Vancouver Art Gallery
Vancouver, BC

lineages and land bases presents more than 80 artworks from the Gallery’s permanent collection that challenge the modern Western assumption that nature and culture exist as two distinct realms, a concept which helped shape Canada’s national art and identity in the early twentieth century. On the contrary, in Sḵwx̱wú7mesh sníchim (the Squamish language), there is no word for “nature.” Instead, within this Indigenous worldview, people are intimately bound to non-human entities, whether plants, rocks, animals or places, locating subjectivity well beyond human beings and creating an ethical imperative to care for the natural world.