ABSTRACT
Insofar as First Nations artists acknowledge and work within a culturally specific identity, cultural boundaries are at issue. Where translation is proffered, boundaries marking cultural difference are implied, but so is the idea that they can be overcome. Where translation is seen as a perversion, (‘traduttore, traditore’—an Italian dictum translated, more or less, as ‘translator, traitor’) the suggestion is that boundaries have to be maintained and translation withheld.1 Both positions are expressed but both positions are also being negotiated by First Nations artists. Their work, inseparable from strategies for its presentation, can very broadly be characterized as negotiating the boundaries-their existence, their significance, their permeability-around ethnicity and its expression in cultural forms. The term ‘negotiation’ is not intended to reassure, or to make anyone feel better, but to be a way of responding to the poly-directional complexities of the situation.
