Embedded within a matrix of dark stone on the second-floor landing gallery at The Rooms is the vivid and materially diverse exhibition Njikam (My Younger Brother) by emerging L’nu artist Alex Antle. Originally from Qapskuk (Grand Falls-Windsor), Antle is currently based in Elmastukwek (Bay of Islands) where her maternal Mi’kmaw ancestors are from, and where she has been nourishing her artistic practice since 2017.

Antle primarily utilizes slow stitching practices like beadwork and caribou tufting, and in the last several yearshas expanded her practice to incorporate print media and photography. The last four years have been significant for her, particularly when she received her first professional project grant from Arts NL, in 2021, to begin this body of work. That same year she was also the recipient of the VANL-CARFAC Emerging Artist of the Year Award. Njikam (My Younger Brother) is Antle’s first solo exhibition and has been previously exhibited in the ROGUE Gallery at Eastern Edge, the Tina Dolter Gallery, and Union House Arts. Now with her fourth iteration, Antle offers newly created appliqué beaded pieces to accompany her caribou tufted prints, and digital images emphasizing the passage of time, her process, and materiality.

Njikam (My Younger Brother), on display at The Rooms until August 14, 2023, was inspired by Antle’s brother Matthew and his relationship to the land and Mi’kmaw culture in Ktaqmkuk. Antle shares that he is somebody who has always been immersed in a land-based lifestyle engaging in L’nu practices like harvesting medicines, foraging, hunting, and fishing.

“His lack of participation in the ceremonial side of culture deters him from viewing his lifestyle as cultural,” says Antle.

Rather than emphasizing Matthew’s perceived disconnect from Mi’kmaw culture, Antle renders tangible both her and Matthew’s nuanced experiences and mediates these tensions and vulnerabilities through several artistic processes.

Anchored in the middle of the space is Sple’tk, an appliqué beaded moose hide that imparts a topographical view of the watershed. Sple’tk is the Mi’kmaq name for the Exploits River that runs through central Ktaqmkuk. It is the longest river on the island and it is a source of life and transportation that has supported Mi’kmaq and Settler peoples alike for hundreds of years. The tributaries sprawling like veins across the beaded moose hide are made visible with ultramarine blue beads of varying sizes which on closer inspection adds a sculptural element to the work.

During each of the four seasons, Antle has taken photos of Matthew and of their adventures together, documenting him engaging in some traditional practices that are specifically relevant to him. Each snapshot is further mediated into stretched screen prints where Antle activates her body in the production of image making. As a printmaker myself, I reflect on the importance of photography and repetition in image creation, and making visible our stories as Indigenous people from what is currently known as Newfoundland and Labrador.

In her essay “Interventions in Digital Territories: Narrative in New Media,” curator Candice Hopkins, who is a citizen of Carcross/Tagish First Nation, discusses the importance of repetition in Indigenous storytelling. She argues: “In art since mechanical reproduction, the copy is understood as subversive: its very presence (particularly if there is potential for infinite replication) challenges the authority of the original. Replication in storytelling, by contrast, is positive and necessary: it is through change that the stories, and in turn, traditions are kept alive and remain relevant.” With each of these prints embellished with qalipu (caribou) tufting and beadwork, Antle shares a new way to give insight into her and Matthew’s experiences as L’nu’k from Ktaqmkuk.

The latest artwork additions to this expanded version of Njikam are the impressive pieces of beadwork and harvested materials that are placed in the bottom row of the vitrines. Like when harvesting labrador tea and foraging for berries, viewers must bend and crouch down to take in each detail of the work. Viewers are greeted with bakeapples and blueberries in the late summer on the cusp of fall. For the winter prints, Antle utilizes the loom to replicate the plaid red pattern on Matthew’s hunting jacket. For spring, she has edged a piece of home-tanned trout skin with silver seed beads that complements the pink underbelly and rich tones present in the skin. For an exhibition that relies so much on photography, this piece of leather as an abstract representation of this precious resource speaks to Antle’s creativity and her ability to play with form, illustrating her growth as an artist.

The visual progression through the seasons concludes with a picture taken of the two siblings hugging each other at Antle’s wedding in the summer of 2020 on Gros Morne Mountain. A tiam (moose) medallion, beaded with hunting orange beads, is located beneath this image. This is actually a gift for Matthew when the show closes. The creation of this exhibition gives space for a nuanced experience that many Mi’kmaw Newfoundlanders can relate to. Njikam (My Younger Brother) shares that the relationship to ceremonial teachings are just one of the many components that make up a Mi’kmaw worldview. What is evident is the joy in the process, spending time with one another on the land, and the importance of sibling kinship.

Reflections of neon Beothuk pendants, electric colours, and textures coalesce into the dark, marbled concrete floor of Eastern Edge Gallery. The energy of the artwork in My Cousin’s Cousin cannot be contained to just the walls of the gallery—it activates all surfaces. This exhibition highlighting the interrelatedness between all beings was created as part of the programming for Spirit Song Festival, a celebration of Indigenous Arts and Culture held annually in St. John’s, Ktaqmkuk. Through the transmission of intergenerational knowledge and reciprocity in their kinship systems, Amy Malbeuf, Jerry Evans, Jordan Bennett, and Meagan Musseau call attention to the importance of nourishing our relationships with the land, water, and animal relatives that sustain us. 

The radiating sculptures of Beothuk pendants, collectively named Re/awakening by L’nu artist Meagan Musseau, are part of her latest solo exhibition, pi’tawkewaq | our people up river. Each of these pendants is created from laser cut plexiglass, which is the same material used to encase dispossessed cultural belongings within museums and archives. The engraved designs reference drawings made by Musseau from her visits with the Beothuk belongings and caribou bone pendants held in the vault at The Rooms. In replicating and enlarging the markings by ancestor artists, Musseau transmits the intimate experiences of visiting these belongings and their embedded histories of these lands and waters, while refuting colonial narratives of erasure. 

On the opposite side of the gallery is Métis artist Amy Malbeuf’s triptych of animal kin, Woodland Caribou, Whooping Crane, and Arctic Grayling. Each image is a constellation of caribou hair tufts exploding like fireworks across the black velvet prairies. Specifically, the appliquéd strips of tarp stitched beneath each animal represent aerial views of pipelines in Northern Alberta that threaten their habitats and lifeways. By using caribou hair as a material, she honours that relationship to create the portrait. In these works, Malbeuf calls attention to the extractive and colonial environmental practices that harm her homelands, and the effects they have on these animal relatives who sustain her community, and who are integral beings of Métis kinship structures. 

Jordan Bennett, Malbeuf’s partner in life and art, was the Visual Artist-in-Residence for the duration of Spirit Song Festival. In this residency, in the days leading up to the exhibition opening, Bennett created three paintings that would become part of My Cousin’s Cousin, each one intentionally responding to lithographs made by Jerry Evans. For instance, Evan’s lithograph Mimajuaqne’kati – Place of Life depicts swirling migrations of caribou, salmon, and seal; each of these beings are sustenance and animal kin from Ktaqmkuk. Bennett drew inspiration from these cyclical movements in the creation of the painting Mechanical Medicine Wheel.

Two days before the opening, Bennett gave an artist talk to speak about his residency, and where the influences in his art practice come from. He spoke of how he was always inspired by the land and waters of Ktaqmkuk, our visual culture, and ancient histories as Mi’kmaq. Most affectingly, he also expressed the significance of Evans’ encouragement and support when he was starting as a young artist, and their reciprocal relationship in sharing their practices with each other.

It would be impossible to write about this exhibition without acknowledging how deeply important Jerry Evans is as a cultural innovator, storyteller, and community member in Ktaqmkuk and beyond. Last year, Evans was the recipient of the 2019 VANL-CARFAC Endurance Award, an accolade given to an artist in honour of their sustained and consistent dedication to their professional practice. Over decades of commitment to honouring his Mi’kmaq ancestry as a Master Printmaker, painter, filmmaker, and tattoo practitioner, Evans has also prioritized knowledge-sharing and supporting future generations of L’nu artists. Bennett described the work of Evans as “living and breathing…reaching backwards and projecting us forward.”

This gathering of works makes me think about how there is a continuum of transmitted intergenerational knowledge inherent in these artistic and cultural practices. With love, kinship, and reciprocity in the relationships between family members, My Cousin’s Cousin emphasizes our responsibilities towards each other and our territories that hold us close.

