Hidden treasures
Museum of Vancouver has 10,000 First Nations artifacts — stashed away in storage.
Tucked away in the basement of the Museum of Vancouver is one of the city’s best kept secrets: thousands of northwest coast native artifacts, collected during the city’s infancy. There are 1,500 pieces that were collected from the Great Fraser Midden in Marpole in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. One hundred and twenty- seven masks from up and down the coast. A row of giant potlatch feast bowls.
One shelf is dedicated to argillite sculptures from Haida Gwaii. Another is filled with model canoes. Beside it is a shelf of spoons fashioned from mountain goat horns. Dozens of totem poles line a wall. Hundreds of baskets are stacked on shelves nearby. It’s a veritable museum within the museum, but much of it hasn’t been seen in years because the museum doesn’t have the space to show it.
So we decided to take a look. And we brought along one of Canada’s top art collectors, Michael Audain, to help assess it.
It doesn’t disappoint. Shortly after entering the museum’s 13,000- square- foot storage facility, you’re greeted by a breathtaking carved sisiutl ( sea serpent) head from a Kwakwaka’wakw feast bowl.
It was done by Charlie James for Chief John Scow around 1900, but the green, red and black paint is still incredibly vibrant. And it’s simply huge — it comes in three sections that interlock.
The museum’s director of collections and exhibitions, Joan Seidl, thinks it’s one of the museum’s gems.
But she also has a soft spot for a much less ornate piece on the shelf above the Scow bowl — a painted seal bladder.
“It’s like a float, but it’s painted,” she said with a laugh.
To the left of the Scow bowl is another striking work by Charlie James, a painted cedar chest of drawers with a thunderbird design. Made in 1931, it’s one of 26 James works that were donated to the museum by W. L. Webber in 1952.
Seidl leads us on a little further, opens up a cabinet, and brings out a national treasure: a carved argillite “casket” ( small box) by the great Haida artist Charles Edenshaw.
The intricacy of the carving is dazzling. The lid features a bird soaring above a serpent and a quartet of frogs, while a lion bursts out of the side of the main box.
Audain was blown away. He is probably Canada’s foremost collector of northwest coast art, and he had no idea the argillite casket existed.
“It is an amazing piece,” he said, laughing. “I’ve never seen a photo of it, even.”
The Vancouver Art Gallery is mounting the biggest Edenshaw show ever held this fall. Edenshaw died in 1920, and his work is scattered around the world. The VAG is borrowing work for the show from elite international institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, the Field Museum in Chicago, the Berlin Ethnological Museum in Germany, and the Musée Ethnographie in Neuchâtel, Switzerland.
VAG curator Daina Augaitis said the gallery also hopes to borrow five of the 14 Edenshaw works in the Museum of Vancouver collection, including a marvellous argillite canoe filled with mythical figures.
“If you want to know where Bill Reid got his inspiration … you’ll see some of these figures in the big ( Reid) carving out at the airport,” said Audain.
Edenshaw isn’t as well- known as Bill Reid but, to Audain, he’s one of Canada’s greatest artists.
“You can see the skill of the artist in carving this out of one piece of stone,” he said, admiring the Edenshaw canoe. “He’s considered by many to be equivalent to Cellini ( the Italian Renaissance sculptor).
“In my opinion, Edenshaw is not just a great Haida artist and sculptor, he’s equal to any of the great Renaissance masters. The way he creates movement in the argillite is a superb skill.”
Digital archives
You can have a look at the Edenshaws in the museum’s collection, and all the other northwest coast items, on the museum’s website. There are 61,429 items on the database, and 2,780 come up when you do a search under “aa,” which is the code for northwest coast native material. If you wanted to see all the canoes, you’d type in “aa canoe,” which produces 144 hits.
Some of the items have detailed descriptions — the history of the Charlie James potlatch bowl is detailed by the late Judge Alfred Scow, grandson of the man who commissioned it.
Still, Seidl said one of the museum’s most celebrated native items, a Nootka canoe, is so big it hasn’t been photographed. It’s so big it doesn’t even fit into the basement storage space, so it’s in another storage facility for large items that Seidl calls “Building 14.”
Of course, it’s much better to see the items in person. Audain was quite taken with the museum’s collection of masks. There are some beautiful works of art, but even the lesser- quality masks are culturally important.
“These pieces are all used, they’ve all been used for ceremonial purposes,” he said. “They weren’t created for the tourist trade or something of that nature.”
How did all this native art end up at the Museum of Vancouver, rather than the Vancouver Art Gallery? It’s because in Vancouver’s early years, the city’s major cultural organization was the Art, Historical and Scientific Association, which started the museum. The Vancouver Art Gallery was founded in 1931; the Art, Historical and Scientific Association was founded in 1894.
“It started collecting that year,” said Seidl. “It really imagined itself interested in the world, so put no frame around what it was prepared to accept.”
“It’s the old Victorian idea of museums,” said Audain.
