Heritages of (de)colonialism: Reflections from the Pacific Northwest Coast, Canada

Abstract

Heritage is power. To realize the potential of heritage in decolonization, it is necessary to first decolonize and broaden the concept of heritage to enable meaningful, action-based connections between past, present, and future that further anticolonial efforts.

Heritage is powerful because it is used as a way to define and identify. It is about who we as humans think we are, based upon where we believe we have come from and where we intend to go. It is what is maintained from the past, by the present, for the next generation to inherit (in-heritage): from objects, buildings, land, resources, status, power, values, ontologies, epistemologies, axiologies, environments, and ecosystems. Current conceptions of heritage are imbued with human agency, as a “discursive construction” (Smith, 2006, 13) with “material consequences” (Harvey, 2008, 19) that is “constituted and constructed (and at the same time, constitutive and constructing)” (Wu and Hou, 2015, 39). As such, heritage has the potential for reworlding and refuturing (Haraway, 2016; Harrison, 2020; Holtorf and Högberg, 2020; Onciul, 2015; Smith, 2006, 2022; Tlostanova, 2022). It can highlight the brief duration in planetary or species time of colonialism and capitalism, while illustrating its failing prospects—evidenced by increasing global inequalities and the accelerating inhabitability of the Earth. This future-orientated power places heritage at the center of efforts to enact and affirm Indigenous rights and address colonial legacies and responsibilities in the ancestral territories now collectively known as Canada.

In 2015, the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission report announced “Calls to Action” to address Canada's difficult heritage. In response, the province of British Columbia became the first in Canada to enshrine the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) into law in November 2019 through the Declaration Act. This established UNDRIP as the foundational framework for reconciliation in British Columbia, placing Indigenous cultural heritage rights at the center, via Articles 11, 12, 13, and 31.

Moving these calls to action into practice is not straightforward. In British Columbia, there are over 200 distinct First Nations recognized by the government, and many unrecognized, with over 30 different First Nations languages and around 60 dialects spoken in the province. This means that efforts to decolonize heritage must work with local Indigenous community priorities, cultural protocols, languages, and governance structures. Nations are prioritizing different aspects of reclaiming culture, stewarding heritage, and affirming their rights at different times depending upon their local circumstances. For example, some Nations are prioritizing building Big Houses to support the renewal of previously banned cultural practices, ceremony, and systems of governance (Thompson, 2020). In 2019, the Heiltsuk Nation opened their first Big House in 120 years (Smart, 2019). Many Nations are actively repatriating belongings: the Nisga'a Nation recently announced that “a long-stolen memorial totem pole will be returned to the Nisga'a Nation … following a historic decision by National Museums Scotland” (SFU, n.d.). While some Nations have well-established cultural centers like U'mista, Nuyumbalees, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Líḻwat7ul, others are planning and developing them, including the Gitxaała Nation (2023). Guardian Watchmen programs have been established by many Nations on the coast to culturally and environmentally steward ancestral territories and waters (Parks Canada, n.d.; Coastal First Nations Great Bear Initiative, 2022) and precontact Hereditary Ancestral Governance systems are being revitalized (Nuxalk Nation, 2021). Relations between Canada and First Nations are also changing at the nation-to-nation level: in May 2023, the Haida Nation Recognition Act recognized the Council of the Haida Nation as the government of the Haida Nation in provincial law (British Columbia Government, 2023). At a state level, the Canadian Museums Association published a response to the TRC's Call to Action #67 that called for a national review of museum policies and practices to ‘determine the level of compliance’ with UNDRIP and make recommendations (CMA, 2022). With such richness and diversity across the Northwest Coast, this essay shares examples that are far from exhaustive but designed to be vignettes showcasing different forms of practice and ways of thinking.

Changing the structural approach to heritage in Canada requires multilayered unsettlings: unsettling how heritage is understood, unsettling who holds expertise and authority to decide use and designation of heritage, unsettling heritage practices, and changing what heritage does, for whom, when, and why. Thinking about heritage in relation to Indigenous rights is an important first step toward change, by recognizing the naturalized and often-unseen logics that maintain the settler-colonial status quo.

