A culture in the shadows
Big Ontario museums have spent millions this year putting Indigenous art front and centre for Canada’s 150th — but in that culture’s own heartland, museums are in crisis and struggling ‘just to keep the lights on’
M’CHIGEENG, ONT.— On a sparkling, sunfilled evening late this summer, Anong Beam was directing traffic at the Ojibwe Cultural Foundation, a community hub for the M’Chigeeng First Nation on Manitoulin Island. An opening was set for that evening, for the Anishinaabe artist Michael Belmore, and Beam, the foundation’s executive director, was carting in chairs and rearranging couches under the towering, rough timbers that tent the vaulted ceilings here.
It all made for an upbeat scene, of an apparently thriving cultural space eager to welcome one of its own. But as Beam’s hurried preparations took her into her office, and then the photocopy room, a soggy ceiling tile told a very different tale — of a failing climate control system, for one, and of the broader truth that something else is broken here, too.
A day’s drive to the east, in Ottawa, a monumental work by Beam’s famous father, the late Anishinaabe artist Carl Beam, is the showpiece of the National Gallery of Canada’s contemporary wing, an emblem of a recent, dazzling multimillion-dollar redesign built explicitly to merge the best of Indigenous and Canadian art in time for the country’s 150th anniversary.
But here, in the culture’s heartland itself, such dazzle has long been in short supply.
“We’ve been in a crisis situation, just trying to survive, for decades,” Beam said. “Really, it’s a trapeze act — we hopscotch from one short-term grant to the next, shuffling them around, but it’s hard to keep morale up when you’re reinventing yourself from the ground up every six months.”
At reserves like M’Chigeeng, far from the grand halls of the country’s biggest cultural institutions, Canada 150 has played out on a very different stage. All year, museums nationwide have been waving a flag of reconciliation, staging elaborate exhibitions this year to put Indigenous culture on broad view.
But in the communities they mean to celebrate, long-standing Indigenous institutions like the OCF are trapped in an intractable status quo.
Piecemeal support from government agencies and, in some cases, crippling debt have conspired in this critical moment to leave these institutions in a familiar position: on the outside, looking in. This time, though, the sting is particularly acute. “Reconciliation is supposed to be our story,” Beam said. “At minimum — minimum! — anything truly done in the spirit of reconciliation would mean both parties being equally involved. Personally, I don’t see that at all.”
At mainstream museums, exhibitions showcasing Indigenous art this year have been framed as a public salve for a litany of wrongs — both an apology and a self-congratulation, of sorts, for making good. They are, at best, a beginning. Big museum shows in big cities, however grand, don’t give back what was taken. And they come nowhere near the root of things, where a nascent cultural reawakening remains in a tenuous struggle to persist.
“We’ve been . . . just trying to survive, for decades. We hopscotch from one short-term grant to the next.” ANONG BEAM EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF THE OJIBWE CULTURAL FOUNDATION
III
On Sunday, the Royal Ontario Museum wraps up Anishinaabeg: Art +
Power, a deeply affecting display of objects drawn from Anishinaabe culture across both time and space, from its cradle around the Great Lakes to its broader spread as far as the western plains and into Quebec.
The museum framed it, grandly, as an explicit step towards reconciliation. To make the show, the ROM had invited two Anishinaabe curators to collaborate with its staff; at least one of them, Alan Corbiere, didn’t necessarily see it that way. An Anishinaabe language expert, historian and former executive director of the OCF on Manitoulin, Corbiere has a soft, easy smile and a sharp sense of humour. In his opening remarks at the ROM in June, he made few concessions about the gap that remained.
At the OCF, “I was the curator, the historian, the executive director, the tour guide, and then also the executive director of snow removal,” Corbiere said, with some flourish. Polite laughter rippled through the room, but he wasn’t entirely kidding.
While no one would look to compare the ROM to the OCF — the former occupies 214,000 square feet in downtown Toronto, the latter 11,000 on a rural reserve — the disparity is vast by any measure. The ROM, with its $26.8 million yearly provincial allocation, has at least a half-dozen senior staff whose salaries exceed the OCF’s entire annual funding, which hovers at less than $200,000 — for staff, programming and building maintenance combined.
Corbiere led a tour of his show, filled with objects made by his people, lodged here, inside the museum’s stony walls. I asked him if it felt strange, despite his relatively free hand.
