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Pacific Coast
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This stone mask has a twin residing in Paris in the Musée de
l'Homme. Separated over one hundred years ago, the two masks
were not reunited until 1975, when the Paris mask travelled to
Canada to appear in the exhibition "Images Stone: B.C."
It was then that the relationship between the two masks,
expressions of the same face, was discovered.
The Museum's mask, without apertures for eyes, fits snugly
over the Paris mask, with its round eyeholes. It is thought that
the pair was worn in a naxnox performance, where an
individual's personal power was displayed in dance. To present
the illusion of the eyes actually opening and closing, the dancer
must have turned quickly while removing the "blind" mask
to reveal the one with eyeholes. The dancer would have needed
considerable strength to hold the four-kilogram inner
"sighted" mask in place with the wooden mouthpiece,
although a harness attached through holes in the mask's rim
might have helped support it. The "unsighted" mask may
have been held in the hand, concealed by the dancer's
costume.
Since naxnox masks and other dance paraphernalia were
kept hidden away when not in use, the audience would have thought
that there was only one stone mask, and that it had the ability to
open and close its eyes as some of the wooden transformation masks
could do.
William Duncan, the missionary who established Metlakatla,
British Columbia, offered the sighted stone mask for sale in 1878,
noting that it represented the "Thief"; he also referred
to a stone mask that was the "fellow" to the one he had
for sale. In Northwest Coast mythology, "Thief " refers
to Raven, who is a culture hero of the Tsimshian Indians. One of
the Raven stories recounts how he stole the sun and then released
it on the Nass River to illuminate what had been a totally dark
world. The theatre of the mask may have emphasized the dramatic
moment for humanity in the transition from unseeing to seeing.
The association of a missionary with the collection of the masks
may indicate that the native owner found that their power was not
compatible with Christianity. The Paris mask was collected from the
missionary by the explorer Alphonse Pinart and donated to the Musée
de l'Homme in 1881. The Ottawa mask was collected in 1879 by
Israel Wood Powell, deputy commissioner of Indian Affairs for
British Columbia. Although he recorded acquiring the mask at
Kitkatla, Powell did not visit the village that year. In view of
the confusion in his records, it is probable that he acquired it in
another community. One possibility is that both masks originated in
Port Simpson. (Coast Tsimshian)
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Floral designs on articles made by the Indians of the northern
forests were once thought to be traditional native motifs. Yet,
such patterns are seldom seen on items made before 1800, and were
never present in prehistoric native art expressions. The designs on
this mid-nineteenth-century Métis pouch clearly represent European
flowers in compositions that are reminiscent of colonial folk art.
This influence is not surprising when we consider that Ursuline
nuns in Québec in the mid-1600s had started mission schools in
which they instructed native girls in the art of embroidery. Truly
floral art, however, had its genesis in the Great Lakes region in
the late eighteenth century. There, Métis women living at missions
and fur trade posts integrated realistic floral designs into their
pictorial vocabulary. By the time the Métis had settled on the Red
River, their floral artistry was so distinctive that they came to
be called the Flower Beadwork People by the Indians of the region.
Pictured here is a Métis octopus pouch - so called for the four
double tabs at the bottom. Made of cloth, such pouches were
embroidered with silk thread or beads, and were used for carrying
pipe, tobacco, and flint-and-steel. Gradually, through trade and
intermarriage with the Métis, native peoples began to borrow their
brilliant floral motifs, and the style spread throughout
northwestern Canada, leading to the development of several local
variants. (Metis)
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