Listening to Our Ancestors: The Art of Native Life Along the Pacific Northwest Coast

The totem poles and painted housefronts, masks and dance regalia, feast bowls and elaborately decorated boxes made by the Native people of the Pacific Northwest have long been recognized as masterworks of art, sophisticated in conception and execution and rich with symbolism. In this book, scholars Peter Macnair and Jay Stewart describe the treasures of the Northwest Coast collections of the National Museum of the American Indian, many of which have never been published before. In addition, Kwakwaka'wakw Chief Robert Joseph and curator Mary Jane Lenz explore the Northwest as a crossroads of Native and non-Native worlds, in the 19th and early 20th century, when many of these works were collected, and today.

Most significantly, in a series of community self-portraits, cultural figures from eleven Northwest Coast nations discuss the ways in which the museum’s collections connect them with their forebears, who made and used these beautiful things. Illustrated with striking new images of important pieces, as well as other historic and contemporary photographs, Listening to the Ancestors invites readers to appreciate Northwest Coast art as its Native inheritors do-for the spirit with which it is endowed.

This book is being published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same title, on view at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., from November 2005 to January 2007. In keeping with NMAI’s mission to bridge the distance between the museum and the people whose cultures it represents, objects from the exhibition will also be shown in the Native communities that took part in this project.