Ian M. Thom. Art BC: Masterworks from British Columbia. Vancouver/Toronto: Douglas McIntyre, 2000: 30-31.

[transcription of excerpt]



Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun

The relationship of the First Nations of British Columbia to the economically and politically dominant white society has been a vexed one for over a century. British Columbia, unlike many other parts of Canada, did not sign any treaties with the First Nations and, instead of attempting to compensate them for their land, simply took it and consigned the people to reserves.

The process of treaty negotiations has been a long and, for the First Nations, a frustrating one. The completion in the year 2000 of a treaty between the federal and provincial governments and the Nisga'a nation was, therefore, an exceptionally important historical event. This treaty was presented, particularly by the British Columbia government, as being fair and equitable to all of the province's citizens, but it was not greeted with universal approbation.

A simple reading of this painting by Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun is as a protest against the terms of this treaty: too little, too late and a sell-out of aboriginal interests. This abrasive stance, at odds with both the Nisga'a elders who had negotiated with the governments and the elected officials of the governments themselves, is typical of the position that Yuxweluptun has taken in much of his art. He is deeply connected to his heritage as a man of mixed Okanagan and Coast Salish ancestry but cannot separate himself from the larger, non-Native society in which he now lives. He is an urban Indian, trained at the Emily Carr College of Art and Design, and his art partakes of conflicting traditions: Native and non-Native, popular culture and the spiritual world of his ancestral past, surrealism and landscape painting in Canada. He also chooses to transgress more traditional borders of appropriation by using forms and ideas from aboriginal cultures not his own. An underlying belief in the essential spiritual quality of the earth itself and an anger at our despoiling of it animates all of his work.

The immediate impact of this painting is due to the almost garish and brutal coloration. It is a landscape, or perhaps more accurately a statement about the landscape, that is far from natural. The hill formations are covered with modified Northwest Coast Native art forms—ovoids and formlines—that suggest Yuxweluptun's study of a number of other First Nations cultures. The only trees left in the landscape are two black monoliths that do not appear to be alive but, like the denuded landscape, have been destroyed. The ground upon which the figures stand seems almost molten, as if the hills themselves had begun to melt and form an unstable sea. The white man, equipped with a briefcase, skulks off with a self-satisfied grin on his face while the two aboriginal figures seem transfixed by shock and/or despair. Ironically, the serene sky filled with fluffy clouds suggests a harmony that is sorely lacking below.

This painting has a distinctly political stance: Yuxweluptun wants viewers to feel uneasy, and he particularly aims it at a white audience to make us consider the consequences of our collective actions. The work does not present a picture of optimism, for while the treaty itself has been passed, Yuxweluptun suggests that it will be some time before the ramifications of this historic event will really be understood. Sadly, he suggests disaster.