Rock art – etched in blood-red lines into granite cliffs, boulders, and caves – appears as beguiling, graffiti-like abstraction. What are these signs? The petroglyphs and red-ochre pictographs found across Nlaka’pamux territory in present-day British Columbia and Washington State are far more than ancient motifs.

Signs of the Time explores the historical and cultural reasons for making rock art. Chris Arnett draws on extensive research and decades of work with Nlaka’pamux people to document the variability and similarity of practices. Through a blend of Western records and Indigenous oral histories and tradition, rock art is revealed as communication between the spirit and physical worlds, information for later generations, and powerful protection against challenges to a people, land, and culture.

Nlaka’pamux have used such cultural means to forestall threats to their lifeways from the sixteenth century through the twentieth. As this important work attests, rock art remains a signature of resilience.

Chris Arnett
Author and carver Chris Arnett is a fourth-generation British Columbian on his mother’s side and a member of the Ngai Tahu, a New Zealand Maori tribe, on his father’s side. With a lifelong interest in the prehistory and history of British Columbia and New Zealand, he has researched the archeology of the Stein River Valley for the “Nlaka’pamux Nation Development Corporation and has worked for the Sooke Region Museum and Archives on a historical survey of logging on Vancouver Island’s southwest coast, which was published in 1989.

Beryl Mildred Cryer
In addition to many newspaper articles on aboriginal myths and history, Beryl Mildred Cryer published one small book, Legends of the Cowichans, in 1949. She died in Welland, Ontario, in 1980.

Chris Arnett's profile page