A S7ayulh (Thunder being) mask carved by the late Yakulhas Glenn Tallio, of the Nuxalk Nation.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
The Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia is currently displaying a precious Northwest Coast robe, a fringed shawl-like garment made of mountain goat wool, decorated with a pair of ravens and mask-like faces in yellow, red and black.
This late-19th century robe from the Nuxalk people at Bella Coola is one of more than 60 treasures in the first-ever exhibition devoted to the Nuxalk First Nation. It is a cultural artifact, lent to MOA by the Glenbow Museum in Calgary where it had been in storage.
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But it is also someone’s family heirloom: The staltmc, or hereditary leader, Willie Hans had received it from his father Tallio Hans when he became head of the family, but was persuaded to offer it to a museum for safekeeping in the 1970s. The Glenbow purchased it in 1974 and the family lost track of their ancestor’s robe, which he would have worn at ceremonies as a representation of his lineage and place in the Nuxalk creation story.
Today, the robe has been rediscovered by Willie Hans’s living descendants as the MOA displays it alongside a photograph showing Tallio Hans with the robe across his knees in 1917. It is this kind of reunion that is the key to the MOA exhibition Nuxalk Strong: Dancing Down the Eyelashes of the Sun. MOA curator Jennifer Kramer, who helped organize the show, said 250 people came from Bella Coola for the February opening and were excited to see the Tallio Hans robe.
“More and more, museums are understanding that these material treasures can do really important work back home,” she said. “They also can do important work on display to the public. So this museum is kind of doing both. It’s both outward focused and it’s inward focused to the Nuxalk.”
A Lxulhla (man-eater) Kusyut mask carved by an unknown Nuxalk carpenter in the mid to late 1800s.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
Her co-curator is Snxakila-Clyde Tallio, a descendant of Willie Hans’s older sister Bessie Hans, and a Nuxalk knowledge keeper and designated speaker who tells his family’s ancestral origin stories at a potlatch, the traditional fall gathering to share wealth.
“It’s a beautiful work of art,” he said, “but it’s about the people who wore that robe, who Tallio Hans was, who Willie Hans was, and the work they did to rebuild our nation and to preserve our culture and language, our governance system. His son Aaron Hans, who is now the hereditary leader after his father, has not seen the blanket in 50 years.” (Tallio, used as both a first and last name when Nuxalk names were anglicized by Indian agents, indicates a person was from the village Talyu.)
The exhibition is the result of a 15-year collaboration between Kramer and Tallio, who is driving current efforts to re-establish his nation’s language and rituals. Together the transplanted New Yorker and the Nuxalk activist have crossed North America looking for Nuxalk treasures, trying to trace family items shown in old photographs such as the Hans robe, or to establish the original ownership of anonymous items in museum collections.
Dating back more than 14,000 years, the Nuxalk were a small nation of about 18,500 people devastated by smallpox in 1862-63. The 300 survivors settled at the mouth of the Bella Coola River and eventually banded together with neighbours, partly because the government forced people into a small reserve where they became known as “the Bella Coola Indians.” Many of their family treasures, regalia consisting of robes, masks, hats and staffs, and the boxes in which they were stored, were disbursed, often sold or ceded in exchange for promises they would be safer in museums. They wound up scattered across Canadian and American collections, sometimes displayed in public but often hidden in storage or kept in private hands.
Tallio Hans, his wife and two of their children are pictured with a Northwest Coast robe made of mountain goat wool.courtesy of Royal British Columbia Museum
Today, the Nuxalk number almost 2,000 with 900 living on reserve at Bella Coola, and as they revive rituals, including the fall potlatch ceremonies and the welcoming of girls into maturity, they are reopening their family treasure boxes and using old items to learn how to make new ones. Since 2006, the nation has revived the cedar bark weaving that is used to make hats and baskets, and is now reviving weaving with wool.
The exhibition is filled with examples, both old and new, of these crafts. It includes several historic carved masks that were brought out for the potlatch, the Northwest Coast harvest ceremony which provided an occasion to share gifts with neighbours in exchange for their witnessing a family’s land title, expressed through dance, song and storytelling.
“The potlatch is where we validate our solemn right to our ancestral homelands … and uphold those who are stewarding it,” Tallio said.
Misunderstood by a capitalist colonial culture as a bankrupting waste of wealth and frowned on as a pagan ritual, the potlatch was banned by the government from 1885 to 1951. However, with the exception of one notorious seizure in 1921 at ‘Mimkwamlis on north Vancouver Island, the law was erratically enforced and some ceremonies continued in private, Kramer said. The ban did force many Northwest Coast First Nations to stop dancing and increased the pressure to sell or give away their treasures.
The potlatch withered, but is being revived: There are 19 Nuxalk families (whose hereditary leaders work alongside the elected band council under an agreement signed in 2018) and most of them now potlatch.
The exhibition, featuring items from the MOA and other public collections, includes such remarkable examples as masks from the late 1800s depicting the creator Alhkw’ntam as the sun and the four carpenter brothers who fashioned the world, or a massive beaked mask depicting Lxulhla, the feared eldest son of the creator who symbolized the path of darkness and was a figure at winter ceremonies.
The show also includes recent work: new regalia such as the cedar bark cloak, hat and skirt woven by Nunanta-Iris Siwallace for a girl’s coming-of-age ceremony in 2017 and inspired by pieces in the collection of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington. There are also several contemporary pieces intended as art or collectables, in the European sense.
Talking about the historical items or the regalia, Tallio prefers the word treasure to art, and the word carpenter to artist.
“These are not art in the same way an English speaker would use the word art. These aren’t pretty pieces that hang on our wall, these are living recreations of our history; they are spiritually rooted and their ownership doesn’t belong to the artist, it belongs to the family.”
Tallio also notes the way the art market distorts Nuxalk culture because it pays local artists more for making work for sale than they would ever make within the community.
Museums enshrined the treasures as aesthetic objects – or stuck them in storage – but he feels the institutions can play a role in preserving culture and says the story about how Nuxalk treasures wound up in colonial institutions is not black and white. Previous generations, decimated by smallpox and then suffering through reserves, residential schools and the potlatch ban, actually chose to work with academics and museums with a view to preserving their culture for their descendants. Some Nuxalk even assembled collections to donate.
One key example of this strategic collaboration is the work of T.F. McIlwraith, an early anthropologist who wrote The Bella Coola Indians, first published in 1948 and republished in 1992. His collection of Nuxalk items is included in this show and will eventually be returned to the First Nation by his descendants.
The Nuxalk disagreed as to how much the show should focus on past wrongs, Kramer said. Some argued it should only celebrate strength, pride and the future while others felt the history was important.
“A lot of First Nations say that museums are colonial spaces, universities take our stories, take our knowledge, and what do we get back? There’s a lot of theft. The Nuxalk have thought differently about this,” she said. “They consciously made the choice to share this knowledge, these songs, these treasures. … Museums don’t have to be colonial treasure houses where you passively look at things for how beautiful they are. They can be allies in this work of resurgence. And the Nuxalk knew this 100 years ago.”
Nuxalk Strong: Dancing Down the Eyelashes of the Sun continues at the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver until Jan. 4, 2026.
