Wrapped in Wool: Coast Salish wool weaving, Vancouver’s public art, and unceded territory

Abstract

I'm not going to stop weaving until I've wrapped the city of Vancouver in our work… because when you arrive here and come into the city you should know that it is Salish territory and Musqueam." 1 These words represent the continuous work of accomplished weaver Debra Sparrow, within a community of weavers who have made significant inroads toward this vision. Materializing over the span of three decades, Coast Salish wool weavings (Salish weavings) are visible at the Vancouver International Airport (YVR), the Museum of Anthropology (MOA), and at the Granville at 70 th Development project (Granville project). However, woven Salish blankets are not usually the first artworks that come to mind for Vancouverites, tourists, or art historians when they think of local art production. The idea of Northwest Coast Native art-as the Indigenous cultural production of the region was historically framed-rests upon visions of monumental totem poles, cedar masks adorned with crest figures and carved in the abstract 'formline' design system most well known through the canonization of Haida artists such as Charles Edenshaw and Bill Reid. 2 Other styles and forms in circulation throughout the region, such as Salish weaving practices, have only comparatively recently gained attention as art. 3 How then, have Salish weavings become situated as public art in Vancouver in the last few decades? What is it they are understood to represent to the traveller, the student, and the passerby in these public spaces? Local press releases and art blogs have noted the weaving installations, but a sustained critical discussion of their paradoxical wrapping of institutional infrastructure has yet to occur in the discourses of textile art, craft, and of Indigenous art. 4 This paper analyzes how the presence of Salish weaving as public art has evaded critical attention within the art historical discourse of contemporary Northwest Coast Indigenous art.