When I visited The Rooms this past summer, to see Labrador artist Melissa Tremblett’s solo exhibition, Reprise, I was on my way down the southern shore to scatter my mother’s ashes off the Drook, in the company of her two sisters. Walking into the gallery to Melissa’s work brought me a sense of comfort, a reminder that we are all connected to our ancestors, and part of a larger relation. Our mothers. Our Aunties. Our grandmothers. We are carrying their love, their teachings, and their hearts. In a way, our lives are like a musical composition, a reprise to all that came before and will come after. 

From my position as a mixed-Mi’kmaq/settler reviewer, I want to clearly address that Tremblett’s Reprise is deeply personal, as it weaves text, photography, beadwork, natural found materials, and textiles to connective tissues of ancestry. This illustrates the artist reconnecting to lost histories and refining her relationship to her identity and Innu heritage. It’s both powerful and vulnerable. The exhibition gives viewers the opportunity to witness multiple selves, to be uncomfortable, to reflect on addiction, mental health and all that creates an object and an identity. There is no division between artist and art work. 

Reprise is a reflective self-portrait, inviting viewers to hold space, contemplate, and pay witness. As part of her Elbow Room residency, Tremblett spent time with many objects found in The Rooms’ collection, including a caribou skin jacket (the maker is unknown) and tea dolls that were central to traditional Innu ways of life and made by her grandmother, Madeline Michelin (1932-2008), a renowned Innu artist. She studied the handiwork of the caribou skin jacket maker, her grandmother, and her aunt—who is also a doll maker—and learned from their techniques. Tremblett created a straitjacket, “Evade, 2019,” made of mixed media (cotton, cotton thread, antiquated brass hardware, and a plastic buckle) that speaks to the artist’s struggle with addiction and an eating disorder. “Reprise, 2020” is another jacket made of wool, cotton, cotton thread, magnets, and seed beads, with a hood lined with her grandmother’s fabric.

Michelin, Tremblett’s grandmother, was a doll maker, a skill passed down by her mother in the resettled community of Sheshatshiu. The juxtaposition of her “Untitled 1997-1998” mixed media tea dolls and Tremblett’s tea doll “Just like Madeline, 2019,” (made with black tea, naturally dyed cotton, fabric, linen, imitation hide, seed beads, and faux leather trim) are an act of generational knowledge transmission, carrying Innu teachings. The words “hearts intertwine,” which are below the three dolls, brought me to tears. The relationship between great-grandmother, grandmother, and granddaughter resonates. The tea dolls, made by dollmakers for their children, are constructed from caribou hide and stuffed with a pound or so of tea. As it was up until the 1950s, Innu people of Labrador moved twice a year to be closer to primary food sources, packing up every winter to follow the caribou herd. It was the children’s job to carry the tea dolls, which the adults needed to borrow to make black tea to share with the Elders and hunters. Once the tea supply ran out, the dolls were re-stuffed with moss. Tea dolls weren’t only practical, they were a way for children to learn the importance of taking care of the Elders and sharing with others. 

Reprise speaks to the ongoing interconnectivity between generations.

Despite the exhibition being visual art, poetry is found throughout the gallery walls, which adds a dreamlike aspect. Tremblett’s words, “Meandering/ Falter/ in spite of the dark/ my heart grows fonder/ mended spirit/ taking root/ renew the mind/ braided spine/ sauntering softly/ hearts intertwine,” almost whisper throughout the space. A framed poem features the line, “We may not know how to talk to our people. But we will always go back.” However, it’s the wordlessness of the large, black-framed “Self-portrait as a Tree, 2014,” a series of reclaimed pieces of birch bark, that speaks for the relationship between the artist and the land, highlighting how Tremblett, of Innu and English descent, is separate neither from the land nor her ancestors.

While Tremblett’s work is provocative and striking, it’s the artist speaking in her own words about returning to Labrador seven years after her grandmother’s death that is central to understanding the truth and courage of Reprise. Tremblett writes about going for a walk with Innu Elder Tshakuesh (Elizabeth) Penashue in the spring of 2015. “When I talked with Tshakuesh about Grandma she would tell me how I was ‘Just like Madeline.’ I’ve always felt I wanted to be just like Grandma when I grew up. When Tshakuesh said that to me, it was the first time I felt like I was reconnecting with Gram. After that, I got into making tea dolls. I had tried before but felt like I didn’t have the right because I didn’t feel like I belonged. Now I know who I am.”

Tremblett’s Reprise is a testament to her own becoming, and it honours her Innu culture and artistic practice. Like Tremblett, I needed to return home to reconnect to the land and waters after my mother died this past fall. Despite being in the midst of a global pandemic, I am grateful to the Atlantic bubble for the opportunity to spend time with this important exhibition in Ktaqamkuk, an artistic place like no other. 

The right to know for settler artists, curators, educators, and viewers is an ongoing struggle when in response to knowledge of art made by—and lived experiences of—Indigenous peoples, Black people and people of Colour. In Mi’kma’ki there is growing engagement with decolonial and unsettling art and curatorial practices as well as antiracist and anticolonial strategies. A key component to systemic change is not only the critical and radical transformation of our institutions by mobilizing Mi’kmaq sovereignty as the foundations of local cultural and educational spaces but to decolonize from every direction possible, and to bring along many folks in the process. 

This dialogue reflects our ongoing conversations about art, craft, museums, settler colonialism, resistance, pedagogies, community, care, generosity, love, food, and swimming that began several years ago. In the following conversation we discuss the ongoing role of cultural appropriation in the contemporary settler colonial project. We make connections between the act of settler appropriation of Indigenous knowledge, cultural and spiritual practices, and customary objects, among other things, to settler possession and Indigenous dispossession. The act of appropriating BIPOC cultures clearly shows a settler belief in having the right to know and to possess. Our ideas draw from Indigenous knowledge keepers, scholars, artists, and leaders such as Aileen Moreton-Robinson (Goenpul), Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Ngati Awa and Ngati Porou), Sherry Farrell Racette (Métis/Timiskaming Algonquin/Irish), Pamela Palmeter (Mi’kmaw), and Marie Battiste (Mi’kmaw). We have in our conversations considered and drawn on the work by late Mohawk scholar Deborah Doxtator, Ho-Chunk scholar Amy Lonetree, Cherokee scholar Adrianne Keen, and the recent collaborative essay by Aylan Couchie (Nishnaabekwe), Raven Davis (Anishinaabek), and Chief Lady Bird (Chippewa and Potawatomi), “Dirty Words: Appropriation.”

We are white-settler cis-women academics living as uninvited guests on Mi’kma’ki, the unceded, traditional and ancestral territory of the Mi’kmaq nation. We hope that our conversation here will contribute to growing conversations amongst white settlers about our individual and collective responsibility to learn, follow, and embody treaty, and to practice treaty principles ethically, generously, and reciprocally in the everyday and in our art and curatorial practices. We also recognize the necessity of settler accountability when making, writing, and curating art as well as anti-racist and anti-colonial work that always starts from the place of acknowledging Indigenous sovereignties. We acknowledge that white settler practices with the best of intentions have the risk of continuing colonial practices of harm and extraction. Our understandings and realizations brought forward here come in large part through learning and in conversation with many Indigenous artists, scholars, thinkers, and knowledge keepers. 

Carla Taunton: An ongoing commitment I have as a white-settler professor and curator is considering how to ignite opportunities for transformative and decolonial changes at the individual (myself included), collective, and institutional levels. Something I spend a lot of time thinking about is how to engage folks with unsettling and decolonizing practices and to do so as a white-settler without co-opting and appropriating Indigenous voice and perspectives but rather be led by and collaborate with. This is because of the longstanding practice of settler individuals and institutions appropriating Indigenous knowledges to include art and claiming it as their own. A good place to start when talking to a white-settler audience about cultural appropriation is contemporary and historic white possessiveness of Indigenous cultural knowledge and material culture. This reveals how cultural appropriation is an ongoing practice of settler colonialism, with deep-seated roots in the dispossession of Indigenous lands, resources, knowledge, and arts. 

