Becoming witnessEcology, embodied ethics and artistic practice

Thesis for Master’s of Fine Art 2005

by

Nancy Bleck, Slànay Sp’ákw’us

Hogeschool voor de Kunsten, Utrecht, The Netherlands

Open Learning University, London, England

1

In loving memory of friend, mountaineer, conservationist, wilderness educator, photographer, and the funniest man I ever met.

Xwexwsélken, John Clarke

Who showed me a home called wilderness.

Contents

Prelude

One I Situating espistemology and artistic practice

Two I Interview with Chief Bill Williams

Three I Art Context

Four I Summary

Bibliography

End Notes

Prelude

I was stirred by a desire to ‘do something’ about what was happening

to the land in a rainforest I had in recent years come to know as nexw-

ayantsut (Sims Creek / place of transformation) and Nsllwx-nitem tl’asutich

(Elaho Valley), located in southwestern British Columbia, three hours north

of downtown Vancouver. It’s environs smelled and tasted nothing like the

suburban sprawl of Mississauga, Ontario, where I once called home, with

it’s shrinking agricultural pastures, increasing highways, and massive

new housing developments, but even more frighteningly closer to what

an ‘environmental holocaust’ may actually imply. Thousands of hectors

of clear felling of an ancient ecology, wiped out over a corporate five-year

plan, displacing grizzly bears, moose, spotted owls, and numerous other

species which depend on the rich valley bottom forests for survival. These

include millions of Douglas-fir, Hemlock and Cedar trees, that can be

witnessed carted down the G-main logging road for shipment to foreign

waters, and all at a high ticket cost for the irreparable loss of life, and

damage left for local communities to reconcile and grapple over.

As a starting point, asking myself ‘what is to be done’ about the erasure

of old growth rainforests, my inquiry led me to seek out non-dominating

ways of producing different forms of knowledge, and of visualizing the

alternatives. I swerved into unexpected collaboration upon chance meeting

with famous mountaineer John Clarke in 1995 in the Elaho Valley, and

then one year later, with hereditary Chief Bill Williams, on a sandbar in

Sims Creek. I did not originally seek out the communities in which I am

now implicated; seamless flows between the arts, first nation’s culture,

ecology, and science, have arrived as an unexpected surprise to me. I

am deeply grateful, indebted and honoured for the genuine friendships

and new knowledge’s that have resulted from a shared commitment to

the land.

This in turn brought me to an artistic practice involving documentation as

art, community and public engagement, cross-cultural and interdisciplinary

collaboration, and to women studies, whose epistemologies provide a

critique of Western science and development, wherein the root of the

problem resides. To become responsible at a local level among multiple

communities, and therefore ‘together’ answerable to the eco-crisis, is

where I locate my art practice and citizenship.

Introduction

What is the reposition of the artist as a ‘witness’?

My research reflects the form of an embodied and engaged artistic journey;

mapping a specific political terrain of the temperate rainforest in West Coast

Canada, located in the northern part of the Squamish Nation traditional

lands. As a co-founder and artist inside the project of Uts’am / Witness,

having spent ten summers of fieldwork in the rainforest: that is engaging the

public to physically ‘witness’ it, while producing documentation as artwork,

my subject position therefore becomes intrinsically embedded within this

research. I will call up memory, story, photography, conversation, as well

as philosophy and cultural theory, as referents and guides traversing

and informing this exceptional landscape under siege. ‘Ecological ethics’

and ‘politics of location’ play a discursive role within my artistic research

navigation.

I am motivated to highlight that the artist has particular and responsive

ways of perceiving the world, that are indeed different from say a social

scientist, mountaineer, environmentalist, feminist, politician, academic, or

cultural theorist. However, I consider carefully how the artist may become

an active player in the political status of contemporary society in midst

of experiencing a long-lasting eco-crisis. In this sense, I encourage and

endorse art that carries the capacity to empower us to constructively act in

the world; art that ‘has the power to position itself politically, determinedly

and critically in the world, but also to be celebratory’.1 It is my objective

as a cultural activist. Antithetical to this belief, I play devil’s advocate, and

contradict these ideals by also defending an artistic potential which does

not subscribe to the expectations of art to ‘change society’ per se, and the

limited role and instrumentalization of art to serve a specific function or

political cause. Instead I will argue for art which is transformative, both for

nature and the human.

New and novel transformations among traditionally distinct disciplinary fields

are favouring more interdisciplinary approaches to knowledge production.

Rosi Braidotti writes, ‘concepts are nomadic because they have acquired

the capacity to transfer from one scientific discourse to another.’2 One of

my wishes as an artist is to find a place of graceful discourse between

ecology, citizenship and participation. Donna Haraway uses the term

‘worldly practice’, as a way to ‘start talking about any dimension of what

it means to be worldly – the commercial, the physiological, the genetic,

the political, [the organic]’3 It is about paying attention to power relations

and flow of capital, which tempers the arts, the environment, gender,

race, politics and almost everything one can think of. A closer look into

how gendered power relations operate in Western rationale, spins some

interesting discoveries where the environment is concerned, as discussed

in chapter one with Haraway’s figuration of the ‘modest witness’.

I will turn to a key player within Uts’am - Witness. One early morning by

the beachside, I engage in a video dialogue with Chief Bill Williams, which

makes up chapter two, offering insights into the Squamish traditional

practice of calling ‘witnesses’ when there is important ‘work to be done’.

My own stories are expressed through looking back at my photography,

as I offer an exchange of ideas, reflecting with a personal narrative on the

praxis of my work in chapter three. I cannot explain this process outside of my

embedded experience. My voice will shift from the academic, to the personal, as a

way to position and submerge my fleshy subjectivity into the conversation between

culture and nature. Gilles Delueze, Felix Guattari, Boris Groys, Sarat Maharaj,

Amir Ali Alibhai, Donna Haraway, and Rosi Braidotti, provide the philosophical

bones and cultural theory for offering more insight into the inquiry.

Two recent conferences in 2005 have provided insight into this conversation and

research of becoming witness. The first one in January in Berlin, Germany titled

KLARTEXT, ‘Artist as political subject’ and the second in April, ‘Arts and Ecology’

in London, England. I attended the first conference, while researching the second,

with regard to how these translate to the notion of the ‘witness’ rethinking artistic

practice in times of eco-crisis. There is so much that could be discussed from

these conferences, but for space consideration, I keep my observations to a bare

and crude minimum. For future research and inquiry, I am keen to participate in the

international debate on the artist’s role to the eco-crisis, and have signed up to the

RSA (Royal Society of Arts) for future involvement.

This investigation serves as a mapping exercise. It is a methodological reflexion

that searches out my own arts practice over the course of the Uts’am - Witness

project, which I will discuss is not about objectivity, representation and presentation

in the traditional ‘high art’ sense, but a socially active / animated implicated practice

– a course of intensive interconnected activities and unpredictabilities.

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One I Situating Epistemology & Practice

Witnessing is seeing; attesting; standing publicly accountable for

and psychically vulnerable to, ones visions and representations.

–Donna Haraway, modest_witness@second_millennium…,

My personal involvement as a witness within the Uts’am - Witness project,

and my own story, which is also my testimony of being called to witness

in the Coast Salish tradition, requires some understanding of specific

situated knowledge’s informing my art practice and actions in collaboration

with the Squamish Nation community. There is a need here to highlight

the personal within the political and vice versa, and to disclose my subject

position determined by my experiences and identity as a woman of white,

Euro-Canadian, middle-class / working-class, nomadic artist working

alongside cross-cultural alliances, producing documentation as art, while

deconstructing the grand narratives that philosophical knowledge claims

of Western power dominations have produced. I do so to expose my bias

informing my knowledge, which does not claim objective truths per se, but

highlights a few useful findings for transformation and change. In order

to make myself accountable, I call up what Donna Haraway describes

as ‘situated methodologies’ / ‘situated knowledges’, positioning oneself,

calling for a critical genealogy of subjectivity. This embodied ethical

standpoint forms the frame of my artistic practice and post-modern political

condition.

Throughout my art inquiry, I have acknowledged a decisive need to

investigate new perspectives on Western dominate rationality, and neo-

liberal globalization, not as a rehearsal for a regime of (un)fashionable

political correctness, but to expose and open up inherent misunderstandings

about what is meant by the political, the ecological, of power relations,

and opening up of the imagination in regards to these, which often gets

in the way of effecting real change within the real world. The whole point

is to attempt to re-imagine the world differently, beyond a ‘colonized

imagination’, through the re-construction of socially creative assemblages,

placing emphasis on respect for the differences of our multi-specied world.