“Well, sure,” he said, with an unguarded frankness. “It’s still a colonial institution, right?”
The contrast, of the airy galleries with the multitudes of museum staff on hand for the launch event, was sharp: While Corbiere and Saul Williams, his Indigenous colleague, worked through the ROM collection, Anong Beam, with a staff of just one, was struggling to keep language classes and traditional crafting sessions alive. A key position, elder in residence, was in jeopardy, Beam said, threatening to leave a gap in traditional teaching.
In late summer, Beam had arranged to bring in Belmore, who is currently enjoying a career surge, for a modest solo exhibition (his work is central to the Art Gallery of Ontario’s
Every.Now.Then.). The mood that evening was festive; Belmore mingled happily with the small crowd, while fried fish was laid out on a table for all.
Exhausted but satisfied, she al- lowed herself a moment’s repose.
“It’s such a pleasure to organize a show of an Anishinaabe artist for Anishinaabe people,” said Beam, who is warm and plainspoken, with a welcoming smile. “And it’s so striking how you could show the same thing two hours south and it would be something completely different.
“Here, it’s a part of daily life. Down there, it always feels like you’re explaining your culture to everybody. Again.”
Beam has gone through those motions all her life. Her late father, Carl, was among the most influential artists, Indigenous or not, that Canada has ever produced (and a champion of the OCF, which was founded in 1974, donating multiple works and creating the sculptures at its entrance).
He was intensely wary of being cast in a role. But in 1986, his work The North American Iceberg became the first contemporary piece by an Indigenous artist to be acquired by the National Gallery in Ottawa — it’s hanging there right now, as a frontand-centre emblem of the gallery’s own Canada 150 display — and Carl would carry its unwanted freight. He became an unwilling bannerman for progress in non-Indigenous Canada — proof, right there in the national museum, that we were no longer ignoring Indigenous culture as a living, present thing.
Then, the story was one-sided, a fact with which Beam struggled mightily, his daughter said. And even now, despite grand gestures and best intentions by museums across the country, balance remains a far-off goal.
Corbiere, in Toronto recently for a language conference, put it thusly: “The OCF is an interesting microcosm, because what’s being said down here is not in step with what’s happening in the community,” he said. “I think there’s a narrative in this country, that the sins of the past will be cleansed by the future. But up there, there’s no core funding, no staff and no benefactor. When you’re always on the ropes, how do you move forward?”
Indigenous peoples’ agency to frame their own stories, even for their own communities, haunts ev- ery effort towards cultural reconciliation. Repatriation, now very much in vogue, is one, though Canadian museums have been returning important objects to their rightful Indigenous keepers for decades; they are broadly compliant, if not always swift.
While repatriation is a critical gesture in righting centuries-old wrongs, reconciliation is not merely transactional, and the perpetual struggle of places like the OCF, tasked with rebuilding a fragile culture with the scantest of resources, is the knife’s edge on which it balances.
“The OCF has been teaching its culture to its people for 40 years,” says Bonnie Devine, an Anishinaabe artist from Snake River First Nation and the founder of the Indigenous Visual Culture program at OCAD U. “But they’ve done it on the backs of people who are critically overworked and underfunded. They brought this culture back through the eye of a needle, frankly. They saved it, and that needs to be acknowledged — and supported.”
Centres like the OCF are the product of a fractious era, spawned by equal parts hope and alarm. Expo 67’s Indians of Canada Pavilion, an unvarnished view into the hardships of native life here, convened by native artist Alex Janvier, gave Indigenous people here their first opportunity to represent themselves on the world stage, and helped to buoy a people reeling from decades of ruinous assimilation policies. But it was the federal “White Paper on Indian Policy” in 1969 that touched off an urgent hunger for change.
The paper proposed to eliminate Indian status as a subset of Canadian citizenship. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau said he intended it as a way to bring Indigenous people onto equal footing with the rest of the country Indigenous people took it as an existential threat that would see their cultural identity erased for good, and responded in kind.
“It was an extremely volatile time for Indigenous communities,” said Ryan Rice, the chair for Indigenous visual culture at OCAD U. “There was this awakening — realizing that if we don’t do something to change direction, the government really will succeed in assimilating us.”
