Haida Gwaii Museum exhibition: Gina suuda tl’l xasii ~ Came to tell something

I am delighted to let everyone know of a fantastic temporary exhibition at the Haida Gwaii Museum at Kay Llnagaay, on Haida Gwaii. All of us at the Pitt Rivers have enjoyed developing relationships with Haida people, and especially with the Haida Gwaii Museum, to begin to share access to the historic Haida collections in Oxford and to ensure that the collections are cared for and interpreted to the highest standard. The Haida Gwaii Museum has developed a very important exhibition about the roles of Haida art, past, present and future.

Gina suuda tl’l xasii ~ Came to tell something features a wide range of historical and contemporary traditional Haida art created for and used within Haida society.

Curated by Nika Collison under the guidance of Haida artists and scholars, the exhibition aims to make an important and lasting contribution to the preservation and continuation of Haida art and its role within Haida society. It includes an array of historic ancestral treasures and contemporary works of over 35 artists ranging from emerging artists to masters of their traditions.

In its social function, Haida art – both visual and performance – is a companion to our Haida language, it “comes to tell something” – recording and communicating history from the time of the supernatural through to events of today; conveying family lineage, social standing, and relationships with others; expressing our connection to the supernatural and affirming our inseparable relationship to, and dependency upon, the lands and waters of Haida Gwaii. It also serves an important economic function within our nation and can be highly political.

Gina suuda tl’l xasii ~ Came to tell something provides multiple layers of access to knowledge and inspiration for new, emerging, senior and master artists and offers the general public a personal and visually stimulating glimpse into Haida art and culture. The exhibition will be accompanied later this summer by a publication which will expand on the knowledge and treasures in the display.

Evelyn Vanderhoop's magnificent robe in the exhibition, photograph Jerry McCollum

Historic robe in the collections of the PRM - not part of Gina Suuda Tl'l Xasii, but an
inspiration for many Haida and other Northwest Coast weavers. PRM 1884.56.82

What visitors are saying about the Blackfoot Shirts Project exhibition

Here are some of the comments from the visitors' book. I've never see so many longer comments before, and people are reading the book and referring to each others' comments too. It's really interesting.

• These shirts belong to a people who are still in existence. They should be given back. Period. Then get them to make new shirts to display in this museum. It’s nothing to do with how fragile they are. It’s to do with being objects which have deep meaning. Please give them back.

• Wonderful exhibit but makes me sad that their culture was ever stifled. The shirts should go back- or should they? They were traded; these shirts were not taken to squash the culture but were given as a sign of goodwill that we should ALL learn from.

• I travelled here from Australia to see the museum and this exhibition after reading about the project. Good luck with it all and congratulations to the project team.
• Christeen Schoepf, Phd candidate, UNE Armidale NSW

• This is an amazing and impressive exhibit. I’m an archaeologist specializing in Southeastern (USA) Native American archaeology, and I find this a very touching story.

• I actually came to the Pitt Rivers to ‘fill time’ as have been here many times over the years. This is why temporary exhibitions are so important, they keep museums alive. I found this exhibition very emotive- I was close to tears. As a conservator who has studied museology in the past- I would hope that at least a long term loan can be organised- I find that people engaging with objects is more important than any ‘small’ amount of damage this may or may not cause. This stuff is alive- it has had a tremendous impact on the Blackfoot people- surely that is more important than having them in ‘dead’ displays- I agree with A.Morton who commented earlier- great if replicas could be made and displayed here- let them have one!  [Shrops.]

The (Blackfoot) ancestors, teaching at Oxford

Since opening the exhibition Visiting with the Ancestors: the Blackfoot Shirts Project in late March, something very special has been happening at the Pitt Rivers Museum. Actually, many special things have been happening.

Visitors are actually working their way all around the room, reading all the exhibition texts and looking at the images and labels. (This is not supposed to happen: museum visitors tend to look at labels for no more than about 30 seconds, and they don’t generally read all of the text in an exhibition.) They are also spending longer in the exhibition than is usual for our temporary exhibitions.

They are also looking closely at the shirts themselves, and at the other objects in the exhibition: the legging, the new shirt, the students’ art work in response to the shirts, and the new quillwork.

Then they are also writing in the visitor comment book. I’m going to have to get a second comment book, because the first one is nearly full. The last panel of the exhibit asks, ‘what do you think about this project?’ and visitors really are telling us. Comments range from ‘the shirts are cool’ to ‘Please send them home.’ People are writing entire pages of comments, and leaving their email addresses. This week, a visitor added suggested readings in her comments, and also inserted a page in the book with reading suggestions. Visitors are responding to earlier visitor comments: there is dialogue going on in the book.

In my experience this is unusual. I am also surprised by the level of support voiced for the project, for Blackfoot people and heritage, and for the idea of visits of important objects home. I’ll transcribe some of the comments here soon, and we are now doing some serious visitor experience analysis, and interviews with visitors. What we’ve seen so far has been both intriguing and heart-warming.

Visiting with relatives...in Oxford

Over the past few years, a group of Blackfoot shirts at the Pitt Rivers Museum has been the focus of a remarkable project to enable Blackfoot people to reconnect with and learn from these important heritage objects. The first thing that we learned was that the shirts are not simply 'objects': they are collections of animate spirits. Three of the shirts have hairlocks of human and horse hair, which denote them as sacred. The shirts were collected in 1841 by Edward Hopkins, the secretary to the governor of the Hudson's Bay Company. When he retired in 1870, he moved to England and took the shirts with him. His family transferred them to the Museum in 1893 after his death.

We wanted to make it possible for Blackfoot people to literally reconnect with these ancestors, to actually touch them gently and learn from them directly. We worked with Alison Brown at the University of Aberdeen, who has a long history of working with Blackfoot people, and the Head of Conservation at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Heather Richardson, who did an internship at the National Museum of the American Indian, working on---their Plains shirts exhibition! Heather agreed to come to Alberta with us, Alison organized small group workshops, the Glenbow and the Galt Museums agreed to host us, and we took the ancestors home for a visit.

Wonderful things happened as a result. Ceremonial leaders, elders, artists, teachers, and college and high school students learned and shared so much knowledge with each other. People sang honor songs to the ancestors, brought them gifts, touched them gently, were moved to tears by their beauty and power. Students learned to do hide tanning and a bit of porcupine quillwork in preparation for meeting their ancestors, and one community revived a ceremony that had been dormant for many decades.

We also wanted to make it possible for museum visitors in the UK to learn from the shirts, and about the importance of the shirts to Blackfoot people today. We wanted to communicate about this kind of work, which is becoming such a part of what museums do. This week, we are opening an exhibition at the Pitt Rivers Museum called 'Visiting with the Ancestors,' which features three of the shirts, and images and words from Blackfoot participants in the project. The exhibit tells the story of the project, of what happened when the shirts went home for a visit, of how Blackfoot people feel about the project.

To celebrate the exhibition opening, we are delighted to have Blackfoot guests, an extended family of people who have brought their infant grandson to visit with the ancestors. And to visit with us. It means a lot when relatives visit from overseas.