"Tradition" is a Moving Target

I've often fantasized having a bumper sticker on the back of my car with the words tradition is a moving target.  People often think of traditions, or traditional people as somehow frozen, a fixed form rigidly reproduced set by authority at some unspecified time in the distant past.  Essentialized and objectified.  Such readings of "tradition" figure largely in determinations of aboriginal rights, of allowed and disallowed techniques of harvesting and using fish and animals and berries, of relationships to landscape (which has relevance both in popular discourse and in treaty negotiations and court cases).  Such notions also figure in judgements of what is "authentic" or "inauthentic" in Aboriginal arts and crafts.  I recently viewed a video on German Indian re-enactment posted on the web by a Canadian First Nations woman.... the German participants used considerable rhetoric about how Indigenous North Americans, and their knowledges, were endangered and disappearing, and how these German admirers were preserving and carrying on the traditions....somehow failing to acknowledge living Indigenous North Americans, and their agency in moving their cultures, arts and identities into the present and future.  "Preserving the knowledge of the Elders"– something that has in fact occupied a good deal of my professional life– does not negate creativity, adaptation, resilience, or changing meanings and contexts.  And I have always striven to show that people I work with are contemporary Canadians, my teachers, friends, collaborators and sometimes neighbours.  Their knowledge is not fossil knowledge of the past, but knowledge that can be brought forward for now, and for the future.
Use of new materials, for example, does not render art less "authentic"; the authenticity resides in who creates it, in its meaning, in intent and purpose, in linkage with past in which it is rooted.  Silk screen prints, for example, were not a traditional way to depict Northwest Coast crests, which were displayed on wooden screens, in woven dance blankets (gwiis halaayt or Chilkat blankets)....in making this statement we run into two difficulties: one, what is the relevant time horizon for "traditional"? and two, in what way is the new hybrid form of silk screen prints made by Indigenous artists depicting Indigenous themes not traditional?  (Even the question of production of art or craft for sale is certainly now "traditional" if we can take practices from the 18th and 18th centuries as "traditional." Certainly in terms of cuisine, for example, no one would argue that boxty, made of potatoes that originated in Peru, is not traditional Irish fare, and certainly no one would contest the traditional nature of a Thanksgiving dinner featuring turkey, mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce, all introduced to European and Euro-American cuisine in the 16th and 17th centuries.)  Museums and collectors all accept these art pieces as "traditional".

Another example of "tradition" that comes to mind is the beautiful appliqued art form usually known as "button blanket" (gwiis gan mala).  (The blanket shown here is a Haida example from a Totempole raising and Longhouse dedication in June of 1978.  It's iconic to me because of the contemporary context, and the presence of the little girl, now probably 40 years old). Abalone shell was a treasured embellishment on the Northwest Coast long before the advent of European trade goods.  Crest form chiefly blankets displaying prerogative and authority displaying appliqued House, Clan or moiety crests are widespread up and down the Northwest Coast, and are certainly taught in traditional form by older knowledgeable women teaching younger ones how to cut, applique and embellish the blankets, though fulled red, navy or black woolen cloth is certainly not Pre-Contact.  Social relations in who draws the pattern, and who stitches blankets for whom continue to display ancient patterns of clan or house reciprocity and gender roles as well. Now I have learned that people use computer applications to draft complex and precise patterns for the appliqued figures.  Hybridity, and evolving tradition both. So tradition is not a reified set of practices, or products, it is a process which creates linkage between past and future through the constantly shifting moment of the present.
Iain Davidson-Hunt and Michael O'Flaherty have described cultural landscape as emergent in a similar vein.  Contesting now entrenched notions of heritage conservation as the preservation of things, of forms, they contend that preservation of cultural landscapes must instead by approached from the perspective of the set of relationships between people and land, and the customary practices (themselves evolving) that have shaped, and continue to shape the land.  The relationships are what is required to create and maintain a cultural landscape.  Many traditional peoples are deeply in relationship with their homelands, conceiving of themselves as part of the land (for example, Catherine McClellan and Council of Yukon Indians book on Yukon First Nations in the last quarter of the 20th century is entitled part of the Land, Part of the Water).  I discussed these issues in an earlier blog on the Hortobagy Salt Steppe World Heritage Site in Hungary, and I've also written of these matters in Trail of Story, Traveller's Path, Reflections on Ethnoecology and Landscape (available through Creative Commons on the AUPress Website at http://www.aupress.ca/index.php/books/120163).
The difference of perspective on what heritage conservation is speaks to conceptual separation or integration of humans the land, and the other entities that share it, that is, whether people are part of ecosystems, in webs of relationship with the biophysical environment and integral to the environments of which they form a part, or separate from them and potentially destructive of a pure and vulnerable "nature".   The crux of the matter, then, is are we part of "Nature", or separate from, and potentially destructive of it?  Are relationships with the land, with the natural world, so to speak, to be conceived of as relationships of mutually supporting entities, or will "Nature" be stripped of all of its richness, its rights, its agency to be objectified and commodified, to be bought and sold, reduced to monetary value and universal exchange? How will we deal with the rights and relationships of Indigenous peoples to homelands in our complicated pastiche of nation states, settlers, immigrants, migrants and globalization?