Indigenous Artists (Part 2)

Quinn: Hello and welcome back to Pictorial on Relay FM. I'm Quinn Rose. I am someone who did not go to art school, but I love learning about art and discovering new artists. 

Betty: And I'm Betty. I'm also someone who did not go to art school, but I have been working as a gallery guide at an art gallery for the past eight years. And I also like learning about new artists, sometimes in the gallery and sometimes outside of it. 

Quinn: So this is a followup to a previous episode that we did, kind of generally talking about the history of Indigenous peoples in both the United States and in Canada, and a little bit about how that history intersects with the art world and contemporary treatment in museums. But today we're going to be having a much more cheerful, I think, look at some Indigenous artists, as well as how different artists have taken their Indigenous identities and how that informs their work in different ways. And different interpretations of that history that we talked about in the last episode, come to life in museums and galleries.

Betty: Yeah. So I have a few artists here that I want to talk about, which relates to a lot of our discussions that we had in the last podcast, just about kind of contemporary history of Indigenous people and their relations to like the rest of Canada and the US and the government and how a lot of artists grew up under these circumstances where it was definitely very difficult in terms of their up—in terms of their upbringing, as well as their life currently. And some of these artists I'll be talking about passed away recently, and some of them are still alive. So the first artist I want to talk about, his name is Carl Beam. He was born in Manitoulin Island in Ontario in 1943. And he passed away in 2005, but one of the reasons I wanted to bring him up first and I think he's a very significant artist is because he was actually the first Indigenous Canadian artist to have his work purchased by the National Gallery of Canada, our largest art gallery, but not as a Indigenous artist in the Indigenous collection, but as a contemporary artist. So in 1985, the National Gallery purchased North American Iceberg and it was placed in their contemporary art collection. So, you know, along with, I don't know, like Andy Warhol and people like that. So, it's pretty significant cause cause Carl Beam throughout his career had always like, he wanted people to just call him an artist, not an Indigenous artist. So, you know, he doesn't just want to be limited by his culture, but of course, a lot of his artworks are informed by his culture. So we can't really get away from talking about it. It's interesting because prior to Beam, a lot of other, or not a lot, some other Indigenous artists also had their work in the National Gallery—or sorry, not the National Gallery. Later on some other Indigenous artists had their works purchased by the National Gallery. But prior to that, a lot of artists of Indigenous ancestry kind of actually tried to hide the fact that they were Indigenous. They, it was, you know, sometimes they didn't want to be, like, pigeonholed in a way. But Carl Beam, you know, obviously because of the nature of his work and the subject matter, he can't really hide that. In any case he actually, I found this interesting, I read somewhere that he calls himself a “post-Indian”. I'm not really sure exactly what that means, but you know, you can interpret that in whatever way you think makes sense. And he's particularly known for, so he's a multi or it was a multimedia artist. He makes like, you know, oil, acrylic, paint, and he painted on like paper, plexiglas, stone, cement, wood, he also made pottery, ceramic pottery and looked for found objects and stuck them together and also did like etchings and screen, silk screen processes as well. One of the methods he was most well known for is using a photo transfer technique, which is to like transfer a photograph onto a large wooden board usually, and then he would paint over it or he would like collage over it and things like that. So, he kind of, like a lot of people think he had a really remarkable ability to like collapse past, present and future with the, like in one space, on a canvas or on a wooden board. And so this first one I sent to you is called Time Dissolve or Time Dissolves. So I guess before I tell you what it's about, what is your first impression?

Quinn: So it basically looks to me like it's an old photograph or like many old photographs that have been collaged together, but it looks like it's melting. Like I think to me, it looks like paint was thrown over it, but it's coming down in these streaks that especially from a distance makes it look like the whole thing is melting. And there are these red circles that seem to be around certain people's faces. And it's really unclear to me why they have been circled, but there is this splatter that looks almost like blood over one corner of it as well. That makes me think that maybe these people are dead or were killed in a certain way. It’s very ominous. 

