Digital Tourism

Tag: Art

Indigenous Needs and Digital Solutions

31/03/2025 / / 0 Comments

The topic of this blog has focused primarily on my experience in the Tourism industry and how it relates to the digital world. While I have touched on it before this week’s topic bares repeating of the fact that this experience comes primarily from an Indigenous community. These communities, especially in BC have developed a reputation as destinations, whether for adventure tourism or for people exploring the cultural history of the province. This brings an increasing number of people from all parts of the world in contact with Indigenous cultures in BC.

This growing tourism industry in these small communities has further increased the needs of these communities to integrate in to the digital world as the needs of the tourism industry increasingly includes digital presence. From tour bookings of sacred sites, to the buying and selling of traditional art, the tourism industry has brought new income streams to these communities, and in many cases this income stream requires digital solutions to access

Landing Page for the Copper Sun Gallery in Bella Coola, BC

One of the businesses I worked closely with is the Copper Sun Gallery, a tour company and art gallery owned and operated by members of the Nuxalk Nation. Their services meet two key needs of their community in ensuring that they are able to compete in the digital world of the tourism industry.

Most directly they offer tours of sacred sites, and locations of cultural significance. These types of tours are growing increasingly popular with visitors from Canada and beyond, and being able to capitalize on this popularity while respecting the sites and providing the convenient and straightforward online booking experience visitors have come to expect generates significant income for the community. Moreover the gallery has partnered with a number of local accommodations to provide these services on behalf of them in order to expand their pool of potential bookings beyond even those that find their own website.

Additionally The Copper Sun Gallery provides a space for buying and selling of locally produced art. Artists are able to sell their works to the gallery for they gallery to then sell to tourists at an agreed upon markup. The buying and selling of art online is a fast growing industry, with many artists building and maintaining an online presence and websites for this purpose. However doing this can be rather expensive and in many cases requires consistent access to a high quality internet connection, both of which are unfortunately not always viable to many indigenous artists, especially in these small communities. Businesses like the Copper Sun Gallery meet this particular need by providing a locally hosted digital space for their works that are more able to reach visitors and admirers alike, without the high overhead that comes with a personal digital presence.

While this is an exploration of only one specific digital solution used by and for indigenous people, I believe a similar model has a great deal of value for bringing much needed income in to smaller indigenous communities.

Works Cited
Copper Sun Gallery: https://coppersungallery.ca/
Nuxalk Nation: https://nuxalknation.ca/

Boots on the Ground

16/03/2025 /

Building off of my last inquiry, I once again took the time to put myself out in the field in an effort to gather materials for my group’s project. In our continued efforts to grapple with the tumultuous world of usage rights, we opted to each explore some of our local public display artwork. This we felt also paired well with the tourism angle we have been exploring.

For this, I suggested we find works that fit within 3 categories, those being indigenous, traditional, and contemporary art on display in BC. As I had already catalogued some indigenous art, I instead turned my attention to the the latter two categories.

A map of public art installations in Vancouver, BC

Luckily with some google searching I was able to find an online map that catalogues public art installations around Vancouver. As I was going to be downtown shortly after this decision was made, I used this to identify two pieces I wanted to highlight.

Angel of Victory Statue located outside Waterfront Station. Vancouver BC

For my traditional work I wanted to highlight a statue that I felt was emblematic of the artistic movements of 19th and 20th century colonial America. For this I chose the Angel of Victory, one of four identical bronze casts by Coeur de Lion McCarthy located at former CPR stations across Canada in commemoration of the First World War. For the sake of our project I wanted to highlight works such as this as pieces of historical significance, such as those commemorating victims of war are some of the most popular for older visitors and families.

Douglas Coupland’s Digital Orca located just outside the Vancouver Convention Centre

On the other side of the coin, I wanted to highlight more contemporary works on display in Vancouver. For our purposes I wanted to highlight pieces that might not necessarily draw people to a location, but rather pieces that are emblematic of their city and which serve as something to find while exploring a new city. For this I chose Douglas Coupland’s Digital Orca sculpture which stands just outside the Vancouver Convention Centre. This imposing piece to me mates the natural beauty of British Columbia, with the modernity of the city of Vancouver, and serves as a perfect backdrop for photos, a meeting place with friends, or simply an interesting place to pass by.

Works Cited:
The Importance of Sources: https://digitaltourism.opened.ca/2025/03/05/the-importance-of-sources/
Vancouver Public Art Map: https://schoolofcities.github.io/vancouver-public-art/map
Digital Orca: https://covapp.vancouver.ca/PublicArtRegistry/ArtworkDetail.aspx?FromArtworkSearch=True&ArtworkId=521
Angel of Victory: https://heritagevancouver.org/top10-watch-list/2009/6-historic-monuments-angel-of-victory/

The Importance of Sources

05/03/2025 /

Continuing my theme of Tourism in the world of digital media and literacy, and in response to the week 8 topic of Curation, I wanted to talk about sources. Coming from a background that had me answering questions about the history and culture of my hometown, I have spent a lot of time trying to gather accurate and useful information for my purposes. And this has lead me to a couple of problems when dealing especially with indigenous history and culture.

