From February 21, 2025 to January 5, 2026, the Museum of Anthropology (MOA) will be exhibiting Nuxalk Strong: Dancing Down the Eyelashes of the Sun, a cultural display of the Nuxalk Nation, located in Bella Coola, BC.
Co-curated by Dr. Snxakila Clyde Tallio, director of culture and language for the Nuxalk Nation and Dr. Jennifer Kramer, a curator at the MOA, the exhibit will focus on the deep connection between physical objects and sovereignty.
“We really don’t think of these physical objects as artwork,” said Kramer in an interview with The Ubyssey.
Instead, terms such as ‘treasures’ or ‘belongings’ are used by the Nuxalk Nation and within the MOA. Kramer said the term 'belonging' comes from the Musqueam people whose unceded, ancestral and traditional territories UBC is located on, emphasizing that “even though a physical treasure may be in a museum or outside of its home of origin, it's still connected to its original maker, or to its original user and owner.”
So while the MOA’s aim is to preserve these belongings, “what [they]’re really about is connecting people to their material heritage” — and this, Kramer said, is what “becomes agency.”
Resources — and the “care, relationship and reciprocity” that they encourage — can be intrinsically linked to a nation’s rights and sovereignty, because in Kramer’s understanding, they transcend physical belonging.
One of the main themes of the exhibit, whether you’re looking at “a four-tiered cedar spruce root basketry hat, a speaker’s staff or a mountain goat wool robe,” is that these are all “handed-down treasures through the family, and they indicate what your history is — how you have come to live in the place that you live, the house that you belong to … but also care of resources, of animals and non-human beings and all that goes into that stewardship of the lands and waters,” Kramer said.
Nuxalk Strong is not an exhibit about the past, instead, it looks to the future.
“There [have] been many exhibits, even focused on the Northwest coast, where it’s been [an] Indigenous people against a colonial museum who have extracted their treasures and used them for … Canadian nationalism or tourism, or used them against them in some way for capitalist profit,” said Kramer. “There are histories of theft, of trickery.”
But alongside this history, Kramer noted there have also been instances of willful sharing.
In the 1880s, nine Nuxalk performers agreed to travel to Germany “to perform their identity in full regalia for European publics, and with full consciousness that they were sharing the wonderfulness of the Nuxalk culture.”
Kramer also brought up how elders willingly opened up to Thomas McIlwraith, who had come to Bella Coola to do ethnography work in the 1920s. The elders knew the community was facing trauma due to factors like the anti-potlatch law and a significantly reduced population as a result of the smallpox epidemic, and the future of the area was uncertain. They needed a means of preserving their “origin stories, to talk their language.”
By taking these precautions while forced assimilation efforts from the government were in effect, these treasures were kept safe until now, when they are being returned to their rightful owners.
“The elders really did make choices,” said Kramer. “To place their treasures in museums or to share their knowledge of songs and stories and governance with linguists and ethnographers so that it [would] be ready when the generation was ready to take it back.”
This “great revitalization,” as Kramer calls it, has now been happening for the past 40 years in Bella Coola.
Kramer explained this principle of future thinking and planning for ensuing generations, those yet unborn, through another Nuxalk principle: reciprocal generosity.
“What you put out there in a positive and good way is going to come back,” Kramer said. “Knowing about reconciliation and knowing that this is future-focused, strengthening work.”
The exhibit will feature Nuxalk treasures that have been kept in museums across Canada, which will be returned to the Nuxalk Nation at the end of the exhibit. Nuxalk language is also incorporated in the form of stories and song. Admission is free on opening night, February 20, from 6–9 p.m.
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