Raising the bar for Indigenous influence
By showcasing design from around the world, group hopes to encourage Canadian cities
MONTREAL— Uncertain cities interested in reconciling with native people need to be encouraged and guided in colouring their streets, buildings and public spaces with an Indigenous brush, the head of an urban advocacy group says.
Whatever project is under consideration, the executive director of Native Montreal said there are many examples around the world and in western Canada that have been inspired by Aboriginal culture, have adopted Indigenous building techniques or factored in the needs and sensitivities of their founding people.
“You’ve got to look at the best projects to start having a certain level of expectation about what’s doable,” Philippe Meilleur said. “If you start from scratch then maybe just changing street signs is enough in your mind.”
An exposition that Native Montreal launched Friday showcases a Maoriinspired entertainment venue in New Zealand, a gallery honouring Austronesian aboriginal culture in Taiwan, a jail in Nuuk, Greenland and a long list of community, school and housing projects in Western Canada that set a higher standard.
“If you see that elsewhere in the world major institutions have done indigenization all over the place . . . then maybe you raise the bar,” Meilleur said. “That’s what we’re hoping to do.”
Native Montreal has also developed an Indigenous design guide suggesting that projects highlight Indigenous people, consult with authentic and informed community members and be environmentally sensitive.
The hope is that the guide will help usher city officials onto uncertain territory they might otherwise simply avoid.
Meilleur said Toronto has had several laudable initiatives, including Indigenous restaurants and an effort to create an Indigenous business district in the area of Dundas St. E and Jarvis St.
Native Montreal wants to capitalize on the momentum that has been building with the creation of an Indigenous task force in 2015 by the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada and word last month that a design project led by celebrated architect Douglas Cardinal, who has Blackfoot ancestry, would represent Canada at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale.
Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre recently dubbed a “Metropolis of Reconciliation” as he changed the city’s coat of arms to include a symbol of its native roots.
Despite these overtures and the estimated 25,000 Indigenous people who live in the city, “the cultural landscape of Montreal is void of any Indigenous culture,” Meilleur said.
Part of that is due to the relatively low and far-flung Indigenous population in Quebec, which makes it difficult to organize and lobby for improvements. It’s also because francophone Quebecers see themselves as “the ultimate minority of Canada.”
Meilleur pointed to a prominent statue of Paul Chomedy de Maisonneuve, the founder of Montreal, that has stood in a public square in the old city since 1895. It cites his words accepting the job of settling Montreal: “It would be an honour to accomplish my mission even if all the trees on the island of Montreal were to change into Iroquois.”
“Maisonneuve is fairly specific. He wanted to decimate the Iroquois and his goal was to kill all of us,” Meilleur said. “As a Mohawk, I kind of take that to heart.”
Instead urging the removal of the statue, Native Montreal commissioned an architectural firm suggest ways the popular tourist spot could be indigenized.
The firm’s idea was to surround the statue with Indigenous talking sticks as high as Maisonneuve’s metal likeness — one for each of the11Indigenous nations in Quebec and a 12th to represent all newcomers to the province.
“With these speaking sticks,” Meilleur said, “The idea is that our voices would be heard and juxtaposed with the voice and the glorification of a genocidal war hero, because that was literally his whole thing.”