“Heritage” is a term that is used interchangeably to mean many different things, from a discipline and built heritage to museum collections, archival records, intangible heritage practices, genealogy, families, land, rights, and responsibilities. The term changes meaning depending on the speaker and context. It would be reasonable to assume that the term “heritage” may be disfavored by Indigenous Peoples, in the same way the word “museum” is often rejected by museum-like Indigenous institutions as a word that is inseparable from colonialism (Cooper, 2008, 155; Onciul, 2015, 39). However, First Nations communities on the Northwest Coast use the term “heritage” extensively to describe many different relational ties, from family connections within and across communities to treasures and belongings,¹ practices, important places within the landscape, and connections with more-than-human kin, and to past and future ancestors. Artist Andy Everson's artwork Heritage depicts a glacier in the unceded ancestral territories of the Pentlatch, E'ikʷsən, and K’ōmox, known as Queneesh, a white whale that saved the people from a great flood thousands of years ago. Across the different Peoples and Nations on the Northwest Coast, there is a commonality of heritage being understood as expansive, (w)holistic, intertwined, and relational.

Heritage can be intended and unintended, with human and more-than-human agency, such as the unintended inheritance of accelerated climate change and the new geological epoch of the Anthropocene. Heritage functions at planetary, national, collective, and personal levels. At a cellular level, our DNA makes both visible and invisible our genealogical inheritances. Recent research indicates DNA may contain evidence of historical and intergenerational trauma passed down through generations epigenetically (Franklin et al., 2010; Gapp et al., 2020; Thumfart et al., 2022). In this way, heritage is personal, and the personal is political.

As personal and political, heritage has affective power (Smith and Campbell, 2015; Tolia-Kelly, Waterton, and Watson, 2016). Much of what is collectively inherited is not positive—a damaged environment, a changing climate, trauma, displacement, poverty, and inequalities. These heritages are connected to the legacies of colonialism, empire, slavery, and capitalist extraction (Yusoff, 2019). The actions of past ancestors inform current heritage priorities and conflicts and leave emotional inheritances of pain, joy, pride, guilt, rights, responsibility, and calls for same and different futures. In this way, there can be many diverse, contradictory, and conflicting heritages. Heritage is not static but ongoing, continually identified, maintained, discarded, reconsidered, and reconstituted.

Heritage is highly political, heavily contested, contentious, and a pluriverse of imagined, enacted, and evidenced past-present-futures. There is not one history of everything, and there is not one heritage, but a multitude of competing heritages that each lay claim to power over how the past is used today to forge the future. This is why heritage matters today, and why it was used as a tool of colonialism in the past, creating a complex and painful legacy on the Northwest Coast.

Frantz Fanon (1961, 210) stated that colonialism “turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts it, disfigures and destroys it.” During the colonization of what became known as Western Canada, Indigenous heritage was targeted because it was (and remains) a source of identity, knowledge, power, and well-being. Treasures and belongings, now often termed objects and heritage, inform and maintain ancestral governance and rights and responsibilities in ancestral territories.

These material and intangible treasures and belongings were collected and removed (generally without free prior informed consent of the Nation) from Northwest Coast communities by traders, explorers, missionaries, settlers, anthropologists, tourists, and collectors from 1774 onwards. As a result, masks, poles, regalia, stories, songs, dances, and even people² can be found in public and private collections and archives across the world (Krmpotich, 2014).

The visibility of Indigeneity on the coast was purposefully diminished, and even erased. The 1862 smallpox epidemic that was knowingly spread up the Northwest Coast from Victoria decimated whole families and villages, and forced survivors to relocate, leaving behind their ancestral territories and villages, their heritage, which provided cultural and social stability (Van Rijn, 2006). With the influx of missionaries and settlers moving in to live permanently on Indigenous lands, treasures, belongings, and monumental architecture, including the Big Houses that are the loci of ancestral governance systems and Poles that mark territory, were torn down, burned, destroyed, or removed from community access (Kramer, 2006, 36). At the same time, the land and environments that sustained people were forcibly taken. On Vancouver Island, First Nations Peoples were moved onto reserves from the 1850s onwards and unceded Indigenous lands were redistributed to settlers, as was access to resources. Many areas deemed to be of value, outstanding beauty, scientific significance, and historical importance were later placed under government management, such as Parks Canada and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, which determined access, use, and ownership. This land alienation overturned Indigenous stewardship of lands, waterways, and more-than-human kinships and prevented the harvesting of food and resources—making the peoples reliant upon and subject to colonial governance, laws, and systems.

In 1884, the Indian Act (1876) was amended to forcibly remove children from their families to residential schools, where Indigenous languages and cultures were banned, and the TRC has documented the abuse, neglect, and high death rate of children in church and government “care” (TRC, 2015). There has been a public outpouring since 2021, when unmarked children's graves began to be identified on the grounds of former residential schools. There is ongoing work in communities to find missing and murdered family members. In recognition of these finds and the TRC Calls to Action, the Canadian government declared September 30 the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. It is informally known as Orange Shirt Day, as people are encouraged to wear orange in recognition of this traumatic heritage that is yet to be fully recognized or addressed.

