Not Written in Stone: Propositions and Provocations from ‘Stronger Than Stone, (Re)inventing the Indigenous Monument’

by Tarin Hughes

As “Stronger Than Stone: (Re)Inventing the Indigenous Monument” opened on the morning of November 21, after a welcome by Siksika Elder, Margaret Water Chief, Jen Budney recalled feeling compelled to understand the reality of her origins and the histories of the peoples of the Americas. Watching the Calgary iterations of the conference online, I realized that I am blind to the reality of where I come from and wondered where my voice fit within the immense subject matter of the symposium.

“Stronger Than Stone” grew out of conversations between Saskatoon-based writer and curator Jen Budney and artists Jimmie Durham, Maria Thereza Alves, and Jeff Thomas. This cross-continental dialogue continued for a decade with plans to realize an intimate conversation in Berlin, which would then turn into a recording and a book. With multiple applications for funding denied over the course of a decade, “Stronger Than Stone” was organized with the help of ACAD Exhibitions Director/Curator Wayne Baerwaldt and the Illingworth Kerr Gallery. Together with a Steering Committee made up of Baerwaldt, Budney, University of Saskatchewan Galleries Director/Curator Kent Archer and Mendel Art Gallery Associate Curator Haema Sivanesan the symposium took shape. Additional partnerships were formed with the Alberta College of Art and Design, the City of Calgary, the University of Saskatchewan, the Mendel Art Gallery, Wanuskewin Heritage Park, the City of Saskatoon and Tribe Inc. With the assistance of countless other individuals “Stronger Than Stone” was realized in November 2014. The symposium was formed as a conversation and named for Durham’s continued work and interest in monumentality and European metaphors around stone.

Over four days between Calgary and Saskatoon, Treaty 7 and Treaty 6 territories, “Stronger Than Stone” dissected, navigated, investigated and proposed through panels, performances, readings, and discussions. Fittingly, the first day opened with a presentation by Jimmie Durham, pre-recorded from his hospital bed in Berlin, in which Durham elaborated on his assertion that all monuments in the Americas are against Indigenous peoples. Stating that we are living in a time when colonialism is at its peak, and that monumentality works against us. If we consider the monuments of the Americas as existing outside of the traditional sense of the word, we can include the United States highway system or even the grandly named dams and reservoirs. In conversation with anthropologist Michael Taussig and curator, critic and art historian Richard Hill, Durham purposed monuments with appropriation of memory. These provocations were a charged start to “Stronger Than Stone” and a symposium that was built out of a vacillating dialogue around Durham’s rejection of the monument and Jeff Thomas’ employment of monuments in the discourse around decolonization.

As the symposium continued, panels worked through topics of histories, memory, defacement, language, future best practices, and public spaces. Artists and panelists maneuvered through their history and the monument within their practices. Working as a curator and director of an artist-run centre, “Stronger Than Stone” was a provocation to consider the charged realm of public space as a setting for artistic practice. The ongoing challenges imposed by urban development, gentrification and the creation of a kind of capitalist monoculture of aesthetics often includes as curator and art historian Miwon Kwon notes in One Place After Another “the appropriation of site-specific art for the valorization of urban identities.”((Miwon Kwon, “One Place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity.” October, Vol. 80. (Spring, 1997), pp. 85-110.)) In relation to Durham’s presentation, monuments propagate the “valorization” of a number of things, namely colonialism and genocide. If this is true, how do we handle the charged realm of public space as a political, mediated space with physical and invisible boundaries?

In the panel The World Upside-Down: What are our Challenges in the Local Context?, artist Elwood Jimmy articulated the simple but necessary idea that artists and community collaborations are not codified. The ways in which we enter into collaborative relationships are continually in flux. Similarly, the spaces that we negotiate, as the institution, the artist or the public must also be responsive and ever-changing. As curator and writer Candice Hopkins later stated as we move forward “instead of every monument being against us, they will be for us” noting an illusive use of “us” and “we”.((Candice Hopkins, The Road Ahead: Towards a Framework for Best, or better, Practices panel with David Garneau and Steve Loft. “Stronger Than Stone (Re)Inventing the Indigenous Monument.” Monday, November 24, 2015.))

Two recent exhibitions on view throughout “Stronger Than Stone” fostered by Saskatoon-based curator Felicia Gay, saw the installation of two separate billboards that made use of the idea of monument for the artist and Indigenous history. “Transformation” at AKA artist-run centre featured works by Joi T. Arcand and Shelley Niro, while “Testimony” at PAVED arts paired KC Adams and Terrance Houle. Individual works by Arcand and Houle were mounted on the shared AKA and PAVED outdoor billboard space. While an architectural fixture of the two artist-run centres, the large-scale billboard is in dialogue with the many advertising signs and billboards throughout Saskatoon. Engaging with their individual programming mandates, AKA and PAVED utilize the billboard for a variety of artist projects that often work through the corporatization of urban public space and its implication on cultural histories, connectedness to the land, and democratic public ownership of our streets. On occasion this means that the billboard becomes a charged political site, as with artist Scott Massey’s recent anti-advertising billboard Outstanding Outdoor, 2014, mimicking the Pattison logo, a large advertising corporation with its own arm of public arts and culture programming.