My desire and hope is an ethical one, which is to ‘care’ ‘fully’ attempt a few

non-linear pathways, globulocalar steps, towards the goal of sustainable

futures.

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Modest Witness

Anti-racist feminist scholar of science, Donna Haraway, in her important

book, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_

OncoMouse™, explores the figuration of the modest witness, that in

theory is close in practice to the 2000+ year tradition of calling witnesses

to events of significant meaning in Coast Salish culture. I borrow from

Haraway the modest witness figuration as one of the main points of entry

into the complex discussion of what it means to be a witness in times of

standardized brutality of nature.

From the perspective of the Squamish Nation, calling witnesses in an oral

tradition is a form of law and governance and is a legitimate and legal

‘document’ in the eyes of the Supreme Court of Canada, which functions

as the cornerstone of history keeping and making of contemporary

indigenous cultural practices. I will not speak on behalf of this strong and

rich community. However, I will speak from my own subject position within

the project of Uts’am / Witness; what it informs and what it contributes and

continues to aspire to as ‘value added’ nature–culture integrated system’s

that celebrate diversity and difference, while forging genuine connection.

Haraway has identified what Squamish people have rigorously practiced

through the very survival of their culture, in the aftermath of genocide of

the previous century that ‘the important practice of credible witnessing

is still at stake’4.

What counts as credible witnessing in times of eco-crisis?

There are two points I would like to acknowledge in discussing Haraway’s

term ‘modest witness’ (borrowed from Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer),

with reference to the environment, and that is the problem of invisibility

and transparency, and what counts as ‘credible witnessing’ as a source

of vision5. The second is the tension between these privileged forms of

witnessing, with that of identifying a critique of ‘objectivity’. Shifting the role

of witnessing away from knowledge-claims, and toward a collective, public

and mixed act of witnessing, where all the players, (especially those whose

visibility have marked them biased and therefore ‘unreliable sources of

important things’6), precisely means cultural intervention into mainstream

modernity’s social power.

This self-invisibility is the specifically modern, European, masculine,

scientific form of virtue of modesty…This kind of modesty is one of

the founding virtues of what we call modernity. This is the virtue that

guarantees that the modest witness is the legitimate and authorized

ventriloquist for the object world, adding nothing from his mere

opinions, from his biasing embodiment. And so he is endowed with the

remarkable power to establish facts.7

Haraway spins the modernist notion of the modest witness, ‘queering’ the

modest in the witness, so as to diffract, displace and problematize this

silent self-invisibility, but notes that ‘reflexivity is not enough to produce

self-visibility’8.

Valid witness depends not only on modesty, but also on nurturing and

acknowledging alliances with a lively array of others, who are like and

unlike, human and not, inside and outside what have been the defended

boundaries of hegemonic selves and powerful places. 9

To address the violence inherent in a Western prevailing style of

development, calls for a closer look at how dualisms function in the

imagination, which Val Plumwood describes in her book, Feminism and the

Mastery of Nature, as ‘the instrumentalization of nature, where culture is

always the privileged rank in the hierarchy’.10 In Women, the Environment

and Sustainable Development, four feminist writers explain that, “the

embodiment of the subject is the political standpoint which allows for a

critique of dualism as a form of violence, that is to say, an oppositional

form of thought which has the effect of psychic warfare” 11

This calls for a critique of the style of conservation that enforces homogeneity

of language in the media, absolutism’s, dualisms and dichotomies of

‘us and them’ rationale, and the feeling of exclusion that comes with it.

Polarization of the different positions is necessary in the maintenance of

keeping those players ineffective.12 As John Clarke used to point out, ‘the

days are over when environmentalists can do no harm.’ And so we think

not to become clever, but because thinking transforms life. In a project to

do away with the foundation of ‘being’, binary and opposition, Deleuze

insists there exists nothing more than the flow of becoming, ‘all beings are

just relatively stable moments in a flow of becoming-life’. (Colebrook; 2002)

*excerpted from the website below

WE HAVE TO LEARN TO MAKE OUR THOUGHT TRAVERSE THE

INTERRELATIONS AND MUTUAL INFLUENCES BETWEEN ECO-

SYSTEMS, THE MATERIAL WORLD, SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL

RELATIONS.” Guattari, The Three Ecologies, p35

“In The Three Ecologies Felix Guattari extended his definition of ecology

to encompass social relations and human subjectivity as well as

environmental concerns, developing the concept *ecosophy as a catalyst

for change with the potential for collective and social reinvention. This

broadened concept provides a useful starting point for a conference

that brought together numerous perspectives on the ways in which

contemporary artists are confronting ecological issues and on the

relationship of the individual to their cultural, social, economic and natural

environments”. Emily Pethick

http://www.thersa.org/arts/conferences/conference1/visitorResponse.asp

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Art that engages critical thinking alongside community participation may

do so at a cost to its autonomy, but may also provide a leap forward in what

many groups and communities in the *ecosophy 13 field are grappling with.

Rethinking a relationship with the human and nature is not accessible, or

even possible, without the hard work of melting down stereotypes, forming

alliance by way of dialogue, and intensive interaction as a methodology for

sustainable, intelligent practice of radical human care.14

In a yearning to search out for those ‘unlikely others’, ‘human and not’,

‘inside and outside’ of the environmental discussion, I find myself in line

with the philosophy of Delueze and Guattari, curious about ecosophy,

becoming-multiple, contradictions, complexities, and the rhizome, just

to scratch the surface. To search for the positive ‘others’ who were not

part of the dialogue; those who were different from the media constructed

stereotype of a ‘warrior in the woods’, and whose voices were urgently

needed, became my primary focus in 1995. What this actually means is

getting down to a grass-roots level of non-violent environmental practice

and cultural activism, and a look at how ‘globalization is produced

locally’15.

Becoming is about repetition, but also about memories of the non-

dominant kind.…it is about the capacity to sustain and generate inter-

connectedness. - Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses, p.8

Recognizing the importance of strategic alliance, while never losing site

of her primary objective, the difference women can make, Braidotti allows

for an unleashing of the imagination to tackle the very core of the problem

of modernity - gender. In my work with the environment and the multiple

communities within Witness, I apply nomadic philosophy and hybrid

strategies of resistance, for entering into a dialogic relationship; and of

becoming-multiple, and becoming witness within my artwork.

What attracted me so much to Braidotti’s way of nomadic thought is its

willingness to reinvent itself, and to embrace self-criticism, which warns

against the ‘complete and unconditional alliance with any philosophy’. (1995:

25) In her own words, ‘nomadism is the actualization of multiple differencesʼ

(2002: and, ʻnomadic becoming is neither reproduction nor just imitation, but

rather emphatic proximity, intensive interconnectedness’17. In this way I am

searching through the question of how and where lie the possibilities for

ecosophic transformation in the context of Witness, and I cannot imagine

this without assertion for the positivity of difference that women offer.

Thus, becoming witness is about embracing the messy act of what

democracy could look like in a current history struggling toward ‘post-

coloniality’. The ‘becoming’ in my ‘witness’ may derive from French

philosophers, and Italian-Austrailan-Dutch inspired nomadic theorist, while

the ‘modest’ in the ‘witness’ from California anti-racist feminist of science,

it is the ‘witness’ in my ‘witness’ that I will appeal to and acknowledge in

a dialogue with the rainforest, and in an interview with one of the sixteen

hereditary chief’s of the Squamish Nation, telàlsemkin/ siyam. This mixing

together of a 2000 year traditional practice of witnessing, combined with

a critical analysis of artist as social agent, forms the embodiment of my

subjectivity as an artist.

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Two I Interlocutors: Dialogue with community

[Place of transformation] nexw- ‘ayantsut

i) Earth / trees / water / non-human world / wild spirit places / conversation with the biological soup of the temperate rainforest

[Protocol] Chicayx

ii) Squamish people and protocols, Chee-ach , oral history and law / interview with Chief Bill Williams

Community Arts Practice

iii) Roundhouse arts residency, involvement with local artists and cultural workers, community art, artist as political subject*

Conservation, Mountaineering and Science Community

iv) Ecologists, biologists, geographers, mountaineers and environmentalists on a ‘walk in the woods’

For space restrictions, I will address ii) from the list of my Interlocutors: Dialogue with Community

Uts’am - Witness Synopsis

Witness is a cross-cultural collaboration in partnership with the

Roundhouse Community Arts Centre and the Squamish Nation.

