Artists explore contemporary idioms and media

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The work of seven First Nations artists-Bob Boyer, Dana Claxton, Ruth Cuthand, Faye HeavyShield, Robert Houle, Ron Noganosh, and Edward Poitras-was featured in the exhibition A History Lesson, which ran from Aug. 7 to Sept. 5 at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA) in Toronto as part of the Planet IndigenUs festival. All the works are part of the permanent collection of the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina.

Planet IndigenUs, which ran from Aug. 13 to 22, was a contemporary arts festival honouring the adaptability and evolution of Indigenous identity. A History Lesson clearly demonstrated that evolution. The exhibition presented contemporary art in a variety of styles, including sculptural installations, mixed-media video installations, abstract painting, and mixed-media printmaking. There wasn't a bead or a feather in sight.

Planet IndigenUs also aimed to reflect what happens when cultures meet-in both the positive and negative sense. Robert Houle's Palisade, an installation featuring abstract paintings and lithographic prints, commemorates the Odawa chief Pontiac's battles against the British in the late 18th century and also references British commander Lord Jeffrey Amherst's attempts to wipe out the Aboriginal population by distributing smallpox-infected blankets.

Houle's series of eight monochrome paintings act as winter counts, recording Pontiac's capture of eight British forts. The long, narrow canvases are reminiscent of wampum belts, and the colours, which get progressively darker, starting at green and ending in black, are a mournful commentary on the state of relations between the two still-warring parties.

The lithographs, meanwhile, reproduce Amherst's letters to his commanders in the field in which he says, "You will do well to try to innoculate the Indians by means of Blanketts, as well as to try Every other method that can serve to extirpate this Execrable Race," They also reproduce a newspaper story about the World Health Organization's chilling recent decision not to destroy the world's stock of smallpox.

Planet IndigenUs tried to illustrate the intersections of past, present, and future intrinsic to Aboriginal art and everyday life. Dana Claxton's Buffalo Bone China demonstrated those intersections using mixed-media and video.

Claxton's installation consisted of broken shards of bone china arranged in a perfect, mounded circle. Above the china, a video showed archival footage of a stampeding buffalo herd paired with contemporary images of a man (actor Anthony McNab Favel) screaming as the buffalo are shot and killed by hunters on a train. Images of a buffalo skull then appear, superimposed on stacks of bone china, emphasizing the connection between the death of the great herds and the material comforts of settler life, as well as the tension between settlers and First Nation people.

But the video ends on a hopeful note: Favel runs his hands and hair over the china, as if willing the buffalo back to life. Then he opens a gate and walks out to a sunny garden, as if consigning the painful history of colonialism to the past and to declare that the spirit of the buffalo remains alive in the hearts and minds of Aboriginal people who remember them.

As colonized people know, history is never over. A History Lesson also included two pieces about the way the past continues to affect the present. Ruth Cuthand's Living Post-Oka Kind of Woman is a series of graphite drawings on paper that showcase her angry commentary about the Canadian government's continued disregard for Aboriginal rights. It's also laugh-out-loud funny. (One panel shows two Native characters and the words "Don't worry, we're oppressed ... but happy.")

In Anon Among Us, artist Ron Noganosh shaped soil from his southern Ontario community into a burial mound. Above the faux grave, a video screen displayed the names of the 63 Noganosh family members who have died from alcohol-related causes, diseases caused y poverty, and violent acts resulting from hopelessness and desperation. Noganosh's work honours the dead by naming those whose deaths are rarely noted by the media-the anonymous Indians who exist in Canada's own Third World-and shows the difference between inflicted invisibility and chosen anonymity as in Alcoholics Anonymous.

Not all of the artworks were painful or difficult. Faye HeavyShield's sculptural installation Aapaskaiyaawa (They Are Dancing) consisted of 12 paper sculptures suspended from the ceiling. Not really human, not really spirit, they connected earth to sky, highlighting movement and shadow in a dance that demonstrated both permanence and fragility.

"It's kind of ironic that this show is called A History Lesson, because it focuses on contemporary art," guest curator Lee-Ann Martin said. "But it's contemporary art created by Aboriginal artists who really want to set the record straight. This history isn't taught in schools, and it's usually the artists who have the first insights into those overlooked elements of history.

"It's those insights and perspectives, in the here and now, and how they articulate them using contemporary idioms and mediums, that I find the most exciting artwork today."