In considering the act of appropriating someone’s culture as an act of settler colonial violence, it asserts cultural appropriation as a practice of dispossession that is akin to the theft of Indigenous lands. An example is the removal of customary objects from Indigenous nations and communities and putting them in museum collections directed by a paternalistic Eurocentric practice of preserving knowledge for the benefit of all Canadians. These objects become items of national public property and this claiming by settler society is observed in national/ist language, iconography, and monuments, as evident in conceptualizations of Canadian heritage. 

However, until very recently most historic Indigenous art and customary objects were not accessible to the communities to which they belonged or to the family members whose ancestors made or took care of them. There are countless articles by Indigenous academics, artists, and community leaders that discuss the harm of cultural appropriation and the role of what Aileen Moreton-Robinson has termed the “white possessive.” 

Julie Hollenbach: I’m reminded of Métis scholar David Garneau, and many others who have shown that the sense of entitlement settlers have to Indigenous culture and this extractive and exploitative attitude toward Indigenous lands and knowledge is an extension of the historical and social framework that legitimated, for Europeans, colonization and seizure of people and their culture, non-human beings, land, and water. The doctrine of discovery was a fifteenth-century concept first enacted in a papal decree that entitled European explorers to claim terra nullius—“no man’s land,” defined as any lands not occupied by Christians—for the King and his Christian god. In this worldview, Indigenous peoples were not recognized as human, and therefore did not have rights and could not possibly belong to their land. This is a form of exceptionalism and a centering of a European worldview.

Taunton: Totally, entitlement is also a key player in the construction of a settler imaginary that is grounded in white supremacy. We see this in the painterly tradition of the modern landscape brought forward by the Group of Seven that has been canonized in Canadian art history as creating a new Canadian aesthetic in the pre-war period of the early 1900s. These tableaus often showcase the settler-imagined construction of wilderness exemplify the emptying of lands of both human presence (Indigenous sovereignty) and impact (settler industrialization and commodification of land). Feeling entitled to possess lands, represent land, and to displace and dispossess Indigenous nations across what is now called Canada is key to the maintenance of settler colonial logic that is underpinned by white supremacy and Eurocentric western value systems. Cultural appropriation is tied to all this in that it shows how settler logic continues to showcase values of racial hierarchy, or rather the legacies of value systems of white supremacy: the thinking that whiteness is of more value and that white-settler society has the authority and right to possess knowledge and objects, for instance, from other cultures as its own. 

Hollenbach: Sunera Thobani wrote this amazing book, Exalted Subjects, 2007, that outlines how the construction of whiteness, which is not actually an ethnicity and isn’t tied to specific heritage, was about creating a ruling class. This ruling class received privileges as exalted subjects (citizens) and worked to discipline other ethnic and racial groups that fell outside the state-defined ideals of citizenship. Creating this ambiguous racial category of whiteness required that people would wholesale abandon their specific culture and heritage. And so, as many Indigenous and Black scholars have noted, whiteness was predicated on violence against and the dehumanization of racialized people and groups. Colonialism and white supremacy aren’t only violent to Indigenous people, Black people, and People of Colour, they are also violent to white settlers. Given this violent rending from any kind of “authentic” connection to individual heritage and ancestry, I can see the connection to why white settlers often turn to the cultural practices of colonized people for spiritual and cultural meaning. 

Taunton: Canada presents itself as a multicultural society that is about diversity, benevolence, and peacemaking, for example. These national myths are in turn ways for a national public to forget how the nation state was actually built by taking and possessing Indigenous lands and how a national identity was maintained by claiming territories, languages, art, and teachings as objects of Canadian heritage as well as areas of academic study (anthropology and art history), all the while attempting to erase Indigenous presence and sovereignties from public consciousness. 

Decolonization as a simultaneous parallel Indigenous and non-Indigenous project is for everybody, just as bell hooks argued feminism was. 

This is not to create a binary that excludes Black people and People of Colour, for example. These parallel projects have many pathways and everybody has distinct roles, responsibilities, access points, and knowledge to bring. They also bring alliances, risks, and potential harms, depending on subject positionality. Decolonizing as a verb is an active centralizing of Indigenous self-determined knowledge, histories, and stories. At the same time, it is an unearthing of invisible colonial structures that are the backbones of settler society’s institutions, such as galleries, libraries, and universities. It is an unsettling of naturalized conditions of contemporary settler colonialism that benefit white-settler communities. Part of the decolonial work for settler cultural workers is to understand how visual culture, the art industry, and the academy have influenced and played key roles in shaping settler colonial order, and how principles of settler colonialism have informed, framed, and generated a great deal of artistic, cultural, and scholarly phenomena. Currently, across Indigenous territories, a critical mass of Indigenous artists are creating resurgence-based art practices such as with beadwork Catherine Blackburn (Dene), Judy Anderson (Cree), Barry Ace (Anishnaabe-Odawa), Ruth Cuthand (Plains Cree and Scottish), and Christie Belcourt (Métis); with weaving Lisa Hageman Yahgujanaas (Haida) and Sarah Sense (Chitimacha/Choctaw); and performance-interdisciplinary artists Ursula Johnson (Mi’kmaw), Dorreen Gruben (Inuit/Inuvialuk), and Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory (Kalaaleq). These Indigenous, land-based cultural practices and knowledges have survived despite ongoing attempts by settler governments to eradicate them. Indigenous self-determination, resistance, and stewardship by historic Indigenous artists have played key roles in the intergenerational transmission and sharing of culture as well as like their ancestors, creating new dynamism by incorporating new techniques and materials.

Hollenbach: Such a crucial point. The artists you mention are great examples of how Indigenous people have always responded to shifts in their social and cultural world through their making practices. Artistic practices purely concerned with aesthetics (“Art for art’s sake”) is another European notion that has been projected onto the cultural production of non-western societies, tied in with modernist notions of “authenticity.” 

Taunton: Yes, exactly. This bringing in of new materials, of settler trade materials, was not a new cultural phenomenon, as Indigenous artists and makers have always adapted and adopted new technologies and materialities. As contemporary artists, they were responding to the influences of their daily lives. Currently, Indigenous scholars such as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson speak of the act of cultural continuance as resurgence work tied to and connected to land, language, and ways of knowing and being. The work of Jordan Bennett comes to mind immediately, specifically his solo site-specific exhibition at the AGNS, Ketu’ elmita’jik, which showcased large wall murals incorporating historic quillwork seatbacks. Tepkik (2018), a 127-foot banner that is currently installed at the National Gallery of Canada as part of the international Indigenous exhibition Abadakone, illustrates the resilience of Indigenous cultures by incorporating visual language and iconographies of the Mi’kmaq living archive—petroglyphs, quillwork, beadwork, and baskets. The Mi’kmaq makers of the 18th and 19th centuries were savvy in their adaptations and engagement with the colonial market, and they were working in the ways as their ancestors and their future kin.

Hollenbach: These are important examples of Indigenous resilience and cultural continuance! 

Taunton: Indigenous resilience, and resistance! Settler colonialism has and continues to disrupt and dispossess Indigenous peoples and nations of their lands while also repetitively legitimating itself as rightful owner of the land, its resources, and, in turn, its peoples. The settler imaginary in turn feels entitled to take, to possess, and to claim markers of indigeneity as a component of settler identity. Indigenous artists, knowledge keepers, educators, leaders, and storytellers have made enormous contributions to dismantling these myths.

Hollenbach: Totally. Mi’kmaq artist Ursula Johnson’s performance “The Indian Truckhouse of Fine Art” (2011) works to subvert these projections of settler colonial fantasies about Indigeneity and authenticity. It is a performance in which Johnson exercised her treaty rights to sell her wares. Wearing the traditional dress of 19th century Mi’kmaq women, she set up and tended a stall selling items she found in souvenir shops and discount stores that she deemed to be culturally appropriative. To each of these items she affixed a piece of hand spun and dyed yarn with a tag that read “This object is 100% Authentic Indian High Art. Made in Mi’kma’ki.” On the reverse of each tag, a price between $17.20 to $17.90 was given (these prices reference the dates of the Peace and Friendship Treaties between the Mi’kmaq and the Crown).

