI.

Farha: Thankfully.

Very quickly, since we're almost out of time, I want to do a little plug for Nuxalk Radio because this is embedded in some of your research.

One of your graduate students, if I'm right?

Jennifer: Emily Leischner, now Dr. Leischner.

Farha: Dr. Leischner did a, was it a podcast called...

Jennifer: It was a radio series over two years.

Farha: Using and Refusing Museums, and this is Nuxalk Radio?

Jennifer: It's available. If you go to Nuxalk Radio 91.1 FM online, you can hear it online live, but you can also listen to those podcasts.

Farha: I'm definitely going to put a link in the transcript of this interview.

Is there anything else you want to say about this future project you're working on right now? What comes after the exhibition? What do you see?

You said earlier that this is really going to be collaborative with the community as well. It's not just you. It's going to involve many people.

Jennifer: It's really hard to know. For me, the next exciting thing would be to see a yakyanlh woven by one of these incredible weavers and danced during a family potlatch.

I'd really like to see the Staltmc Anulhkw'ikmlayc-Tallio-Hans yakyanlh brought out during Hazel Hans's memorial, maybe next summer, before it goes back to Alberta.

Or maybe a new one will be made, not a copy, but a new version of it. Every single re-creation is future-thinking, and it's that connection to one's ancestors, but also to the future, that is so exciting.

It's so alive and always new.

Farha: And this title, Relations and Returns: Reconnecting Nuxalk Treasures and Kin, that's your working project.

Jennifer: Sometimes it's the physical belonging, the physical treasure, that might go home because it has work to do there.

But sometimes that treasure needs to be available for the public to see, like your earthquake mask at the Audain Art Museum, and it can do better work public-facing.

Sometimes it's more about understanding the knowledge of how that treasure was made or why it was made, and then repurposing it for new things. It's exciting.

Farha: And it shows how one exhibition can do so much.

I think it's a testament to the work you do, and this is why I've had a curatorial series on The Blue Hour. I want to bring out what happens behind the scenes.

Sometimes when the public views an exhibition, they don't realize what goes on behind it for many years. It's hard work and a lot of toil. Thank you for that.

I would imagine the exhibition archive is still on the MOA website for people to look at?

Jennifer: It's under past exhibits.

Farha: Exactly, which I can link.

Jennifer: There is also a podcast because we had a CUES grant from UBC, a Community-University Engagement Support grant, that was part of the exhibit. Clyde, Emily, and I spoke about it just last fall.

Farha: Jennifer, for taking time out of your day to come here.

Jennifer: It's been my pleasure. Thank you so much for the invitation.

Further reading and listening

Dr. Kramer also mentions the UBC Community-University Engagement Support (CUES) grant connected to the exhibition. She, Snxakila: Clyde Tallio, and Dr. Emily Leischner discuss the Healing with Heritage project in the podcast episode “Stories of Partnership: How the Nuxalk Nation Is Healing with Heritage”.