Asudden, intense activism rose and Indigenous cultural organizations blossomed nationwide. “There was a real push to make these places,” said Steven Loft, the Canada Council’s director for Indigenous Arts. “But by the ’80s, to be frank, the prevalent attitude at many of the funding agencies was that Aboriginal culture shouldn’t be supported, because it was dying out.” That meant, Loft said, that centres like the OCF ended up being bypassed for critical permanent operational grants, leaving them to languish on whatever Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC) would provide, as they do today.
The situation stands in sharp contrast to what the federal Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in its 2015 final report, recommended. It examined both the practice and legacy of residential schools, and singled out culture as a key element of a wider reconciliation effort.
The commission looked to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People for guidance, noting that “(s)tates have an obligation to take effective measures to . . . make reparations where traditional knowledge or cultural rights have been violated.”
Amore thorough violation than the residential school system, with its outward agenda to erase Indigenous language and culture, and to break families and communities to the ground in an explicit effort to rebuild the next generation in a European mould, is hard to imagine. But those reparations, for the most part, have been slow in coming.
“It’s crazy to me that someone from here would have to take a bus five hours south to learn about who they are,” Beam said. “Isn’t the point to make the culture vibrant and alive again, right here?”
A day’s drive south to the Six Nations Reserve near Brantford, the Woodland Cultural Centre, a jumble of boxy, grey-aluminum-clad portables, sit on10 acres of woods and long grasses.
It was built in 1952 as overflow classrooms for the Mohawk Institute, an adjacent red-brick residential school with imposing classical columns; when the school closed in 1970, the freshly established WCC started retrofitting it, and moved in two years later.
“I say we’ve been doing reconciliation here since 1972,” said Paula Whitlow, the WCC’s executive director. “This was a place where they took culture from us. We’re using it to bring culture back.”
It’s a bright fall day when Whitlow, who is alternately grave and goodhumoured, took me on a walkthrough of the centre’s current exhibition, Onkwehon:we Matters, which she curated. The WCC is a hub of Haudenosaunee culture here, at the heart of Canada’s most populous Indigenous reserve. All around the gallery, pale and brightly lit, a sparse array of objects sat in dinged-up vitrines. A few empty cases displayed not objects but a type-written apology stuck in place with Scotch tape.
“‘Coming soon,’ ” Whitlow chuckled, reading aloud, knowing “soon” was little more than a hope. “I had a few more objects I wanted to put on display, but I couldn’t find any more case tops that weren’t broken.”
Earlier, Whitlow had led a brief tour through the centre’s tomb-like history galleries.
“Even our fake grass is deteriorating,” Whitlow said, walking past a life-sized diorama of a pre-contact Haudenosaunee village. It led to a weary-looking labyrinth of displays, where she looked up in mild dismay.
“I wrote a grant to get us new LED lighting, but it exposed our horrible walls,” she says, pointing to a glossy curve of drywall with ragged joints and painted-over wallpaper. Nearby, a tired-looking mannequin in a drab brown hooded robe glowered impassively. “A Franciscan missionary,” Whitlow explains. They were the first to make contact with the Haudenosaunee people here. She laughs. “We like to call him the grim reaper.” The WCC serves as an emblem of the gulf between Indigenous communities and mainstream Canada. As in education, where per-student spending on reserve is as much as a third less than in provincial schools, the WCC and OCF are underpinned by scarce, federally controlled resources.
The WCC has reliably received about $600,000 annually from the Federal Indigenous and Northern Affairs Commission; the OCF, with its sparser population, $117,000. Both figures have been static for more than a decade (though both received a bump up in the Canada 150 year, according to INAC, to $653,337 and $176,246, respectively). Aside from small operational grants from the Ontario Arts Council, $59,212 to the WCC and $23,590 to the OCF, all else is piecemeal, catch-as-catch-can from whatever agency it can find (at the WCC, a $16,000 annual project grant from the Canada Council helps with operations).
At its peak in the late 1980s under director Tom Hill, the WCC was a hotbed of contemporary Indigenous culture, holding annual juried shows and launching careers.
It maintains its mission, however diminished.
“It’s such a pleasure to organize a show of an Anishinaabe artist for Anishinaabe people.” ANONG BEAM OJIBWE CULTURAL FOUNDATION EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR