Engraved silver bracelets and painted spruce-root baskets exude a warm aura in the dimly lit room. Big colour photographs of basketry hats and mats line one wall of the gallery, and enlarged historic photos of old Northwest Coast villages face them on the opposite wall. In between, tall glass cases highlight the work of two outstanding Haida artists, Charles and Isabella Edenshaw.

Installed in the O’Brian Gallery at the UBC Museum of Anthropology, the exhibition Signed Without Signature examines what it is that makes the styles of these two artists so distinctive. More provocatively, perhaps, it calls up the social, cultural, and economic conditions that shaped the Edenshaws’ creative output in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

“It was a time of dramatic change,” says curator Bill McLennan as he tours the Straight through the show. He then goes on to describe the devastating impact that anti-potlatching legislation, smallpox, and restrictions on First Nations fishing had on Haida and other Northwest Coast cultures. The objects in the show, some made for family and community but many produced for sale to outsiders, are a great example, McLennan says, of how the Edenshaws not only survived their difficult circumstances but also created a brilliant and enduring body of work.

Born in Skidegate on Haida Gwaii about 1839, Charles Edenshaw, also known by the Haida name Da.a.xiigang, is famous for his silver and gold jewellery, his painting, and his carving in argillite and wood. His wife, Isabella or Qwii.aang, probably born in the Kaigani Haida village of Klinkwan, Alaska in 1858, excelled as a basket maker. During their long marriage, which produced 11 children, Charles often painted Haida designs on the hats and other objects that Isabella wove.

Like many historic First Nations artists on the Northwest Coast, McLennan explains, the Edenshaws were of high social standing and had access to specialized knowledge about family crests and privileges. “You had to have that status to be able to translate oral tradition into physical form,” he says. “As a high-ranked person, Charles Edenshaw would have earned his living carving totem poles and making ceremonial regalia. With the potlatch laws, he didn’t have that business, in a sense, but he had the knowledge and the skill, so he adapted it to new products.”

McLennan points out some of these “new products”, including not only Charles’s silver bracelets decorated with such crest figures as Mother Shark, Sea Bear, and Frog, but also napkin rings, spoons, and the carved and engraved heads of canes and walking sticks. Similarly, Isabella sold many of her Haida-style hats and baskets, along with mats and screens, to a merchant in Port Essington, where she spent her summers working in fish canneries. “They adapted, as all First Nations were forced to do, in a dynamically changing world,” McLennan observes.

The exhibition supplements the work of the Edenshaws with art by a few of their contemporaries, such as Tom Price and John Cross, and by present-day Edenshaw descendents, including Robert Davidson, Isabel Rorick, and Jim Hart, who has inherited the chiefly name ”˜Idansuu (of which Edenshaw was a 19th-century anglicization). Especially moving, in the way they symbolically bridge generations, are the carving tools that Charles Edenshaw made for himself, then passed along to his nephew, Charles Gladstone, who then willed them to his nephew, the late Bill Reid. Reid, who taught himself how to make Haida art by closely studying Edenshaw’s engraving and carving styles, is represented here by a wooden Wolf pendant inlaid with abalone shell.

Neither Isabella nor Charles signed their work, yet both developed distinctive styles we can recognize today. McLennan, a skilled photographer and a specialist in interpreting the graphic design of the Northwest Coast, has developed a way of scanning Charles’s curved bracelets and printing the designs flattened on paper, so that they can more easily be analyzed. “Basically, you can put a whole ream of these scanned images together and you can start seeing chronology, you can start seeing changes in form and dynamics, and you can really see the differences between different artists,” he explains. “Charles was modernizing Haida design, opening it up and working in the negative space and creating a whole new way of balancing and seeing.”

Isabella’s woven hats also show a distinctive combination of elements, especially the raised diamond or “dragonfly wing” design on their brims. More than a century after the Edenshaws created the work on view, they continue to speak to us—sing to us, even—in their strong and resonant voices.

Signed Without Signature: Works by Isabella and Charles Edenshaw runs at the UBC Museum of Anthropology until September 30, 2011.