Beaded Bags and Miniature Canoes: Indigenous Artists and Souvenir Markets

Manon Gaudet, Ph.D. student in the History of Art, discusses the multiple meanings embedded in works made for the tourist market by numerous Indigenous peoples in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Once forsaken as “inauthentic,” these works have since been reclaimed by communities, artists, and curators for their crucial role in maintaining cultural and economic systems threatened by colonial structures, and for the enduring aesthetic legacies to which they attest. Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Place, Nations, Generations, Beings: 200 Years of Indigenous North American Art. Space is limited.