To Catch a Fish: A Conversation with Marianne Nicholson

This podcast interview is available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Listen to the conversation between Mariano Diaz, Dr. Emily G. Hanna, and Marianne Nicholson, and follow along with this transcript. Run time is approximately 34 minutes

Mariano: Hi, I'm Mariano Diaz, Content Producer here at Mingei. Today, I'm joined by our Chief Curator and Director of Exhibitions, Dr. Emily G. Hanna. Emily will share insight into our newest exhibition, To Catch a Fish, and help provide context for her conversation with featured contemporary artist Marianne Nicholson. Thank you for joining us.

Mariano: Emily, thank you so much for joining us. To start, can you give us an overview of To Catch a Fish and what can visitors expect when they step into the exhibition?

Emily: It has 130 odd objects from around the world, most drawn from our permanent collection, but also some contemporary work that we borrowed. And it really explores the act, the activity of fishing and the gear that's required for that, but also this kind of mystical relationship that people have with water and fish, the fact that it's a realm that is not ours, we are oxygen-breathing, and to enter the water, it's beautiful, but it's also treacherous. And so the show really takes you through three areas: the gear itself, this mystical aspect of healing, and the legendary, the miraculous—people who ride fish, fish, human creatures—and then objects from the everyday that are adorned with fish, but all having a deeper kind of symbolic meaning.

Mariano: Great. You mentioned that it's a mix of objects from our permanent collection and also three contemporary artists. What was the thinking behind balancing historical works with contemporary pieces and artists working today?

Emily: I think that's what we do. We're Mingei; we're art of the people, and we always like to showcase, you know, artisans and artists who are still making—they're moving their craft traditions forward. They're incorporating really interesting subject matter. So I'm always going to want to do that. I'm always going to want to show what's, what's, happening now. And how does it relate to the past, if it does?

Mariano: And where did the original idea for the exhibition come from? Was it a particular object, a question, a theme? What sparked it?

Emily: To walk through our storage. It's just the thrill of a lifetime. Different people have different thrills. For me, walking through storage, we have 30,000 objects in our collection. And they aren't just useful objects; they're useful, beautiful objects. So to go in our storage and see massive fish traps from the Philippines that are taller than I am, and see nets and weights—every time we go into storage, it sparks ideas. But this particular idea was born. The three curators have an ongoing brainstorming meeting. We have a running list of themes, and this was Guusje Sanders and Arianna Torres. This was their idea. My coworkers and I ended up having the show, which I'm really grateful for because I've loved doing it. It's fantastic.

Mariano: So when we're talking about that balance between collections, contemporary artists, one of the featured contemporary artists is Marianne Nicholson, someone who you've met before, worked with before. Can you give us some insight into the first time you met Marianne, where you were working at the time?

Emily: At the time, it was about 2015, I imagine, and I was working in Birmingham at the Birmingham Museum of Art, and we were—I had gotten very interested in collecting and exhibiting contemporary Native American art. That was my kind of singular passion. And we were getting ready to repatriate a large whale fin that was part of a house, a clan house in Alaska. This was part of a NAGPRA repatriation, and I was exploring contemporary indigenous artists who brought orca iconography into their work and found Marianne. She had created a pod of orca whales, and all you saw were these glass fins breaching the surface. And it looked incredible and I—so I made an appointment. I went up to see her in Vancouver, and we ended up driving all around the city looking at all of her public artworks.

She's such a thoughtful, thoughtful, brave person. She did this giant pictograph, 50ft tall on a cliff wall where she lives, in Kingcome Inlet, signaling to the world, to anybody who can see it. This massive pictograph in red. "This is our land. We are sovereign." That was her visual message to the loggers, to the commercial fisheries, to the pesticide sprayers. All the people who are just encroaching, encroaching, encroaching on sovereign land. There was this incredible painting. She hung from the side of a cliff. You can see a picture of her, this tiny little figure bouncing around in the wind. She's just a very passionate, thoughtful person. Always advocating, always advocating for her own people, for indigenous First Nations peoples whose things have just been taken away. You know, when the potlatch was banned, when language was banned, when children were taken into residential schools. It's just a hard series of stories. But she is just always saying through her art, we're here, we're making, you know, she makes beautiful, beautiful objects in many different media.

Mariano: Talking about how emotionally and physically immersive her work is, how does her work fit into the larger vision and themes of To Catch a Fish?

