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.

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

“There wasn’t much napping,” says Kym Greeley, as she makes us espressos as we begin our interview. She has just returned from driving across Canada, from Vancouver to St. John’s, via the Trans-Canada Highway. Greeley shared the mileage with her sister, Joann.

When her sister was driving, Greeley took photographs using a dashboard-mounted tripod, which was constructed to capture the driver’s perspective through the windshield. Then, when it was Greeley’s turn to drive, she asked her sister to press the shutter upon her request.“You were kind of forced to always pay attention to what you were looking at and what you were seeing, which was really fun,” says Greeley.

This attention is central to Greeley’s work. She is a landscape painter who observes the ways we interact with nature every day, and reflects this complexity back to the viewer. At the centre of her work is a relationship to Newfoundland and Labrador, which is continuously evolving.

Physical and visual access to the landscape changed significantly in 1966 when the Newfoundland portion of the Trans-Canada highway was completed, spanning 900 kilometres between St. John’s and Channel-Port aux Basques. Previously, the most accessible way to travel was by boat, but road access created an entirely new set of sightlines and approaches to some remote communities, carved through the wilderness.

While representations of this place can linger in a bucolic aesthetic calibrated for sale in souvenir shops—picturesque harbours, windswept cliffs and impossibly bright jellybean houses—Greeley’s paintings offer another view.

Greeley uses the car windshield as a frame, and the highway as a major compositional element in her paintings. Objects often cropped out of tourism brochures, such as road signs, guardrails and lane markings, become significant features. The aesthetic of the highway is reflected in her refined style. Like the graphics used on highway signs, each element is clear and readable. Layered together, however; they create intricate compositions and complex, open-ended narratives

Common Occurrences, Greeley’s most recent exhibition at Christina Parker Gallery, was created during a long winter. In Be Real, a reflective speed bump sign is illuminated against dark woods. There is a sharp curve in the road and snow on the shoulders. While you are reminded of the fragility of human bodies, and the destructive power of speeding cars, the hazards here seem to extend further than road safety.

Sometimes her colours are an exercise in subtlety, where a flat expanse of water meets a pale expanse of sky. Drama happens in bright white snow drifting across dark rock, or ice piled up along the shoreline. Sometimes I Feel Too Much is a stomach-fluttering vista where the ground seems to drop straight down to the North Atlantic just below the bottom of the frame. It’s the kind of image that only seems possible in winter. There is the ever-present danger of slipping, but also the delicious solitude of travel after tourist season.

Common Occurrences also focuses on another site of human intersection with the landscape – the lookout point. It Doesn’t Mean Anything at All features a rectangular sign, in silhouette at the centre of the frame, in front of a vast bay, punctuated by a pale strip of land at the horizon. There is no text visible, yet its presence indicates some interpretation, or mediation of this landscape was deemed necessary.

Greeley describes lookouts as places “that the community has designated as their optimum viewpoints.” Located conveniently off the highway, these locations present an idealized, camera-ready view of the landscape that never includes the road itself. “Most people when they get to these lookouts, don’t even exit their vehicle,” says Greeley. “They just feel satisfied by taking a picture out the windshield or out the side, and then Instagramming it or Facebooking it, to prove that they’ve visited that place. It is enough interaction for them.”

But lookouts also serve a practical purpose for those living and working in rural areas.

“The lookouts are the highest points, so those places are where you have cell service and so a lot of people travel to the spaces from their cabins, or just stop to check their phone,” says Greeley.

“We’re guilty of it, too. We go up the big hill to watch the sunset and check our emails, take a few snaps and drive back down to put the kids to bed.”

This visual mediation between human and landscape provides another framework for Greeley.

“I’m kind of interested in the technological connection through another object. The fixed compositional frame mimicking the compositional frame of your phone or your iPad, and what you’re looking at through that.”

Greeley’s frames take in more than most. They foreground interpretive panels, retain walls, view platforms and handrails. Her work illustrates more markers of human presence and human perspective on the landscape. It is these markers that remind us of our own subject position within the places we inhabit.