Betty: Yeah, for sure. And, you're definitely right about, or you're most likely right about this like melting nature. And again, like the title has the word “dissolve” in it and you know, he's saying like time is dissolving. So the photos that are in the, so the big photo that’s at the lower bottom that looks like it's a whole bunch of people in a group. That is actually a school reunion that Carl Beam had with some of, I think most of the people he went to school with. So Carl Beam was sent to residential school actually from the age 10 to 18. So he was there for eight years, quite a significant long time, for, you know, anybody who had to endure residential school. Which I, if you have, if you don't know what it's about, listen to our previous podcast, I kind of went quite in detail about what that was. So that's a picture of his residential school. I believe the circle to the right is him. And there's a, to the left there's a guy and there's like some writing beneath the guy's head. I think it says my friend Gilbert, so that was his best friend in school. And then the picture’s just above on the left, a woman wearing like a black jacket. That's Carl Beam's mother. And I think the circle again is him as a, as a kid. And then there's like a smaller picture of a bunch of kids. And I think that's like a younger class photo of him in school. The, the bottom picture at the, like the very bottom, like I haven't been able to find out exactly what those are and they're really blurry, but it's like, it looks like a film, like a film strip that's continuous, or it's almost like insinuating something like time passing through like a film strip or something like that. And then, cause, and I think the photos in there are not necessarily like photos of him and his family, like the ones in the middle, same with the picture at the very top. That's actually a copy of a painting, which is, it's called the Lamentation of Christ. So it's Mary holding Christ, I think after he was taken down from the crucifix. And so anyway, I'm not going to go too much into every single metaphor in this painting, because then this whole podcast will be about this painting, but essentially, like he's referencing a bunch of things. He's referencing things like obviously residential school, the white paint, like he doesn't, he never like truly explains exactly what that means, but a lot of people think it references like whitewashing. And then like the red splatters, like you could really, you could interpret that as blood, because obviously lots of people are beaten and abused and, you know, a lot of violence was committed against these kids. So that’s a pretty easy parallel to draw. But the thing with Mary and Jesus at the top and the inclusion of his mother, Carl Beam was really most likely trying to insinuate this relationship. This bond between mother and child or parent and child in general, which the residential school is meant to destroy. It's meant to break this bond of mother and child. And, and the thing is, that's not just like, what happened. It actually was official policy, like in historic documentation at the creation of the residential schools. There's official like language in there saying things along the lines of the best way to break a nation's power is to break the relationship between mothers and their children. So this, this is a great way for us to basically eradicate this culture, without actually killing people directly. There's also like euphemisms or symbols that he's included in, in here. Again, like, so the addition of like the slight color, it seems like there's also slight bits of blue in there, although it's hard to tell. But basically, you know, residential school, in addition to being a really like depressing place, you also had to dress mostly all in black. And again, like I mentioned last episode, you can't speak your own language. You can't express any emotion or joy. You can’t talk to your family, obviously. But something that Carl Beam always talked about is that, he always said like, kids will be kids. They'll always find ways to find freedom, even in the most repressive situations that, you know, they'll get into trouble, they'll just do things to resist. And art class for him was one of the things that he really, you know, enjoyed because you got to paint, there's color, you got to express yourself, you know, probably the only time you get to do that. And for a lot of them making art, creating art, was a way that they got through it. They, they came out of it alive and some people didn't. So, yeah, a lot of other people in addition to Carl Beam used painting and colors as a survival mechanism. So yeah, like, the kind of background is still kind of depressing, but it what Carl Beam and probably a lot of other artists similar to him want us to get out of this work is not necessarily just like, oh, poor us. You know, we had this terrible time as children, but also that we were resilient. Like we pushed back, we survived and we came out the other end and we persevered. So, you know, I like, I personally quite like this work for that reason.