Founded by John Clarke, Nancy Bleck and Chief Bill Williams, it

became the first arts residency to the opening of the Roundhouse in

downtown Vancouver, BC. This community-based project was hugely

attended in its first year (nominated for the ‘Ethics in Action’, Award

in 1998, and national winner for ‘Best Cultural Event’ from Tourism

Canada in 2002). It culminated in BC’s largest-ever exhibition involving

175 artists, professional and not, on issues of environmental practice,

first nations culture, and political engagement. It has remained a

stable residency project ever since its inception in 1997. Each year

several hundred people participate in Witness through a mix of

cross-cultural dialogue, ceremony, non-violent practice, wilderness

camping, art exhibitions, workshops, forums and/ or media events.

Over 40 different volunteers run the project each summer through the

Roundhouse. Celebrating diversity and difference, Witness connects

urban city dwellers to their rainforest backyards three hours north, to

learn more about Squamish traditional lands, and ecological issues

that affect us all. The project shrinks and expands, depending on the

year and events taking place, political circumstance, and / or needs

and desires of the multiple communities involved.

Conversation with Telàlsemkin/ siyam, Hereditary Chief

Bill Williams

FIG. 1 Reportage photo from the ‘verification ceremony’ of calling back witnesses, Sims Creek, April 2001

The Squamish peoples have gone from a population of approximately 80, 000

people, down to 150 upon contact with settler societies, nearing the edge of

extinction. Today there are 3 300 Squamish members, and 15 fluent speakers

of the traditional language, which is actively being taught in elementary and

secondary schools, and practiced during the witness ceremonies. While they have

never ‘ceded or surrendered rights to our traditional territory or the power to make

decisions within our territory’ (Squamish Nation Assertion of Title), they retain only

0.03% of their original ‘house of land’ at the moment.

We are shadows in our own land. Anyone can come here and not know

who we are. At a minimum, we have to share who we are and our

culture. - Chief Bill Williams

Being called to witness in the Coast Salish tradition is a sacred honour.

FIG. 2, Telàlsemkin/ siyam, dyptch, C-prints, 2004

Entangled as I am between an artistic researcher in love with ‘rhizome

rainforests’ and Squamish Nation culture that frames Uts’am-Witness, it

is my Euro-Canadian rooted subjectivity that prevents me from voicing

a simplistic score here. I am a daughter of immigrants who was born to

this land via the gateways of colonization. I have no authority to speak

‘culturally’ on behalf of an indigenous subjectivity, even as Slanay

Sp’ak’wus, my adopted Squamish ‘ninahalahin’ name. Nor do I even

wish to, unlike the anthropological practice of speaking on behalf of

‘Others’, often in distorted scholastic scores, or over idealized tones.

That is the farthest of my intentions, as I firmly believe that voice is

best coming from its own authenticity and aliveness; its own cultural

survival, beauty and wealth of traditions. Let the conversation begin.

Nancy Bleck: August 7th, 2005. I am speaking with Telàlsemkin/ siyam, one of sixteen hereditary chiefs of the Squamish Nation, (and elected chairman of council). Maybe you can state your name and explain your hereditary chieftainship?

C.B: My hereditary Chieftainship is Telàlsemkin/ siyam, as given to me

by my family and recognized by the community. My driver’s license name

is Bill Williams, and my baptismal name is Billy, George, Mario, Joesph

Williams, (chuckles) I don’t say that very often, (more chuckles)… …

yeah, that’s who I am.

N: I will be asking a few questions in regards to the research work that I have been doing in the Netherlands, with my artistic practice, and also with the Utsʼam – Witness project. To begin, I would like to ask you what your motivation is for getting people out to witness the land.

My objective is setting them on a journey.

I’ve met people this summer who came to Witness for the very first time,

and again this summer I’ve met people who I met 8 yrs ago, and this is

their 8th year of a 9 year journey that they’ve continued coming back. So

what it’s all about is planting that seed to get out there. Change is slow,

people do not like change…people do not like to change their routine. In

order for people to accept something new, and even with Squamish people,

going out to the land is very new to a lot of them. They grew up in an urban setting - they grew up beside the second largest drug market in Canada, in North America, in terms of heroin coming into the land. So being a person who would walk out into the Mother Nature setting is terrifying for them because they have never experienced anything so close. They think that a bear is going out jump out behind a tree and consume them, when in reality itʼs actually going to be the tree that is going to consume them, by the beauty of the tree and the wholeness of the tree. And for

the tree just being there and putting out the beautiful feelings of all the

trees that are out in Mother Nature and it’s not the animal that is going to

kill them. And so the change is actually going backwards, the change is

going back to Mother Earth; the change is getting out of the urban setting,

getting out of the feeling of convenience, getting out of the ability to want

immediate gratification. But to actually physically work for something,

take two / four hours to walk along a trail and finally see something, and

then realize that as they are walking back from their journey that they are

in fact slowing down and being able to see what is all around them, the

grandeur and splendor that Mother Nature offers.

And so for us as Squamish people, because we are so urbanized, just like

the rest of Canadian society, it’s hard for them to get out of their feeling of

comfort, their comfort zone and getting into a new area of something that

they’ve never experienced and that’s the wilderness, the real wilderness

that we do have in our lifesblood as people, because all races have that, itʼs just a matter of generations of loss. If your mother and father, or your grandmother and grandfather were not a part of Mother Nature, or part of the surroundings around you in terms of a natural state, and you always grew up in cities, then thatʼs all theyʼll talk about, thatʼs their history, thatʼs their stories. But if you show them as to things beyond that, in terms of

connecting to the land, then a little spark will jump out in front of them

and something will say, ‘I have to go there’, or its been something I heard

about and I want to be part of, and thatʼs what I was talking about earlier, that seed that we want to germinate to entice people, because getting out to the land – once they connect, is fabulous, theyʼll want to go back and back again, but if they donʼt give themselves that chance to connect, then itʼs harder for us to connect with their children because they canʼt pass on the stories.

FIG. 3, Untitled, C-print, canvas heat transfer, 1998

N: Now in getting to the simple, but complex question of the notion of witnessing. One of the things that I am researching involves what is means to be a witness, or to become a witness. It is a word that gets used in contemporary society often –but what it means to become a witness in Coast Salish culture is different from my experience, and requires a different level of responsibility. And in the Coast Salish tradition when witnesses are called, is when there is important ̒ work ̓to be done. I wonder how that ʻwork ̓has changed or been modified over generations. And how do you see ʻwhat is important work to be done today ̓- how do you see the importance of how witnesses play a role?

C.B: To be called a witness in a Coast Salish form, has been modified

to take into account today’s culture. People want to get to the ‘ah, ha’

but they don’t want to spend four days to get to that ‘ah, ha’, they want

to have that realization in 30min. To call a Witness event in the Coast

Salish way has been modified lots, and they way it’s been modified is

the method of calling witnesses, and how we wrap up the witness event,

has changed dramatically. In the old way of calling witnesses, we call the witness the same in that we call many people, but in the old days, we would call the mature men of each community that is attending the event, and no women were called. Today, such as the memorial yesterday, a lot of women were called, so that changed the male and female role in that event. And the other way it’s changed is getting to that 3min ‘ah, ha’, as opposed

to the five hour journey, we only allow a certain amount of witnesses to

be called. In some instances, to glorify the watch, we would only call four

people to speak at the end of the witness event, even though we might

have called 400 witnesses, so what we are doing is putting tape over the

mouths of those 400 people who were called, and only allowing 4 people

to speak, thinking that these four people can actually speak on behalf of

the 400 people who were there, but in reality I might have an idea what

your thinking is, but I can’t speak for you, and I know the general concept

of where you might be coming from, but again, because each individual

is so unique and different, how you or another person would phrase their

words, especially using the English language, it dramatically effects what

is being said and how people hear it, and so our calling of witnesses with

people in the Sims, it changes the reality of witnessing – it’s modified, its

shortened, the reality is not even the same in its true feeling of a Coast

Salish event, we use some terminology that is similar, for instance when

we call witnesses now – thankfully its called ‘work’. And the reason why

it’s called work, is in normal events in Coast Salish it generally takes a

year, or four years to prepare, and again the preparation of having the

event, whether it’s a memorial, a wedding, a naming, whatever, is the four

year journey of getting there, its not the actual memorial, its not actual the

wedding, it’s going out and getting the food, and going out and getting

the wood, its sitting down and weaving the blankets, it sitting down and

weaving the hanker chiefs, its sitting down and practicing the songs; itʼs the journey, and to call witnesses is the end result. So the modification I guess is that everything is shortened, thereʼs lots of immediate goals of wanting a 5 min gratification, a 3min ʻah, haʼ, than really looking at the journey itself.

