Indigenous creative traditions are inseparable from the cosmologies, relationships, and responsibilities within which they were made — to extract them from that context and display them as art objects is to misread them, rendering sacred what was relational, aesthetic what was ethical. The ceremony, the song, the woven pattern, the carved form: these are not expressions of individual creativity but acts of participation in a world that is understood to require such participation to remain alive. To approach these traditions with respect is to recognize that they operate by premises about the relationship between making and being that differ fundamentally from the premises most Western aesthetic discourse takes for granted.
Mura