Coppers from the hood: Haida Manga Interventions and Performative Acts

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In the traditional indigenous economy of the Northwest Coast, copper shields were a highly prized form of material and symbolic wealth. In many cases, they were requisitioned by colonial authorities and became part of the ethnographic holdings of museums. Challenging this history of appropriation and keeping, Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas created a series of artworks, Haida Manga Coppers from the Hood (2007), for the exhibition Meddling in the Museum: Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas at the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. As site-specific interventions, these Coppers were designed to subvert dominant narratives and practices that circumscribe ownership of cultural heritage and concomitantly suppress indigenous rights, epistemologies, and histories. This institutional or indigenized critique was not only evinced in the display and materiality of the Coppers from the Hood but also iterated and amplified in the “performative acts,” such as the First Nation speeches delivered at the exhibition opening. This article explores the interplay between objects and acts, between the tangible and intangible expressions of museum anthropology that not only index but also instantiate social relations, indigenous identities, intercultural histories, and the politics of ownership and belonging. I argue that through these types of material and performative expressions the museum can be understood as a “site of persuasion” (Dubin 2011:478; Morphy 2006:473), wherein indigenous peoples, including activists and artists, continue their struggle to reclaim and animate their cultural heritage, in old and new forms. [Haida Manga, performative acts, indigenized critique]