Greeley describes herself as “somebody whose most comfortable language is image.” She has developed a distinct vocabulary of form, texture and colour that she employs with precision, like an iconography for this place. But hers is also a poetic sensibility—using formal structure and exacting detail to explode layers of connection and meaning.

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.”

Andrew Cairns and Benjamin Woodyard, Big Drip , 2014. 1. 7 x 1. 2 m.
Photo: Sam Stewart

Andrew Cairns doesn’t so much paint, as reveal. In a body of work spanning 60 plus paintings over five years, Cairns experiments with colour and line as his own Op Art revival.

Propelled by the interplay of pigments and rooted in process, Cairns’ large-scale, geometric pieces are inspired by a deep love of quilts. His decorative abstractions are in contrast to the usual mode of Maritimes’ landscapes, while celebrating a visual style influenced by local craft tradition. Taking instinctual action, Cairns’ work honours memory through the contrast of bold, modern expressions.

“You learn a lot from limiting the possibilities. I look at the canvas as a problem I’m trying to solve in a visual way.” -ANDREW CAIRNS

“Initially, I felt I was doing something that others weren’t and it helped it stand out a bit,” says Cairns. Experimenting with drawing, printmaking, photography and video, Cairns, “stumbled on” the method of using tape on his canvasses while painting. “I use tape as a resist, which is fabric term,” he explains. “The tape stops other colours from going on certain parts of the fabric.” He adds that making the patterns fit into one inch boundaries “without being boring is a challenge, but then the colours are very intuitive.”

“It has been quite a learning curve figuring out what colours do what together. Some colours look so good together,” says Cairns.

“The process is kind of funny because I’ll put the tape down, then the different colours, and I won’t really know what the final product is going to look like until I take the tape off.”

The artist compares his work to that of post-painterly minimalist Frank Stella: “But I don’t even know if I had really seen Stella before I did the first painting in his style,” he says, musing that Stella’s look has simply seeped into popular culture. “I’ve been drawn to the 1970s in general and the aesthetic of that time. I think it fits well with how I feel about making work.”

“I want to offer a body of work in a uniform style, to define what I’m doing. In pushing a very specific output, I’m freer to deviate,” says Cairns.  “You learn a lot from limiting the possibilities. I look at the canvas as a problem I’m trying to solve in a visual way.”

Andrew Cairns, Lo-Deco, 2015. Acrylic on canvas, 1. 4 x . 9 m.

Cairns describes his work as communicating at the level of direct visual appeal. “It’s a bit optical but not overwhelming, as some Op Art can be quite hard on the eyes,” he says. “But working big, often six feet by six feet, taping, is a nice way to tackle a large space without it being too much. The result is pretty clean but also maze-like.”

Over fields of contrasting colours and shapes, Cairns work is informed by textiles and handicraft. “I’ve always really liked quilts. Some of my early stuff really intentionally mimicked the look of quilts,” says Cairns. “It can be powerful and provocative to bring decoration in. It’s unexpected and not always seen as high fine art. I know some people can feel like it’s a slippery slope, but I don’t feel that way.”

He acknowledges the unique challenges of being a Maritime artist, based on PEI: “In my experience, being an artist in the Maritimes seems like such an untenable position sometimes—who you’re going to sell work to, where you’re going to show—whereas it seems like you can make a valid argument about doing design.”

His work spans the past and present, pointing to the tension between the exalted and ordinary. Sentiment and impulse drive Carins’ hypnotizing monuments. “They’re fairly open to whatever people want to read into them. They’re a space for projection.”

Above and below: Mario Doucette, “La dispersion des Acadiens (after Henri Beau),” 91 x 152 cm, oil on wood 2015-2016.

In the summer of 2004, I worked in the gift shop at the beautiful Grand-Pré historic site in the Annapolis Valley, where visitors learn about the history of the Acadian people and their expulsion from their homeland at the hands of the British Army. I had been politely let go from my previous job at a café, due, I suspect, to my penchant for listening to music and daydreaming rather than polishing glassware or serving customers. At the Boutique de Grand- Pré, I was free to play what I wanted from the selection of Acadian music for sale. My go-to was Madame Butlerfly, Edith Butler’s little-known foray into New Age music. Sitting nestled amongst Acadian stoneware pottery and hooked rugs, listening to a rendition of Grain de Mil that featured backing vocals sung in what I believe to be Mandarin, I had a clear view of historical murals of Acadians building dykes and tilling the reclaimed soil in bonnets and aprons or breeches and high socks. Artist Mario Doucette has never liked these depictions.

