Native Art of the Northwest Coast: A History of Changing Ideas

The Northwest Coast of North America has long been recognised as one of the world's canonical art zones. This volume records and scrutinises the history of how and why this has come about. A work of critical historiography, it makes accessible for the first time in one place a broad selection of the 250 years of writing on Northwest Coast art. Organised thematically, the excerpted texts are from both published and unpublished sources, some not previously available in English. The contributors - leading scholars, writers, and artists - provide perspectives on the diverse intellectual traditions that have influenced, stimulated, and clashed with each other. In un-settling the conventions that have shaped "the idea of Northwest Coast Native art," this book joins the lively, often heated, and now global, debates about what constitutes Native art and who should decide.