“A colonial idea,” said Seidl with a laugh. “Control the universe by owning it.”
Northwest coast art also wasn’t considered art in the late 1800s and early 1900s. So when Elizabeth Rogers — wife of Vancouver pioneer Jonathan Rogers — donated the Edenshaw casket in 1944, it went to the museum.
“Doris Shadbolt was one of the first curators in the country to promote First Nations work as art,” said the VAG’s Augaitis. “She was doing it here at the Vancouver Art Gallery. But you’re quite right, that wasn’t until the 1950s.”
As a result, while the VAG has a good collection of contemporary First Nations art, it doesn’t have historical material like the Museum of Vancouver, the University of B. C.’ s Museum of Anthropology or the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria.
But then, no local institution has a collection that compares to what was taken out of B. C. in the late 1800s and early 1900s for foreign collectors and institutions.
“If you took MOA’s collection, the Museum of Vancouver’s collection and the Royal British Columbia Museum’s collection and put it all together, you’d still have more northwest coast art in New York City than those three museums put together,” said Bill McLennan, Northwest Coast curator at the Museum of Anthropology.
“Which is more significant around here? I don’t know — all three museums have a good cross- sampling. But you go to New York or Washington, D. C., and it’s unbelievable.”
Exceptional collection
That said, there is some remarkable First Nations material at the Museum of Vancouver. Much of it came from patrons like Elizabeth Rogers or Mrs. J. J. Johnstone, who donated the Edenshaw argillite canoe in 1927.
Then there is the Lipsett collection, which used to be in its own museum on the Pacific National Exhibition grounds at Hastings Park. It was collected by Mary and Edward Lipsett in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and includes 1,208 objects, among them elegant baskets woven from many First Nations: Se′ shalt, Tlingit, Skwxwu7mesh, Coast Salish, Quwutsun, Haida, Nuxalk, Nuu- chah- nulth, Makah.
“The basketry collection is exceptional, because it was collected by this one individual, and looked after very well,” said the Museum of Anthropology’s McLennan.
“We get offers of basketry collections all the time, but they’re so beaten up, they have no history. But that one is significant, because it’s in really, really good shape, as a collection.
There’s some really amazing material.”
The Lipsett collection was renowned in Vancouver’s early years — the Province did a big feature on Mary Lipsett in 1926, where it described baskets “woven of blueberry fibre and decorated with walrus tusk, ( and) others with their designs in black from pounded clamshells and their red and green vegetable dies.”
The Lipsetts gave their “Indian art” collection to the city in 1941. For many years, it was in the basement of the B. C. Pavilion at the Pacific National Exhibition. It was transferred to the museum in 1971, but today it’s in storage, as is a collection of Chinese antiques Mary Lipsett donated in 1949.
The museum collected other works in the 1920s for a proposed “replica Indian village of the British Columbia coast” in Stanley Park.
“In the mid- 1920s, there was a big push on to collect for what they were imagining was this mock Indian village, this faux Indian village that the Art, Historical and Scientific Association wanted to create in Stanley Park,” said Seidl.
“They were assembling bits and pieces from all over the province that they thought were going to go into this fake Indian village … at the same time they were evicting real Indians ( from their homes in Stanley Park). Literally, practically to the year.”
Seidl said the replica village concept was abandoned after “local First Nations raised objections to the construction of a north coast style village on Coast Salish land.” But some remnants of the proposed native village remain, such as totem poles made by Alert Bay carvers that are near Lumbermen’s Arch.
Growth in future
The museum now consults First Nations before it mounts any exhibits of their material, Seidl said. Some sacred masks and rattles in the collection aren’t supposed to be seen outside of ceremonies, so will no longer be displayed. Seidl has also been repatriating ancestral human remains that were collected from around the province in the early 1900s.
“Almost every weekend this month, I have been working with different First Nations to repatriate ancestral remains,” she said. “This is part of our historical legacy, being an old institution, inheriting a lot of stuff that was ( collected) in a not very good way in the past.”
Working with First Nations paid off in the acclaimed Through My Eyes exhibit Seidl and McLennan curated at the museum in 1999. Seidl hopes to do another major First Nations show soon.
“Right now we’re working with Musqueam towards an exhibit of our material from the Marpole midden,” she said.
“( The midden) is a giant village site in southeast Vancouver that underlies a lot of the Marpole neighbourhood. A lot of archeologists would call it the most important archeological site in the Lower Mainland, because of the tremendous time depth — it goes very deep in places, as well as being vast in extent.”
There are 4,463 items in the museum’s ethnology collection that relate to First Nations, and 5,717 in the archeology collection. ( The entire museum collection is 70,000 artifacts, including the First Nations material.)
To properly display the First Nations material, Seidl feels you’d need about 20,000 square feet, which is the size of the entire exhibition space at the museum. The institution would like to move to a bigger facility downtown, perhaps in concert with another organization.
Audain thinks the collection is worthy of a better facility.
“Someone could create a fabulous northwest coast museum with what you have here,” he said.