“It always bothered me. I tried to research the clothing of the time, but in my art it never looked right.”

He remembers being introduced to similar images as a teenager. In his earlier series, Histoires and Bagarres, Doucette uses line drawing and a naive painting style as a child’s lens in an attempt to go back to the romanticized, mythologized version of Acadian history he learned as a kid and imagine it differently. In his vibrant, unaffected yet fantastical drawings and paintings from these series, you can sense the teenage urge to embellish the margins of the quaint, folkloric depictions found in interpretive centres and textbooks.

Basing his paintings on extensive research, Doucette promotes aspects of Acadian history that have been obscured in popular portrayals inspired by works like Longfellow’s epic poem Evangeline, where Acadians are presented as tragic figures and passive victims. “In my paintings I highlight heroes that people should know who we don’t learn about in school. We didn’t know that there was an Acadian resistance, we didn’t know that there were people like [resistance leaders] Father Le-Loutre and Joseph Broussard.”

“We only have one perspective of our history, the perspective of the British. The histories were written based on their accounts.” —MARIO DOUCETTE

However, there is a question mark hanging over Doucette’s work. In his paintings, Acadians do not wear the folkloric costumes I remember from the Grand-Pré historic site; instead, they are depicted as translucent figures, or their bodies are scribbled over, or they are naked. More recently, in Harias, they are shown wearing classical robes. These choices underscore a key issue in Doucette’s project: the absence of a historical record that reflects the Acadian perspective.

“It’s a people that existed, but we don’t know a lot of details of how they lived … We only have one perspective of our history, the perspective of the British. The histories were written based on their accounts.”

Faced with the impossibility of a truly accurate version of Acadian history, Doucette has accepted that he cannot go around the traditional narrative, but must go through. Rather than feel limited by the lack of alternatives to the historical tradition, he chooses to see the freedom that his playful approach to historical narrative and his outsiders’ perspective afford him. “I have an incredible liberty to play with these ideas and imagine what it was like in Acadia because we really don’t know.”

Mario Doucette, “Boishébert fut blessé à la jambe – colour study,” 30 x 40 cm, Ink and coloured pencils on paper, 2017.

Above and below: Mario Doucette, “Les Acadiens de la Nouvelle-Écosse (régime anglais) – colour study,” 27 x 40 cm, Ink and coloured pencils on paper, 2017.

If Doucette’s work from his first series strongly recalls the aesthetics of outsider art, it is not by accident. Doucette has a strong admiration for self-taught artists like Henry Darger and appreciates the freedom afforded by operating entirely outside the system. The marginal role that Acadians have had in telling their own history makes them outsiders too.

Including anachronisms and mixing his own inventions with historical symbols, Doucette creates parallels between his own fantastical choices and those of historical artists. Symbols like the British lion and Superman, American myth par excellence, confront each other in his art and reveal the absurdity inherent in imposed external narratives. In this historical world of toppled idols, Doucette is free to dress his Acadians how he wants. “I thought if we have no stories of Acadians from their lifetime, then they kind of exist of out of time. So I continued drawing them nude, and now I put them in Roman robes, which ties in with the neoclassical style I’m attempting.”

At first glance, the meticulous neoclassical oil paintings of Harias are a major departure from the playful outsider aesthetic of Doucette’s earlier art, but they can almost be seen as parts of a larger installation. In his exhibitions, he decorates the gallery to recreate a salon or a history museum and viewers enter another world. “The message of propaganda is transmitted in multiple ways, including through the context the work is presented in.” He calls his work propaganda art and it’s clear that this is how he looks at all historical art. Doucette appropriates the trappings of official, noble art, from the robes to the gallery walls, to give weight to his new versions of Acadian history.

