Trade Canoe: Forty Days and Forty Nights

Narrator: This painting is one of Smith’s “Trade Canoes”. It’s from 2015, but she began making them in 1992—around the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in North America. 

Andrea Carlson: The idea around the “Columbian Exchange” is that the “new” world and the “old” world exchanged goods and things and ideas, but what did the Natives really get out of that exchange?

Narrator: Artist Andrea Carlson belongs to Grand Portage Ojibwe.

Andrea Carlson: We got disease, we got colonization, we got land loss, we lost species. And what did Europe get out of it? Lots of resources. 

Narrator: Smith subtitled this trade canoe Forty Days and Forty Nights, evoking the Old Testament story of Noah’s Ark.

Andrea Carlson: The title is so incredibly interesting to me because, as we know, Christianity has been a colonial force throughout the Americas and colonized world, but I feel like this isn't a title in support of Christianity. But it can be about general ideas around this story of forty days and forty nights, of this flooding of the earth. 

A number of us have access to Christian stories and storytelling through colonization where we wouldn't have access to a Salish creation story. In this vessel, the things that are being saved are beings, they are spirits, they are stories. 

I love how at the center of this piece, Coyote emerges, Coyote as a central character with these bright beams behind him. 

Narrator: Coyote is an important figure in the creation myths of tribes rooted in the Great Plains, like Smith’s Salish ancestors. Coyote is also a trickster and a productive troublemaker. As you’ll see as you explore the exhibition, he shows up a lot in Smith’s work.