Northwest Coast people incorporate art into all aspects of life, continuing traditions of visual expression into the present that reflect dynamic and ongoing relationships among humans, ancestors, and supernatural beings. The past and present merge into one continuum.I would add a few more things that our art reflects our relationship with, such as place, event, and myth. The idea of the past and the present merging recognizes that it is continually merging.
Karen Kramer is the Curator of Native American Art and Culture at the Peabody Essex Museum. This article describes her epiphany "That art IS life on the Northwest Coast. It wasn’t just happening then. It is still happening now." The integration of art and life is a theme in Raven’s Many Gifts: Native Art of the Northwest Coast, which runs at PEM from April 5, 2014 – mid-2015.
I've always appreciated the concepts of INCORPORATION and INTEGRATION. To fully appreciate these concepts, and thereby apply the ideas, you have to look at their etymologies.
Incorporate: from Late Latin incorporatus, past participle of incorporare "unite into one body,"
Integrate: from Latin integratus, past participle of integrare "make whole,"
Why do I believe these ideas are so important? We are continuously engaging in this process; we are continuously affecting the cultures we are from, even as our cultures are continuously affecting us.
Culture cannot be lost or stolen. It is dynamic and alive and it becomes the totality of what all its members contribute (or don't contribute) to it. Including art.
Who we are is based on our enculturation. Because Native Americans, for the most part, have a large chunk of history in which generations were accultured, many are searching for that sense of wholeness, in which the past IS connected to the present. Art/artists are one kind of voice for this drive to integrate - to make sense of.
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