ABSTRACT This review suggests that Nuxalk Strong: Dancing Down the Eyelashes of the Sun reframes the ethnographic gallery as a site of protocol rather than as a trophy case. Co‐curated by Snxakila—Clyde Tallio (Nuxalk Nation) and Jennifer Kramer (UBC MOA), the exhibition centers law, lineage, and language to present belongings and supernatural beings as ongoing relations. Contemporary makers stand beside ancestral treasures; Nuxalk Radio and interactive bilingual spaces turn sound and speech into reflections of sovereignty; and intentional returns—most notably of masks and weavings linked to the McIlwraith collections—are treated as part of the interpretive arc of engaged and community‐facing scholarship, not as backstage logistics. We celebrate the juridical‐ceremonial method, the clear pedagogy of governance, and the refusal to romanticize both loss or return, and note productive tensions around acoustics and attention in this multi‐modal gallery. Taken together, the exhibit's careful choreography of law, story, and material and immaterial culture models the kind of ethical partnership in which authority remains with families, ancestors, supernatural beings, and belongings and collections continue to work and circulate in the world.
Armstrong et al. (Thu,) studied this question.