Quinn: It's also worth noting what an achievement it is to be recognized as a contemporary artist in a major art institution. Because one of the major things that we talked about last episode was the tendency of art museums to treat Indigenous art as things that are craft and are often closer to the natural world, rather than this modern artistic world, which is of course an absolutely crap distinction. And so every little piece of greater recognition of both the artistry of sort of traditional art forms that are often regarded as craft rather than art, which is pretty ridiculous, or even just the recognition of contemporary artists who are working in art forms that the average person would say like, oh yes, that's a fine art product, but they're coming from a historical background and perspective that has been so marginalized everywhere, but also in the art world. And that actually brings me to one of the artists that I wanted to talk about, the artist Dyani White Hawk. She's got a very interesting background because so her mother was adopted out of the Rosebud Indian reservation in South Dakota to non-native parents in Wisconsin as White Hawk was growing up. Like she had very little connection to sort of her native heritage, because that was removed from her life. Her family is from the Chicago Lakota tribe. And once you, when she got a little older and got into her teen years, then she became learning more and more about her Lakota ancestry and really becoming more connected with her heritage, which of course really informed her art experiences as she started to emerge in the art world. So she's worked in tons of different mediums. She's well-known for her paintings that are really influenced by traditional, like quillwork, beadwork, textiles. The traditional parts of the Lakota tribe. And she talks frequently about this dismissal of craft as not art and wanting to both recognize craft more directly as an artistic form, in these various different things like, the beadwork and the textiles, but also things like basket weaving, canoe making, lots of stuff that is dismissed as not art, because it does have a practical purpose, even though there's a ton of artistry that goes into that construction as well. And her work also frequently comments on actually a similar concept to like negative cultural appropriation, which is the minimizing of Native artists versus like giving lots of recognition to Western, such white artists who are taking influence from Native artists. So it is a very similar question that conversations about cultural appropriation are asking, which is like, why do you like this thing when it comes from a white person, but not when it comes from an Indigenous person, even though it is from the Indigenous person's life. And asking like who is allowed to be the artist in that question? And a specific work that kind of illustrates some of these issues, is called—there’s a little series, Carry One and Carry Two. And looking specifically at Carry Two, it's basically this basket, it's like a copper basket and ladle that is absolutely covered in this gorgeous bead work. And so the basket is attached to a wall that, it’s hard to tell because there's not a person standing here for reference, but it looks to be quite far up on the wall, maybe like about eye level with the person. But coming down from that basket is this giant trail of synthetic sinew that are all just coming down in strips. And so obviously this is a completely impractical basket. Like you wouldn't actually use this to carry anything, but it is technically a basket. It technically could have a functional use, but she's rendered it very impractical and then put it up on a wall and called it art at the same time that she's using these more traditional methods of bead work. And so it's grappling with those questions that I was just talking about about like, what is allowed to be called art? Why do we call something art versus craft? And why do we place these moral judgments onto what one or the other is? And so I just thought that was a really cool piece to point out.

