Symbols give insight into who we are and what we value: experts

CBC

3 days ago

As CBC prepares to launch a contest to find the quintessential symbol that defines British Columbia, culture and history experts say much can be learned by digging into a symbol's origins and meaning.
The bracket for B.C.'s Best Symbol starts on Monday, and will run for several weeks, with voting open online from Mondays to Thursdays. One final symbol will be announced as the winner at the end.
A symbol, defined as a thing that represents or stands for something else, can give us insight into how we see ourselves and our communities — past, present and future, say experts.
Michael Dawson, history professor at St. Thomas University and co-editor of the book Symbols in Canada, said symbols are formed in a variety of ways: some are officially proclaimed by governments, like flags and national sports, while others are more natural.
"The ones that are probably the most popular, that are closest to people's hearts, are the ones that emerge more organically," Dawson said.
WATCH | The Search for B.C.'s Best Symbol:
What is British Columbia's most iconic symbol
1 day ago
Duration 2:53
Meanwhile, national symbols can be a way to bond and connect.
"They're a way of reaffirming shared experiences, potentially even shared values, shared perspectives," Dawson said.
Some categories of symbols, like food (such as Nanaimo bars or maple syrup), animals (bears, salmon, beavers) and local commercial items (White Spot's pirate pack), frequently become representative of communities around the province, he said.
But symbols can also create divisions.
"Hockey is something that tends to bring people together at a national level. It's also something that can push people apart at a regional level," Dawson said.
"You're either a Flames fan or an Oilers fan. You're not both."
Marketing and advertising play a big role in deciding which symbols proliferate and last, he said.
Dawson outlined how late 19th century tourism promoters in Vancouver and Victoria explicitly downplayed Indigenous culture and instead focused on the cities' connection to "Britishness."
But when the Great Depression hit, shopkeepers needed a way to make more money.
As a result, Dawson said, businesses in the 1930s began to increasingly incorporate elements of Indigenous culture in advertising, such as totem poles.
The businesses and their marketers wanted to promote images of supposed mysticism and exoticism to differentiate B.C. and attract tourists.
Dawson said the creation of this kind of advertising became a process of "selectively remembering, selectively celebrating" aspects of British and Indigenous cultures — "but making sure to never show that they were in conflict."
"Tourism is there in the 1950s, 1960s, right through to the present day, helping people to reimagine and forget [and] come up with a highly selective representation of that colonial imperial process so that it actually becomes hard to have a conversation about British Columbia being the product of colonization," he said.
Indigenous symbols and contexts
Jordan Wilson, curator for Pacific Northwest and contemporary Indigenous art at the University of British Columbia's Museum of Anthropology, traced part of the history of how Pacific Northwest art became seemingly synonymous with Canadian Indigenous art back to a prominent exhibition in 1927.
The National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa's show "Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art: Native and Modern" was essentially the first time Indigenous material culture from the Pacific Northwest was presented as art and shown alongside paintings from the Group of Seven, Wilson said.
But much of the context was stripped from the Indigenous art and items on display.
"Visitors to that exhibition would not really have gained a sense of where these objects came from, what their use was, who they belonged to," said Wilson, who is a member of Musqueam Indian Band. "They were really presented as beautiful objects."
There was a friction created by cultural gatekeepers "celebrating" Indigenous art and items while the Canadian government sought to oppress Indigenous people.
"[The exhibition was] really trying to position Indigenous art or material culture as Canadian art, while at the same time residential schools are in full effect, the potlatch ban is in full effect, and there's this broad dispossession happening of Indigenous lands and resources."
For example, the potlatch ban, which ran from 1885 to 1951, outlawed the ceremonial use of some of the same items that were displayed in the 1927 gallery show.
"To put [it] in sort of crude terms ... you want our art, but you don't want our politics," Wilson said.
Symbols as identity
Dawson said understanding the complex histories behind symbols can lead to better understanding of our neighbours at home and abroad.
Symbols also have the power to influence how people think, he said.
"People invest something of themselves in these things," he said.
CBC News gave Dawson an early peek of which symbols will faceoff against eachother in the contest. One particular bracket match-up caught his attention: treehuggers versus logging trucks.
"There are folks that would be like, 'Absolutely, I identify with the tree-huggers, let's go!' And others that are like, 'No, no, the more logging trucks I see on the road, the happier I am."
Digging deeper into the histories behind each symbol is meaningful, Dawson said.
"It's important to think about these symbols, to become familiar with their histories [and] differing contemporary understandings that people have ... it allows us to maintain, I think, a higher level of political discourse than we might otherwise have."