"Archaeological research is blind and empty without aesthetic re-creation and aesthetic re-creation is irrational and often misguided without archaeological research. But, 'leaning against one another' these two can support the 'system that makes sense,' that is, an historical synopsis." - Erwin Panofsky
Leslie Dawn's National Visions, National Blindness: Canadian Art and Identities in the 1920s examines the history of the Group of Seven's reception in Europe and the ensuing quest, by Eric Brown and Marius Barbeau, to reterritorialize Canada. The process necessitated the need to either erase the Native presence or frame it within a narrative of decomposition that would pave the way for the settler races to claim the country as their own. Dawn takes the resistance of the Gitxsan in British Columbia as a further test case of the failure of the strategy.