FIG. 4, Detail from ‘Witness’ Photo-canvas mural, heat transfer, 3’ x 37’, 1997

N: One of the things I was reflecting on from Donna Harawayʼs book, Modest Witness, is that the credible act of witnessing is still at stake. I am interested is what counts as credible witnessing? In the practice of witnessing, how does one become ̒ credibleʼ? To be the eyes and ears of an event, or the eyes and ears of what is happening, how would a Coast Salish person be trained over a lifetime to be that credible witness?

C.B: It is fairly simple – its wanting to be recognized, just like any other

community. In the Coast Salish ways they’ve always tried to include

everybody when you go to an event. In today’s society, if there is 400

people, then they’ll call 400 witnesses, and in the old days they would only

call a very specific few, and especially of you have ancestral name, you

are very happy to be called and recognized on the floor by a Speaker in

front of 200 or 400 people, for the very first time, and you know because

your name is called is something very special because it is an obligation

that you are now given, and it isn’t an obligation that’s given to you, it’s a

recognition by other people that you have the ability, the wits around you

to know that being to called as a witness you have that responsibility and

because you are being called, other people know that ‘yes, that person

has that responsibility and can act accordingly and can do the job that

we are asking of that person to be the eyes and the ears and remember

this forever and a day’. It is that recognition of people who are outside

of yourself who would call your ancestral name to verify that you are

responsible and you can remember and echo things in a way that will not

vary from the real work that is taking place in that particular instance. It

is that recognition and is that time in having people know that you can

handle that responsibility.

N: Prior to collaborating with the Squamish Nation, I never thought of the ʻact of witnessing ̓ as a form of governance. What is witness in a ceremonial practice, in the Coast Salish tradition?

C.B: To be called to witness is the actual cornerstone of our Longhouse tradition of what we call Chicayx [chee – ach], chicayx is our foundation of our law, of how things get done. And in order to verify our law, we

need people not just within our family, our community, but people from

outside our community to come in and to verify that the event that is taking

place is something that they will bring back to their community to their

family, eventually, that says yes this event did happen, and yes they did

call witnesses, they did have a Speaker, yes they did have a doorman , yes

they did have someone looking after the fires, and yes they did feed us,

so that everything that they did was is in the same way fashion and form

as in our community, and that there was no conflicts - nobody standing up

and saying that they have a problem with this event, and because of the

people that were there 200, 500, 1000, and that there was no issue taken,

then it is all a good qualified event that is part of the chicayax, part of the culture, that is handed down orally through our aunts and uncles, through our grandmothers, grandfathers, that gratifies our chicayax, our history, of how things should be done.

N: It is the closest thing to what I understand what democracy could actually look like. (chuckles) You talked before about naming and the recognition of witnesses being called in an ancestral name, and we witnessed Drew Leathemʼs naming ceremony a few weeks at the closing event for Witness this summer. I have a few questions around the naming process, particularly the difference between a ʻninahalayan ̓name and an ancestral name. What

has changed in giving a name to a person that isn’t of First Nations

heritage? John Clarke, myself, Finn Donnely, Princess of Lichenstein, and Drew, those are the people that I know that have adopted Squamish

names, there could be others that I donʼt know. What has changed in the culture to recognize people outside of the culture to give them a little name (ninahaylahin)?

C.B: Ummm, absolutely nothing (laughs). The only thing that has changed

is that those people that you mentioned are now aware of Squamish. They

never knew anything about Squamish, and all these peoples have attributes

that mirrors Squamish thinking in some respects, and mirror things that a

Squamish person should carry, and these people that you mention have

sediments of things in their heart and their mind that they do on a day to

day basis that mirror the Squamish culture and because of that members

of our community have said, ‘well let’s do something about that’. It shows

that you can be recognized by our Squamish siyam’s (chief’s) and have the

ability to be adopted and carry a Squamish title. What you’ve witnessed

in the names of the people you know who are outside of the Squamish

is within your generation. There are generations before that I know that

people who carry names of distinction, like Senator Austin, and he worked

with the late Percy Paul, in that age group, to do things that benefited

Squamish, and that time in the 1950’s and 60’s, they gave out names in

just the same way that Sekyu siyam and myself and other members in our

community are doing, in recognizing peoples attributes, and showing how their true spirit of the heart is, and because of that we have to continue looking not only inside our community, but outside our community to benefit our community in ways that our members canʼt. And look at people

who do show a personal level of commitment that we know that in 50

years from now, if they are still living, those attributes still will be strong,

they are not going change and that the generations of youth will benefit

over that time period, so it is just an extension of the Squamish culture and

an extension of today’s thinking, but still mirroring some of the thinking

of our membership. Squamish is unique in accepting people, I think, only

because I know the history of Squamish, and back in 1880, members of the

siyam’s (chiefs) of the day, they adopted people into the Squamish culture and

allowed them to marry inside the culture and allowed them to be members

inside the community. (end of tape)

In the way of giving names - there are two ways of giving names, one way is

giving an ancestral name, and that one is fairly simple, in that it’s the name

of one of your ancestors, so the connection is immediate. The other way is to

give a name such as the name you have, and if we give out a name that is not

an ancestral name, then what we have to do is sit down and talk about it. And

talk about an individual’s strength, and to come up with words that would

encompass those strengths in a way that can be seen. The name that you have Slànay Spʼákwʼus, [female eagle] or eagle woman, is a name that directly reflects the work that you do, through the eagleʼs eye, we were looking at that meaning. We all know that an eagle can see very far and very detailed what

is all around, but an eagle can also from far distance zero in and see very

specifically that little field mouse in the whole field and be able to go down and

pluck it out, or just watch it, and that is a reflection of what we think that you

have, in being able to take a look at a bush in a forest and be able to single out

one aspect of the forest that you feel is important, and through that ability…

because not a lot of people can do that, they’ll always see two million bushes

there, or two million trees, and not be able to see the old red cedar there, or

see the yellow cedar, or see the blueberry bush, it’s just a whole bunch of

green to them. So that’s the thinking behind giving the names that are not

ancestral names, names that would fulfill the attributes of the individual that

they’ve already developed, that they’ve already been using in their life and

nothing will change from that, so what we have to do is be able to recognize

that attributes that they posses, and in the case with Xwexwsélken (mountain goat), John Clarke, it was immediate, bang it was there, he lived that for 25

+years before I even met him, and upon recognition of what his history was it

was very easy to identify the name for the late John Clarke. Other people

it takes a bit more to bring out, or to recognize the attributes that person is

utilizing, especially if they are younger, because they still haven’t really

developed their own thinking and their own patterns of life to an extent

where a name can be brought out very easy, so it takes a bit longer to

recognize those attributes that something in fact is going to be life-long.

N: Part of the work that I am now doing which is a reflexion on work that I have done before. I am looking at some of my photographs again and how it informs my process, looking at a visual image as a form of intelligence and how it starts to talk back. It often takes a long time in order to know what is being investigated, or the inquiry, or the curiosity and sometimes it takes awhile to actually hear what the images have to say. Can you comment on an image that I have done that for you started to talk back?

C.B: There are a number of images that have helped…the capturing of moments in time has always been hard to do with indigenous cultures, because what is happening is there is a capturing of time or image through eyes that are not of the same culture, and what is seen is some of the

images that you have taken are getting close or right bang on, in terms of

wanting to capture an image of time of our cultural events that need to be

captured through our eyes. Because the medium that you use, the camera

is so relatively new even though that they’ve had cameras in 1880’s or

90’s or whenever they had them, the first images, it’s still something that

our culture hadn’t taken on in the same perspective of ‘recording the day’.

If you look back to the images that we have, of the early images of the

Squamish peoples, we have dozens of nice images of St. Paul’s church,

but we don’t have pictures of our events, we don’t have pictures of our

children, other than the residential schools when they are all lined up

really nice in their uniforms, we don’t have them playing at the beachside

with the canoes (..) we don’t have them intermingling in a natural setting,

up until recently we didn’t have our Speakers in the middle of the ‘work’

being recorded, those are the things that in my mind should be brought

back to the community, these things should be done in a way that reflects

what they’re doing in the truest sense of the work that they do, is to bring

out the culture, while bringing out the culture capturing them in that time

capsule of that film. And that work that you have been doing recently

captures that. Not the film of those nice burning bushes or the film of the

clear-cuts, but more of the people, of the ways of capturing who we are

and where we come from

FIG. 5, Untitled, Duratrans, Light Box, 12” x 30”, 1995

N: I read a book in Holland during the Masters course called ̒ Understanding Media Theory ̓ and it goes right from describing the first media of spoken language, to our hyper-mediated world today, and how with each transformation of media ,how it is built upon the previous media, whether that was the spoken, the written, the printed, etc, and itʼs a very delicate thing because it informs differently, a different kind of intelligence happening through the media, whatever is being mediated, and maybe you could say something about how that change has happened so quickly from an oral traditional culture, which is still being practice today, alongside living in a hyper-mediated world, and still working with those forms of technology also.

a zone of urgency, and now itʼs different, its gone deeper, and Iʼd like to hear your thoughts on what that place of transformation [nexw- ‘ayantsut], what that actually involves, what that means.