Another amendment to the Indian Act in 1884 outlawed ceremonies that upheld Indigenous laws and governance. This targeted attack on children, culture, heritage, language, governance, and identity was an attempt to erase Indigeneity and assimilate everyone into the new nation of Canada. Kenyan author and academic Ngugi wa Thiong'o (1986, 3) argues, in a different colonial context, that “the effect of the cultural bomb is to annihilate a people's belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves.” While the ban ended in 1951, many treasures remain in museum collections. Hereditary Chief G̱ixkastallasame-gi Cecil Dawson (2022) stated that “visiting our regalia in Museums is like visiting a relative in prison.”

The ongoing impacts of colonial legacies resonate painfully in everyday lived experiences of Indigenous Peoples in Canada. They are evident in the logics of modernity and capitalism, and the structures and concepts that maintain the status quo. As Blackfoot Kainai Elder Narcisse Blood argued, “it's not the physical boundaries of colonisation that matter. It's the outposts they left in the mind” (quoted in Heavy Head, 2021, 3).³ Colonization caused intergeneration trauma, yet it failed to destroy Indigenous Peoples, nor their cultures, languages, connection to ancestral territories, identities, or heritage.

With Canada's recent adoption of UNDRIP, it is possible to see how heritage can be used as a two-sided tool that can both inform and dismantle colonial logics.⁴ For Indigenous Peoples of the Northwest Coast, heritage is a key source of power and a conveyor of rights and responsibilities that, with the legal weight of DRIPA, could help to restore ancestral governance, cultural practices, pride, land, and kinship relations. This in turn could help reduce inequalities, increase food and cultural security, and uphold Indigenous rights.

Cultural resurgence and increasing state recognition of Indigenous ontologies have enabled a significant shift to the concepts of what should be cared for and protected for the next generation. In Aotearoa New Zealand, the 2017 recognition of the Whanganui River as holding legal personhood as a Māori ancestor acknowledged Mātauranga (Māori knowledge) and the agency of more-than-human kin (Kramm, 2020). On the Northwest Coast, there are places, rivers, mountains, islands, and glaciers with personhood that is not yet formally recognized by the state (Cruikshank, 2012). If UNDRIP enables a return of Indigenous stewardship of ancestral territories, it is possible that the way heritage is defined and cared for will not only preserve what has passed but sustain what is yet to come in a way that is more beneficial to the majority, including more-than-human kin.

At the local level, heritage held in museums and archives is a resource for reconnection, renewal, and revitalization. Heritage professionals who care for collections, archives, parks, and sites are increasingly receptive to and active in upholding Indigenous rights. This change has come through the unending efforts of Indigenous activists, and such work now also has government and legal backing (DRIPA, 2019; TRC, 2015). It is increasingly being recognized that collections without histories, genealogies, or understandings of who made them or used them, and for what, when, how, or why, are little more than curiosities while they are held captive in museums, disconnected from their relations. In British Columbia, the Museum of Anthropology has led the field in terms of changing practice, providing access, repatriating, and loaning collections for use in ceremonies (MOA, 2019). The local Museum at Campbell River supports storing and loaning treasures for use by Indigenous community members, and at the family's request, they followed end-of-life cultural protocol for a Thunder Bear Pole carved by Sam Henderson, which was burnt in a ceremony on the Campbell River Spit in 2016, then replaced with a new pole in 2017 (Museum at Campbell River, 2018, 129). While these changes are promising, Tuck and Yang (2012, 3) remind us that “solidarity is an uneasy, reserved, and unsettled matter that neither reconciles present grievances nor forecloses future conflict.”

Although often painful, reconnecting with historic material held in museums is important to revitalizing culture. Visiting and holding ancestral treasures can help reconnect knowledge and raise cultural pride; items can be read for information about the artists who made them and the leaders who commissioned them, providing clues to genealogies and movement of materials through marriages, adoptions, trade, exchanges, and conflicts (Duffek, McLennan, and Wilson, 2021). Close inspection can reveal customary methods and techniques and test ergonomics and movement, which can enable new regalia and cultural treasures to be created and placed into use. The ability to make new regalia informed by historical forms creates cultural vitality, supports emerging artists, and provides treasures for the next generation, refuturing the present. The renewal and return of items held in museums can spark the reawakening of customs like kadzitła and coming-of-age ceremonies that were temporarily suspended by colonial force under the Indian Act. Dormant clans and hereditary titles are being reinstated, with descendants stepping back into leadership roles and responsibilities for families, clans, territories, and ecosystems.

