Top: Lynn Gros Louis (Huron-Wendat). Bottom: Anita Lalo (Innu). Images courtesy Nadine St-Louis and Ashukan Cultural Space, Montreal

Think of the dreamcatcher and it evokes a familiar image. A hoop, a woven web, adorned with beads and feathers. The iconic talisman, said to have originated from the North American Ojibwe, is a common sight in most Canadian souvenir shops. But don’t believe its “Made in Canada” label. More likely, it’s been mass produced overseas and imported into Canada for pennies on the dollar. What may cost you $5 at the shop is costing Indigenous artists their livelihood.

Reclaim Indigenous Arts is an education campaign designed to inform the average consumer of just that. Many Indigenous people rely on arts to make a living, says Jay Soule, artist and co-founder of the initiative. The import and sale of mass-produced knock-offs of Indigenous art pieces is a problem for creators who have spent their lives learning the methods and cultural significance behind the goods. “It’s creating an atmosphere where consumers don’t understand the difference of real, handmade Indigenous arts and crafts,” says Soule.

Why would the average consumer spend $50 on a genuine dreamcatcher that uses real red willow and actual sinew for the web when they can buy an imported facsimile made of faux-feathers and plastic beads for just $10? That’s why the campaign is urging consumers to take action and spread the word as far as they can.

The initiative features a letter-writing campaign to local councillors, souvenir shops, and even Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, a template for which you can download from the website, sign, and send. The goal is to actually enforce a UN act that Canada has technically adopted, which gives Indigenous people the rights to protect their traditions, customs, and art, with the hope to eventually ban the import of cheaply made, inauthentic Indigenous art. Down the line, the initiative hopes to repatriate sacred objects and art that are either on display in museums and galleries or lay forgotten in archives—and were taken without permission from Indigenous communities in Canada. According to Soule, these ancient injustices set the stage for what’s happening today.

“This is why Canadians and businesses feel that it’s okay to do this,” says Soule, “because Canada itself has been the leader of cultural appropriation for the last 150 years. It sets a precedent for the devaluation of Indigenous arts and crafts.”

Today’s charged political climate and various high-profile incidents of cultural appropriation were the catalysts for Soule and Montreal-based entrepreneur and founder of the Ashukan Cultural Space, Nadine St-Louis, to launch the initiative.

The response has been positive, says Soule. In fact, the campaign has even garnered the attention of Hamilton city council, which is considering taking a closer look at ways to combat cultural appropriation.

In the meantime, he suggests being careful when purchasing so-called “Made in Canada” Indigenous crafts. Ask the shopkeeper who the artist is or which community the piece is from. “Most likely if they don’t know the answers to those questions, they’re not handmade,” says Soule.

After being taken away from their culture, many Indigenous people are connecting to their traditions through art—and are trying to make a living. It’s a task difficult enough without cheap rip-offs made in an overseas factory flooding the market. Soule brings to mind a powerful comparison, citing the recent police raids in Markham, Ont.’s Pacific Mall for selling counterfeit designer fashion brands.

“Why would the police raid a store on behalf of Louis Vuitton and Coach…but not give us the same respect and protect our arts?”

EXPLORE THE FEATURE:

Editor’s note by Gwen Benaway ● Prose by Kai Minosh Pyle ● Interview with Lindsay Nixon ● Visual art by Fallon Simard ● Interview with Ziibiwan Rivers ● Prose by Jaye Simpson ● Poetry by Arielle Twist

A note from the editor:

When I was asked to guest edit an Indigenous-specific supplement for This, my first instinct was to look toward the Trans, Two-Spirit, and Queer Indigenous voices that were emerging around me. Indigenous transness is a complex way of being in the world. As Billy-Ray Belcourt notes in his essay, The Poltergeist Manifesto, Queer Indigenous being is a double impossibility. Indigenous being is often viewed as an impossible selfness, a remnant of a past conquered people or an unimagined future. Queer Indigenous being is similarly located in either the sexual and gender diversity inheritance of our Two-Spirit ancestors or invisible in mainstream White Queerness. If Indigenous being broadly and Queer Indigenous being specifically are seen as impossible ways of being within settler society, Indigenous transness is absent from colonial imaginations.

