Entering the space of John Wynne’s Anspayaxw, I feel as though I’m literally crossing a border. I open a gallery door adjacent to the Museum of Anthropology’s Great Hall—an exhibit of monumental Northwest Coast material culture—and move into a space dominated by the intangible. First, there are sounds: feet crunching tracks through snow, a river flowing under ice, the rapid breath of a dog who has been running hard. There is the chime of an electronic clock, the sound of a passing vehicle, and then, Gitxsanimaax and English-speaking voices, telling stories, calling out bingo numbers, ringing in laughter, and singing. These sounds and voices were recorded by Wynne in collaboration with linguist Tyler Peterson on the Gitxsan Anspayaxw (Kispiox) reserve in northern British Columbia.

Twelve channels of sound are projected through twelve flat-panel speakers, suspended in a darkened gallery. These are hung facing inwards to create their own rectangular space. Each speaker is fronted by a vividly lit image created by Wynne in collaboration with visual artist Denise Hawrysio. I enter this space, drawn from one panel to the next by a montage of remixed sound and image.

Some of these photographs depict Gitxsanimaax road signs created by a few young residents hired by the band office back in the seventies, one of whom, Gwen Simms, appears in the piece. They chose names that reflected the clan and family organization of settlements on the reserve, or local significances of places, to replace road names assigned by the Department of Indian Affairs. What was once arbitrarily named ‘Poplar’ or ‘Spruce’ became Lax-see’l (Frog clan), a road where several of the clan’s families were living; or Angol (meaning ‘run’), named after a road where the softball team would run to build stamina. These road signs represent one of many dynamics of translation in Anspayaxw. These are not literal, symmetrical translations but transformative inscriptions and reclamations of language, meanings of place, and culture.

The photographs are also of people from Anspayaxw who, in their homes or in one case in the linguistics lab at UBC, are shown in the act of recording language and narratives—some of which are included in the installation—for Wynne and linguist Peterson. These images, framing the documentation of Gitxsanimaax, are also translations. Wynne has transformed them into something new. They have been mirrored, but asymmetrically, like imperfect Rorschach ink blots. On one side of the image, the subject of the photograph is present, animated in speech, focused on the act of recording surrounded by photographs of family, and children’s toys. On the other side, the microphones and tape recorder remain, but the person is gone. Only the trace of his or her body is left as an imprint in the chair, or the suggestion of a recorded voice left echoing in the room. The photographs depict the presence and the absence of a person. The artist’s translation of these images evokes concern over the shift of endangered Gitxsanimaax to English, the gradual loss of a language that could one day only exist on the linguist’s tape.

The images and sounds of Wynne’s Anspayaxw hang in the border zones between anthropology and art, drawing attention to the subjective nature of language documentation and photography, and the multiple layers of translation that are central to the documentation and interpretation process. It is Wynne’s navigation of this border space between disciplinary practices that is most unsettling about the work. The sounds and images, the products of ethnographic and linguistic research, are edited and remixed to resist easy interpretation. Reality, Wynne suggests, is never symmetrical. This is a quality that the doubled images are intended to reflect. The imperfect reflections counter the viewer’s desire for symmetry; they disrupt the sense that what is seen and heard can be simply understood. Relations of power are rarely symmetrical either, but there are spaces of negotiation in between.

Thelma Blackstock is recorded speaking the words of a funeral song named Xsin Naahlxw (Breath). The words are spoken rather than sung for the linguist, whose goal is to transcribe the Gitxsanimaax words. Wynne uses this recording in the installation with the permission of the representative of the House of Geel, Catherine Blackstock-Campbell. He presents it as spoken word to resist ethnologizing and circulating this sacred, hereditary, song. Instead of a documentation of a performance, it is a record of the moment of encounter between researcher and speaker. It reveals the process of translating intangible cultural property into orthographic transcription, which, without permission from the owner, is an act of theft.

Later, Fern Weget sings her own Gitxsanimaax translation of Bob Miller’s 1933 country song, White Azaleas. Unlike Blackstock’s funeral song, with its strict protocols of ownership, Weget sings the song because “it doesn’t belong to nobody.” Weget makes this popular song her own, yet at the end of her performance Wynne reinterprets the recording, drawing the tones of her voice into expansive harmonics, remixing the piece anew. Both of these songs, like the images, are asymmetrical reflections. The artist’s/linguist’s recordings, Wynne demonstrates, are not unmediated actualities, but the creation of new forms. Weget’s White Azaleas, a Gitxsan version of a public-domain country-and-western song, is translated into the social and cultural life of Anspayaxw.

The two songs illuminate the tension between epistemologies and legal regimes of ownership. Along with the stories told by residents of Anspayaxw—narratives of survival, suffering, and humour in the face of colonial oppression and discrimination—they expose negotiations of relations of power: the subjective acts of recording language and culture, creating works of art, and the dynamic processes of cultural change, adaptation, and appropriation.

Kate Hennessy is a Doctoral Candidate in Anthropology and Trudeau Scholar at the University of British Columbia. Her research explores the transformative role of new media in museum and academic practice. Her multimedia works investigate documentary methodologies and collaborative practices to address indigenous and settler histories of place.

Detail from Anspayaxw by John Wynne. Photo by Ken Mayer