Abstract
First Nations designs and motifs derived from crest imagery have proliferated over
the last two decades in urban British Columbia. Their circulation through public and
private spaces is, however, subject to limitations, variously perceptible. The
notion of figuration is used to consider the ways in which this material is
apprehended. Non-natives through whose hands this material circulates, typically
exercising what they think of as their rights to freedom of access, are led towards
more intractable forms of ‘evidence’ for aboriginality. First
Nations, equally implicated in its circulation, exercising their sovereign rights,
monitor the ‘trivia’ in such a way that it becomes, not without
an ironic readjustment of power relations, a line of defence against further
encroachment. In this sense the most ephemeral, apparently valueless, items are
characterized by
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