The voices in this supplement resist the assumed impossibility of our lives to show the vibrancy of our living. When Jaye Simpson writes “how do I explain my queerness to the gatekeeper of my blood line?” they are speaking back to the impossibility of Indigenous Queer and transness, answering it with a clear invocation of radiant being. Arielle Twist writes, “I am reworking my reality” and “How does a tranny/ coexist with lust.” Her writing is not about a distant Indigenous transness rooted in the past, but a celebration of an Indigenous trans body here in the present. Indigenous transness in Twist’s poetry is a sexually active and fully present hereness that not only exists, but desires and moves through a world that refuses to allow our realities to exist.

In Kai Minosh Pyle’s work, they inhabit a rich complexity of Anishinaabe and Métis being. They write, “duality is binary with an ndn heart,” complicating notions of traditions, gender, and pushing softly back on notions of Two-Spirit being which exclude or erase transness. The line, “i’ve stopped using the word ‘traditional’ because i no longer know what it means and maybe never did. you should, too,” hits like a thunderstorm over a lake. There is beautiful “survivance” in Pyle’s work, interweaving anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe) language while questioning the ways we are taught to see Indigenous transness.

Nothing celebrates the beauty of Indigenous trans bodies more than Fallon Simard’s art. In the series of images within this submission, they show their chest after top surgery. Intercut with purple, pink, and other digital images, the artwork is a ceremony of trans ndn embodiment. Their artworks and online activism is grounded in a fierce and loving defence of Indigenous trans women and resists transphobia. Within these images, Indigenous being is present as a vital and complex living that cannot be regulated into absence or ghostly haunting. Lindsay Nixon’s interview is another window into the kinship-based notions of Indigenous Queerness and Transness. Their work as an activist, community organizer, academic, and writer is creating space and expanding profound conversations on Indigenous being across many disciplines and discourses. Within their words, Indigenous Transness is not merely an inheritance, but a vital gift to our communities.

Finally, my interview with Ziibiwan Rivers explores the legacy of toxic masculinity and the important of working within kinship and spaces that uplift us. Their music is exceptional, merging genres and modalities to envision beautiful new soundscapes. Taking kawaii into profound NDN realities, Ziibiwan’s work is everything I’ve ever wanted in the world. In all the vibrancy present in this issue, Indigenous being is a burning light, unrelenting in its intensity but gentle in its illumination.

I am immensely honoured—as an artist, as a trans girl, as an Anishinaabe and Métis woman—for the opportunity to uplift these incredible voices and celebrate the wonder of their work. We are not impossible. We have always been here, we are still here now, and we will be here in the future. Share with us in our living.

— GWEN BENAWAY

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Language is a living, breathing phenomenon that informs culture. Individual and societal identities are forged through the spoken and written word. It is a unifying force, “an invisible line from the heart into the past,” as Art Napoleon, a First Nations cultural educator of the Cree Nation, describes it.

Warm greetings in a variety of First Nations languages welcome you upon entering the “Language Forest” of the First Peoples’ Our Living Languages exhibit at the Royal B.C. Museum. The exhibit began in June 2014 and is now a permanent feature at the museum in Victoria. The atmosphere is inviting and understated, infused with a kind of humility and graciousness so often associated with First Nations people.

In another display is a map projected onto a wall that displays the various regions and dialects of First Nations languages in British Columbia. Each region corresponds to a button you press in order to highlight that region of the map. Most of the 34 First Nations languages in British Columbia are no longer spoken or understood.

In a display called “Latch Keys,” there are two keys that children of the Schools of Sorrow (the Kuper Island Indian Residential Schools) made out of a kitchen spoon and sardine cans in order to break into the food stores because they were starving.

In a small theatre in the middle of the exhibit, you watch a video that explores how a separation from land was the beginning of language loss. Because First Nations people identify so strongly with their relationship to the land and the natural world, the language structures that arise from this intrinsic relationship were compromised when the people were uprooted from their natural territories. The video also reveals hopeful measures to help these languages flourish again.

The “Cradle of Language” is one of the final components of the exhibit. It is a softly-lit cocoon-like space where you sit and listen to lullabies and stories. It is an enchanting finale to a beautiful expression of First Nations resilience and courage. The words are haunting and mysterious, imbued with a kind of paradoxical despair for what has been lost, yet hope for what still may come.

Joshua Whitehead has a lot to say. The 29- year-old Oji-cree, Two-Spirit otâcimow, or storyteller, often finds himself fuelled by anger: from the day-to-day frustrations to systemic-sized injustices, and Canada’s political climate and the ongoing colonization of Indigenous peoples in Canada. His collection of poetry, full metal indigiqueer, came from this fire, this feeling “of wanting to destroy shit. To destroy the canons that I was forced to read for two and a half degrees.”

