Assimilation or resistance? : the production and consumption of Tlingit beadwork ...

• Main Author: Smetzer, Megan Alice
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2011
• Subjects: tlingit
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0100353; https://doi.library.ubc.ca/10.14288/1.0100353

The extensive art historical and anthropological literature addressing indigenous Northwest Coast artistic production has, at its center, a "significant silence." Though produced, consumed and valued, in a wide range of cultural contexts, for more than one hundred years, Tlingit beadwork has never been comprehensively analyzed. I engage with, and begin to fill, this significant lacuna in scholarship through the compilation into a catalogue of nearly eleven hundred beaded objects in widely dispersed museum collections, including regalia and other items made for Tlingit use, and souvenirs; the use of theoretical frameworks not previously applied to the Northwest Coast; the critical examination of historic texts and images; and, most importantly, conversations with Tlingit headers and elders. Euro-American constructions of authenticity, tradition, the hierarchy between fine and applied art, as well as notions of hybridity and commoditization created the circumstances for beadwork's marginalization. Drawing on ...