Taunton: Yes! I love this work. Ursula Johnson’s “The Indian Truckhouse of Fine Art” subverts the colonial ideology of the salvage paradigm and the outside Eurocentric constructions of hierarchies and classifications that reflect western value systems and the longstanding longing to possess something of the other. The salvage paradigm was a late 19th and early 20th century attempt to collect and preserve Indigenous material culture; to document cultural, social, and political practice; and to create a permanent record based on the Eurocentric belief that Indigenous peoples were vanishing. Although these attitudes shifted in the academic and museological sense, Haida art historian Marcia Crosby argues that much of the Indigenous art produced in the 1980s and 1990s is an attempt to reclaim the image of Indigenous peoples from the ethnographic context of the salvage paradigm. Indigeneity was theoretically and physically collected by settler society: material and visual culture were seen as being salvaged and placed into museum collections, and artists and photographers documented and collected the images of individuals and snap shots of everyday culture.

Today’s salvage paradigm could be seen as cultural appropriation. Colonial legacies remain embedded in Canadian culture, exemplified in the misplaced yet common belief that so-called authentic Indigenous cultures were lost through contact with European society. The result of this feeling of loss in non-Indigenous consciousness was the construction of an expectation of a fixed Indigenous culture—which Indigenous peoples have resisted and subverted throughout the processes of colonization and decolonization.

Hollenbach: The salvage paradigm didn’t function only on an institutional level, with ethnographers collecting Indigenous culture for museums, but also on a personal individual level, with colonial military officers returning home to Britain with souvenirs of Indigenous culture as gifts for their wives and daughters. Those objects would be proudly displayed in the parlour as status symbols. Later, European settlers would collect Indigenous cultural objects and souvenirs for display in their own homes. Often, there’s this perception that colonialism was this masculinist pursuit enacted in the public realm through war and conflict, treaty signing, and border making. 

But colonialism also occurred through the domestic practices of white-settler women as they created homes meant to mirror the imperial centre on the empire’s periphery. Algonquin and French-Canadian artist Nadia Myre made a work providing a powerful critique of this history in 2016, called Decolonial Gestures or Doing It Wrong? Refaire le Chemin. The work drew inspiration from Victorian women’s magazines with text descriptions that guided anglophone settler women in the creation of Indigenous inspired handicrafts. Myre followed the instructions, which were read out to her, without knowing beforehand what she was making. The work unravels the violent ongoing colonial action of attempting to consume and homogenize Indigenous culture. 

Taunton: Specifically, these objects, which as you note were very important objects within white-settler domestic spaces, in many cases were made by Indigenous women using adaptations and integration of trade materials (such as glass beads, velvet, wool, silk ribbon etc.) with Indigenous iconography and materials. They are important objects of Indigenous continuity, meaning that they are vessels which hold past historical and cultural knowledge as well as familial and collective intergenerational memories.

In Mi’kmaq territory, quill pill boxes, calling card trays, pin cushions, and the backing and seat panels of chairs were actively collected and now are housed in museums such as the Natural History Museum here in Halifax as well as large holdings at the McCord Museum in Montréal among others. Many leading Indigenous thinkers explain this phenomenon as an act of cultural continuance and, in some cases, a practice of resistance during a time of heightened assimilation. So Mi’kmaq makers were creating a new economy to support their families while continuing to pass down knowledge encoded in the designs and making practices. This is all happening against the backdrop of the very aggressive assimilationist policies of cultural genocide established by the federal government and enacted through the Indian Act, such as the forced removal of children to Residential Schools and the ceremonial or potlach ban 1884-1951, which deemed ceremonies and cultural customary practices and objects illegal. 

Hollenbach: A lot of these confiscated and stolen objects were placed in provincial and federal museums for “safekeeping” and “posterity.” I see a real connection between the display practices of the museum as the state’s showroom of what the nation values—its core beliefs, outlook, and worldviews—and the displays in individual settler’s living rooms, where they proudly present handmade and mass-produced objects that signify the individual or family’s values, beliefs, and investments. Whether that’s inherited family heirlooms, personal creative projects, sports paraphernalia, spiritual icons, luxury items, souvenirs, or Indigenous-made objects, they are either presented as authentic “artifacts” or as strictly aesthetic objects.

Which goes back to that extractive and possessive colonial impulse. When we go to museums, we see stolen objects presented in a static, possessive way that is normalized. And then settlers visit museums and often take on the ideologies and values presented in the space, but also internalize the display logics of the space along with that attitude of entitlement that we talked about. The museum and other key state institutions tell us that it’s normal to collect and display objects for safekeeping for the future. (As if that’s white people’s role!) And so then the individual mirrors this attitude and activity in their own daily life and domestic space. I’ve noticed that within popular public discourse around cultural appropriation there’s an emphasis on the theft of Indigenous culture by museums, or cultural appropriation by sports teams and corporations for their branding, or the way non-Indigenous luxury fashion lines use and misuse Indigenous designs or symbols to sell fast fashion.

Carla: Yes, such as Urban Outfitters’ Navajo co-opted designs, the Canadian teams’ HBC 2010 Olympic Games–inspired Cowichan sweater, Victoria’s Secret’s use of Plains headdresses, Dsquared2’s copy of Inuit and other Indigenous cultural patterns, designs, and garments, and the list goes on and on.

Julie: These examples are harmful in many ways! Cultural appropriation of Indigenous culture and knowledge negates Indigenous sovereignty over their culture, it extracts profit without any kind of return. Indigenous people are not able to determine and control the representation of themselves and their culture, and the stereotypes and misrepresentations often perpetuate the dehumanization of Indigenous people and lead to further violence. I think consumers have an awareness of how big institutions and corporations are perpetrating harm against Indigenous communities, but there seems to be a disconnect or some cognitive dissonance when it comes to translating this understanding to individual consumer practices. I mean, it was and remains a constant practice of unlearning, for me, too—to recognize how individual consumer practices mirror those attitudes of entitlement, extraction, and possession that continue and contribute to present day colonialism.

Taunton: Decolonization is an ongoing process, and unlearning (also ongoing) is key. So many BIPOC artists, curators, and educators have brought these urgent critiques and truths forward. What I find particularly exciting right now are recent collaborations between companies and Indigenous artists, such as Christi Belcourt and Valentino (dresses and purses) or Jordan Bennett and Pendleton Blankets. Also interesting is the recent Indigenous Fashion Week Toronto and Simons collaboration, featuring 8 Indigenous artists’ designs on over 35 garments. These collaborations are Indigenous led and show a way forward that is grounded in ethics of decolonial reciprocity and shared responsibility. 

Hollenbach: Yes, exactly. So great! This brings up an important question. In thinking about Indigenous fashion, or Indigenous artists collaborating with popular brands, or Indigenous makers selling jewellery on Etsy, I often hear this question from white-settlers who are trying to engage with Indigenous culture respectfully—it’s also something I remember wondering myself: is it appropriate for settlers to buy and wear Indigenous-made jewellery and fashion, or to buy Indigenous art and live with it in their homes. What are your thoughts?

Taunton: I think it can be a key component to settler responsibility; however, for white settlers it’s imperative to ask the why questions. Is it a desire to participate in what we have explained to be as a colonial longing to own and to know? Meaning, are settlers buying Indigenous jewellery, art, and fashion to consume and co-opt for themselves some aspect of imagined notions of authentic Indigeneity, or can this transaction be situated in self-reflexivity, respectful engagement, and decolonial reciprocity? I think a lot about treaty and treaty relationships and what they could look like in 2020. Here in Mi’kma’ki, the Peace and Friendship Treaties signed in the 1700s were established to create co-existence for Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. To me, the support of Indigenous art and artists is part of all cultural institutions’ treaty responsibilities, generally speaking: purchasing art and crafts from Indigenous artists is an incredibly productive way to contribute to a stronger arts community. Currently there are many Mi’kmaq and Inuk artists on Instagram and Etsy who are making absolutely brilliant work, such as Melissa Peter Paul, Nicole Traverse (Blomindon Beadwork), and Mi’kmaq Printing, Inez Shiwak, and Vanessa Flowers among others. 

Hollenbach: Yes. Looking to treaty as a guide here is so helpful. Can you expand on this? 