Whitehead started publishing poems while working on a degree in English and a minor in Creative Writing at the University of Winnipeg. Then, inspired by Nisga’a poet writer Jordan Abel’s “weird but amazing Indigenous experimental poetry,” Whitehead realized he could write an anthology of his own. He wanted to tell the underrepresented story of Indigenous people who are Two-Spirit and queer, or, as Whitehead calls it, “Indigiqueer.”

Whitehead realized that many of his poems already had a narrative arc that connected them. He also discovered that a protagonist was already woven through the works: an “epic poetic hero(ine),” an “Indigiqueer trickster,” or, as Whitehead fondly refers to them: “Zoa.”

In full metal indigiqueer, Zoa goes on a journey and takes on literary and pop culture figures like William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Sylvia Plath, J.K. Rowling, Lana Del Rey, and RuPaul.

The result is an epic odyssey that he likens to Beowulf. But Whitehead’s version of an epic is a “super queer organism,” one that is wild, feral, vibrant, sex-positive, beautiful, and also dirty at times, he says. For Whitehead, it was important that he created something that placed Indigiqueer people in the contemporary world. He does this “to remove us from the was, to remove us from this romanticized anthropological notion and place us into the now—into the future.”

According to Whitehead, some people call full metal indigiqueer poetry, some say it reads too much like prose, others call it experimental. For him, being an otâcimow encompasses all of the above. It’s why Whitehead also began working on Jonny Appleseed, his debut novel, which is to be released this April.

His work is an extension of his own body. He’s even tempted to call his poems “biostories.” “They’re not memoir, they’re not nonfiction, they’re not quite fiction,” he says. “Perhaps it’s just because as an Indigenous queer person I don’t have access to write as a disembodied person. I’m tied to my body. The world tells me so every chance it can get. You’re brown, you’re Indigenous, you’re queer, you’re too femme.” Whitehead points out how many writers can shed themselves in their writing, to write only for the sake of story. “Literature, the act of speaking, the act of writing, is a wholly political act,” he says—and he can’t remove the body from that.

But these days, Whitehead also finds himself writing from hope, he says. This was the case with Jonny Appleseed, which came from him focusing his energy on his communities and the love that he wants to give back. He cites an “Indigenous renaissance” of literatures being rewarded, something that only furthers his hope. “I’ve nurtured anger into a state of excitement and love for the Indigeneity and Indigenous literatures that will come beside it.”

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ROBERT BOYER, IMAGIO PIETATIS—A NEW WAVE FOR OZONE, 1990, OIL, ACRYLIC, GRAPHITE AND CHALK PASTEL ON BLANKET, 229.5 × 249 CM. THE MENDEL ART GALLERY COLLECTION AT REMAI MODERN. PHOTO COURTESY OF REMAI MODERN.

Nestled along the riverbank of the South Saskatchewan River in Saskatoon stands the Remai Modern, the new contemporary art museum that currently houses Indigenous artifacts from artists of the Treaty 6 territory—the land on which this $84.6 million facility resides.

Determined by the river, a collaborative exhibition by Ontario-based artists Duane Linklater and Tanya Lukin Linklater, is a part of the museum’s inaugural exhibition, Field Guide. Focusing on Indigenous ideas, histories, objects, and forms, the exhibit is meant to rouse the past, present, and future of Indigenous art within the province with the hope that it will inspire deeper conversations about the history of Indigenous art being taken and removed from communities.

“We thought it was important to centre their voices in the museum,” said Duane Linklater in a media interview. “To have a discussion about the role of the museum, the development of the museum, the past relationship, the current relationship, and hopefully think about the future relationship with the Indigenous people from that area.”

At 12,000 square metres, the opening of this spectacularly spacious museum has been revered by art critics and was even featured in the New York Times as a must-see.

Placed in such a humble location, the hype of the Remai Modern may just be the catalyst that lifts Indigenous arts to the world stage.

While this grassroots-led exhibit is long overdue, it’s one that has the ability to become an example to museums in Canada: rather than trying to buy off or bypass the communities they reside within, they can include them in the process and rely on them as a foundation.

Slated to open in the fall of 2018, the Indigenous art park named ᐄᓃᐤ (ÎNÎW) River Lot 11∞, pronounced (EE-NU) River Lot 11, is a partnership between the City of Edmonton, Confederacy of Treaty No. 6 First Nations, Métis Nation of Alberta, Edmonton Arts Council, and six Indigenous artists whose works will be permanently exhibited there.