C.B: What that means is a two step process, maybe even three. What that

means is that first of all, you recognize who you are first, and in recognizing

who you are you recognize your values, and your foundation, and once

you recognize who you are what your values are, then you can go out

and explore to see where your values fit, who do your values fit with.

And to get an understanding of other people and whether or not your are

really way off the wall, or whether your values are so attuned with the

culture of today, then your values are of common interest to a lot of people,

or are your values off to the left or off to the right of what mainstream

society thinks? It really doesn’t matter, but what matters is the change of

being able to accept the things that come into your life that you’ve never

experienced before. And these changes will ultimately always benefit you

and they will always make your foundation stronger, because you have a

bigger thicker base to build yourself on, and if you have a bigger, thicker

base then the more you’ll be able to accept, because you are already

comfortable with your foundation, and how you’ve gotten to where you

are. The more you are able to reach out and feel what that part of the

envelope you are pushing will feel, because you know that even if you

break and open that part of the envelope and you didn’t want to, you can

still draw yourself back to the foundation of who you are, and where you

come from. And that change, that transformation, if you don’t break that

envelope what you do is you build yourself a higher level of foundation, so

you can push yourself even more in different areas. So that transformation and that change is within everybody, but not everybody is willing to take those chances, willing to say that ʻyes, itʼs a beautiful day out today, but there are a lot of children crying in the world, and I want to help that. I

C.B: Well what is happening today is that our teachings, our chicayx is still the same, they havenʼt changed, what has changed is todayʼs culture on how that information is recorded, and how immediate that information can be transferred from that event to the rest of the world, and Chief Xalek / Sekyu siyam always says that, ʻTransformation and change is needed, itʼs requiredʼ. The evolving culture of today had to take into account our

culture, and in order for us to make those changes we have to go back

to the foundation of our chicayx, to make sure that it still in tact, that

the foundation layer is there, but the modification of that culture is the

transformation of who we are today, and we only can do that successfully

in order for tomorrow’s children to recognize who were are today, is to be

able to make that change. If we don’t make that change then we are trying

to freeze ourselves in time, and in an ever-evolving world that we live in

today and if we try to do that, we will marginalize ourselves, because we

would never be able to keep up with how information is being exchanged

today. Ten years ago we would never thought of carrying our pictures on

a CD, and be able to transform those pictures digitally around the world

instantly. If we always tried to keep things in our comfort level, then

change would never happen, and again we get back to that discussion in

order for us to change successfully, we have to adapt, and recognize how

the foundation of our culture can remain the same yet still be able to take

up these new tools to evolve our culture, to explain who we are and where

we come from yet once again, but through a different medium.

N: On the understanding of what is a transformative process, when we are up in the Elaho, the name of that area is called, nexw- ‘ayantsut [place of transformation], and it interests me a great deal – change and transformation, its one of the things I am most interested in. I see art as a transformative process. I used to see it in different ways. I think through the course of working on Witness in the last ten years, has very much transformed me personally. I started to come at it in the beginning more as

donʼt feel comfortable with me just sitting here where I am - I want to do something about it. Or yes, the forest is beautiful and we are growing new

trees around us, but there is something about an old-growth forest that will

always remain unique and different and maybe we should not log it, or not

put roads into those areas but just leave it alone and let Mother Earth take

care of that area’, and every once in awhile bless ourselves to be able to go

into that area and really feel what an old-growth setting is all about, and

go in and feel the oneness with Mother Earth. Knowing that where you

are going now, if its put aside, or not being developed, is something that is so unique it ultimately becomes like our ancestors, or becomes what our elders are all about, who are in fact the jewels of our community, because they are so unique and so different and carry so much wealth in terms of information of what happened to them during their lifetime, and how their life changed, and yet still remained the same, because we as Squamish

people live in this area and this is our home, and other people who come

here they feel for the first time the newness of an old-growth forest, they

feel the freshness of a glacial spring, that they have never even considered

before in their lives, and they all of a sudden realize that they are walking

in to something that to us as Squamish people is old-school, to them their

bursting their envelope, their bursting their feeling of comfort, their in an

area that they’ve never experienced before, but our elders just shrug their

shoulders and say ‘it always been there’. And the same with what we’re

trying to tell our youth, to our children, it’s always been there, it’s only

up to them as individuals to experience, and to get comfortable with their

foundation of who they are and where they come from, and once they are

comfortable, then they will go out into the land, and go do the baths [early

morning glacial river baths], and they will find out more of who they are

and where they come from in a positive way that will not only benefit them

as members of our community, but it will benefit our community because

it will make our community stronger.

N: Do you think because the old-growth forest is so ʻnew ̓ to settler-societies, that it makes it that much easier to exploit?

C.B: well, what makes it easy for exploitation is the get rich quick

mentality, of a majority of our culture today, where they can see that rather

than waiting one-hundred and twenty years for a tree to grow, they would

rather go cut a tree that presently exists that might be one-thousand years

old to fifteen-hundred years old, and they don’t have to do nothing about it,

they just have to cut it and not wait like they have to with a majority of the

wood today. So it’s more of a get rich quick mentality and not committing

themselves to sitting there and manicuring the forest over a hundred and

twenty years to let it to grow in a way that it should grow and putting in

the time to really appreciate the wood.

N: With your experience and time put into Witness as a project, through the Roundhouse Community arts centre, how have you changed through that process yourself personally?

C.B: I’ve had to change to put myself out in the limelight, I’ve never

seen myself as a person who is there leading people and pointing in a

direction of where we should be going and what we should be doing. I’ve

always seen myself as a leader who leads without doing those kinds of

activities, who would sit down and do all the background work and make

sure something gets pulled off and in a successful way, and not necessarily

standing there and being the person who is pulling things together to be

the focal point of the event, and that’s changed, because in order to have

work being done, to hire a Speaker, and call witnesses, you need a family,

you need a group or an individual to create the reason for the event, create

the reason to call witnesses. Because our culture has not been put out in the limelight the way that we put our culture out in the witness project

itself, it has forced me to be that focal point, to be that person of calling witnesses and hiring the Speakers, and making me more vocal than I ever wanted to be.

N: Do you see your role changing in the future with that?

C.B: I see it changing in very positive way, and it’s changing today with

the introduction of the ambassadors in the last two years, the ambassadors are a group of young people [majority of young women] in our community who are going out in the land, who are putting themselves forward in front of the mainstream society and putting themselves out and saying who they are and where they come from, and its beautiful because they are taking

over my role as being the person to call the witnesses, to hire the Speakers,

they taking over that role because they themselves are being the Speakers,

they themselves are the family who is calling the gathering together to

call witnesses, so hopefully in the next three to five years, they themselves

will take over completely all the roles and responsibilities that I have been

carrying in the last nine years of pushing the Squamish culture forward

and that they, all 14 or 16 will then be carrying that role and responsibility

in their day to day activities. Then I can step back and maybe focus on

other segments of our traditional land holdings that need to be highlighted

or further light shed upon those issues.

N: yes, we were in email conversation about some of the things that Interfor (multinational forest company) was negotiating with the Squamish Nation, and that is the buying back of the TFL 38 [tree farm license 38 – meaning 38 thousand hectares of land] in which these old-growth forests reside in, how is that process going?

