Friday, October 7, 2011






Nigit’Stil Norbert, Representation (detail), 2011, stills from stop motion video

By Tony Martins  /  Images courtesy of the Ottawa Art Gallery

Given his baffling statement made at the 2009 G20 summit about Canada having “no history of colonialism,” I can think of few Canadians besides Stephen Harper more in need of a visit to one of the current exhibitions at the Ottawa Art Gallery: Decolonize Me.

While Canada has never laid claim to, say, verdant Caribbean islands, we certainly did expand our colony to Vancouver Island and many other huge tracts of land—both ceded and not—where Aboriginals had been rooted long before the first Europeans arrived.

The effects of this are inescapably a part of who we are today—the operative “we” here includes both Aboriginals and descendents of the colonizers, living together uneasily, inequitably, and still trying to figure the best ways forward. If a key step in that process is a greater understanding of our shared history, Decolonize Me is an important body of work for any Canadian to examine for its broad and frank look at the effects of colonization and decolonization on Aboriginal people.

A grouping of projects by six emerging or mid-career artists from across aboriginal peoples of Canada, the exhibition is the work of Heather Igloliorte, an independent curator from the Nunatsiavut Territory of Labrador and currently based in Ottawa.

Igloliorte told Guerilla that she “began building the exhibition around the initial idea of revealing the hidden histories of colonization in Canada and investigating how the dual processes of colonization and decolonization were impacting the daily lives of Aboriginal people.”

You could argue that the current mainstream approach to dealing with Canada’s past (and current) treatment of Aboriginal peoples is to politely acknowledge it, apologize, and then quickly purge the details from memory. This exhibition is a reminder of such details and the ongoing challenges that result, particularly for younger Aboriginals now attempting to “decolonize” or reclaim themselves and their heritage.

In her 2009 stop motion video called Representation, Nigit’Stil Norbert (Gwich’in / Yellowknife) juxtaposes the unbraiding of a woman’s hair with the binding and confining of a stereotypical “Indian” doll with braided rope. “As the braid unbinds, the doll becomes bound,” Norbert wrote in her artist’s statement. “It is believed by some First Nations people that braids are a physical representation and extension of our thought and of our spiritual essence, our strength.”

Preservation of that strength seems of primary concern for Norbert, who wrote in a statement about her Enframe series of photos also included in the exhibition, “Without traditional knowledge, and my grandmother’s specific beading style, I feel as though I would cease to exist.”

While many of the techniques and art-making methodologies involved in the exhibition may seem decidedly “Western” at first glance, Igloliorte feels that broadening the conception of Aboriginal art can only be a good thing—even if it wasn’t her primary objective. The central aim was instead to use “the brilliant communicative tool of art to change the way Canadians view their relationship to Aboriginal culture and to the history of colonization and imperialism in this country,” says Igloliorte.

To that end, works such as The longing Series (2011) by Sonny Assu (Laich-kwil-tach / Vancouver) point to the intersection between Aboriginal artworks and the Western world’s predilection for consumption even in art gallery settings.

Assu’s project includes mounted wedges of reclaimed cedar found discarded by log-home builders/exporters on Vancouver Island. The wedges happen to resemble the prefabricated Northwest Coast masks often found in gallery gift shops.

In his artist’s statement, Assu contends that his version of the masks “have an inherent beauty: the poetics of a chainsaw paired with centuries-old growth rings reveal the wisdom of these once majestic cedar trees … The felling of the rainforest enables us to display wealth in the form of luxury vacation homes, but we often give little thought to the waste produced by such affluence.”






Sonny Assu, The longing Series, 2011, reclaimed cedar, brass mount

The most disquieting project in the collection is also the most straightforward: Barry Pottle’s 2009 series of photographs documenting our federal government’s now-defunct Eskimo Identification Tag System.

Pottle (Inuit / Nunatsiavut, Labrador) contrasts enlarged, dehumanizing images of the numbered tags that Inuit were required to wear until around 1969 with re-humanizing portraits of smiling Inuit people who wore the tags.

Because Inuit names were considered difficult to write and pronounce, the tagging system was developed for census purposes: “Inuit people either wore or had to memorize their identification number,” Pottle writes in his artist’s statement. “Inuit even signed their names with their numbers, and Inuit artists often carved their numbers, instead of their names, into stone sculptures.”

Barry Pottle, Awareness #1, 2009, digital photograph



Such historical acknowledgment is both compelling and important, yet the irony of mounting Decolonize Me in a Western gallery is by no means lost on Igloliorte.

“Let's be frank; the Ottawa Art Gallery resides in one of the most ‘colonial’ historic properties in the city, the old courthouse,” she said. Consequently, attempts were made to “decolonize” the gallery space as much as possible.

“Doing things like including sound elements and having live performances are definitely more in line with decolonizing methodologies and Indigenous art practices,” said Igloliorte, “which do not privilege the visual the way that Western galleries have in the past. Inclusion of the artist's first-person narratives was another way to “contextualize the works was also a deliberate attempt to decenter curatorial and institutional authority over the art and artists,” explained the curator.

The historical symbolism of the OAG space itself may call into question whether the mounting of exhibitions such as Decolonize Me are themselves evidence of colonizing or decolonizing—or both. For Igloliorte, the issue is more about the growing acceptance and relevance for Aboriginal cultures in the Western art world.

“Couldn't infiltration be one of the first steps towards decolonizing ‘white man's’ art institutions?” the curator asks. “When contemporary Aboriginal artists started showing in fine art galleries twenty and thirty years ago it was cause for an uproar amongst those who thought Aboriginal art only belonged in anthropological institutions and natural history exhibitions … We are now building towards such a critical mass and there is hardly an institution in Canada that doesn't show Aboriginal art or work with Aboriginal curators. Who knows where we will be ten years from now?”

Assimilate this! (2011) is a fascinating two-channel video installation by Ottawa’s Bear Witness (Cayuga) that adds strong local representation to Decolonize Me. The exhibition resulted from a conversation between Igloliorte and former OAG contemporary curator Andrea Fatona, who had made a point of showcasing work that would draw a more diverse audience to OAG. Now that Fatona has moved on, we can only hope that such diversity continues.

Decolonize Me is more than compelling art; it is critical evidence of greater tolerance and integration on both sides of the Aboriginal/Western equation. Despite this progress, however, Stephen Harper and colonial Canada have a long way to go toward fully acknowledging the past and present. Igloliorte cites our education system as just one example.

“I can barely remember learning anything about the first peoples in high school, and if I hadn't sought it out deliberately, I wouldn't have had to learn anything about Aboriginal people in university, either,” said the curator. “I have colleagues with doctorates who've never studied any non-Western history. Aren't we all in the West? Are our histories so easily separated?”