As news broke of the discovery of the remains of 215 Indigenous children on the grounds of the Kamloops residential school late last week, I had just finished wrapping up a Zoom meeting of the contemporary Indigenous art history course I have been teaching since early May. Having studied the history of the residential school system and the generational trauma it had created, as part of my own graduate school training at UBC, I had learned of the impact of this dark chapter of Canadian history even more intimately through an introduction to contemporary Indigenous art. Over my years at UBC, I would come to learn more from many artists, some of whom shared their direct experience and family stories in classroom and studio visits.
An image of Tamara Bell’s powerful and impromptu public art installation at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Image taken from this Art Newspaper report which had global reach across the art world this week.
As the news sank in for Canadians, I felt a responsibility to remain silent and amplify the voices of Indigenous creatives, artists, and leaders, as they spoke to the Canadian and global public about the emotional and political weight that this discovery held. As a white woman born to immigrant settlers and today living on Native lands in this country we call Canada, I have always felt deeply conflicted about my own position as a historian teaching Indigenous art history. Even as I completed a BA history thesis on the topic of Indigenous ethnologist George Hunt and the photographs he had made capturing the everyday lives of the Kwakwaka'wakw peoples of the Northwest Coast, and later worked to incorporate in my MA and Ph.D. aspects of nomadic theory emanating from postcolonial texts based in radically different spatial understandings of Indigenous peoples when visually representing their worlds, I have struggled with how to impart the knowledge I have gained.
Amplifying contemporary Indigenous artists, especially those who attempt to capture the unfathomable dimensions of the colonial experience is a critical way to educate the Canadian public about Canada’s past and present relationship with First Nations peoples.
Two years ago, I finally felt the need, and the call, to take up and teach an Indigenous art history course that had been on my department’s books for over a decade. Knowing that this content was critical as a counterbalance to the Western-dominated courses in art history, while also being supportive of all Canadian universities’ mandate to apply Indigenous protocols to the curriculum, the time had come. After consulting extensively over the years with Indigenous scholars and art historians—many of whom urged me to teach the course— I finally found what I think is a respectful, balanced, and self-reflective way to approach the topic. Most importantly, I refrain from any traditional lecturing in this course and instead work with an incredibly rich array of open educational resources, readings, videos, first-person artist interviews, and (when we return to post-Covid times), visits with Indigenous artist guest speakers and tours of local exhibitions and studios, to create a flipped classroom model and course curriculum.
As I wrote in one social media post last week, emphasizing my own focus on introducing contemporary Indigenous artists to my students : “Art provides a powerful means to explore and reveal the unspoken dimensions of human experience, and I urge everyone to pay close attention to contemporary First Nations artists (now and in the future) on the topic of the Canadian residential school experience. There is a power in these art works that supersedes much of the rhetoric and attempts to explain the unfathomable.”
An installation shot of Carey Newmanor Hayalthkin’geme, The Witness Blanket (2015) housed in the Canadian Museum of Human Rights.
Look for example to the immediate response by Haida artist Tamara Bell and her public art installation that gathered 215 pairs of children’s shoes on the steps of the Vancouver Gallery. Here is an artistic expression that does more “work” than any traditional memorial could possibly achieve, and once again underscores the special and distinctive power of art to connect and unite audiences in new understandings of the past. I also want to highlight here the ongoing work of Kwakwak’awakw artist Carey Newmanor Hayalthkin’geme and The Witness Blanket project he created for the Canadian Museum of Human Rights that has toured Canada in one iteration or another since 2015. If you have not yet heard of this art work, this would be a great place to begin an education about the atrocities of the Indian Residential School era in Canada, but also of the resilience and dedication to healing and recovery within First Nations communities. In the end, we all share a responsibility as citizens of a multi-cultural and open democracy to learn more about all dimensions of our country’s history. We can start by looking to our artists.