C.B: That process is still on track, it has slowed down a lot only because of

what’s called ‘due diligence’ meaning that they have stated that they have

a certain value, in Interfor’s mind, that what the TFL 38’s net worth is, and

we have to go in a sound out whether or not that value has any credibility

to those numbers. I thought it would be a quick process of two months, and

it looks like it will be more of a process of 8 months to a year, before things

resolve. But buying timber forest license is one half of the equation. Even though Interfor has a right to log in TFL 38, which is the majority of our traditional territory, they have to follow the provincial guidelines, and the provincial guidelines say that their annual allowable cut is still 240, 000 cubic meters a year, which hasn’t changed, which also includes the cutting of all the old-growth in our traditional territory, and until we change that number, our Wild Spirit places are in jeopardy, and those negotiations are

going on simultaneously with the buying of the TFL 38 license is going

on, so we won’t know until January ’06 whether or not we can take the

Wild Spirit places out of the annual allowable cut. If we can’t it would be

a great benefit to Squamish to buy the TFL 38 and not log, and just take the

penalty of not logging, and look at other people to help us pay that penalty,

because ultimately the provincial government wants money for the old-

growth forest, so if we give them money and not log, then my thinking is

that provincial government wouldn’t really care, as long as they get their

money. So we have to look at other groups and organizations to help us,

with that, but if we can negotiate the Wild Spirit places out of the annual

allowable cut, then that’s the best world we would be in, because then we

wouldn’t have to worry about the cutting of the old-growth forests ever

again. What we could do then is focus not on the fight of trying to keep the old-growth forests, but focus on the fight of introducing the old-growth forest to our children.

~~~>>>><<<<<~~~

Three I Art Context

Art has deep and difficult eyes and for many, the gaze is too insistent.

Better to pretend that art is dumb, or at least has nothing to say that makes

any sense to us. - Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects

We have turned ‘art’ into ‘pictures’ in effort to mask its potency.

- Beth Carruthers, p.23

The artist becomes a compassionate activist, collaborator, listener,

celebrator and educator. In the context of community, art is no longer

dead; it is reborn. - Amir Ali Alibhai, p. 42

How does this impact on my art practice?

Until recently I have understood my artistic practice as straightforward as a

‘contemporary photo-based arts practice’, which in the context of Witness,

displaces my community cultural work as simply another extension of my

commitment to the eco-crisis, falling into the old hierarchal trap which

always privilege’s culture over nature. Not surprising, considering my

training at the Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver, BC, where I was inspired

first-hand by the Jeff Wall’s, Ian Wallace’s, Stan Douglas’s, Ken Lum’s, and

Jin Me-Yoon’s. Since Documental XI, however, my practice can be better

understood as ‘art documentation’ where the ‘artwork’ itself is located

elsewhere, that is, intangible outside of ‘experiencing it’. The essay by

Boris Groys, in Documenta XI, ‘Art in the age of Biopolitics: From Artwork

to Art Documentation’, questions the very distinction between art and life,

and argues that ‘today’s art is to become life itself’.

The changing role of contemporary art to find reconnection back to life-

issues, (which contradicts my love for the those luscious, over-sized,

modernist, all-encompassing photo-based ‘high-art’ works), has actually

been the privileged rank in the binary for most of my work in the development

of Witness. Desire to place myself in the context of the gallery-museum

conformity of the high-art world, took a back seat, (but remains a desire

none-the-less), which complicates and confuses my ethics in practice.

In light of recent shifts in the art world, using the example of Documenta

XI, curator Sarat Maharaj bravely sidesteps ‘art in terms of the gallery-

museum system’. Maharaj posits the Duchampian paradoxical question,

“Can one make a work of art that is not ‘Art’?” I have personally struggled

with the question of such ‘art today’, well before reading his text, ‘Xeno-

Epistemics: makeshift kit for sounding visual art as knowledge production

and the retinal regimes’. My bewilderment is reflected in so much as I

grapple constantly between the prospect of ‘producing’ tangible artworks

in a gallery-museum style approach, with that of actually ‘becoming’ a

work in and of itself in relation to a larger community.

They whip us up to see-think-feel weather fronts-new affects, subjectivities,

feelings, emotional eddies and tidals – that trigger transformative thought,

action and behaviour. Let’s look at them as art-ethical processing plants

churning out options and potentials for chipping in, action and involvement

in the world.

The difficulty within a process-oriented possibility or ‘art-ethical processing

plants’ lies in overcoming traditional notions of producing a singular work

of art. That is to say free-association to create irregular, odd, eccentric,

idiosyncratic imaginings. Art to most people, especially within a ‘community

context’, must be ‘understood’ to be recognized as art. There is a judgement

value placed upon a work immediately, which can also shut down a more

experimental, unregimented attempt.

Jan Verwoert, professor of Contemporary Art at the Academy of Umea,

points out that art has an ‘implicit critical potential’ which is different from

an ‘explicit political effect’. The ‘implicit potential is the artist’s ability to

un-frame existing definitions of art and artistic competence. Placing the

artist in the social context defines the criteria of competence for the artist

as negotiator, visionary, communicator, which limits this potential18’. If

artist’s are those working from the ‘inside-looking out’, whereas of neo-

liberal globalization from the ‘outside-looking in’, then what Robert C.

Morgan suggests to artists, is for an awareness of the limitations of his /

her involvement, and to ‘think inwardly in terms of what we can transmit

to the outside.19”

Amir Ali Alibhai, artist, curator and arts programmer at the Roundhouse

Community Centre, who has written about Witness on several occasions,

takes a different spin on the artist as ‘compassionate activist’ and community

animator, which I have shared upon multiple occasions. ‘Community

is not a static entity ‘out there’, but is manifested through action – it is

practiced’.20

Witness fulfills the roles described as the ‘territory’ of community art

practice, depending on who you ask. Witness is Public Art, Activism,

Empowerment, Education, Collaboration, Celebration and Community

Development, simultaneously... Perhaps the simplest explanation

for why community art practice has emerged recently is the need to

contemporary society for us to find a space to speak – to participate

in the public sphere in critical dialogue, and not in a manner that is

bureaucratized, surveillanced, not about consuming products, and not

removed from our embodied realities. – Amir Ali Alibhai, p.35

Former director of the Songbird project, artist and friend, Beth Carruthers,

writes in an unpublished essay titled, “Returning the Radiant Gaze”, that

“we have outlawed art, burned art and glorified art...not because art is

a mirror, a narrative, or a representation, but because art is something

more”. It is this ‘something more’ that I am always trying to touch with the

art process. I become irked when art is downsized to a ‘task’, assigned a

‘mission’, or reduced to grand-scale ‘propaganda’ for a political message.

It is insulting to the art practitioner. This was the case in many of the

artistic presentations at the KLARTEXT conference in Berlin of this year.

It is not the elitist commercial criteria for ‘high art’ that I argue for, but

the transformative repositioning of the creative process to have effect in

society, beginning with the plane of community.

Community art practice emerges at a time when globalization and the

dominant culture of consumption threatens the diversity and integrity

of distinct cultural communities and our traditional mechanisms for

community-building and maintenance (ie: the ‘public sphere’), and

indeed our sense of being active agents in society.

– Amir Ali Alibhai, p 39

For me personally, art is not an easily understood relationship. Perhaps it

is one part of my jobs as an artist and cultural worker – to assist people in

feeling comfortable with not understanding. What differs between cultural

practice and artistic practice is that to be considered ‘culture’ is to already

operate from an accepted canon, or a tradition drawing from its own rich

historical reclaimed roots. Whereas according to Mika Hannula ‘artistic

research is a new area a field within university studies that deserves to be

called social innovation21’. Such artistic practice carries that very difficult

task of reinventing culture or social innovation, in the here and now, and

therefore becomes ‘both a possibility and a risk’ (Hannula; 2004: 70). It

does not have the stability that ‘culture’ carries. Borrowing heavily from the

cultural past, but far from being traditional, artistic research is about creating

new situations and new knowledge’s from a self-critical and self-reflexive

framework, combining theory, practice with anarchistic experimentation

(Hannula; 2004), and thus offering new ways of negotiating the world. It

is a risky business. And because of this high risk factor, there also exists

a great potential for failure, which is also part of the inherent process of

community intensities and reinventing a whole other social imaginary.

There have been thousands of pictures taken. I rummage through a pile

of contact sheets from the panorama camera, searching for images I have

over-looked in previous years; images which through time and distance,

