Welcoming the Wild Salmon Caravan: Socially Engaged Art as a Decolonizing Practice

The Wild Salmon Caravan (WSC) is an Indigenous led socially engaged art project designed to celebrate and call for the protection of wild salmon in so-called BC, and particularly in Secwe̓pemcul’ecw. I use critical reflection (Morely, 2008) to gain insights from my involvement organizing arts-build workshops, festivities and building relationships through this annual event since 2016. The Cross Cultural Protocol (Morrison, 2016) and the Cross Cultural Interface Framework developed by Dawn Morrison and the Working Group on Indigenous Food Sovereignty provided the scaffolding for reflections on my research questions: “What do the Cross Cultural Protocols teach non-Indigenous people about acting as an ally?” and, “How does socially engaged art such as the WSC contribute to public pedagogy regarding decolonization?” In the research findings, I share stories that relate to each of the 12 Cross Cultural Protocols and identify the points of entry, interface, contradiction and strategy present in each narrative that helped me to understand how, as a non-Indigenous person, I can better act as an ally, as the protocols urge us to do. I also find that the WSC, as a socially engaged art project contributes to public pedagogy regarding decolonization through healing multiple facets of self-in-relation (Graveline, 1998): self, family, community, agency and the world. Along with personal reflection, the research findings resulted from learning through semi-structured dialogues with Indigenous and non-Indigenous participants of the WSC, and are presented using métissage (Hasbe-Ludt, Chambers & Leggo, 2009) and writing as a method of inquiry (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005). As such, my own voice in the research findings is woven together with historic documents, Indigenous poetry, stories and Secwe̓pemc voices