Emily: So one of the really important ideas that I wanted to tease out was about sustainability, and the sort of difference between the approach of smaller-scale communities, people who are fishing for their daily, their daily meal, versus the commercial industrial fisheries that are pair trawling, picking up everything in their net, you know, decimating fish populations. Electro, who knew electro fishing, dynamite fishing, all these kinds of horrendous practices that are really changing entire ecologies, but taking fish away from people for whom it's not just sustenance, but it's a spiritual relationship. People who live close to the environment and who have to be in the environment to get their, to get their daily bread, have a different relationship. It's one of reciprocal care. It's one of awareness. And so her the work that she created called The Halibut Hooks, really invites you to, to enter into the water. When you walk into the work, it's projected. It's a, it's a projection. This also was very interesting to me because she makes work for her own community, which is ceremonial and private, and she makes work for arts institutions and museums. But she's so aware, and she makes us aware that museums are implicated in the hemorrhaging of physical objects because of that hunger to collect objects just drained out of of indigenous communities, they were taken out.

And so now when she shares her work, it's a light projection. She owns it. We have it for a time. Light is about spirituality, but we we don't end up with a physical object. And I loved that and I wanted to celebrate that. But to get back to the fish story, you walk into her projection, and you see this incredible painted house front, which is what how Kwakwaka'wakw people adorned their long houses up near the water. But the point she makes is that what exists above the horizon also exists below the water. So the the chief of of the underwater realm also has such a house with a painted house front, his copper better than yours, better than mine. 

And so you see the chief at the top with his hands out. You see the octopus on top of his head. You see halibut and hooligan swimming and herring. And then at the top you see these tiny little figures in boats. And they've lowered. They've lowered their halibut hooks into the water. So you enter that space and you are in the water in that realm. And she's inviting you to think about the reciprocal relationship that they have with this divine system that sustains them. They don't take too much. They don't take more than they need. They are helped and aided by the orcas by all of these forces. And they take what they need. And the way she put it, I think even in when I was talking to her, is the halibut know that they will be taken. They give their permission to be taken. So it's just interesting to consider the indigenous perspective on fishing. That was really important to me.

Mariano: Great. So what do you hope visitors take away from experiencing To Catch a Fish, especially after encountering such an immersive work like Marianne's?

Emily: Well, I think what we can tell already—the show hasn't been open very long, but people are relating to it because they love the water, they love fishing. And when you walk into the show, since there are objects from all over the world, you immediately know that this is a, an experience that's shared by many people. No matter who you are, your ethnicity, or your background, it's an experience that is shared. Whether you like to—you have a favorite fish dish that you like to make, sure you are a fisherman, or you go out on the water to watch the whales. People are connecting to this show and it's connecting diverse people. And that's what I love to do at this museum.

Mariano: So, before we transition into your one-on-one conversation with Marianne, is there anything that you hope our listeners pay special attention to while listening to her speak about her work?

Emily: I think people will be glued to her words without me telling them to be, but I'm remembering a talk she gave at Princeton in about 2022, maybe, and she talked about naming in indigenous communities, and that you have multiple names over the course of your life as you enter different phases of your life. And that it's such an honor to do things for your community, not for yourself. You don't do it for yourself. You do it for the group. And then at the end of your life, that becomes part of your name. It was your honor to do this for your community, and I think you will hear that in what she says, that she is just devoted and persistent and passionate through her art. She has a PhD in linguistics, PhD in anthropology, and she's using all of that in service to her community.

Mariano: Thank you, Emily. That sets the stage beautifully for our conversation with Marianne Nicholson. Now let's dive in.

Emily: Marianne Nicholson, it's so nice to have you here in San Diego. You are part of this exhibition, To Catch a Fish, and you've created this incredible work. And I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about what we're looking at. Tell us the title, and then what are we seeing when we stand in front of this work?

Marianne: Yeah. Thank you for inviting me to be a part of this. The last couple of years of being much more interested and engaged in the intersection between our technologies, our fishing technologies, and our land-based technologies, in conjunction with our ceremonial objects. As an artist, I always was more inclined to be interested in the artistic part of the ceremonial objects. But I've come to realize that the practical application of our of our land based technologies that interact with the world are an absolutely essential relationship to those ceremonial objects. And so this opportunity to create this artwork is an example of those of that intersection.

Emily: So we should maybe backtrack, and you introduce yourself — your First Nations from Vancouver but also Kingcome Inlet.

Marianne: Yeah. My one of my traditional names is I'm of the most Magdalena from Kingcome, Gilford Island. I'm also part coyote, and that's — those are nations that are part of a larger group of nations called the Kwakwaka'wakw. And we live on the mainland and in the Broughton Archipelago of what they call now today, British Columbia.

Emily: Yeah. And I remembered from when we worked together before — and you were presenting the work Waterline years ago — that we talked about fishing and commercial fisheries and the impact of all sorts of industrial processes and companies on the land and in the water where you are. And in this exhibition we're looking at at fish and fish as a source of sustenance for people around the world, a very ancient form of sustenance that people are still engaged in, and that people who are close to this process of fishing and who rely on it, have a kind of reverence for the water and for fish, and often have a sense of reciprocal care for that source of sustenance. And so your work is entitled The Halibut Hooks. And I wonder if you can talk about the halibut and the other fish that are in the work.