Betty: Kind of, this kind of reminds me of traditional bandolier bags, which are also made of, I think either glass beads or porcupine quills, that we have here, like in, around where I live, like in some of the Anishinaabe nations would make these kinds of bags. And again, those are meant to be like ceremonial, they're worn in like some sort of like leaders ceremony or something like that. And it's not meant to hold anything. And in fact, I was just looking at Carry One and it looks very similar to a bandolier bag, like Carry One is kind of like Carry Two. Whereas got that since synthetics in you, that's like all the way to the ground, but the carry like the bag itself, it looks like just a flat rectangle. Like it doesn't actually hold anything. Which is like a bandolier bag, often you can't actually put anything in it. You just hold it over your shoulder and it looks really nice. So, but yeah, so it's like, I think like often people think craft is, or people try to make the distinction by saying it's not art, oh well like craft is like knitting a sweater. It has a function. Whereas art is often not functional directly. It's meant to be looked at, but in many of these cases like with, Dyani White Hawk Carrys and with the bandolier bags, they are just meant to be looked at. So you can't, it's hard to make that argument saying, you know, this is craft and not art. Cause it actually has a function cause, cause it doesn't. And again, even if it does have a function, it could also be art. So I do like how she kind of, like further blurs that boundary between arts and crafts. Actually, I kind of, I wanted to talk about another artist that kind of has to do with what Carl Beam, the previous artist, talked about in his work, which is this relationship to the mother. And so one of the other artists that, who is an alive contemporary artist. She's an artist as well as a filmmaker. So her name is Shelley Niro. She was actually born in Niagara Falls, New York, and she’s of the Mohawk Nation. But she grew up in Ontario, which, you know, across the river. So she is, she makes films and she also is a photographer and she generally uses herself or female members of her family. And her themes that she generally likes to do is like challenge stereotypes and cliches of Native American women. So this work I sent you just now is called The Shirt. And so basically it's Shelley Niro herself. She has an American flag bandana on top of her head, probably insinuating her like American heritage or, maybe also insinuating what America has done to the land. And then she is wearing a white shirt and the first picture says “my ancestors were annihilated, exterminated, murdered and massacred”. And the second picture says, “and all I get is this shirt”. So, yeah, so obviously she's making allusions to the land. And of course, like in, as I mentioned before, a lot of Indigenous cultures are, the mother is very, very important symbol. Actually, a lot of cultures are matrilineal, so, Ojibwe. So Carl Beam was Ojibwe for instance, for example, and he took his wife's name Beam. And there are families that the children take the mother's name and the name is passed down through the mother's side. And generally like, like families are passed down through, through the mother side. And so, you know, not only is this destruction of the woman terrible in the first place, because she's a human being, but also you're literally, you know, destroying entire family lines and, and of course, like she's posing in a way, like she's like a tourist, like going to a place and getting a t-shirt. And all I get is his shirt, like a tourist shirt. But of course, like, you know, it's, it's talking about a very serious issue. Oh, and again, like, some people look at this and we do have these pictures up at the art gallery, again they think, oh, you know what she has on her shirt, like “my ancestors were annihilated, exterminated, murder, and past, massacred,” that's past tense, that happened in the past like 400 years ago. And it's like, no, a lot of these problems are happening right now. And especially one thing that Shelly Niro as well as a lot of other Indigenous people want people to understand is, so we have this, acronym in Canada called, it's MMIWG, which stands for a Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls. So, again, an official report was commissioned in the last few years to just going through like thousands and thousands of women who are Indigenous, who have either, who are either missing or murdered. And, they're like cold cases. We have no idea where they are or if they were found, we don't know like what happened to them. And some of the cases, you know, it’s difficult to know obviously what happened, not every case gets solved, but the vast majority of these cases is because the police don't care. Like they, they don't take it seriously or they don't really investigate. They kind of just shelve it and, or some cases don't even invest—don’t even take it as a case. And then the other thing that this series alludes to, which is kind of a less sad issue, which is some Indigenous artists and people are actually trying to change one word in the lyrics of our national anthem. So as everyone knows, our national anthem starts with “O Canada” and the next line is “our home and native land.” So, they would like it to should be changed to "our home on native land”, which is technically more accurate. Obviously this hasn't been officially changed. I'm not even sure if there is an official lyric. But anyway, so yeah, these are just some of the, some of the things she's bringing up and they're, again, they're contemporary issues.

Quinn: That's cool. I didn't know the thing about trying to change the Canadian national anthem, but that makes sense to me.

Betty: Yeah, it's definitely like, it goes back to what we were talking about last episode is like, you saying "I'm a native New Yorker”. It's like maybe you were born there and grew up there, but are you a Native New Yorker? Cause Shelley Niro is actually a Native New Yorker.