Located within Queen Elizabeth Park in Edmonton’s North Saskatchewan River Valley, the park will display six unique pieces of art created by Canadian Indigenous artists. Carrying the theme “the stories of This Place,” each piece will showcase different ways Indigenous people connect to the land. For the city, the park is an “opportunity to restore, reimagine, and reclaim a part of Edmonton’s history that is often under-recognized.”

While the original owner of the park’s lot was Métis landowner Joseph McDonald, the park is actually located on ancestral lands of the Indigenous peoples whose descendants entered into treaty with the British Crown, resulting in the territory opening for settlement. And the banks of the river where it’s situated were used by First Nations for travel, trade, ceremony, and sustenance for thousands of years.

“The profound legacy left by our Kôhkominawak (our grandmothers) and Kimosôminawak (our grandfathers) is one of the sacred areas used to cross Kisiskâcêwansîpî (Saskatchewan River), where many ceremonies and rituals took place before crossing this majestic sanctuary,” steering committee member Elder Jerry Saddleback told media.

“Our original peoples of this area held sacred knowledge that gave them a close spiritual relationship with our Mother Earth deity. She is called the sacred river, as with all water of the Earth, Her own breast milk, nurturing all of humanity.”

ᐄᓃᐤ (ÎNÎW) is a Cree word meaning “I am of the Earth.”

“Indigenous Peoples, since time immemorial, have had a close relationship to the river valley,” said City of Edmonton Indigenous relations director Mike Chow. He says this is why ᐄᓃᐤ (ÎNÎW) River Lot 11∞ is the convergence of many narratives, and brings together the love of natural park spaces and public art with an opportunity to celebrate and amplify Indigenous cultures.

The chief of the Papaschase band whose traditional territory was once located in south Edmonton before it was pushed out via way of multiple annexations, says the park is a good way for locals to learn about Indigenous history.

“I’ve been saying for years that we need more Aboriginal art in this town,” said Papaschase Chief Calvin Bruneau. “It helps to beautify the local area. And in the process of collaboration, metro Edmonton can learn to work with Indigenous people better to create understanding and acceptance.”

Photos by Ryan Parker. From top to bottom: Untitled by Tiffany Shaw-Collinge; Mikikwan by Duane Linklater; Turtle by Jerry Whitehead; Iskotew by Amy Malbeuf; Preparing to Cross the Sacred River by Marianne Nicholson; and Reign by MaryAnne Barkhouse.

Ghost Days by Terrance Houle. Video still courtesy Alex Moon.

Terrance Houle, whose Blackfoot name is Iinniiwahkiimah (Buffalo Herder), is searching for bricks from his junior high and parents’ residential schools. He will bring all three bricks back to the IXL brick factory in Medicine Hat, where he will film a performance of him smashing them until they become fine dust. His parents will sing a healing song while this is going on, and after the performance, Houle will sprinkle the dust back on top of a hill in the original settlement place of his people. Houle’s performance, which will tour parts of Canada this summer, is called Ghost Days.

Mainstream arts organizations are making attempts to partner with Indigenous artists to celebrate Canada’s 150th year, but some members of the Indigenous arts community suspect some of these relationships are not genuine.

This isn’t the first time that mainstream arts organizations have shown a sudden interest in collaboration. Ryan Rice, chair of the Ontario College of Art and Design’s Indigenous visual culture program, says that this has happened on every colonial anniversary. Mainstream arts organizations feel a need to represent the Indigenous population during these periods, resulting in community engagements that aren’t meaningful and often temporary. This poses the risk of cultural appropriation and misrepresentation.

Isidra Cruz, Indigenous arts officer at the Toronto Arts Council and Associate Indigenous Arts Officer at the Ontario Arts Council, says that a lot of mainstream arts organizations received Canada 150 funding for Indigenous projects, while Indigenous organizations did not. The latter are already working on projects that accurately represent Indigenous voices, and this work could have been amplified, she says. “It’s really frustrating as an Indigenous artist,” and it shows what the government thinks reconciliation is versus the reality.

Sometimes art pieces are made out to be Indigenous projects, but there may be little to no Indigenous control in the creative process. In order to avoid misrepresentation, it’s important for Indigenous artists to have sovereignty over their own projects, says Clayton Windatt, executive director of the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective. Rice says this can be done through meaningful collaboration and consultation.

Indigenous artists have been excluded from the mainstream arts community for many years and so have formed their own organizations. During the early 1970s, seven Indigenous artists started meeting to discuss the prejudices they faced as artists in Canada. Incorporated in 1974, the group later became known as the Indigenous Group of Seven. After this, Native Earth Performing Arts was formed in 1982, Native Women in the Arts in 1993 and the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective in 2005.

In recent years, the relationship between Indigenous and mainstream arts communities has improved. People have become more educated about Indigenous issues causing national and provincial funding councils to change and relationships to develop. Three years ago, in response to the request for separate funding for the creation of Indigenous art, the Toronto Arts Council implemented Indigenous Arts Project grants. Cruz says that while this change is positive, it is late to the game.

The Indigenous arts scene blends both artistic and traditional practices with contemporary European arts practices. Prior to colonization—and currently—art and culture were closely intertwined with one another, which is widely misunderstood by the mainstream arts community. Houle likes to incorporate traditional themes of spiritualism into his work, and has used his art as a healing tool.

For Houle, art is about playing to the spirits, which he believes has been largely forgotten in the Canada 150 preparations. “I just want people to know my contemporary Indigenous experience and find some sort of common ground within that.”

Shelley Niro’s visual art and film have explored a borderless continent, power and pop culture, life on First Nations reserves, and much more – never without a sense of self. Niro, born in 1954 in Niagara Falls, New York, is a Mohawk artist from the Six Nations Reserve near Brantford, Ont. Living in Brantford, she works in film, photography, paint, and installation art to illuminate subjects—often herself, friends or relatives—in ways that talk back to normalized stereotypes of Indigenous women. This year, Niro is one of eight recipients of the Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts, and a group exhibition of their works will be on view starting April 8 at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. This recently spoke with Niro about her artistic process and the inspiration she draws from those closest to her.

When did you first get involved in art making, and what was your path to becoming a working artist?

I made art most of my life, but I really began to do it on a full-time basis around the mid-’80s. I said if I really want to become an artist, I have to develop some confidence in what I’m doing and stop doubting it. I just started to follow that path, to stop questioning what I’m doing and just go for it.

The photograph that drew me to your work was “The Rebel” (1991), which then led me to Mohawks in Beehives series (1991) and to your 1998 film Honey Moccasin. How did those projects come together?

In those works I used my family—my mother and my sisters. Mohawks in Beehives, that was right after the Oka Crisis, and I wanted to do something that was kind of uplifting, something that was not serious. During that time, every time we opened up the newspaper there was always something about, if not Mohawks, the Native population in Canada. It was always dark and dreary and you’d always see stories of suicides on reserves, poverty, and how Natives are taking money from the taxpayers. So, I was challenged to either try to change a perspective or just do something for myself so that it would make me not so depressed about what I’m reading.

“The Rebel” (1991)

Why did you choose to use family members and friends as models?

I really like using family and friends because it gives me an opportunity to be with them, even when they’re not modelling, but I can still respond to them as I’m working on a photograph. And I’m archiving them as well, as I keep using them.

A lot of your recent work, such as “Memories of Flight” or Flying Woman series, seems to look in two directions: inward and outward, to the past and toward the future. Is that how you see it?

Yeah, I do. I think you always have to look to the future, because if you do that there’s always hope there. If you stop looking toward the future, something’s missing. I think, too, looking at the past, looking through memory, and acknowledging ancestors is also something I find I have to do in my work, because it’s an element I grew up with and I want to continue doing that.

“Flying Woman”

How do you think oral histories translate into painting and still photography?

I can’t literally translate what the oral history is, but I think it’s important to know that history was passed down that way. I don’t like to be so literal in my art making that it’s like, “This is oral history.” I think it’s something that generates and inspires me to continue and to be inventive in the work itself. I get a lot of comfort knowing that those histories have been spoken about for many years, that I’m not just starting at zero. It comes through foundations and layers of knowledge that I know about and my friends and family know about as well. It’s just important to know that it’s not new.

You often have many types of media in one work, whether it’s performance, still photography, or 16 mm film. How do you navigate these different elements?

I see film as sculpture. As you’re shaping your film, you have to bring elements that will make it a lot stronger and entertaining. You don’t want to make a boring film. So I really try to think of those things, especially because I know Native people will be watching it. I want to put elements in there that they can relate to and hopefully appreciate.

Photos courtesy of Shelley Niro.