Marianne: Yeah. So when we in our — like, we live on the water and we live with the ocean, our kind of our world, our cosmos is very much, you know, based on that relationship with the water and, and the—we in a way, like we call it the undersea kingdom. And we think of that whole realm as a realm in itself, in and of itself. So in a way, like metaphorically, when we when we talk about houses, like — what is a house? Like, you think of a house as a maybe a building that houses a family, but you can also, by extension, think of a house as a community, and then you can also think of the house as the world. And this is how we conceive of our relationship with our own bodies, to our extended family and community, and then our extended experience in the land.

So the undersea world, the undersea world is one that are people had incredibly intimate knowledge of, and that comes through in all the histories that they give and narrate about encounters with the undersea world. And so I was really interested in a lot of the masks that would come out of performance that we would enact within our ceremonial practice, basically enacting what all the beings of the of the undersea kingdom are, which is which is a very, very beautiful performance amongst our people. And through that performance, you see the love and respect that we held for each creature, but also the intimate knowledge of how each creature operated.

So in the case of this one, there was in particular this idea that in the undersea kingdom, the roof of the house is — this is the surface of the sea — and that humans float on the surface of the sea in canoes or boats, and that they would release their tackle, there, there hooks to catch halibut, down from their boats and lower them down to the bottom of the sea, which of course the the halibut inhabit as, as part of their character. So that that's part of this kind of a attempt to use this installation of light and objects and photography to introduce the viewer, to reconnect their physical relationship to the undersea world by placing them within the same position as that halibut would be at the bottom of the sea, looking up at the the humans who occupy, who are floating on the top of the house and fishing for halibut using their traditional halibut hooks.

And one of the things that's important to us, as indigenous people, is that we had centuries-old practices that were sustainable. So in the technologies are built to sustainability, so you're not catching too much. And there's also an invested relationship in each — every time that you take something from that world in order to sustain yourself within the human world, that there's a reciprocity that must occur in that interaction. And key to that is this conceptualization of those worlds as equal or mapped to the human world. And that's why you see this house front, which you would think is occupied by human occupants. But in our stories of the undersea kingdom, the the chief of the undersea, he lives in a copper house, a house that is completely made of copper. And in his house, when humans are welcomed into his house, there they will see all the different sea creatures who have their equal in the in the human world. So in that way, that sense of empathetic relationship to one another is the fundamental principle behind how we fish and how we relate to that underworld. And therefore, if we are seen as equals, then we do not over-exploit or persecute, etc., etc.

Emily: So the the beautiful house front — I'm sure when people listen to this, they'll be looking at a photograph of the installation. You you walk into the installation and see this beautiful sort of colossal painted house front covered with imagery, fish swooping and different kinds of fish. And as you just described, tiny fishermen at the top with their hooks dangling down. And so in Kwakwaka'wakw houses, that is the kind of traditional house front that you see and would have seen, saw in the past and continue to see.

Marianne: Yes.

Emily: And can you explain, if there is—if I've understood it properly—the relationship between the house and the potlatch, or is the potlatch a completely separate entity and ceremony?

Marianne: No. They're interconnected. They're very much interconnected. So what we used to do in the traditional houses — they were what we call them, gutsy, and that translates as a large house. And these were large buildings, almost, you know, the size of a warehouse in a way. And many families would live in that one house together. So we would—we had a very, very strong sense of communal living, and which is very different today with independent family homes. We didn't live like that. We lived together in these large houses together.

And then, when it came time for the time of ceremony, then, you know, one or another one of those houses would be cleared, the floor space would be cleared, and it would be prepared to become the ceremonial house. And when that happens, then, then all the people are invited to come and bear witness to what's being enacted on the floor. And what you would see enacted on the floor during the ceremony was basically the retelling of our histories and our relationship to our crests, which all come from the land or from the sea or from the sky. So that's what these would be, the dances that we would be performing in the house, and the rest of the community and extended communities would be invited to bear witness.

And through those processes, these histories that are being told and enacted, and the rights and privileges to land bases, are being validated by those witnesses. So in a way, it's almost like a court of law, in addition to being a wonderful experience of artistic expression, and, and like, also a university, where these histories are also being taught to the people. And of course, in Canada, this was all banned. It was outlawed. It was—it was rendered illegal by the Canadian government. And we were persecuted and put in jail for practicing this and passing on our worldview.

