Sarah Hunt - Kwaguilth Band, Discussing art as a cultural property

So traditionally, particularly amongst costal peoples, the rights to certain dances, songs, images and figures are passed along through ceremonies. So at potlatch ceremonies, people are given the rights to do certain dances, and that can happen between families, or through marriage, or through your lineage. Those things could be passed along across nations as well, but it would have to be done in this traditional, ceremonial kind of way. So today, obviously, through commercialization of First Nations art, and sort of displacing that art around the world, it is displayed not in a traditional context, but in museums, or art galleries, or as part of collections, and a lot of the meaning of that has been lost. Particularly now with First Nations art, a lot of people are doing art that is not from their own background, or borrowing from one another, or even non-native people doing native art really undermines, or doesn't recognize that those symbols or the practice is actually owned by those cultures, or is seen as cultural property rather than as just an object that you can buy just like anything else. So I think that that is definitely one of the larger impacts that colonization has had on First Nations cultural practices.