FROM CANVAS TO PAGE
Cree artist Kent Monkman is adapting his drag character’s historical memoirs into a book,
On a recent morning in artist Kent Monkman’s westend Toronto studio, riot police in black-visored helmets and flak jackets variously beat, grappled with and otherwise violently engaged a small number of unarmed Indigenous people, usually women, as charcoal-black smoke billowed up behind them to blot out the sky.
The scene, a composite photo projected life-size and in living colour on a vast canvas where an assistant dutifully sketched the outlines of every detail — a rifle butt here, an eye stretched wide in terrorized panic there — is one work in a new series and only the latest chapter in an ever-unfolding tale in the artist’s mind.
“Colonization is alive and well, there’s no doubt about that,” says Monkman, who is Cree from the Fish River First Nation in Manitoba, and only the most wilfully blind would disagree.
Chapters, for most of his career, have been a useful metaphor for his painterly storytelling. Monkman, a gifted appropriator with contrarian purpose, has for years retrofitted the musty European tradition of history painting to unfurl a Canadian counter-history. Think of epic tableaux often lionizing one conquest or another — Jacques Louis David’s heroic image of Napoleon crossing the alps, Eugene Delacroix’s Liberty leading a heroic revolution — but told from the point of view of the vanquished, not the victor, and you’ll find yourself right in the middle of Monkman’s revisionist point of view.
But chapters, the written kind, are a sudden concern of their own. In January, Monkman introduced to the world Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience. It was his most ambitious and pointedly critical exhibition of the exclusions of official Canadian history yet, right in time for Canada 150. Alongside Monkman’s epic revision to the canon — a litany of ugly colonial oppressions, from disastrous treaties to residential schools to the epidemic of Indigenous incarceration — small snippets of poetic prose fleshed out the scenes.
Written in the voice of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, Monkman’s drag queen avatar — and, conveniently, a supernatural being with the gift of time travel — the words were those of a first-hand witness. They were compelling enough, even in short form, for Scott Sellers, an editor at Random House, to approach him about a full-fledged book. Monkman, naturally, was keen, but had an important call to make.
“He does this to me all the time,” said Gisele Gordon, shaking her head, as Monkman snickered nearby. Gordon, as Monkman’s long-time silent partner and closest friend — he’s an honorary uncle to her two children and their guardian should anything happen to her and her husband, the Cree artist Archer Pechawis — is used to his cries for help.
“‘The deadline is a week away, and I have nothing,’ ” she laughs, is a typical Monkman plea. True to form, with Shame and Prejudice only a couple of weeks away from opening, Monkman was foundering with the written piece.
“I just couldn’t do it. My attempts were feeble,” he said, eyes widening. “So Gisele picked this up and put it out in about a week. It was just astonishing — I was really moved when I read them. She came up with these beautiful, very concise chapters that then caught the eye of the publisher.”
For Monkman it was no surprise. Scanning the last two decades of his career with Gordon on hand is like tapping a shared consciousness. What he can’t clearly recall, she often does, her clarity giving structure to his productive imagination (“I’m always the one who brings it back to serious matters,” she says, “and Kent is always saying ‘let’s play!’ ”)
Roadblocks have frequently been conegotiatied. (For his 2010 Nuit Blanche performance as Miss Chief, Gordon did everything but put on the thigh-high red PVC boots herself. “That was another one when Kent called me essentially five minutes beforehand and said ‘I have no idea what to do — help!’ ” she said.)
Sharing a mind means sharing a voice, and Gordon is as comfortable in Miss Chief’s head as Monkman himself. “Kent can write in my voice, I can write in his. We can both write in Miss Chief’s,” she said. But for Shame and Prejudice, “we had to find a whole new voice, and that was a terrifying responsibility. I felt like this would be the most important exhibition I would see in my lifetime. What Kent’s always done with his paintings is reframe North American — Turtle Island — history. And the memoirs will very much be a full extension of that.”
For years, Miss Chief had been the spoonful of sugar to help the bitter medicine of colonial oppression go down, an element of humour to leaven the dark- ness (“You need to give the viewer a break, if you want them to come along with you,” Monkman once told me). But for Shame and Prejudice, there were few laughing matters. Paintings there covered shameful episodes of our history in vivid, unsparing detail: RCMP officers ripping children from their parents’ arms in The Scream, or Indigenous chiefs Big Bear and Poundmaker in leg irons being forced to sign a treaty with Sir John A. MacDonald in Subjugation of the Truth.
Throughout, Miss Chief’s voice deepens the images, providing connective tissue. (“The sight of our proud leaders, later taken in chains to Stony Mountain prison under false charges, was meant to break our spirits,” she writes in Gordon’s exhibition copy; of The Scream she says only: “This is the one I cannot talk about. The pain is too deep. We were never the same.”)
Back to those images of protestors beaten down by riot cops: History will remember this, too — they’re inspired by the Dakota Access Pipeline protests over the past year at Standing Rock reservation — but maybe not as its victims would choose.
Monkman calls the series The Protectors and, in the memoir, they serve both as a working conclusion — for now, at least — and a reminder: that however history chooses to frame it, there’s someone watching from the other side who has a voice she’s not afraid to use.
“All history is a mythology, isn’t it?” Gordon said.
“We’re really trying to rewrite history the way it should have been written. It may not be peaceful, but it’s hopeful. This will be a better history — one that comes a lot closer to the truth.”
Miss Chief was the spoonful of sugar to help the bitter medicine of colonial oppression go down, an element of humour to leaven the darkness