Healing from a painful past
Indigenous artists focus on the past, present and future of their people
ABANDONED CONTAINERS filled with quilt-making tools and materials speak of loss and pain.
This is one of many thought-provoking pieces in “… since forever …” an exhibition at the Carnegie Gallery.
The exhibition comprises installation work, paintings and textiles by three well-established local Indigenous artists: Barbara-Helen Hill, Elizabeth Doxtater and Tracey Anthony.
Hill creates with fabric, embellishing a big wall hanging like “Tree of Life” with appliquéd butterflies, beads, and tiny dolls.
“The Quilts,” by comparison, looks unfinished. Hill invites us to look down on two baskets and a wooden crate filled with folded fabric, unfinished quilts, pins and scissors.
“I am learning to quilt,” Hill tells me. “I was showing a mini quilt to Elizabeth Doxtater and she suggested, because I couldn’t find a piece in my imagination for the show, that I put in some quilts to represent the pain of losing a child. I could relate to that, being a woman, a mother, grandmother and great-grandmother.”
Hill’s work also reflects on the history of the residential schools.
“Our people, the original people, were placed in residential schools to beat their language out of them, to educate them but only to a certain degree,” she says.
“These children were, in many cases, taken from their homes, stolen by ‘Indian agents’ or maybe worse. “The Quilts” speaks to the anguish and torment that many mothers and grandmothers felt at the loss of their babies.”
Hill says she had relatives in residential schools.
“But I didn’t know them. They were grown and gone and no one spoke of the residential school. They were my grandfather’s brothers and possibly one of his grandmothers or great aunts.”
Doxtater suggests the residential schools be called “Christian-Canadian Genocidal Encampments for Indian Children.”
Her installation, “Genocidal Encampments,” includes a pair of old school desks, small blackboards and a wooden crate inhabited by a corn husk doll.
Doxtater makes these traditional figures and often has them recreate historical events.
This doll, wearing an austere, missionary-style dress and boots, is in a residential school.
A photo of the Mohawk Institute, a former residential school in Brantford, can be seen behind her.
She kneels and raises her hands in a Christian attitude of prayer and supplication. The way her hands are raised makes them look bound, like a prisoner’s.
A blackboard sits atop the crate with the words “Deliver us from Evil” written four times. The words are taken from a well-known Christian prayer.
The corn husk doll reappears in “Sky Woman as Mona Lisa.”
“In the Haudenosaunee explanation of the formation of our celestial family, Sky Woman was the original being that came to earth directly from Sky World,” Doxtater tells me.
“She became Grandmother Moon and continues to protect the waters and helps with new life.”
Silver leaf for the background evokes moonlight.
“The use of the Mona Lisa image represents how all women are connected,” she explains.
In Anthony’s “Free-Unity,” a man with a Mohawk hairstyle and sunglasses takes centre stage.
“The modern native man,” Anthony explains, “holds onto his culture whilst finding his way in a contemporary world.”
Surrounded by traditional patterns and wearing a suit, he punches toward us.
A tattoo on his fist reads “free.”
Regina Haggo, art historian, public speaker, curator and former professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, teaches at the Dundas Valley School of Art. dhaggo@thespec.com