begin to speak to me again. Years of collecting now become a recollection.

The photographic paper onto which the integral tri-packs and dye-couplers

have adhered themselves to, are metaphorically symbolic of the residue

of an ancient ecology and lumberyard of ghosts. It almost stopped me

once from making more images, upon the realization of the absurdity of

it all. ‘Ha la, Nancy, I mean that civilization is a nonsense you know’... I

hear Vera’s heavy Czech accent sounding in my memory, laughing as she

speaks with alarm. I continue sifting through the piles.

Two trees stop my search.

‘WildLife Tree’ and ’98.8’, (FIG 7 & 8), both of them neatly labeled with blue

spray paint as if done so onto a chalkboard inside a giant classroom. One

of them was photographed in the time-span of a weeklong solo trip I made

into the ‘rock shelter’ area of the Elaho Valley back in the summer of 1999.

The whole area of forest was taped off by Interfor as ‘special management

zone’. I was asked by telalsemkin to photograph the area shortly after it

was discovered, and archeologist Yumks, Rudy Reimer, declared the area

as a Squamish sacred site. Before I entered the rock shelter area, Splash,

Aaron Nelson-Moody prepared the songs and tumulth for the ancestors,

acknowledging to them of my presence in the forest with the camera. I

was told that this neighbourhood of the mountain was used for people

who would leave their village sites and spend anywhere from 4 months, to

4 years, and even up to 16 years alone in the forest, conversing with the

natural world, learning how to become more human.

I formed alliance with the trees.

FIG.7, Cedar 98.8, C-print, 3’ x 8’, 1998

FIG.8, “Wild Life Tree”, C-print, 3’ x 8’, 2001

Ten thousand years since the last ice age, the temperate rainforest is an

ancient ecology that has been evolving since time immemorial. ‘Rhizome

rainforest’ inspired by Deleuze, metaphorically mirrors a delightful ecosystem

as a living, breathing meme spreading beneath the forest floor, and springing

up back onto itself, as a ‘thinking agency’, alive and teeming with memory,

non-hierarchy and fusion. Which is closer to the way nature actually works

– a highly sophisticated process of ‘becoming-other’ than what is not itself;

a hybrid course of action. “Have Fun!” mimics the blue spray paint markings

on the cedar tree scheduled for clear-felling, and logger culture of Squamish.

FIG. 9, Have Fun! Photo-canvas heat transfer, 4’ x 5’, 2000

My referral to this image (FIG. 10) is two-fold: on the one hand I reflected

on Emily Carr’s “Scorn be timber: beloved as the Sky”, a painting that

the well-known BC artist produced in the 1950’s, as a critical comment

on the logging industry and practices at that time. I climbed on top of the

cabin of the truck for a better perspective, of the view down the Elaho

Valley, at mile 60, when I saw her painting in my imagination. It was as

if nothing really changed in the forest management practices code in

the course of fifty years. A lone cedar tree stands isolated among a bare

ruin of newly erased land. With the next lightening storm, this cedar tree

wouldn’t stand a chance of not being blown down, lacking shelter and

foundational support from a larger ecosystem. Inferfor has support of the

law, when conducting forestry in this way. Unfortunately, what happened

the following week of taking this photograph was that the entire cut-

block ignited into a blazing inferno initially caused by a storm, and the

gasoline cans that were carelessly left on site. All the trees that had been

felled in the cut-block were left lying on the ground for more than half

a year. When the storm hit, and the fire started, everything, including

Interfor’s invested profits of horizontal timber, became a massive pit of

black ash.

FIG.10, Cedar Elder as witnessed by daughter of immigrants, photo-canvas, 3’ x 8’, 2000

FIG.11, Daughter of immigrants as witnessed by cedar elder, photo-canvas, 3’ x 8’, 2000

Secondly, what became clear to me after my week of solo time in the

rainforest was that I was actually never ‘alone’. There was a constant

hum of activity going on all around that I was not accustomed to noticing

living in the city. I had instruction to photograph the site for the Squamish

Nation. Soon I became aware that I was not the only ‘modest witness’

to this place and time, but that in my brief presence of being there, I too

was being witnessed and recorded in the memory of the land and those

species living there. What I was witness to was not simply a motionless

cedar tree rooted there in the nutrient-rich soil for the last 1500 years,

but a cedar tree endowed with a memory, history, agency, interdependent

relationships, all in a course of continuous unstable events in constant

processes of becoming change and transformation. The life-span of this

cedar tree was close to, or more than a millennia in age when the storm

struck, and lacking the support of a neighboring infrastructure, fell prey to

the expansiveness of wind and open air.

There becomes a different intelligence being included in the whole

process, where the visuals start to talk back.

- Katherine Dodds, notes from conversation, 2005

FIG.12, Untitled, Photo-canvas heat transfer, 6.5’ x 5.5’, 2000

I started with packing a 4x5 inch, 35mm and 6x6 medium format cameras,

along with a good supply of film. Walking alone for hours through cedar

groves, douglas firs and hemlocks forests and back into the clear-cut

where a base-camp had been set by the Western Canada Wilderness

Committee. My main concern was how this was being reported in the

media - the language that was being used and constructed, who was

doing the talking, and as a result - what social groups did that privilege or

silence?

FIG.13, Kal’kalhil wild woman of the woods eating her children, Photo-canvas B&W portraitof

mask and colour panorama landscape, 3’ x 10’, 2000

FIG.14, Breach of protocol, Photo-canvas B&W portrait of William Nahannee and colour

panorama landscape, 3’ x 10’, 2000

In light of the injustices of cultural genocide in Canadian history with

regards to indigenous peoples, I think about how Squamish people are

so receptive to sharing the oral traditions of their history, land and culture.

In what ways are those duties and responsibilities brought to the public

sphere, to encompass a shared history, and understanding of the land in

contemporary times? If history itself is a story of the winners, how then

is it possible to (re)write the script of the past, (re)invent the present,

and to (re)imagine a future? Not separate from one another, but rather

simultaneously, as if a triple person in a triple time, beginning with a past,

a future and a present (Homi Bhaba). We are responsible for our bodies,

our race and our ancestors – which include the stories of those that have

been marginalized, silenced and made irrelevant. If art and culture have

any impact, how then can artists trained in traditional schools (as practiced

in Squamish culture, based on tradition, practice and apprenticeship) and

contemporary schools (based on praxis [theory / practice], and artistic

research) collaborate to find effective ways of communicating a new social

reality? A shared reality, which includes a shared responsibility?

Strange plant becomings, becoming tree. This is not the transformation

of one into the other, but something passing from one to the other. This

something can be specified only as a sensation.

-Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 173

The artist is a seer, a becomer. How else would he recount what

happened to him, or what he imagines, since he is a shadow? He has

seen something in life that is too great, too unbearable also, and the

mutual embrace of life that threatens it.

-Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 171

FIG.15, Untitled, photo-canvas heat transfer, 3’ x 10’, 2000

FIG.16, Love, loss and permutation, Photo-canvas transfer, 3’ x 8’, 2005

Four I Summary

...constant interaction with what used to be called nature, what used to be

called culture, through the mediating factor which is universal technology

that we are moving in and consequently drawing into the environmental

issues, drawing on the political question of new technologies, drawing

on the kind of spirituality and issues of spirituality that are so important if

we are going to make sense of this real cultural upheaval we are going

through. And keeping in mind, basically and most naively, the importance

to reassert the difference woman can make. This, for me, is the central

issue: to go on reasserting a sexual difference as a positive factor of

dissymmetry between men and women. We have got something else

to offer and it may not sound very post-structuralist, but I could care

less because it is ultimately that political passion that is going to carry

through.

- Rosi Braidotti,Metamorphoses, p.

The artist is a translator; one who has learned to pass into her own

language the languages gathered from stones, from birds, from dreams,

from the body, from the material world, from the invisible world, from sex,

from death, from love.

- Jeannette Winterson, Art Objects, p 146

Summary

Each chapter re-instates the question for investigation, from another

angle, from another locality, what is the repositioning of the artist as a

‘witness’? My thesis does not attempt to provide concrete, fixed answers

as such, but operates instead toward highlighting a direction and way of

thinking of art today that is spreading the world over. Stemming from local

modest initiatives, with project-based works, such as Uts’am-Witness,

its emphasis is clearly placed upon comprehension toward the intention

of a political, environmental and artistic work in process, instead of the

presentation or representation of a work in relation to the commercial art

market and gallery-museum conformity, and instead of a quick-fix solution

to the many and multiple socio-ecological problems we face on a daily

basis.

I remain unfixed between the different worlds; straddling them, holding on,

letting go at times, and whirling around the philosophical terrains between

