In niigaanikwewag at the Art Gallery of Mississauga, indignation is met by powerful grace
Mississauga show is devoted to works by Indigenous women whose weapons of choice are determination and persistence, writes Murray Whyte.
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“The Onondaga Madonna,” a poem by Duncan Campbell Scott, a pre-eminent man of Canadian letters and, not coincidentally, one of the chief architects of the federal government’s Indigenous assimilation efforts, feigns sympathy with patronizing flourish: “She stands full-throated and with careless pose,” he writes, “This woman of a weird and waning race/The tragic savage lurking in her face/Where all her pagan passion burns and glows.”
I could go on, but let’s not, because it’s here, in her angry handwritten scrawl, that Meryl McMaster has chosen to let Scott’s words fade to a vanishing point, an oblivion of irrelevance to which they deeply belong. It’s hard to choose a signature piece in
niigaanikwewag, the Art Gallery of Mississauga’s stirring exhibition devoted to works by Indigenous women but, for me, McMaster’s
Truth to Power comes close. Alongside Scott’s paean to assimilation, the artist, who is Siksika Cree, looks placidly to the camera amid a stand of trees dusted with snow. Neither waning nor tragic, McMaster is self-possessed and confident; we see, in her juxtaposition, what has survived and what has not.
Niigaanikwewag (which, in the Anishinaabe language, is the feminine plural of “they who lead”) is like that: meeting indignation with a stoic, powerful grace, its works turn to a roster of female artists whose weapons of choice are determination and persistence — quiet defiance versus declarations of war.
Not that the latter would be unjustified. Scott and the generations of bureaucrats that followed his lead famously favoured a solution to “the Indian problem” that would deepen its assimilation procedures “until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic, and there is no Indian question, and no Indian department,” as he told Parliament in 1920.
But
niigaanikwewag, guest curated by McMaster University’s Rhéanne Chartrand, chooses to vivify what is, not condemn what was. Stil, don’t mistake its quiet resolve for acquiescence: Rebecca Belmore’s Fringe, in which a deep scar runs down the back of an Indigenous woman, fitted with a fringe of beads, suggests violence met with a will to endure; Rolande Souliere’s
Modern Day Syllabics is an array of graphic panels imprinted with symbols used by several Indigenous groups to revive languages nearly erased by the residential school system.
They run the gallery’s full length, controlling your movement, and that’s precisely the point. Souliere makes a quiet demand to pay mind to what was lost as she asserts it survival, imposing its subtle insistence with a physical presence.
Other works here toggle from strident declarations of self to silent determinations to carry on. A pair of works by Vanessa Dion Fletcher use traditional bead work to depict menstrual stains (both a symbol of Indigenous peoples’ continued existence against the odds, I’d think, and a poke at the “blood quantum” notion of genetic proportions that make one “Indigenous enough” to gain official status in the government’s eyes).
Meanwhile,
Rita Letendre, an iconic abstract painter who just turned 90, kept her own Indigenous heritage tucked away her entire career, making the reasonable judgment that being a woman in the men’s club of Les Automatistes was challenge enough. Her two works here speak of resolve: to go on, against practicality and reason, and to forge for herself the life she couldn’t deny.
Niigaanikwewag means to describe leaders and each of the artists here are, in their way: Christi Belcourt, the towering activist for Indigenous cultural revival, whose intricate
This Painting Is a Mirror is a constellation of tiny gestures that make a verdant, thriving whole; Tanya Lukin Linklater, whose performance piece
The Treaty Is in the Body is part of a pioneering practice to inscribe colonial violence in a project of contemporary dance.
One piece, though, makes the connection a little more clearly. Caroline Monnet’s
Creatura Dada is a video piece capturing a bacchanalian celebration around a table of plenty: the decadent slurp of oysters, the free flow of champagne, the peeling of grapes, enjoyed by a clutch of Indigenous women to whom such just deserts have rarely been offered.
The entire procession is led by Alanis Obomsawin, a living legend of a documentary film director who, now 85, knows something of Indigenous endurance and mettle. Surrounded by a youthful cohort, Obomsawin is a figure of rapturous joy, and one feels the passing of a torch from a past marked by determination to a future of ebullient vitality — a future made possible by the stoic perseverance of the past.
“She who leads,” yes; but to where is the question
niigaanikwewag looks, in its plainspoken grace, to answer most fully.
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iigaanikwewag continues at the Art Gallery of Mississauga, 300 City Centre Dr., to April 15. See artgalleryofmississauga.com for more information. Four Lands, a public engagement project about shared lands from Jumblies Theatre, in concert with the exhibition, has its “grand finale” April 12. Please see www.jumbliestheatre.org/jumblies/current-projects/four-lands
