First Nations: An exhibition exploring the arts and cultures of North America at the Quai Branly Museum

The Quai Branly Museum invites visitors to meet the First Nations of the Pacific Northwest with an exhibition running from September 29, 2026 to January 10, 2027.

Are you familiar with the First Nations who inhabited the northwest coast of America? Films, books, and Western imagery have distorted our understanding of these culturally rich peoples, who fell victim to colonization and globalization. From September 29, 2026 to January 10, 2027, the Musée du Quai Branly - Jacques Chirac sheds light on these communities that once thrived between the Pacific Ocean and the rainforests.

The exhibition Premières Nations. Arts et cultures du nord-ouest de l'Amérique brings together art objects, works, spiritual items and everyday objects that illuminate the cultural, political and spiritual life that animated these peoples. As the exhibition unfolds, one traces the relationship these communities maintained with nature, the importance of the spiritual world, the encounters and upheavals sparked by travelers and European and Asian colonizers, and the way these early societies were structured and traded. The show also highlights art and the means by which these diverse communities communicated and shared their traditions.

The Quai Branly Museum thus invites us to discover and appreciate the history and traditions of these developed societies. Visitors dive into a structured world, meeting clans and villages that had built their own systems of exchange and alliances, long before colonists arrived in the eighteenth century.

These First Nations lived in a world of grandeur: on one side, an almost endless expanse of water, a strong and capricious ocean. On the other, forests of towering trees, brimming with life and resources. A world between sea and land, where people move with the seasons. Nature was then a source of life. It was also the source of many spirits and deities. That spiritual world shows up everywhere: on clothes, headdresses, the walls of houses, the sides of canoes, everyday objects... The First Nations have shaped a highly precise imaginary around these spirit-beings who share their daily lives.

The spiritual world is central to many First Nations communities. The sacred realm is closely tied to the power and the clan’s hierarchy. Each community is connected to an ancestral spirit, and the cycles of nature are linked to the spiritual world. Masks, carvings and sacred objects are symbols of those who bridge the gap between humans and the spirits.

This unique culture, or the ties shared among communities and the relationships these nations managed to forge and sustain, was all but upended by the arrival of Europeans. Christopher Columbus wasn’t the first to reach the Americas. Archaeological finds show that Japanese voyagers landed on North American shores centuries earlier. There is also evidence of British privateers, Russians, Spaniards, and then the French making their mark. These early stages of colonisation opened the door to international trade on these lands, notably through the fur trade.

But these exchanges have had, above all, devastating consequences for Indigenous peoples. Diseases from the Old World, culture clashes and wars, up to the colonial bans and the seizure of Indigenous lands and artefacts. The old clans are broken, their relationships severed, their traditions proscribed.

Although still largely overlooked, First Nations culture has not been completely erased. artistes contemporains continue to keep alive the ancient knowledge and traditional creative techniques. The exhibition features several contemporary artists who sustain these cultures, or who reinterpret the know-how for a modern world.

Meet these First Nations up close through the Quai Branly Museum’s unprecedented new exhibition in Paris.