I've been studying Pacific Coast Indigenous Art in school, and it's been absolutely fascinating to learn about these styles I've grown up seeing all around me. As an Indigenous person living in the region, it's a way to connect with a part of my own heritage that I've never really been able to dig into before now.

This design is based on a Coast Salish spindle whorl, and features a pair of some of my favorite subjects. Obviously, Velociraptors aren't traditional animals, but using them in this piece really helped me to understand the principles of composition behind the Coast Salish style. Over the 20th Century, Coast Salish art has been heavily overshadowed by the related, but distinct Northwest Coast Formline designs, which are probably what you imagine when you think of "Native American Art," but our professor was very deliberate about teaching us Coast Salish Design first, before moving on to Formline.

Both of these styles are more than just ways of making pictures; they're entire visual languages, with components and rules and grammar that pack meaning into every shape and line. The design principles behind them are incredibly advanced. You could spend years picking these designs apart, and people have made careers out of doing just that. These styles are among the most impressive artistic achievements in human history, which makes it all the more ridiculous that so many people see them as just "cool native art." These styles, and the artists who keep them alive-- Susan Point, Shaun Peterson, Bill Reid, just to name a few off the top of my head-- deserve all the recognition of European Renaissance painters for what they've accomplished. Raising an entire art style practically from the dead after 100 years of cultural and literal genocide is no small feat.

I will probably not continue to work in these styles after leaving school-- I'm not part of any particular tribe and I wouldn't feel comfortable promoting what I do as "Native Art" when there are so many other great artists who would do the style so much more justice than me. But I will certainly take what I've learned in studying them and apply it to my future works. The advanced designs, use of negative space, and strong sense of flow and motion inherent to Pacific Coast Indigenous Art are all things that I've wanted to apply to my own art, and I didn't even realize how significant they were to Indigenous designs until I started studying them, despite growing up seeing them all around me. They're absolutely brilliant.