“People behave differently in this kind of space. They tend to whisper.” The alternate history first imagined in the naive style of a child’s drawing now comes alive and we are able to step into it. Doucette recognizes that his subject and his audience are very localized—he says that he has Acadian viewers in mind as he creates his work—and yet he hopes everyone who sees his work will appreciate the global appeal. His engagement with historical absence has lead him to engage with universal questions about historiography, the political role of historical art, and what possibilities there are to move beyond received identities and narratives. Like a daydreamer in the midst of a history lesson, Mario Doucette is immersed in tradition, looking for freedom, for his art and for the Acadian identity.

The Colours of Pride NFB film from 1973

As Visual Arts News Research intern, I spend a lot of time digging around the Nova Scotia Archives. Recently, I discovered an interesting pair of film advertisements, which the National Film Board (NFB) sent to VANS in the late 1970s. One film portrayed Indigenous people in visual art, while the other depicted Indigenous people as visual art. In the middle of this 150th year of colonialism, seeing both films together feels like an accurate snapshot of the roots of our cultural mis/understandings of the history of Canada today. 

The 1973 documentary The Colours of Pride, hosted by ground breaking curator/art historian/administrator and multi- disciplinary artist Tom Hill, centers around four highly celebrated Indigenous artists, including three members of the influential Professional Native Indian Artists Association (PNIAA)—known colloquially  as the “Indian Group of Seven.” The film (available here via a campus subcribtion) features compelling interviews with Daphne Odjig, Alex Janvier, Norval Morrisseau and Allan Sapp, each of whom has their own unique aesthetic but shared a desire to reflect on their cultural identities. For instance, Anishinaabe artist Morrisseau, aka Copper Thunderbird—the founder of the Woodland style movement, dubbed the “Picasso of the north”—takes inspiration from his family’s oral traditions, vibrantly depicting Ojibwe legends, visions and dreams. By contrast,  Sapp’s paintings are more grounded in everyday realities, featuring his Cree community’s experiences on the Red Pheasant Reserve in north central Saskatchewan. 

Paul Kane, Assiniboine hunting buffalo, National Gallery of Canada

Paul Kane, Flathead woman with child, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Achat, legs William Gilman Cheney

In his sensitive depiction of his subjects, Sapp’s work contrasts Irish born Canadian painter Paul Kane’s embellished depictions of Indigenous people from about a 100 years earlier. The second film I stumbled across,  Paul Kane Goes West (1972),  explores Kane’s popular paintings and journal sketches from mid-1800s—credited as the first settler depiction of Indigenous peoples between Toronto and Vancouver. The film relies on voice-over readings from Kane’s journal and images from

Paul Kane Goes West NFB film postcard

his journal sketches—now considered an accurate depiction of First Nations people during that time—and his studio paintings, which liberally take inspiration from his sketches. The Canadian Encyclopedia describes his studio work as using the “stylistic discourse of his day: idealized Aboriginal people, Europeanized landscapes, muted colours.” From today’s more critical viewpoint, one can view Kane’s romanticized studio paintings as contributing to harmful stereotypes, such as the “Noble Savage,” unlike some of the more authentic fieldwork he recorded in his journals. Critics such as Arlene Gehmacher, a curator at the Royal Ontario Museum, have noted a number of factual inaccuracies in Kane’s paintings. For instance, his Flat Head Woman and Child, Caw-wacham appears to be a mashup of a few of his watercolour paintings, fusing characteristics from three tribes into his depiction of a mother and child. 

The legacy and influence of the artists in these films can be seen in Canadian contemporary arts today. Celebrated Cree and Irish multi-disciplinary artist Kent Monkman directly responds to artists like Paul Kane by reclaiming and queering the historical representation of Indigenous people from mid 1800s, as well as continuing the trailblazing legacy and tradition of the members of the “Indian group of Seven.” This year, 150 Indigenous artists including Monkman, as well as Mi’kmaq artists Ursula Johnson, Jordan Bennett and Alan Syliboy, received $10 000 each from the REVEAL Indigenous Art Awards, funded through donations and sponsors, to continue the creation of art by them, not about them.