Information

Shown below are items associated with Frederick Alexcee available without first logging in. This person appears in records from MOA and The Burke.

Knowledge shared by institutions

Alexcee, who held the name ’Wiilsmwan, was the son of a Ts’msyen mother and Haudenosaunee father; a member of the Giluts’aaw tribe (Gispudwada clan), he lived most of his life at Lax Kw’alaams. As a child he experienced the heyday of the community and then, in 1862, the loss of population, first from the missionary William Duncan moving with 350 community members to establish a new Christian community at Old Metlakatla, and then from the devastating impact of smallpox and other diseases brought from Victoria by the crews on visiting ships. Alexcee worked as a fisher, and served as an assistant engineer on the Methodist mission ship, Glad Tidings. He appears to have taught himself to paint in a pictorial or narrative style, recording views of Lax Kw’alaams during its height of growth; he also produced ‘moving pictures’ of Ts’msyen oral histories by painting on glass lantern slides. Two of his pictorial landscapes were included and categorized as a “primitive” expression of an emerging national identity in the National Gallery of Canada’s Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art, Native and Modern in 1927 -- an exhibition that positioned works by such artists as the Group of Seven and Emily Carr as modern in contrast to works of Northwest Coast Native art, which were presented as wholly of the past. Alexcee’s paintings were the only works in the show by a living, and named, contemporary Indigenous artist. [Duffek, Karen, 2019].

Born: 1853
Died: 1939