Chinuk Wawa in the arts: “The Sun is Setting on the British Empire”

Here’s quite an interesting work of art that you may not have known of.

Marianne Nicolson is a Musgamakw Dzawada’enuxw First Nations Kwakwaka’wakw artist, cultural researcher, and advocate from British Columbia, whose creations adorn a number of prominent public spaces.

“The Sun is Setting on the British Empire” by Marianne Nicolson (image credit: Belkin Art Gallery)

A few years ago, Marianne, who I had been in the UVic Linguistics department with, asked if I could contribute a translation into Chinook Jargon for a piece she was working on.

I supplied a “Chinuk Pipa” (Chinook shorthand) text for her theme, “The Sun is Setting on the British Empire”.

The Jargon says, Chako mimlus son kopa kanawi kah Kinchoch ilihi.

That’s in the Northern Dialect of Chinook Jargon, appropriate to BC, but intentionally using an antiquated word for ‘British’.

(By the time of the Indigenous “Chinuk Pipa” writers, folks said Ingland / Ingland Ilihi / Inglish Ilihi.)

Here’s the blurb from the gallery where this artwork was installed:

Commissioned for the exhibition To refuse/To wait/To sleep (January 13-April 9, 2017), Marianne Nicolson reworks the British Columbia provincial flag by repositioning and inverting the Union Jack below a setting/rising sun that has been recreated with a Pacific Northwest Coast Indigenous aesthetic. Nicolson references the flag’s original orientation (1895-1906); while the early version shows the sun atop the Union Jack and suggests a cooperative situation and mutually beneficial alliances between the crown and Indigenous nations, these emblems were reversed in 1906 and symbolically reveal a relationship of oppression, theft and genocide. By righting the symbols of the flag back to their original relationship, Nicolson’s banner invigorates the hope for and assertion of Indigenous rights over the land, which today remain largely unresolved.

Marianne Nicolson’s banner was installed on the exterior of the Belkin Art Gallery from 2017 to 2020; it was removed in anticipation of a new banner as part of Soundings: An Exhibition in Five Parts (September 8-December 6, 2020), which was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic and is still being researched…The Sun is Setting on the British Empire was commissioned and installed with the support of the Audain Foundation, 2017.

ikta mayka chaku-kəmtəks?
What have you learned?