Arcand’s billboard project installed in the winter of 2013 entitled otē nīkān misiwē askīhk – Here On Future Earth (Amber Motors) “imagine[d] a future post-colonial reality.”((http://akaartistrun.com/portfolio-item/ote-nikan-misiwe-askihk, (accessed December 30, 2014).)) In a recent conversation with the artist, she described otē nīkān misiwē askīhk as a re-envisioned city where nēhiyawēwin (the Cree language) was a visible, public language. Not only was the text signage on Amber Motors (the location of an abandoned used car lot in Riversdale, Saskatoon) in Plains Cree syllabics, but also the outdoor billboard site offered a reading of Arcand’s image as everyday promotional signage. otē nīkān misiwē askīhk enabled Arcand to “imagin[e] (digitally) what [her] city might look like if the Cree language was visible to the public” but also challenge the public, “Saying the city is on Indigenous land let that be reflected in the visible language of the city. The artist and the institution must recognize the lands and the history of the lands first.”((Email interview with Joi T Arcand, January 17, 2015.)) If as Durham proposes, we can see monuments all around us, Arcand’s billboard and installation inside the AKA gallery space The Beautiful NDN Supermaidens, 2014, monumentalized powerful and long-standing themes in the artist’s work, “Indigenous women and Indigenous languages.”((Email interview with Joi T Arcand, January 17, 2015.)) While The Beautiful NDN Supermaidens was located on the gallery walls, it stood 10 x 14 as a large-scale digital mural depicting fourteen beautiful, empowered and strong Indigenous women.

Houle’s billboard Aakaisttsiiksiinaakii: Many Snake Woman: “The Daughters after Me” is on view until spring 2015 and features four stills from a 2008 video work of the same name. Each still shows a portrait of the women in the artist’s immediate family, “I first started with my Grandmother then my Mother: Maxine Weaselfat- Sacred Soaring Bird woman, my sister: Jolane Houle – Three Suns Woman and finally my own daughter: Neko- Peace Keeping Woman or Many Peace Flags Woman.”((http://www.terrancehouleart.com/aakaisttsiiksiinaakii.html, (accessed December 30, 2014).)) The video and billboard are Houle’s recreation of a portrait of his grandmother May Weaselfat (Bloods/ Kainai) by German-born NYC artist Winold Reiss((http://www.terrancehouleart.com/aakaisttsiiksiinaakii.html, (accessed December 30, 2014).)) held in the Glenbow Museum’s collection. Like Arcand’s mural, Aakaisttsiiksiinaakii monumentalizes Indigenous women challenging negative media depictions and presenting realities of powerful women, in Houle’s case, a second-generation Residential School survivor, a mother, a grandmother and an elder.

Curated under Gay’s transformation and testimony thematics, Arcand and Houle’s billboards activated the public space with Indigenous language, history and positive depictions of Indigenous women. When asked about the role of the institution in enabling the artist to work in public spaces, Arcand felt that galleries and institutions have a role stating, “Creating public art is expensive, access and space must always be negotiated.”((Email interview with Joi T Arcand, January 17, 2015.)) While I am in agreement, I wonder about the implications this has on the hierarchies of cultural institutions, from funders to policy makers, boards, curators, artists and the public. Who are we to assume these roles, to make choices, to navigate public spaces? On Monday afternoon following a panel, a public forum engaged artists Rebecca Belmore, Adrian Stimson and KC Adams in a discussion of the artist’s role and working in controversial spaces. Belmore wondered how artists can take care of themselves when they work in a public and thus vulnerable way. Stimson answered that for him, it’s about the research and histories. Adams reiterated that as artists they move through what occurs in the world around them and “send it back” good or bad.((The World Upside-Down What are our Challenges in the Local Context? KC Adams, Ruth Cuthand, Sandra Semchuck, Elwood Jimmy, Adrian Stimson. Monday, November 24, 2015.))

For me, this is where the answers lie. The way forward is fraught with challenges, vulnerabilities and systems of control in which we are all confined. Holistically and collectively we need to see the deficits, but we must also find a way forward together. As the day closed on Monday, November 24, on a panel The Road Ahead: Towards a Framework for Best, or Better, Practices, Candice Hopkins relayed a hopeful prediction and call to action, “On the road ahead every day will be a cultural day … we will remember you get the culture your economy will allow and that those two things are contingent with one another … we will move from a place of resistance to a place of ownership.”((Candice Hopkins, The Road Ahead: Towards a Framework for Best, or better, Practices panel with David Garneau and Steve Loft. “Stronger Than Stone (Re)Inventing the Indigenous Monument.” Monday, November 24, 2015.))

Upon leaving “Stronger Than Stone,” I understood ownership meant I needed to know the history of the peoples and the land on which I was born; an island that was first inhabited by the Mi’kmaq people. A place named Epekwitk or “resting on the waves” until it was changed by settlers, for the fourth time, to Prince Edward Island in honour of Edward, Duke of Kent.((http://www.gov.pe.ca/infopei/index.php3?number=40581&lang=E (accessed January 25, 2015).)) While the most famous monument is Green Gables House, the inspiration for Anne herself, it would seem that between the approximately forty formal monuments only one references the Mi’kmaq people. With this additional knowledge, I know what I have always felt was true, that the land is the monument, the memorial and the history of that place; a site of intrinsic public memory. As a person born in the Americas, as a woman, as a cultural worker, I know that “the road ahead” isn’t codified, it is not written in stone, but as Hopkins said, “We [must] have the courage to speak public secrets to make them known.”((Candice Hopkins, The Road Ahead: Towards a Framework for Best, or better, Practices panel with David, Garneau and Steve Loft. “Stronger Than Stone (Re)Inventing the Indigenous Monument.” Monday, November 24, 2015.))

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“Stronger Than Stone: (Re)Inventing the Indigenous Monument” symposium ran from November 21 to 24, 2014, at ACAD in Calgary, AB and at Wanuskewin Heritage Park in Saskatoon, SK.

Tarin Hughes is a Saskatoon-based writer, curator, and the Executive Director of AKA artist-run.

This article was originally featured in BlackFlash Issue 32.2.