Taunton: Living in Mi’kma’ki, we have an existing roadmap to co-existence by looking to and learning about the Peace and Friendship Treaties. These treaties show us how to move towards activating a nation to nation relationship and reciprocal responsibilities. The treaties are based on Indigenous Mi’kmaq practices and principles of shared accountability, shared respect, and friendship. And there is an expectation of living together in peace, but also of reciprocity. It’s rooted in Indigenous sovereignty, and it invites all folks who are non-indigenous—to include Black people and people of Colour, recent arrivals, and white-settlers, too—to participate in treaty-making every day. To aim to make treaty everyday can help guide us as a community of Indigenous, Black, POC and white-settlers in asking questions about stewardship, about what we purchase and how we engage with the lands we live and work on. To embody treaty for settlers means to navigate the everyday to include art making, curatorial practice, and other cultural work in a way that upholds principles of accountability and reciprocity. It also means to commit to learning and unlearning while disrupting and dismantling patterns of colonial harm, co-option, and, ultimately, possession. 

At the entrance of the Galerie d’art Louise-et-Reuben-Cohen in Moncton, on the occasion of Sovereign Acts exhibition curated by Wanda Nanibush, a small monitor is installed on the wall. Showing in a black and white historical video, a group of performers are dancing, dressed in what appears to be traditional garments and headdresses. Captured on film by Thomas A. Edison in 1894, it is here one of the oldest Indigenous performance videos. Ironically, it’s the video of a fake Ghost dance. In an accompanying description, it is explained that in 1884 in Canada and 1904 in the United States, traditional rituals were punishable by imprisonment. In order to continue to perform and share their knowledge, these Indigenous groups had to adapt to stereotypical movements to please and fill the imagination of a colonial public, consciously leaving aside a part of their identity. This recording is a document of assimilation and the subjugation of Indigenous peoples of North America.

The exhibition Sovereign Acts includes the work of Indigenous artists Rebecca Belmore, Lori Blondeau, Dayna Danger, Robert Houle, James Luna, Shelley Niro, Adrian Stimson, and Jeff Thomas as they explore various aspects of artistic performance as an act of cultural resistance. Through various techniques combining photography, video, painting, installation, and performative documentation, the exhibition examines the influence of the identity of colonialism on Indigenous cultures. 

Robert Houle’s traditional portrait paintings, Mississauga Portraits “Waubuddick”, “Maungwudaus,” “Hannah,” installed on a painted royal blue wall, recalls museum aesthetics and criticizes the lack of representation of Indigenous art in these institutions. The same concern is present in Jeff Thomas’ work, which exhibits black and white photographs of preparations for a Powwow celebration. Unlike the conventional image of performers in action, Thomas manages to capture spontaneous and intimate moments. His work is an internal point of view highlighting the authenticity of his own culture in order to participate in the creation of visual references.

The complexity of identity influences from a contemporary point of view is accentuated by the masquerade present in the photographic series of both James Luna and Shelley Niro. Luna and Niro examine cultural appropriation as a way of addressing stereotypes. In particular, Niro’s photographic series, “This Land is Mime Land,” reflects on three diverse perspectives of Indigenous women’s role throughout an international and colonial, an Indigenous viewpoint, and an introspective gaze. 

On the other hand, Dayna Danger’s large-scale photo-graphic installation depicts four people wearing black fetish masks covered with beadwork of the same colour. Danger’s work explores a paradoxical dynamism between empower-ment and its objectification through a glim of vulnerability. Do the masks create a distance between the identity of the subjects and the space they occupied in the gallery? In this case, the hidden identity of the subjects reclaims space for gender non-conforming people, sexual minorities and sexually diverse role outside of the settler colonial institutions. Danger’s work also speaks to the bodies’ resistance of the perceiving of gender within a western gender binary. 

Adrian Stimson’s work explores self-construction through characters, mostly known by The Shaman Exterminator and Buffalo Boy. Stimson investigates from his personal experience including several generations of Indigenous communities attending residential schools and its impact on culture. The photographic series in the gallery revisit and bringing together both stills from performances and historical images taken in 1892 in Sisika Nation. In a first diptych, Onward upward, Christian frock, the front of the lie… the work depicts an historical image showing Indigenous children dressed as altar servers, standing in line on the side of a church. It is accompanied by an image of Stimson personifying a priest dressed with nylon stockings and high heels. The adjacent diptych, Chalk Board Witness signs, Telling Eyes, Sketches of Indian Life, the historical image shows children in a classroom with a cold and surprised look. This one is presented with a picture of Stimson’s Buffalo Boy sitting in a classroom with a similar facial expression. In a way, these performances are healing efforts through the recognition of ongoing suffering and self-acceptance to better understand how to live with trauma and tragedy. 

Rebecca Belmore’s “In A Wilderness Garden,” is presented as a triptych video installation projected on a large wall. In the first video, Belmore is seen in a forest, her hands tied behind her back while lying on the ground covered with leaves. Belmore is tenacious in constant motion and tries to get up. This section of the performance makes me restless, impatient, but above all helpless in front of this struggling woman. Then I notice the centre video. I see a character motionless with a blanket over his head and bare feet. This immobilization reminds me of mine in this moment. It also makes me think about the inaction of colonial peoples vis-à-vis the many injustices of Indigenous Peoples. In particular, I am thinking of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous women and girls, whose presence I feel symbolized on the adjacent wall by Lori Blondeau, who is wearing a red dress. The third video shows a leaf blower scattering leaves. This last scene may imply that the conse-quences of the inaction of the second figure will make life even more difficult for this woman in order to finalize her efforts.

As an exhibition, Sovereign Acts is a space of understanding, shared knowledge, and above all, an awareness of reconciliation. The performances of every artist of the exhibition constitute an act of resistance aimed to reclaim the narrative of their cultural voices by changing colonial perspectives that had influence their identity.

For Logan MacDonald, collaboration is a practice, a form of kinning and a “way of navigating the communities [he] participates in.” Most importantly, collaboration is braided into the fundamentals of “everything [he] does.”

As MacDonald’s own identity resides in multiple communities, and constantly engages with a myriad of voices, histories, temporalities and ontologies. Confronting the intersections of queerness, Indigeneity, access and ability, MacDonald reckons with the limitations and possibilities of identity.

His work entangles the personal and political as projects take on histories of homophobia, rural isolation, cultural erasure, loss and mourning. From his work in queer art trio The Third Leg (notably the project Welcome to Gayside), to more nuanced embodiments of reciprocity in his most recent exhibition Visiting, MacDonald uses collaboration to create a dialectic that is active, curious and always refusing closure.

As a practice, MacDonald mixes mediums and disciplines with precision and intention. Lyrical, at times witty, and always pointed, MacDonald uses photography, textiles, oil painting, graphite drawings, installation, and signage to mediate viewership, confront the limits of access, and represent the myriad identities that reverberate through the works. MacDonald’s most recent exhibition Visiting, is an extended iteration of The Lay of the Land (2017), which opened at Eastern Edge in St. John’s and has since visited Winnipeg’s Ace Art. The Lay of the Land was the result of MacDonald’s travels through Indigenous communities, histories and activisms across the country. MacDonald recreates makeshift structures – heavy beams of lumber bolted together – used by Indigenous activists in British Columbia as a means of claiming property against colonial and industrial incursion. Photographs of graffitied sidewalks scream “NATIVE LAND” in black spray paint. Neon repeats throughout the show, confronting encroachment, demarcation, and consumption.

You won’t find photographs of faces in Visiting. MacDonald intentionally mediates third party viewership of his subjects in order to protect the intimacy of his encounters. Instead of presenting photographs, MacDonald draws the image, interjecting the melancholic mechanics of graphite sketching between the viewer and the original experience. By denying access to the primary image, curator Emily Critch says that MacDonald generates tension in the work and refuses to “author” someone else’s narrative. As a means of honouring the intimacy of shared encounters, this is a means of negotiating consent, a form of reciprocity and respect for our kin, both an invitation and a refusal.

Similarly, a small but striking oil painting of a hand holding MacDonald’s status card confronts us with the political surveillance of Indigenous identity. We are asked to reckon with authenticity, generational loss, and the possibility of reclamation. For those of us who will never have a status card, who feel the simultaneous sting of rejection and anger of relentless erasure, this work also speaks to the impossibilities of desire.

