Circulating Aboriginality

Abstract

First Nations designs and motifs derived from crest imagery have proliferated over the last two decades in urban British Columbia. Their circulation through public and private spaces is, however, subject to limitations, variously perceptible. The notion of figuration is used to consider the ways in which this material is apprehended. Non-natives through whose hands this material circulates, typically exercising what they think of as their rights to freedom of access, are led towards more intractable forms of ‘evidence’ for aboriginality. First Nations, equally implicated in its circulation, exercising their sovereign rights, monitor the ‘trivia’ in such a way that it becomes, not without an ironic readjustment of power relations, a line of defence against further encroachment. In this sense the most ephemeral, apparently valueless, items are characterized by keeping-while-giving and are declarations of the inalienable. It is suggested that inalienability derives from the idea of mutual embodiment as between humans and non-humans figured in the crests.