Ndlovu-Gatsheni argues coloniality “is a death project. Decolonisation is what I call a theory of life” (in Omanga, 2020). The recognition of life and the positive potential of heritage, even in places of deep trauma, is evident in many Indigenous communities. Residential schools have been both dismantled and reclaimed as places to share Indigenous knowledge, language revitalization, and cultural practices (Onciul, 2014). These are powerful acts of survivance (Vizenor, 1999). Indigenous methodologies such as attending and “relational accountability” (Wilson and Hughes, 2019) have enabled the reawakening of connections and knowledge made dormant by colonial oppression. It requires a (w)holistic approach to heritage for the next generation.

Heritage is the present summation of the complex enfolded relationships that connect past to future, humans to more-than-humans in the living and nonliving world, and the envisioned responsibilities to past and future ancestors. It brings the relationship between past, present and future into a tight fold, and can be considered a future-orientated, even future-making endeavor (Harrison, 2020; Holtorf and Högberg, 2020). The need to “re-future the present” (Tlostanova, 2018) and create space for non-Western possibilities that disrupt the status quo of inequality and delink “the rhetoric of modernity and the logic of coloniality” (Mignolo, 2007) is central to decolonial theory, thinking, and practice (Knudsen et al., 2021, 5). “Postcolonial thinking writes itself into the future” (Mbembe, 2010, 85; translated by Knudsen et al., 2021); thus, there is the potential for heritage to be utilized to create a future that is different from what is now. What is kept or let go, protected or degraded, directly informs what the next generations will inherit as their heritage, their belongings, and their burdens.

It requires changing everything informed by systems created through colonial thought, actions, and processes.⁵ It is not about returning to an imagined past but about tracing the roots and routes of understandings and presumptions normalized by their ubiquity and systemic embeddedness to assess how they came to be, the history of their legitimacy, and their relevance today and for tomorrow. It is about changing the way we each think, speak, live, act, and relate to one another and the environments we reside in.

Critical engagement with heritage has moved understanding beyond simplistic definitions of heritage as historic material and recognizes the role heritage can play “as practices or performances” that mobilize the past “to address contemporary social and political issues” (Smith, 2022, 624; see also Dicks, 2000; Harvey, 2001; Macdonald, 2013; Smith, 2006).⁶ Mobilized heritage can support anticolonial work by evidencing other ways of being and living with our planet that can inspire the creation of futures that are profoundly different to the present.

As Emma Waterton (2014, 823) argues, it is necessary to “become more attentive to different possibilities for knowing and doing heritage: the ways in which it makes sense or answers back to a fuller range of people.”⁷ Heritage is a tool to think with, to reflect and shape the world we live in. As such, heritage has power: the power to hurt and to heal; to maintain the status quo or support (k)new ways of being (Edwards, 2009), to define and inform, to fragment and connect.

The way heritage is understood and used can be decolonized, opening space for other ways of knowing, constituting, and engaging. On the ancestral territories of the Northwest Coast, heritage has been a source of power, pride, oppression, and renewal. Awakening and revitalizing Indigenous heritage supports, and is supported by, increasing recognition of Indigenous rights as part of an ongoing anticolonial decolonizing process.

Beyond the “things” of heritage, it is possible to step back and survey the larger picture and consider heritage as collective inheritance. This definition opens up a much wider and relational consideration of heritage that connects the personal with the collective and the planetary.⁸

If heritage can be decolonized, then it shifts from being a tool for power and domination to an opportunity for reworlding, refuturing, to reconsider what kind of ancestors we as humans intend to be (Cohen, 2021) and what we will leave for future ancestors to inherit.

I write as a woman with British heritage and familial ties to the colonial-settler commonwealth country of Canada; as a guest on the unceded ancestral territories of the Pentlatch, E'ikʷsən, and K’ōmox First Nations on Vancouver Island; and as an academic partner in research with Kumugwe Cultural Society (Onciul, 2021, 2023). Land acknowledgments mark an important change in the wider recognition of ongoing colonial legacies of inequality and land alienation in Canada. This is a positive change in public awareness of Canada's difficult heritage; however, for this to be a shift from rhetoric to action requires making meaningful change to how environments, places, and practices (i.e., heritage), are cared for in ways that uphold local Indigenous rights and priorities.