MacDonald resurrects archival ghosts, entangling past and future, grief and hope, loss and desire. Here, visit-ing also becomes a visit-ation. Morill, Tuck & The Super Futures Haunt Qollective write, “visitations reinforce connections, create new ones, disrupt expectations. Visitations are not settling, they are not colonial exploration. Visitation rites. Visitation rights. Visitation writes.”[2] The visitations in MacDonald’s work assert that he is “also in collaboration with people who are inaccessible.” In The Lay of the Land and Visiting, MacDonald looks to voices silenced by colonial violence, mediating and reclaiming “lost” images, structures and objects through contemporary frameworks. Images of snowy, pine trimmed roads, shadowy rocks, and bushels of blooming shrubbery are mounted on lumber, concrete and graphed paper. Visiting is a verb and everything here is under construction. Consent is ongoing.

A focal point of Visiting is a large-scale photograph of the artist’s limp body, facing upward, sprawled across a large tree stump. MacDonald notes that the surveillance of trees acts as an analogy for the surveillance of queer and Indigenous bodies in public spaces. MacDonald tells me that “this work is sad. It is about contemporary mourning and historical mourning, but it is also a call to action and to empathy.” In these betweens there is also a generative tension that illuminates hope and possibility. While there is something apathetic and exhausted about the artist’s slack limbs falling to either side, there is also something powerful and active about a tired body laying with another, of holding space with one another. How do we find ways of carrying on? MacDonald tells me that it can be “good to put a name to a thing.” This photograph tells me that where words fail us, visiting together can be enough.

[2] Tuck, Eve and Karyn Recollet. (2017) “Visitations (You Are Not Alone) in #callresponse. Vancouver: grunt gallery. www.evetuck.com/s/Visitations-You-are-not-alone-2017-Tuck-Recollet.pdf

When you first walk into the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia’s exhibition space holding Ketu’elmita’jik, created by Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland) artist Jordan Bennett, the colours and designs flood your senses. They enter you like some otherworldly creation that has seeped into your brain and started playing music you can’t quite hear.

This site-specific work fills the entire gallery. On one wall the painting extends past the usual ten-foot tall barriers and into the space of the gallery above. Ketu’elmita’jik, a Mi’kmaq word meaning they want to go home, incorporates 18th, 19th, and 20th century Mi’kmaq quillwork borrowed from museums across this land that is commonly called Canada. The intricate brightly coloured quillwork is carefully displayed on the wall in custom Plexiglas frames and cases created specifically for their current inhabitants. The designs and motifs painted directly on the walls echo those of the quillwork.

In the gallery space there are no labels, dates, material lists, or institutional ownership affiliation displayed on the wall— this space functions as one cohesive piece. The exhibition holds a cyclical sense of space and time, one that reflects Indigenous worldviews. By continuing the designs of these quillwork pieces Bennett is adding and continuing the knowledge these designs hold, encouraging the next generation to see them, to hear them, to feel their ancestors.

These works were made in community by many women’s hands[1], they are a collective collaborative piece, and made with the specific intention of trading. These are artworks; they are not utilitarian objects, they were traded to sustain the community’s livelihood. They were made in surroundings of laughter, story, food, sharing, language, and love.
It is worth pointing out that Indigenous products—trade items, handmade goods, and art works—are made to sustain, celebrate, continue, and pass on our way of life, our culture, our community livelihood. Hunting, gathering, storytelling, and making are all interconnected—they also allow us to practice our ways of life as well as participate in local and
global economies.

Bennett’s continuation of the quillwork in paint depicts his ability to listen and draw from his ancestors and the makers of these art forms; making becomes a prayerful act, one of honour, listening, and continuing. An act to reconnect and heal from colonial trauma. Not simply by displaying the work, but by adding to it, by continuing the conversation past the barriers of the piece he is honouring his ancestors. This action illustrates the breath of life in the quillwork that still exists, which requires its’ ancestors in the present to interact with it; much like Coast Salish masks they need human contact. It is so important for us, as Indigenous peoples, to see and interact with the work of our ancestors because it is in our blood memory, and our ability to read the designs and speak the visual language, even if we have not found our oral one yet.

The quill pieces hold Bennett’s ancestors—they directly draw a line from them to him and future generations. He understands the continual thread that is being pulled through time. We recognize that when we use these designs they are not ours, they are our communities’ and we are adding to the existing narratives.

A good friend said to me once, “as an artist, especially as an Indigenous artist, you have to understand that whatever you make now, you are adding to a history, you are continuing a story, and however you tell it, that version will always exist, thus influencing future generations”. The weight of this statement is heavy, but it should be. Indigenous artists are not just creating: we are continuing, we are surviving, and we are reconnecting. Bennett’s understanding of that weight is evident in his growing body of work.

Most recently, I saw Bennett at the unveiling of Pjila’si at Zatzman Sportsplex, another site-specific installation using Mi’kmaq and Beothuk designs. This permanent installation celebrates Indigenous contributions to sports and recreation in Mi’kma’ki. The piece utilizes various materials: aluminum, oak, walnut, ash and maple wood, 3M road sign sheeting and locally sourced labradorite. The 3M road sign sheeting almost shouts at the viewer, “Look over here!”. While the local materials such as the wood and stone softly suggests: “We have always been here.” At the opening, Stoney Bear Singers began with a powerful drumming performance and finished with the honour song.

“It was important for it (the honour song) to be sung in the space so the ancestors feel welcome,” says Bennett.

Indigenous art is not just art, it is our being and ancestors pushing through our bodies, through our fingertips, it is blood memory in physical form. Many Indigenous languages don’t even have a word for art, as it is embedded in our way of life.

Bennett has created a space that celebrates Indigenous ways of being and knowing within the walls of an institution that was not made for us. His ability to include and continue his ancestors designs is inspiring and will continue to inspire future generations.

[1] Handwork such as quillwork is typically done by women but if a person who identifies as a man or non-binary showed interest the community would make space for that person.

In Nova Scotia and elsewhere people are grappling with the issue of what to do with monuments associated with a painful past, and are asking whether the action of tearing down statues like that of Edward Cornwallis in Halifax helps to redress a history of violence, or whether the removal simply hides or disguises what has happened. In thinking through the dilemma posed by this question, we are forced to consider when it is appropriate to remove a monument, what should happen to it when it is taken down, and what to do with the space left behind. I suggest that the artist and the counter-monument movement have a role in reconciling these issues.

Traditionally, monuments have been erected to glorify an event, person, or ideology. However, the intended meaning of a monument is never fixed but changes depending on the socio-political climate and our understanding of history. When we come to recognize the atrocity or violence of the past, the meaning of the monument changes. It is now a signifier of a painful past and its presence symbolizes pain.

Destroying or removing a monument is an act of distinguishing our contemporary values from offensive actions of the past. Removing a monument like the statue of Cornwallis and leaving the empty pedestal in place indicates an absence: one that is a symbol of decolonization and reconciliation. The empty pedestal represents the stories that have been omitted from the dominant discourse. The action of putting something in the statue’s place could continue to silence these missing stories. But is leaving the empty pedestal enough?

It is impossible to discuss memory and commemoration without looking at the work of James E. Young on Holocaust memorials and the idea of the monument and its role in public memory. He introduced the German concept of Gegendenkmal, which translates to “counter-monument.”

The counter-monument movement emerged in Germany following World War II, as the country was grappling with how to commemorate the atrocities of the Holocaust and its devastating loss. People began to reject traditional monuments and their implied values. They argued that public memorial art and monuments were being built as substitutes for remembering the events, and that the lack of engagement with the monument once built, was in actuality, a way to forget.

