Resounding Resistance in Rebecca Belmore’s VALUE

The Museum of Anthropology (MOA), perched on the edge of the University of British Columbia’s Vancouver campus, overlooking cliffs that lead down to the Pacific Ocean, recognizes that it is built on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded land of the Musqueam people (MOA 2025). Outside the building are towering monumental carvings by Haida, Kwakwaka’wakw, and Musqueam First Nations artists, and inside are two exhibitions, Nuxalk Strong: Dancing Down the Eyelashes of the Sun, curated by Snxakila–Clyde Tallio and Jennifer Kramer, and Rebecca Belmore’s complex and intimate exhibit, VALUE, comprised of four pieces distributed throughout the museum. This review focuses on VALUE. Belmore, a renowned Anishinaabe multidisciplinary, award-winning artist, has long commented through her work on worth, possession, and the body as an ongoing site of Indigenous political struggle. VALUE, her latest exhibit, guest-curated by Jeffrey Boone, is an engagement with the notion of value, resounding loudly the question of what value is and who has the authority to determine it—a sentiment of significance within an anthropology museum. To discuss anything with, in, and around a university and any museum it governs is to begin by unequivocally acknowledging the active backdrop of suffering and dispossession of First Nations communities. MOA’s enduring work with origin communities aims to rectify past wrongdoing in the acquisition of many of its collections. This is an ethical response and a critical contribution to the dialogue on Indigenizing and decolonizing museums. In this context, museums like MOA are questioning the very value of museums in their current forms and practices (Adebayo 2024). Established in 1947, MOA houses 50,000 ethnographic objects, the most significant holdings of cultural materials from Northwest Coast First Nations communities. While MOA has been commissioning and exhibiting the work of First Nations and Indigenous artists since the late 1970s, in Belmore’s solo exhibition, VALUE, nestled alongside these collections, fosters an opportunity for critical, reflexive engagement through contemporary Indigenous work that evokes conversations on agency, power, and belonging. Belmore’s exhibit comprises four artworks from her larger oeuvre. As you enter the museum into the Great Hall, you first encounter Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to Their Mother (1991), a large wooden megaphone, approximately two metres wide, originally installed in a mountain meadow in Banff National Park (Alberta). When it was first installed in response to the Oka Crisis, people engaged their voices with the land to recognize that acts of speaking and listening are figured as gestures of reclamation. In the museum, it becomes an artifact not to speak with, but to listen to, as recordings of stories emanate from a speaker installed inside. Moving further through the museum into the Koerner Ceramics Gallery, you encounter Wild (2001), a work that bridges Belmore’s two practices—installation and performance—while its placement engages with critiques of European history from the same era. In VALUE, artifacts from a 2001 performance at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (Canada) include a Victorian lacquer four-post bed covered in red satin, stitched with human hair and beaver pelts. In the original and subsequent performances of this work, Belmore plays with the tension between the luxurious comfort and intimacy of the bedroom offered by her host and the overt hostility and discomfort of being unwelcome. “Through this work she enacts a layered redressing of history while fulfilling the fantasy of finding a comfortable, even luxurious, place to stay in a hostile world—a world that saw her ancestors as potential aggressors to be feared” (Belmore 2025). Wandering further along the galleries, you experience Worth (2010), which is a memorialization of the sign from her 2010 protest performance in Vancouver, declaring: “I …