Quinn: I want to talk a little bit about Gerald Clark. He is an artist. He was born in 1967. He is again, someone who is contemporary and still making art today. He was born in the Cahuilla band of Mission Indians, which is the full title of their tribe. And he also had an interesting relationship sort of with his Indigenous heritage growing up because his parents divorced at age three and he moved to Orange County with his mother and siblings. But on the weekends, he would live on the reservation with his father. So we had this back and forth relationship with his own Indigenous culture and heritage. He also started out his career in the trades, specifically welding, electrical, maintenance, and hydraulics, which ended up informing a lot of his artwork later on. He then went and got a Bachelor of Arts and sort of started his work as an artist of many, many, many different mediums. And so he works like as a painter, but also as a sculptor, he does some basket creation. He does these series with brands, which I'll be talking about a little more, he's made like fake road signs, lots of different types of mixed media. And of course this is all informed by his background of having a lot of experience working with his hands and doing welding and stuff like that. And he is now extremely involved with the Cahuilla tribe. It is in fact part of the Cahuillan tribal government and the last record I saw said that he is still actively part of that government. And so he's sort of like very involved in the day to day of the Cahuilla people. And he as an artist is dedicated to basically giving back Native American people, like as he put it, the “humanity that has been taken from it by stereotypes created over the past five centuries. Searching for the unconventional beauty one only finds in the truth.” And then he said, “I'm a California Indian, part traditionalist part Disneyland. I want to express the passion, pain and reverence I feel as a contemporary Native person.” All which is to say, you know, like he's a person. He’s a complicated human being with like lots of different stuff going on, as we all are. But taking that essential humanity and also sharing it through a specifically Native perspective. And his work is very politically focused and strives to reflect political opinions like within, his specific area in the country, but also the United States as a whole and in their whole history. And so just to use one specific example of his work, one of the things that he is most well-known for is the Branded series. So he created a branding iron, like you would use on a cattle ranch, which his family had a cattle ranch. And so that's another connection to his family, but it actually spells out “Native”. The first one, I believe he spoke that he made, spelled out Indian and then he has one active on his website now for Native, that he used to stamp onto different things. This is actually a satire of collectors who are trying to brand what is and isn't Native. So taking like objects and being like “oh, this sort of traditional thing, this like thing that looks like the stereotype of what I have in my head of an Indigenous piece of art, like this is Native, but this thing that's a painting that's made by a contemporary Indigenous artists like this isn't Native because that's not what I think it should look like.” And so that's where the idea for this came from, and then he uses it to brand onto things like just, just a piece of paper. What does it mean when you just take a piece of paper and stamp it and brand it literally as Native. What does that mean? And who gets to decide what is and isn't a valid form of Native art? And so you can see, like, I clearly was going for a kind of theme here with the artists that I ended up selecting and looking at the questions that they are demanding be asked about legitimacy and how we grant legitimacy.

