Welcome to AMMSA.COM, the news archive website for our family of Indigenous news publications.

Shuswap story told in pictures in Victoria art gallery

Article Origin

Author

Inna Dansereau, Raven's Eye Writer, Victoria

Volume

5

Issue

11

Year

2002

Page 7

The Things We Do exhibit is on loan to Victoria's House of First Voices Aboriginal Art Gallery from Kamloops' Secwepemc Cultural Education Society until the end of April.

The exhibit presents 60 photographs, 12 of which are black-and-white, depicting traditional Shuswap life from the late 1890s to 1990s. The photographs are sorted by seasonal activities into 10 groupings.

"The first one is traditional activities. The second one is portraits of Secwepemc people and then we have a grouping of working with the land...living off the land and housing, traditional and contemporary," said Suzanne Bate, the gallery intern. "We have one (grouping) of residential schools,...fishing,...hunting, and tanning hide.

"My favorite one is called Lilly Harry Shuswap Medicine and that's a photo by Marianne Ignace. It's a color photograph, and it shows this grandmother who's sitting on the ground and she is working with something in her hands off to the left of her body, but her head's pointed to the right. She is looking off somewhere else. And she's got a big smile on her face. And I think the photo's showing her teaching somebody about traditional medicine, like plant medicine, herbology . . . .

"The woman has so much character in her face, and the photograph seems very lively. And I feel like she's just about to turn around and look at me and say 'This is how we do this, and this is how we do that'," Bate said.

"Many of the photographs have people in them that look very dynamic like they have something to say, or a story to tell, or something interesting about them."

Bate said she has another favorite photo of an "interior of a pit house...there's no people in it, and it just shows all the wood on the inside of the pit house and the wooden ladder that comes down from the top to get down inside. It's a little bit abstract."

This photo by Gerald Etienne is titled Contemporary Pit House Interior, Hat Creek Ranch.

"Some of the photographs we don't know exactly who took them, and they come from various collections," Bate said.

The House of First Voices Aboriginal Art Gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is free. The gallery is located at 31 Bastion Square in Victoria. Call (250) 361-3456 for information.