HEXSA’AM: TO BE HERE ALWAYS

Siku Allooloo // Scott Benesiinaabandan // Darryl Dawson // Jaymyn La Vallee // Diane Roberts // Sara Siestreem // Juliana Speier // Nabidu Taylor // Kamala Todd // William Wasden Jr. // Tania Willard // Lindsey Willie

Central Gallery
October 5 to December 28, 2019

Curated by Marianne Nicolson and Althea Thauberger

In 1914, delegates of the McKenna-McBride Royal Commission met with Johnny Scow (Kwikwasuti’nuxw), Copper Johnson (Ha’xwa’mis),  Dick Webber and Dick Hawkins (Dzawada’enuxw), and Alec Morgan (Gwawa’enuxw), as well as all the Kwakwaka’wakw Chiefs, to establish the land base of the Kwakwaka’wakw group of nations. A century later, in May 2018, the Dzawada’enuxw First Nation launched the first-ever BC Supreme Court case to extend Aboriginal title to the ocean, claiming that the Province does not have the authority to grant tenures to salmon farms in the Broughton Archipelago. As two moments in a tangled timeline of resistance, these legal encounters bring forward the ways that cultural practices can bring new realities into being for a community experiencing ongoing social, cultural and ecological effects of colonization and globalizing economics.