‘old worlds’ and ‘new’, of artistic practice, ecology and citizenship. I am

wary of ‘art with a mission’, yet at the same time, my desires to create

sustainable futures become political by default.

Intuition and rigorous ideals have guided my actions and energy leading to

a community, grass-roots project that has enormously enlarged over the

years, with its humble beginnings rooted in the simple form of a creative

response to the eco-crisis. Mistakes were made along the way; too many

to mention them all. Getting people ‘out there’ to witness for themselves

was tiresome work. Failures in fundraising and communication resulted

in canceling a scheduled international exhibition in Prague in 2004. Or

the burn-out that comes from long-standing, fast-growing community

‘work’, with promises of forever taking the breath out of you; both in the

exasperating sense, and in the most positive, transforming and inspiring

sense imaginable.

All the above mentioned challenges and struggles dim by comparison

to the positive rewards of genuine human-nature connections made,

strengthened by a renewed relationship to the land, and by the different

forms of knowledge’s that have surfaced from dialogue across cultures,

and across species. The re-positioning my ‘artwork’ as a ‘witness’ is in

relation to a larger community, that stretches beyond the art world,

where the visual outcomes have a real affect in the way that the critical

engagement of community is practiced. And the political enactments

via the exhibition space to enlarge the scope for a thinking audience, is

also encouraging. (Witness Arts Exhibition, curated by Amir Ali Alibhai,

Roundhouse Community Arts Centre 1998; 2001)

Chief Bill Williams is unique in the community from which he comes from.

Trained in both spiritual values and political negotiation, and a leader for

a community undergoing massive health transformations, he was the first

to ‘bravely side-step’ his own comfort zone, and form alliance with a lively

array of ‘Others’, we the ‘newcomers’. As a leader, both elected chairman

of the Squamish Nation Band Office and hereditary chief, I observe his

how strength of skills traverse the different worlds in a seamless way. He

is a political force that ‘moves across established categories and levels of

experience: blurring boundaries without burning bridges’. (Braidotti.1994:

4) while opening up new possibilities for emergence and change.

This understanding is so critical for awareness of how to move from one

experience to another, from one category of social group to another, in an

active way. Which is to be at once a guest, and at home, among multiple

levels of experience, communities and subcultures; and to mobilze groups

of people to dialogue with one another, who don’t normally get together,

on issues concerning the land. (ie: Scientists, Loggers, CEO’s of multi-

national corporations, Native Chiefs, environmentalists, housewives, artists,

legendary mountaineers, intellectuals, homeless, drug addicts, geologists,

biologists, media press, spiritual leaders of the Longhouse, urban native

youth, medicine people, lawyers, schoolchildren, community organizers,

volunteers, tourists, etc.) This nomadic risk taking and community undertaking

is what I have been busy with in my practice for ten years, which has

taught me that the singularity of art, coupled with social responsibility, and

combined with Chicayx / protocols and nomadic becoming, can transmutate

to become more fluid, multiple, more lively.

And it is essential to situating the Uts’am - Witness project, how it formed

during its infant stages through an environmental crisis, then to a watchful

awareness of wilderness ethics, First Nations protocols, and artistic

methodologies. I say this as a means to locate a path-finding, so as to insert

a new methodological map and fresh route, that in the future for Uts’am -

Witness will be made by entirely new-sprung subjects.

Further research, participation and involvement is underway to access

the international debate on the changing role of the artist in times of eco-

crisis. One of my long-term goals is to connect these issues into a broader

international scope. I plan to respond to future symposiums organized

through the RSA, Arts & Ecology in London, and submit our project online

to link with other projects.

To navigate the world in such weird and wonderful times, artists are

becoming even more flexible and alert, and finding home in ‘places, spaces

and scales’ that multiply their role. This means acknowledging complexities

and contradictions; acting upon a critical awareness of inconsistencies to

form alliance and interconnection with different cultures, and to transform

ourselves ethically. This opens a space to give consideration for artistic

practice that embraces a radical renewal of our sense of responsibility. Art

that contributes to the circumstances allowing for unique and unexpected

properties to emerge; which is to say, art that loosens up the binary knot

between nature and culture, community art and high art, sexual difference

and power relations, development and sustainability, spiritual and

intellectual, fuels my hopes, and expands my creative journey.

Nancy Bleck,

Vancouver, BC, Canada, August, 2005

Bibliography

Primary Sources

nexw-ayantsut (Sims Creek)

Conversation with Telàlsemkin/ siyam, Hereditary Chief Bill Williams, August 7th, 2005

Scale, Place and Space, workshop with Joanna Regulaska, University of Utrecht, June, 2005

Secondary Sources

Alibhai, Amir Ali, “Locating Community Art Practice”, unpublished essay, Vancouver, Canada, 2001

Braidotti, Rosi, 1995. “Feminism and Modernity”, Free Inquiry, Spring Issue, (1995)

Braidotti, Rosi, 1994. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminst Theory. New York: Columbia University Press

Braidotti, Rosi, 2002: Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, Cambridge, UK, Oxford: Polity Press

Braidotti, Rosi, 1994. Women, the Environment and Sustainable Development: Towards a Theoretical Synthesis. Zed Books Ltd, London

Carruthers, Beth, “Returning the Radiant Gaze”, unpublished essay, Lancaster, England, 2003

Colebrook, Claire. 2002. Gilles Delueze, London and New York: Routledge

Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. 1987, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

EastLink Symposium, “The Third Space in the Fourth World”, Eastlink Gallery, 2002, p 48

Groys, Boris, “Art in the Age of Bio-Politics” Documenta XI

Hannula, Mika, “River Low, Mountain High, Contextualizing Artistic Research”,

Leir en Boog, Henk Slager and Annette W. Balkema, Eds., Series of Philosophy of Art and Theory, Artistic Research, Volume 18, 2004, p. 70

Haraway, J. Donna, 2000. How Like a Leaf: An Interview with Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, London and New York: Routledge

Haraway, J. Donna, 1997. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse, London and New York: Routledge

Heim, Wallace, “Locating Change, ecologising art, but nature overlooked: a commentary on the launch of ARTS & ECOLOGY”, 2005, published on the internet view downloadhttp://www.thersa.org/arts/conferences/conference1/visitorResponse.asp

Maharaj, Sarat, “Xeno-Epistemics: makeshift kit for sounding visual art as knowledge production and the retinal regimes”, Documenta XI

Mulder, Arjen, 2004.Understanding Media Theory, Language, Images, Sound, Behaviour, V2_Publishers/NAi Publishers, Rotterdam

Plumwood, Val. 1993: Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London and New York: Routledge

Winterson, Jeannette, 1995. Art Objects: essays on ecstasy and effrontery, London: Jonathan Cape

Conferences & Websites

Uts’am-Witness Project, 1997-2005 (ongoing)http://www.uts’am-witness.ca

KLAREXT! Artist as political subject, Curators Marina Sorbello and Antje Weitzel, Berlin, Germany, January, 2005

Arts and Ecology, RSA London, England, April, 2005

http://www.thersa.org/arts/conferences/conference1/visitorResponse.aspResponses by: Jan Verwoert and Emily PethickEnd Notes

End notes

1 If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution, Press Release, e-flux, August 1st, 2005

2 Braidotti, Rosi, 1994. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press

3 Haraway, J. Donna., 2000. How Like a Leaf, Routledge, New York, London, p. 10

4 Haraway, Donna. 1997: Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse London and New York: Routledge

5 Ibid

6 Ibid

7 Haraway, Donna. 1997: Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse London and New York: Routledge. p. 24

8 Ibid. p. 268

9 Ibid. p. 269

10 Plumwood, Val. 1993: Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London and New York: Routledge

11 Braidotti, Rosi, 1989: Women, the Environment and Sustainable Development. p. 174

12 Ibid.p. 4

13 Guattari, Felix: The Three Ecologies, p. 35

14 Braidotti, Rosi, 1989: Women, the Environment and Sustainable Development. p. 5

15 During a workshop at the University of Utrecht, Joanna Regulaska introduced me to the concepts of scale / place / space; concepts I had been busy with in my practice throughout the early years of Witness, of forming the very difficult interconnections across multiple-communities, bridging people who didn’t normally talk, yet alone get together. Building connections across scale, breaking boundaries of the ‘fixity’ of community – the ‘jumping scale’ of bridge building and of ‘local embeddedness’, and shifting the focus of ‘global’ to ‘specific’ through social / cultural dynamics and flows of ideas across scale.

16 Braidotti, Rosi, 1994. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminst Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. p.5

17 Heim, Wallace,“Locating Change, ecologising art, but nature overlooked: a commentary on the launch of ARTS & ECOLOGY”, 2005, p. 4

18 EastLink Symposium, The Third Space in the Fourth World, Eastlink Gallery, 2002, p 48

19 Alibhai, Amir Ali, “Locating Community Art Practice”, unpublished essay, Vancouver, Canada, 2001, p. 39

20 Hannula, Mika, “River Low, Mountain High, Contextualizing Artistic Research”, Leir en Boog, Series of Philosophy of Art and Theory, Eds. Annette Balkema, Henk Slager, Artistic Research,Volume 18, 2004, p. 70