For nearly four decades, Salish artist Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun has interrogated the abuses of the colonial system in North America and the capitalist system worldwide through a body of work that reimagines the possibilities of traditional Northwest Coast Native visual motifs. Yuxweluptun possesses an intimate familiarity with the bureaucratic mechanisms used by the Canadian government to suppress Native agency and self-determination. The artist’s politically active parents were instrumental to the formation of Yuxweluptun's philosophical outlook, a key driver of his work. His father was one of the first Indigenous men in Canada to obtain a college education—a feat that involved petitioning the Vatican for the authorization to do so—and, in order to protect his son, later taught at the residential school that the artist attended as a child. The artist’s mother was a member of the Indian Homemakers Association, a grassroots organization of British Columbian Native women who fought tirelessly for the improvement of Native peoples’ political rights and living conditions, including those of non-status Indians and Indian people living outside reservations.¹ Yuxweluptun’s choice to pursue painting rather than politics was a strategic decision, driven by what he saw as the futility of a political vocation in the face of the Canadian government’s oppression of Indigenous people. The Indian Act, a continually-updated set of laws that codify the Canadian government’s relationship with Native people and communities, is a frequent target of the artist’s opprobrium—as are the multinational conglomerates that heedlessly extract the natural resources of British Columbia to devastating environmental results.

      In Leaving My Reservation, a lone, emaciated figure clutches a briefcase as he walks across a clear-cut landscape devoid of trees and plant-life. The figure symbolizes the Native bureaucrats who represent their tribe to the Canadian parliament, where they campaign—often unsuccessfully—for treaties and land-rights. Yuxweluptun’s view of these political players is bleak. “They’re creepy sellouts that do things without permission,” he notes. The figure’s tongue lolls out of the side of his flat, transparent head, which offers a view to the radiant blue sky behind him. “He’s ready to lick big,” the artist quips sardonically.² Striding along the landscape, the figure leaves the organically shaped forms of the Native reservation for the Anglo-Canadian world. The rectangular slats in the ground behind him, which resemble an opened accordion file, represent the countless government papers kept on Native people in Canada. In the distance, the mountains are not only bare, but hollow, as if their contents have been mined so aggressively that nothing remains.

      Yuxweluptun has spoken at length about the failure of traditional Northwest Coast carving to convey the gravity of issues facing Native communities, including government-driven cultural loss and disenfranchisement. As a student, the artist eschewed training in carving techniques to study painting at the Emily Carr Insitute of Art.³ Borrowing from the grandeur of European historical paintings and the oozing, floating visual language of surrealists such as Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst, Yuxweluptun’s work expands the possibilities of Northwest Coast imagery by placing it within a defiantly contemporary aesthetic context. His use of surrealist visual tropes, in particular, is a reclamation of modernist traditions which were largely drawn from white artists’ encounters with the art of so-called “primitive” cultures including, notably, those of the Northwest Coast. Visionism, which is what the artist calls the stylistic mode he has created out of this constellation of influences, uses the artistic traditions of colonial powers to assert the importance of Native conceptions of place, as well as to pillory the economic and political powers that subjugate Native communities.

¹ Conversation with the artist, May 15, 2022.

² Ibid.

³ See, for instance, Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, “Artist Statement” in Karen Duffek and Tania Willard, Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun: Unceded Territories, (Vancouver: Museum of Anthropology, 2016), 6-8.