Camping on the shore of Lake Huron with friends, we once saw muskellunges freely teeming in, over, and around each other in the water. Were they mating? Bonding? Warding off prey? None of us knew, but the muskies delighted us with how they seemed to be enjoying themselves.

I was reminded of this incident by the feature photograph with Rebecca Rafferty's review on the Inuit prints and sculpture (on exhibit at the MAG through February 14), which encouraged me to go see it for myself. Rafferty describes Pootagook Kingswatsiak's stonecut, "Fish in a Pool," as "too many fish tumbling over one another in a tight implied square," which Rafferty sees as confinement: "a symbol for life on the reservation." ("Survival Art," January 13). She saw only two dimensions in this print, but consider a 3-D view.

Just as Merwin teaches the young Arthur to not so much observe as to become the soaring falcon, so Kingswatsiak takes us down beneath the water's sunlit surface (expressed in yellow ink) to teach us about the realm of fish, to become fish in a joyous celebration of simply being. The fish are squiggling in circles, not within a square. Indeed, each creature in the exhibit is just as exuberant, each a living gem in this tiny treasure of an exhibit.

I encourage your readers to go see it for themselves, especially if they can forget the sort of reductionism (indian = rez) for which Rafferty expresses "some intense dislike" in many native museum exhibits - before slipping into that exact cliché in the last paragraph of her review.

MARIL NOWAK, BRANCHPORT

Rebecca Rafferty's response: Actually, I mean to complicate the 2-D stereotype many people have: that the native is only concerned with nature and couldn't possibly make a symbolic political statement in art. I'm not saying the artist meant for this symbol to appear, I'm saying it's not hard to find, and it's fair for any viewer to think about possible metaphors when we approach art. In my review, I did say that the art celebrates the beauty in nature and simply being, but I wanted to look at other possible meanings. I don't reduce it to "Indians = rez"; I reduce it to "First People's lives = changed by our presence."

I'm getting a variety of criticism for this review, and while I'm certainly open to it, I think that my point has been largely missed. Some readers don't like my insinuation that something has been taken from the Inuit. I am asking: can we look at the people, not just fetishize the way they used to live? ALL cultures which used to live off the abundant land have been forced to trade that freedom for a sort of half-modernity.

Another criticism, made online, was that I naively think too highly of the "art" and that the exhibit is an embarrassing non-representation of the rich history of Inuit art. But the show isn't about Inuit art; it's about art created for a tourist market in an emergency move to save an ailing economy. It's about objects made valuable not because they are high art within Inuit ideals, but because of who came to own them.

But I am hesitant to slam the artists, and besides, I think some of the art is beautiful. I found the exhibit interesting not because it was highly representative of Inuit art, but because of what it does imply about readily-overlooked power structures. And of course I, too, encourage viewers to see the exhibit, and think for themselves.