By choice and by circumstance, Coast Salish peoples are silent partners in the internationally celebrated style of Northwest Coast Indians. Intimate instead of assertive, their art is overshadowed by the colorful bilateral geometries carved and painted on masks, boxes and totem poles of the peoples from the north, including the Kwakwaka'wakw (Kwakiutl), Bella Coola, Haida, Tsimshian and Tlingit.
Thanks to an exhibit opening Friday at the Seattle Art Museum, the public silence of the Coast Salish in the realm of art is over.
"S'abadeb -- The Gifts: Pacific Coast Salish Art and Artists" was organized by SAM's Barbara Brotherton, Native American art curator, with assistance and advice from 40 Coast Salish advisers, as well as a wide range of art historians and curators.
It is the first exhibit devoted exclusively to the art of the people who were living in Seattle when the Point Elliot Treaty of 1855 drove them to the outskirts of their territory and later failed to deliver a range of promised compensations.
Coast Salish art is Seattle's root music. It's the basis for what came after, even when the people behind it were no longer dominant on the scene.
Call it the poetics of the handyman. Everything is for use, and the sacred reveals its nature in its refusal to make a fuss. If gray was good enough for a goat, a carefully crafted gray is good enough for a weaving made of goat hair.
Just how good is that weaving?
The best are very good indeed, among the finest in the Northwest, although a traditional Coast Salish weaver wouldn't say so.
Why puff up? The quality of a dress woven in soft cedar bark or a blanket of animal hair speaks for itself.
Instead of totem poles that advertise the power of a clan, there are house posts carved in a fluid, naturalistic style that can't be found anywhere else in the lexicon of Northwest Coast art. Coast Salish cultures don't have clans. They have family groups linked to other family groups, and their potlatches (gift exchanges) continue to be homey instead of extravagant.
Long on the wane, these communities once again are gathering strength, as they are in Victoria and Vancouver, B.C., their other original strongholds.
The absence of major Coast Salish exhibits doesn't mean museums lack interest. But just as the Coast Salish didn't carve totem poles or paint their tools or their cedar baskets or their house posts, they have declined to participate in an exhibit devoted to the ceremonial objects in daily use in their cultures.
It's easy to envision the collective shrug: What's the point?
Brotherton achieved the impossible by celebrating not just art and artifacts but the people who make and continue to use both without distinction.
Four years in the making, "S'abadeb" (the Lushootseed term for "gifts") includes more than 175 works of art drawn from national and international collections, on display with the approval of the Salish people. The earliest pieces include a miniature pestle made about 1,100 years B.C., and the latest are contemporary.
The contemporary work honors the spirit while bending the rules. Color is abundant, naturalism appears in novel guises, and old ideas stay alive in new forms.
"S'abadeb" opens in an orientation gallery with a video wall created by Seattle artists Alex Schweder and John Grade, the same team that invented the "sound bath" effects in the African galleries.
Their video wall offers a sea of contemporary Salish artists in head-shot form, saying what they find appropriate to say about their culture. Every few minutes, another person rotates into the featured spot and his or her voice is heard.
Once inside the exhibit, the lack of spectacle can be daunting. In this show, the drama is in the details. Visitors who dig in rather than stand at a passive remove will be rewarded.
I love the little people climbing all over a comb, embedded into a spindle whorl, incised on a bark shredder or offering their hollowed-out stomachs as an oil dish.
Eighteenth-century bracelets made of goat horn offer a good chance to examine the Coast Salish aesthetic at its most robust, with whorls, crescent moons and circles instead of formline patterns curving into symmetrical secondary shapes, dashes and hatch marks.
Dominant ovoid and U-forms are here, but they are liberated from the rigorous geometries of other Northwest Coast design aesthetics.
Against the far wall in the first gallery floats a fine Salish canoe, what curator Steve Brown called the Cadillac of the Puget Sound waterways. Compared to a Kwakwaka'wakw canoe, it's barely there at all, but what it lacks in flourishes it gains in the profound simplicity of its elemental form.
Schweder and Grade covered the wall behind the canoe in video waters. On another wall are three 19th-century house posts from Vancouver Island, with pairs of minks climbing upward. Schweder and Grade offer three video views as accompaniment: the historic longhouse, what remains of it and the water view it provided.
I have never seen a traditional show so rich in contemporary art. Because Coast Salish are famed for their baskets, they didn't carve many boxes, but Andrea Wilbur-Sigo's loose-jointed formline design for her box could be rooted in no other culture.
Maynard Johnny Jr.'s "Four Salmon Heads" in acrylic on canvas is a salmon-based boogie-woogie. Susan Point and Marvin Oliver, renowned in glass art circles, shine with particular splendor in their own cultural context.
Matika Wilbur's silver gelatin print portraits of native elders line one gallery wall, and Edward Curtis' photos line the other, establishing a call-and-response pattern of people across time and space.
"Coast Salish cultures are experiencing their own renaissance," said Brotherton. "For many reasons, including loss of land, language, industry and forced attendance at boarding school, they went to sleep and are now awakening. This exhibit is intended to celebrate that awakening."
Consider it celebrated.