Counter-monuments are difficult to define, but, in general, they disrupt dominant narratives through action, performance, or installation in a way that critically draws on the principles of the traditional monument form and its language and values. Despite their connection to traditional monuments, counter-monuments do not always have monumental qualities, according to Young. Rather, he defines them as “brazen, painfully self-conscious memorial spaces conceived to challenge the very premises of their being.”^[1]

Academics, architects, and artists have been deeply engaged with questions regarding how to commemorate the absence of a people as happened in the Holocaust, and also, how such ideas about commemoration can be applied to other complex memorial spaces around the world. Contemporary approaches explore themes of inversion and absence. Prominent forms of these themes might include a focus on site-specificity, abstraction, transparency, reflectivity – often through the use of polished surfaces, the removal of pedestals to bring monuments closer to the ground or even into the ground, and the use of plaques. These contemporary memorial spaces and counter-monuments serve to engage and bring the viewer into the space where they have to make an effort to interpret the multiple meanings of the memorial.^[2]

A significant example of a counter-monument is Horst Hoheisel’s “Aschrott Fountain” in Kassel, Germany. In 1939, at the outbreak of WWII, a fountain designed for the city by architect Karl Roth in 1908 and funded by Jewish entrepreneur Sigmund Aschrott was demolished by local Nazis. In the years following, over 3000 Jews were deported from Kassel and killed. After the war, the fountain was temporarily filled with dirt and flowers planted. Locals called it “Aschrott’s Grave.” In 1984, the city of Kassel invited artists to restore the Aschrott Brunnen Fountain. Hoheisel disagreed with the city’s decision to restore the fountain. In his proposal, he stated that by reconstructing the Aschrott fountain, people in the city would forget why it had been destroyed in the first place, thereby erasing the awful violence. Already, people in Kassel assumed it had been destroyed by British air raids during the war. Instead of rebuilding the fountain, Hoheisel proposed a negative-form monument by inverting a hollow concrete structure of the original fountain’s form into the ground. Viewers engage with the monument by standing on the glass covering the void, looking down through their own reflection into the fountain’s internal structure as ground water runs through it. Young discusses the Aschrott Fountain in Memory and Counter-Memory, asking, “How does one commemorate an absence?” He answers his own question, “In this case, by reproducing it… Hoheisel has left nothing but the visitors themselves standing in remembrance, left to look inward for memory.”^[3]

The intention of the “Aschrott Fountain” is for viewers to engage with the memorial space and to encounter feelings of loss and displacement: to be reminded of the original destruction and devastating void of the Holocaust. This work provides great insight into how contemporary memorial spaces and counter-monuments can help communities decide when it is appropriate to remove a monument or, instead, when to invite artists to find alternative ways to engage viewers with memorial spaces, acknowledge outdated values, and disrupt the invisibility of omitted narratives from dominant discourses of the past.

In 2017, Grade 6-8 students at The Booker School in Port Williams, Nova Scotia, participated in an inquiry-based project surrounding the controversy of the Cornwallis statue. Their teacher, Ms Temma Frecker, was awarded the 2018 Governor General’s Award for Teaching Excellence in History for developing the interdisciplinary project.

The students are regularly encouraged to look at reconciliation issues in Canada. For this project, they learned about the complicated legacy of Edward Cornwallis. They recognized his contributions to history, while also acknowledging that Mi’kmaq peoples have been here for 14,000 years and have suffered directly from his scalping proclamation. A large portion of their work focused on understanding the relationships between Nova Scotia’s British and French settlers and the Mi’kmaq peoples.

Through a holistic approach, the students examined the socio-historical context of the statue by looking at multiple perspectives. This process led them to better understand the reasons why many contemporary groups wanted the statue removed. Though they agreed with this action, the students came up with their own proposal titled, “The Conversation.” The students proposed to remove the statue of Cornwallis from the pedestal and place it on the ground, standing among three additional statues who represent African Nova Scotians, Acadian, and Mi’kmaq histories.

The statues would be accompanied by plaques noting both positive and negative aspects of our history. They chose Grand Chief John Denny Jr. (1841-1918), Viola Desmond (1914-1965), and Noel and Marie Doiron with a child (1684-1758) to join Cornwallis – all facing one another in conversation. The students recognized that each of these figures have something to teach us about Nova Scotian values and important ideas. The interactive space and informational plaques would enable people to learn from and critically question the past and engage with the memorial space.

Projects like this provide an opportunity for real change through discussion and listening to multiple perspectives. In Counter-Memorial Aesthetics, Veronica Tello confirms that “[d]ifferential knowledge is what allows history and counter-memory to perform its critical work: to critique the notion of the singular monument born of a single origin.”^[4] Through critique, the Booker School students came to understand how, together, triumphs, failings, loss, and hardship shape our current realities. Their project and final proposal show how we can approach reconciliation (or reconcili-action) and decolonization through education by looking to counter-monuments as a way to commemorate and include diverse narratives of the past.

Given the removal of the Cornwallis statue and other monuments to Canada’s colonial heritage, we cannot ignore the interesting parallels between the decolonization of Canada and the decommunization of post-Soviet countries in Europe. The removal of monuments and iconography is a central pillar of change in both.

Post-Soviet countries have destroyed or removed statues of Stalin and Lenin and other Soviet iconography from public spaces. Streets, parks, and cultural buildings named after Lenin have been renamed. Thousands of empty pedestals where Lenin once stood are left in place, many with his name still etched in the stone. These monuments represent dependence on and oppression by the former Soviet Union, and their removal is an active symbol of independence through decommunization.

Similarly, the removal of the Cornwallis statue can be seen as a step towards healing, reconciliation, and most of all, action. The physical act of removing this figure shows that the municipality of Halifax recognizes and acknowledges its painful past. It is an action that included Indigenous and non-Indigenous voices together in the process of advancing Canadian reconciliation through decolonization. Across Canada, Indigenous names of place are being recognized and reclaimed. In both cases, though, in post-Soviet decommunization and Canadian decolonization, we must ensure that we are not left with only empty pedestals and debate and no action.

I believe that the counter-monument movement in Europe and the decommunization of post-Soviet countries can be analyzed and applied to our Canadian context. This approach can help us begin to reconcile monuments with a painful past and decide when it is appropriate to remove a statue or monument and what happens when it is taken down.

Rather than erasing Canada’s violent history, I propose that we place it within its historical context through counter-monuments and education. When decisions are made to build or remove monuments and memorial spaces, we need to critically examine their socio-historical context, the current context, what these actions symbolize, and what they may symbolize for future generations (given the ever-changing nature of monuments). When looking at whose history is being commemorated, we also need to recognize the voices of those whose history has been or is being omitted because of our actions.

Counter-monuments and their function as memorials are a site of constant struggle as their meaning and their socio-historic and aesthetic contexts are ever changing. This struggle to memorialize is often embodied in the temporal and ephemeral qualities of counter-monuments, their very temporality reflecting the fleeting nature of memory and the need for it to be continuously revisited.

As suggested by Sue-Anne Ware in Anti-Memorials and the Art of Forgetting, “In this way the design outcomes become physical catalysts for social change.”^[5] For this reason, I see real purpose in not only creating counter-monuments, but also building the components for recognition and reflection into our education system to be revisited over and over again.

Finally, it is important to remember that it is difficult to create a counter-monument without the context of the original. As is the case with the Cornwallis statue, once a monument is removed, the empty pedestal may become a vessel by which we can acknowledge the atrocities of our history.

However, this space must be available for artists and the community to explore. These colonial spaces provide opportunities for dialogue about our national history and how we can take action and move forward as a culture.

^[1] James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture. (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2000), 11.

^[2] Quentin Stevens and Karen A. Franck. Memorials As Spaces of Engagement: Design, Use and Meaning. (New York, London: Routledge: Taylor & Francis Group, 2016), 43.

^[3] Young, “Memory and Counter-Memory,” Harvard Design Magazine, Vol. 9, Constructions of Memory: on Monuments Old and New (February 1999, n.p.). (no page number).http://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/9/memory-and-counter-memory (accessed 21 Feb. 2019).

^[4] Veronica Tello. Counter-Memorial Aesthetics: Refugee Histories and the Politics of Contemporary Art. (London, Oxford, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 15.

^[5] Sue-Anne Ware. Anti-Memorials and the Art of Forgetting: Critical Reflections on a Memorial Design Practice. Public History Review, No 1. (UTS ePress and the author, 2008), 75.

The concept of call and response evokes a dialogue rooted in musicality, a back-and-forth predicated on sharing and reflecting back, developing, and growing a conversation. #callresponse, co-presented by Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery and Eyelevel Artist-Run Centre, is an ongoing project that developed out of Tarah Hogue’s research on Indigenous feminisms and artistic practice at grunt gallery in 2014.

In collaboration with co-conspirators Maria Hupfield and Tania Willard (their preference for “co-conspirator” or “accomplice,” a specific politicized alternative to “ally” inspired by Jaskiran Dhillon’s “On Becoming an Accomplice,” explained in the stunning exhibition catalogue), this traveling and ever-evolving collection reflects on the specifically institutionalized site of “the gallery,” a series of conversations and interactions with the physical land, its inhabitants and keepers. These conversations center Indigenous women and their practices.

