cultural geographies 2002 9: 202–247 © 2002 Arnold 10.1191/1474474002eu243oa Colonialism’s afterlife: vision and visuality on the Northwest Coast Bruce Braun Department of Geography, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis This paper explores the relationships between landscape and power, colonialism and its aftermaths, and state territoriality and its contestation, in the work of two popular Northwest Coast landscape painters: Emily Carr and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun. The work of both artists is explored in terms of their representation of relations between indigenous peoples, physical landscapes, state power, and modernity, and in the context of ongoing political struggles over land, resources and the environment between First Nations and the Canadian government. The paper also calls attention to the multiple and fractured nature of postcolonial visualities, to the discursive, social, technological and institutional relations that shape how landscapes are experienced and represented, and, ultimately, to the trace of colonial pasts in the environmental and political imaginaries of a postcolonial present. The Northwest Coast will always remain in our minds as Carr saw it (Ruth Appelhof) 1 If it could be said that there is an observer . . . it is only as an effect of a heterogeneous network of discursive, social, technological and institutional relations. There is no observer prior to this continually shifting field (Jonathan Crary) 2 he relevance of postcolonial studies to the Americas has been widely debated, both within and outside geography. For some, its theoretical approaches have offered useful concepts that help elucidate the operations of power, historical narratives, forms of subaltern knowledge and consciousness, and national modernities, that emerged in the region in the wake of European exploration and settlement. 3 For others, its concepts are too rooted in colonial experiences elsewhere – India and South Africa, for instance – to have much more than general use in the Western Hemisphere. There have been other reasons for reticence too. In Latin America, Spanish and Portuguese control was markedly uneven, and ended early, such that the present seems much less directly shaped by past colonial projects than other post-Independence events. In the United States, colonialism has often seemed irrelevant, since it is widely considered a solely European T