So my practice has been engaged with reviving that worldview, and this is what I'm attempting to do with this, The Halibut Hooks—like, really, to reconstruct a visual symbol of the beliefs that we carried and the principles that we carried and the laws that we carried in our relationship to the sea and the beings from the sea. So the halibut, the halibut are, in a way, in our mindsets, honored. They're honored in the story. They're they're honored participants in this inter-relational attempt by the humans who are floating at the top of the house. And in our belief system, it's that the halibut allows itself to be caught. And we honor that. We honor that. We know we—we need to keep the world in balance so that the beings that we rely on will allow themselves to become a part of our sustenance. So, so this this house front, it attempts to do that. And the reason why it's cast in light is because I'm looking to recreate the ephemeral, the spiritual side of things, and I'm using light as a medium to carry those ideas forward.

So in the center, in the doorway of the house front, there's an image of a river. We talked about that a little bit earlier, and this pattern of the eulachon migrating up from, from the salt water into the fresh water to spawn, and then your fishing pattern with that species is to catch them as they come back toward the salt water, and that this is—this is a sustaining fish for your culture.

Emily: And so I think those are those the smaller fish that we're seeing in the—yeah—house front.

Marianne: Yeah. What you see on the house front, in the center above the doorway, is Komokwa, the chief of the undersea, and his hands are out. And it could be—it could be herring. All the fishes, all the fishes are emerging from him.

Emily: I see, and then you have the halibut, the kind of more bottom sea dwellers on the bottom.

Marianne: But the photo, the photograph in the middle is of the the inlet in Kingcome. Because–like how you were saying—those hooligan, they have—they return home, they emerge from our watershed. They're born there and they leave and they travel the world, and then they come back, at a, at a — after a certain number of years. And, and that's when we're fishing them and we're rendering our what we call t'lina.

And I thought it was incredibly poignant to be here at this time, because it's May. And I kept thinking about my sister, because when we went—we are, uncles encouraged us to go to university so that we could use those skills to work with our people. So, I mean, I became an artist and a linguist, and my sister became a biologist. And so for many decades, my sister's been working in fisheries and with the with the fishes. And right now, while I'm installing this artwork that shows the eulachon and the inlet, she's literally out there on that water that's pictured there. And her and other members of our community are testing the waters and monitoring the eulachon run. So it's a—it's a lovely juxtaposition between an expression, an artistic expression, and lived, lived experience on the land.

Emily: We were talking earlier about the different industries and governments that have encroached on on the land and the water, and the impact that that has on on biodiversity, and the logging, the clear cut logging that took place that allowed flooding to happen. And I don't know, I imagine there are fish hatcheries, fish farms—I don't know that for a fact, but that's what happens in a lot of commercial fishing. But it just, it it seems as if the sustainable way that that your culture has practiced for millennia, maybe is just really bumping up against the commercial practice of just wholesale taking and just overfishing, overtaking. And I'm not sure what I'm asking. It's just—it feels deeply, deeply wrong, you know? And, it seems to me from the time that I've known you that you're in a constant state of advocacy against this encroachment, and also advocating within your community to bring young people into into the knowledge that you have gained. You have your PhD in linguistics and anthropology and are very keen to to pass that on and rebuild. So I haven't asked you a question—I made some observations.

Marianne: But I'll add to that, because really, the big project for me right now is to try to—like, I'm in the process of building a home in Kingcome and try to focus everything that I learned and found out when I went out into the world. And now I'm coming home, just like, just like the eulachon. And I'm hoping—spiritually, especially in creating artworks like this—and learning and reaching out and and developing relationships to encourage our young people to return home to, because it's in our nature to be there. Just like how for the eulachon, it's in their nature to return to their birthplace.

So it's a very beautiful, beautifully layered way to be in the world. And I guess that that would be my hope. I wanted to create artworks that people could relate to, and that this kind of messaging comes through, and and to show also—not just—but our own people as well, how beautiful our traditional ways of being are, and how much we need to hold on to them during a time in the world when those values are being really oppressed and pushed, pushed aside. So, you know, the commercial fishery has, you know, it lacks perhaps the balance that's needed there, and the respect that our people have for for those beings. And we need to fight hard to, to retain those things, because in our fight for our rights, the government often offers us a piece of their pie, which means that we would join them in what they're doing. And if we join them in what what they're doing, our lands and waters will truly just be destroyed. So, so this outpost—that image of that, of that land base that you see in that photo — that's an outpost for this wonderful way to be in the world, that, for me, has become incredibly important to sustain.

Emily: Thank you so much for speaking about your work and for doing what you're doing.

Marianne: Yeah. Thank you for thank you for thank you for inviting me and letting me come here and enjoy all of this.

Check out To Catch a Fish at Mingei International Museum in Balboa Park, on view May 2nd through November 1st, 2026. Learn more and get tickets online at Mingei.org.