Artists Christi Belcourt, Maria Hupfield, Ursula Johnson, Tania Willard, and Laakkuluk Williamson-Bathory collaborated and conspired with Isaac Murdoch, Esther Neff & IV Castellanos, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Meagan Musseau, and Tanya Tagaq to create a series of site-specific works that have continued to evolve as an ongoing project, and result in unique gallery exhibitions and across the country. Engaging with the hashtag #callresponse—perhaps the most ubiquitous symbol of a modern form of conversational structure and organization—viewers are invited to peek into a much larger and more expansive meta-dialogue.

There is a sort of starkness in the placement of the various works in the gallery, and a bareness to some of the pieces themselves. This creates an intensity and offers a complex intimacy that permeates the entire exhibition. For example, Belcourt and Isaac Murdoch’s Reconciliation with the Land and Waters, is a physical record of ceremonies the artists led at gatherings on Indigenous governance across Manitoba, Ontario and Saskatchewan in 2015 and 2016, and now exists in the gallery in absence. The robe was gifted to the artists, who are part of the Onaman collective, by the Grand Chief, and it was returned to the artists in support of their community work. 

The simplicity and deceptive familiarity of Ursula Johnson and Meagan Musseau’s collaborative audio-based endurance piece Ke’tapekiaq Ma’qimikew: The Land Sings belies the complexity and sheer breadth of the work. A map affixed to the gallery floor notes the “SMU Art Gallery, Halifax NS” as a sort of starting point for a journey charted across 13 maps tacked up along the gallery wall, which ends at “East Bay Beach, Cape Breton Island, NS.” Through a pair of headphones, the viewer is able to listen to Johnson’s “song from and for the land.”

Perhaps the most arresting pieces are Williamson-Bathory’s video-based works, which visually dominate the gallery with their size and activity, and are unflinchingly, almost confrontational, in their blend of intimacy and engagement. Timiga nunalu, sikulu (My body, the land and the ice) features the artist reclining nude upon a vast icy landscape, a classical art pose and composition which is disrupted by the artist’s use of “uaajeerneq,” a Greenlandic mask dance that plays “with elements of fear, humour, and sexuality.” The collaboration here features Inuk multidisciplinary artist Tanya Tagaq performing a contemporaneous vocalization, and in the moment a soundtrack of sorts for both the original video, and to Williamson-Bathory’s transformation into uaajeerneq, culminating in a physical performance between the women that exudes a sort of intimate kinship, and a demand to the audience to “actively experience, witness and remember.”

Maria Hupfield’s “call” to conversation is demonstrated simply by Bag, an industrial felt replication of Anishinaabe floral beadwork designs that the artist carried throughout a number of her performances. Post-Performance / Conversation Action is Hupfield’s adaptation of the highly institutionalized artist talk into a form of intergenerational community building, centering Indigenous women.

Feet On the Ground, the participatory group performance response developed with IV Castellanos and Esther Neff, challenges the viewer to examine their role in decolonization, explicitly asking “do you want to surrender or take action?” In the gallery, the physical evidence of this active collaboration (surveyor’s tape, tiny foam tools, stark black banners) lays on the floor, and the silence of the objects highlights the dynamic human component necessary to enact.

Tania Willard’s Only Available Light is perhaps most explicit in its confrontation of the manipulation and exploitation of Indigeneity by settler colonialism, something it achieves with brilliant simplicity. By placing selenite crystals in front of a projector, the silent 1928 film The Shuswap Indians of British Columbia, originally commissioned by the National Museum of Canada, Willard disrupts the transmission of the images and forces the audience to reconsider what they’re viewing. This disruption is underscored by Leela Gilday’s sound composition, and the placement of these crystals with a birch bark basket “rescued” from an antique store, and glass Listerine bottles salvaged from Willard’s reserve. The bottles are filled with seed beads and digital prints of the selenite windows of a Roman cathedral, and illustrate children on their way to residential school.

#callresponse cannot simply be understood as a response to reconciliation or a catalogue of resistance. Rather, it is an ongoing project of engagement that rejects marginalization in favour of an exploration and prizing of Indigenous women artists, and the impact of their work.

As Hogue explains, “We wanted to represent the fullness, the critical, vital abundance of Indigenous women’s artistic practices, who are leading conversations and actions for the future. It’s also important to say, however; that the invitations were all premised on a consideration of long-term engagement within the artists’ respective communities while recognizing that the ‘community’ would also be different in each case. It’s really that on-the-ground work that brings all of these artists together.”

Kathleen M. Higgins is a K’jipuktuk (Halifax) based arts writer, public servant, and dog aunt.

Indigenous art challenges and overthrows colonial expectations. It combats shame. It pushes beyond prejudice, shimmers with resilience, and counteracts art history’s Eurocentric mythology.

First Nations Cree artist and curator, Kent Monkman’s exhibition Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience responds to the Canada 150 celebrations through the subversive lens of his gender-fluid alter ego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle.

Monkman frames the exhibition akin to Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice through narrator Miss Chief, whose voice guides viewers through didactic panels, and is equally part trickster, part truth-teller. Miss Chief is cocky, coy, and brilliant in her re-telling of Canada’s colonial history. You can’t help but want to have a cocktail with her, kick out Trudeau, and give her the title of Prime Minister.

In this queer re-mapping of Canadian art via the lens of his drag alter-ego, Monkman, both as curator and artist, critiques and Indigenizes the last 150 years of genocide via Miss Chief, my new favourite badass sassy narrator. Monkman’s masterwork addresses the dark and challenging aspects of Canada’s history.

Through positioning his own paintings, sculptures, and drawings in relationship to artifacts and artworks borrowed from national museums and private collections, Miss Chief time-travels and re-stories Canada’s history, which begins in present day, and circles back to Confederation.

Monkman’s paintings depict images of police and priests taking Indigenous youth from their parents, the signing of the Treaties, the horrifying realities of Residential Schools, and through his fabulous alter ego continuously combats homophobia. Miss Chief subverts the heteronormative/patriarchal gaze as she speaks to two-spirited sexuality, and two-spirited people, a third gender that’s always existed in Indigenous nations.

The touring exhibition Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience asks viewers to acknowledge the experience of Indigenous peoples, and re-frame the fundamental mythology of Canada’s history. Monkman’s art challenges a national narrative, and takes viewers to harrowing places as the work reflects on the effects of colonization in Indigenous communities, and addresses the ongoing effects of intergenerational trauma.

His “Urban Rez,” series looks at how Indigenous women are preyed upon, violated and murdered in a reflection on the epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls through the Cubist female nude. Monkman aims to bring attention to this violence, and depicts the tensions of Indigenous spirituality in an urban environment, and the Christianity that has institutionalized Indigenous people.

In the exhibition’s eloquently written and stylized brochure, Monkman’s introduction speaks to how he didn’t see the Indigenous experience of the last nineteenth century represented in the canon. He wondered: could his paintings reach across a hundred-and-fifty years to convey the colonial history of Indigenous people? Through the lens of Miss Chief’s “cunning use of runny mascara,” who artfully embodies the past, present and future, and his own interest in art history, Monkman has developed his own visual language. He confronts “the devastation of colonialism while celebrating the plural sexualities present in pre-contact Indigenous North America.”

Monkman’s mission is to “authorize Indigenous experience in the canon of art history that has heretofore erased us from view.” At the core of his work is an unabashed ability to visually depict trauma—violence, poverty, illness, the `60s scoop, the reserve system, residential schools, and ongoing racism—with heart, honesty, and intellectual zeal.
Yet, he doesn’t leave Indigenous people in the trauma, his work and Miss Chief illustrates a larger arc of survival, and power. He continues to assure viewers, “The fact that Indigenous people continue to survive all of this is a testament to our resiliency and strength.” Miss Chief’s ability to see the past, present, and future dismantles the Euro-centric idealism, and revises the canon.

As animals are central to Indigenous understandings, spirituality, and Traditional Knowledge systems, Monkman uses images of the bear and the beaver as the fur trade’s currency and emblem of colonial Canada. Christianized beavers pray to the heavens on the cover of the exhibition’s bible-esque brochure, making me wish every dodgy motel and hotel room was stocked with his text.

At the heart of his exhibition is the resiliency of Indigenous peoples, and the artist dedicates the exhibition to his grandmother Elizabeth Monkman, who “was shamed into silence in the face of extreme prejudice.”