Betty: And speaking of another artist who also kind of defies expectations, the last artist I will be talking about is a British Columbia artist called Brian Joungen. So he's actually Dane-zaa, which is his Native side, and Swiss ancestry. So he lives in North Okanagan in British Columbia and he's also a mixed media artist. But he mostly makes like, installations and sculptural works. He’s not like, he doesn't have a lot of paintings, although he also does like collages and things like that. So, yeah, so his works, often they’re, they have like a political topics, are politically driven, but he also has, he says, I have a lot of other interests similarly to, Clark he’s, you know, a complex human being and not just a native guy in BC. But like he also really loves sports. He loves basketball and football. A lot of his work is sports related. But he also like sports and that whole concept of like the gym and the like local YMCA. Like, it is a very, also a very integral part of a lot of First Nations communities. So you know, it also does have to do with his First Nations identity. In any case, so the work I want to talk about that he did, it's a work called it's technically called 1960, 1970, 1980 in reference to these years, but since then, he's also made 1990, 2000. And 2000. So—and sorry, and 2010. So they’re, every year is a giant tote totem pole made out of golf bags. So, some of them are like red golf bags that’s stacked up high and some of them are like blue and yellow, like they're all different colors cause golf bags come in different colors. And he sorta modifies them. He does this to a lot of like sports memorabilia, he modifies them a little bit. So it it's interesting cause some of the folds in the golf beds, the bags actually look like masks or like faces. So from far away they look like totem poles from British Columbia. So you know, and some of them, especially the red and black and white one is actually of traditional colors of some of the Haida totem poles out there. So it is, you know, you could mistake it for a totem pole, but they're made of golf bags. They're fabric. So, anyway, so the particular years, so every single year references something that happened in Canada that has to do with First Nations people. Some of them are like, you know, negative things, things that happened that were bad, essentially. But some of them are more positive things. So I thought we'd end on a more positive note. So was just a quick run through. So 1960 that totem pole refers to the first time that First Nations people acquire the right to vote in Canadian federal elections. But 1960 also refers to the Sixties Scoop, as I mentioned before, where the Canadian government essentially kidnapped tens of thousands of Native children and forced them to be adopted by white families. And then 1970 mostly references the white papers that were issued by the Trudeau government. Now this is a Pierre Trudeau, who’s Justin's dad. And he actually, a lot of First Nations people, a lot of Indigenous people do not like him. And in turn, probably don't like his son either because the white papers actually eradicated a lot as the special privileges that the Indian act had given Status Indians at least. But a lot of it was stripped because Trudeau was trying to argue that well, Indigenous people should be treated equally as Canadians. So you should just have equal rights, which is good, like having the right to vote, but some of these privileges were taken away and a lot of it, again, were like treaty, were written in the treaty that they had whatever these privileges are, whether it's fishing grounds or land or whatever. But a lot of it, he was just like, nope, nevermind. So Justin is not liked by some people for that reason, even though it was his dad, but he hasn't really done that much, to kind of reverse these decisions either, so. And then 1980 was when, so the First Nations were fighting for representation within the constitution of Canada. As I said, we technically only became independent from Britain in 1981. So this was more or less of a success because they were officially included in the Canadian Charter of Independence and in our, in our constitution. But 1990, which is actually when this piece was made, and so the totem pole in 1990 represents this thing that happened in Canada called the Oka crisis. So it was a court decision that was granted to a developer to expand a golf course into disputed Mohawk territory outside of the town of Oka Quebec. So it was, it was in like at the time, I think both of us weren't alive yet, but it was on the news, like everywhere at least in Canada. It was a crisis that lasted 78 days and resulted in one fatality and over a hundred wounded. Most of it was Mohawk protesters, but I think 35 was Canadian armed soldiers. So, yeah, the Canadian government had to send the army into there to the disputes and the protests, which is Mohawk Nation protesting the building of this golf course, hence the golf bags. But the golf course represents more than just, you know, white people coming in here and, building a golf course over traditional Native grounds. It's also, it symbolizes this, you know, wealth and upper-class privileges, which in a lot of cases is kind of exclusive to white communities. But also golf courses are very environmentally damaging. They destroy the bio-diversity of the land and uses massive amounts of water. So, even golf courses built elsewhere are problematic. So 2000, I forget what that totem bag was for, so we'll skip over that. So 2010 was the year of the Vancouver—so, the Olympics actually has received widespread criticisms for, like appropriation of Indigenous imagery in their commercial imageries and like, mascots and stuff like that. But you know, on a positive note, between 2008 and 2015, so in that 2010 period, Prime Minister Harper also issued the Truth and Reconciliation Report, which again is, you know, it really only just acknowledges the wrongs that were done by the Canadian government, but it is seen as a bit of a win because at least it was acknowledged rather than just erased.

Quinn: Oh dear.

Betty: This is my positive note. It’s acknowledged.

Quinn: Well, as I'm sure you can tell by everything we've talked about this episode, there are so many amazing Indigenous artists out there. And in fact is trying to have an episode where we just talk about the broad category of Indigenous artists is going to be impossible because their work is so varied. And so obviously you're just taking a couple of selections to speak about some very specific aspects of the few pieces of artwork that relate to some of the themes we were talking about in the last episode. But we will obviously be returning to many more of these artists and lots that we didn't have time to talk about today in future episodes. But thank you so much for listening to this episode of Pictorial. You can find our show notes at relay.fm/pictorial, and you can also follow us on Twitter or Instagram @PictorialPod. You can also follow me on Twitter or Instagram @aspiringrobotfm. 

Betty: And you can also follow me on Twitter and Instagram @articulationsv. I'm also on YouTube as ARTiculations. And speaking of YouTube, we also upload these episodes to YouTube, where we edit in pictures of what we speak about throughout the podcast. There is a bit of a delay recently because of me, but hopefully they will catch up within a few weeks.

Quinn: Thanks for listening, art enthusiasts!