ABSTRACT
The colonizing ideas of extinguishing any existing rights, confining the aboriginal population on reservations, and the tendency towards assimilation – the best way to solve the problem being to dissolve it – summarize the sites of grievance and mistrust. The anger at the Indian Act, and the arguments against it, focus on the land and its resources and on the concept of aboriginal rights to that land which, in British Columbia at least, the government cannot claim was ever ‘extinguished’ in treaties. Cultural representations are unavoidable in any consideration of the social relations between the First Nations and the non-native population. The significance of material culture lies at present in its challenge to colonial authority, its assertion of survival, its demand for response, its provocation to action. There is a need to find ways of reconstructing the evidently highly articulate relationship between the visual manifestations of this culture and contemporary social relations.
