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'Sea of Salmon,' created by coast Salish artist Shain Jackson, now hangs on the wall of Kwantlen Polytechnic University’s Richmond Campus.
Photo courtesy Kwantlen Polytechnic University
Coast Salish artist fills KPU Richmond with Sea of Salmon
Published 11:33 PDT, Wed May 21, 2025
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A new art piece with significant meaning now hangs on the wall of Kwantlen Polytechnic University’s (KPU) Richmond campus.
The piece is called Sea of Salmon. It’s a powerful visual tribute to the significance of salmon in Indigenous culture and the natural ecosystems of B.C.
Coast Salish artist Shain Jackson, from the First Nation community of Sechelt, created the installation. He spent months crafting the salmon sculptures using traditional and contemporary methods, ensuring the school of salmon on the piece represented the way salmon flow in streams.
Inspiration for the piece, according to Jackson, came from the rejuvenation of the salmon streams that hadn’t seen salmon in decades.
“Salmon is super sacred to a lot of us on the coast and unfortunately due to the horrifying logging in the ‘50s, the logging companies destroyed a lot of our streams where I’m from,” says Jackson. “As Indigenous rights progressed, a lot of companies doing different projects had to come to us to do it in a good way.”
Jackson says before one company began building, they started to rejuvenate salmon spawning grounds.
“By the time they opened up the power project, the salmon were coming back very thick. It was absolutely incredible,” says Jackson.
The piece is hanging on the first floor of the campus, a place Jackson hopes people will take time to talk about the meaning behind it.
“The main meaning behind this and why we call it legacy is because it doesn’t matter what happened. At some point when we can all come together with a common purpose, it’s never too late,” says Jackson.
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