In the years immediately following World War II in Vancouver, native Northwest
Coast images and objects were frequently made visible in the public spaces of the city,
claimed and exchanged physically and symbolically in events involving both aboriginal
and non-native participants. Like the political and social relations surrounding them, the
meaning and purpose of these objects and images was, arguably, pliable and constantly
shifting. The Totemland Pole, commissioned in 1950 by Vancouver's fledgling
Totemland Society, and designed by local Kwakwaka'wakw carver Ellen Neel, was one
such object-as-symbol. Numerous individuals and communities, aboriginal as well as
non-native, were implicated in the object's production. Following anthropologist
Anthony Cohen's work on social symbols in The Symbolic Construction of Community, I
argue that while the symbol itself was held in common, its meaning varied with its
participants' unique orientations to it. The differently motivated parties, specifically the
work's creator, Ellen Neel, and its commissioners, the Totemland Society, attributed
divergent meaning to the Totemland Pole simultaneously. As Cohen suggests, I propose
that this difference did not lead to argument. Rather it was the form of the Totemland
Pole itself, its impreciseness or "malleability," within the particular socio-political
climate of its production, which enabled these divergent meanings to co-exist.
In order to investigate ways in which the Totemland Pole was understood
simultaneously as symbolically meaningful, this project attempts to map out the subject
positions of and relations of power between Ellen Neel and the members of the
Totemland Society, in relation to the particulars of the local historical moment. The
forgotten details of the Totemland Commission and the lack of a legitimizing discourse
of Neel's production, both fuelled by the gendered, class and race inflected politics of
knowledge construction, have necessitated that the concept of absence be fundamental to
my project. I have therefore approached the Totemland Commission from a number of
surrounding institutional and social discourses, which form trajectories I see as
intersecting at the site of the Totemland Pole. Any one of these trajectories may have
been taken as the singular approach for the investigation of such an object. However, I
wish to deny the autonomy normally granted these discursive fields, emphasizing instead
the ways they are interdependent and may operate in tandem to enrich our understanding
of an object which was the result of, and relevant to, shared histories. / Arts, Faculty of / Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/10730 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Phillips, Kimberly Jean |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Format | 13693925 bytes, application/pdf |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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