To give some context, I am white. My parents are white, my grandparents are white, I am about as white as they come. As such, living in an indigenous community and working in a role in which I represent that community, I had to be exceptionally careful in how I presented and communicated about indigenous sites, history, and culture as ultimately I have no connection to these things. I will not pretend I was perfect in this position, however I always did my best to direct people to knowledgeable indigenous members of the community as these were simply better resources in certain issues than I am. However given that being able to direct visitors to more knowledgeable community members will not always be an option, we have to wonder what is the next best thing?

Nuxalk Mountain Goat Wool Robe, Cedar Bark Potlatch Hat, and Carved Speaker’s Staff features in the UBC Museum of Anthropology

In doing our project, my group has been aiming to feature whenever possible indigenous art. However one complication we ran in to early on in the process was attribution and usage rights. Given that the easiest art to legally use for project would be that in the public domain we would ideally be looking for some public domain indigenous art.

But that’s where the problem lies. According to the University of British Columbia “Effective December 30, 2022, the copyright for a work created in Canada will usually expire 70 years following the end of the calendar year in which the creator died.  However, for works where the last living author died on or before December 31, 1971, the previous copyright term (of 50 years after the end of the calendar year in which the author died) still applies.  Works that already entered the public domain prior to the enactment of the copyright term extension under the Copyright Act will remain in the public domain.” Furthermore, “If author(s) are unknown, then the work will enter the public domain: (a) 75 years after the end of the calendar year in which it was created; or (b) if the work was published prior to the end of such 75-year period, then the earlier of: (i) 75 years after the end of the calendar year in which it was first published, or (ii) 100 years after the end of the calendar year in which it was created.”

Unfortunately given these rules this means that in order for the art we feature to meet these criteria it must be to put it bluntly quite old. And unfortunately the reality of colonialism is that most of the art we have that is old enough to be in the public domain was stolen, coerced, or otherwise acquired illegitimately obtain from its rightful owners, in most cases without proper care to record the identities of who produced it.

Information Placard for the above 3 pieces

This presents difficulty not only in featuring and presenting these works ethically, but also in providing attribution of the pieces you present, especially once they lose the cultural context in which they were produced. Sometimes through familial connections we are able to regain some context, like in the Mountain Goat robe featured above which the UBC Museum of Anthropology has been able to trace to its original creator. However still others are simply attributed to “unknown weaver” or “unknown carver” as these connections and knowledge have been lost.

There is no simple answer to how to provide attribution and context in the world of indigenous art. However given that the unique art and cultures of British Columbia form such an integral part of our tourism industry, especially in small indigenous communities like my home town of Bella Coola, it is not one we can simply ignore. It is the responsibility of academics and educators alike to ensure that proper attribution and citation is given, and we must do our best with the resources we have.

Works Cited:
UBC Copyright: https://copyright.ubc.ca/public-domain/

Gathering Resources

27/02/2025 /

My learning process at this stage in the course has been focused on gathering resources. For our project my group is aiming to combine our backgrounds of Tourism, Arts, and Business to create digital advertisements for the art and architecture of British Columbia. However as a part of this, we wanted to be aware of the usage rights of the works we feature.

Landing Page for the Internet Archive’s Canadian Libraries page, which contains a repository of images, texts, and other resources from around Canada

In order to curate resources for our project that we can ensure we have the rights to, we have taken two approaches which I have been working on. The first is looking for works which are now in the public domain. My approach to this has been to explore the Internet Archive, which conveniently has a page dedicated to all forms of media from Canada. By using the search and filtering functions of this online resource, I have been working through works published prior to 1940 to create the highest chance of finding works which can fall under the public domain

Sisawk Sea Creature Mask produced by Nanutsaakas-Kyle Mack Tallio as featured at the UBC Museum of Anthropology
Information placard for the previously mentioned mask

The other method I have used to gather resources came about somewhat by accident. This past weekend I found myself making last minute plans to visit the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, as curator Jennifer Kramer was doing tour of the brand new Nuxalk Strong Exhibit featuring histories of, as well as historical and contemporary works by Nuxalk artists, the indigenous people who originally inhabited the area around Bella Coola, BC, my home town. During this tour I had the opportunity to speak with Jennifer directly and was able to secure permission to feature some of the pieces featured in the exhibit for our project, and this class. As getting explicit permission is always ideal when featuring or sharing art, this was always preferred for our project however finding works that people can visit, as and tracking down those who can give us permission to feature them was a daunting challenge that I personally did not see as likely. So having been able to secure permission has been extremely valuable to me.

Works Cited:
Nuxalk Strong Exhibit: https://moa.ubc.ca/exhibition/nuxalk-strong/|
Internet Archive: https://moa.ubc.ca/exhibition/nuxalk-strong/

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