When artists start mucking with history

 

We attended the lecture at the art gallery Saturday night by Stan Douglas, whose latest work, entitled Klatsassin, officially debuts today.

Douglas is advertised as an artist of outstanding credentials, and his Klatsassin exhibit as one that “defies the official version” of the Chiloctin War. (It consists of a movie and some photos of the actors.)

Artists make me nervous when they start fooling around with history, because they have a habit of wanting to be the “first” to “discover” some big new angle about what “actually happened” in a particular event. In this case, Douglas uses as his subject matter Klatsassin (I’ve always used the spelling Klattasine, including in my 1977 book The Chilcotin War). Klatsassin, or Klattasine, or Lhatsassin, was a Chilcotin War Chief who led a party in 1864 that slaughtered 19 whites including a road-building crew, a farmer, and my great-great-grandfather who was sent to apprehend him (Klattasine and his band of murderers shot him in the back).

After listening to Douglas talk for an hour, I’m no more edified as to what his interpretation of events is, except that it has to do with inter-loopings of time and space and reality and all the stuff artists like to think about. While those who rediscover the Chilcotin War every few years like to call it a little-known event in B.C. history, it was, in fact, one of the most documented — journals, reports, correspondence, ledgers, contemporary interviews, court testimony all provide a pretty clear view of what happened.

What happened was, Klatassine/Klatsassin talked a bunch of other Chilcotins into hacking to death a road-building crew as they slept and stealing their stuff. That doesn’t fit with the more romantic notion that he was a great warrior defending his land, but I have yet to see anything to substantiate the latter.

As I’m just getting warmed up, I’ll expand on this a little later.