Embodying Our Ancestors

I have a foggy memory from childhood of my father taking me to a Métis event. It may have been a governance meeting or a fundraiser. I have no idea what age I was or what happened while we were there aside from the one thing that stands out clearly in my memory decades later: a table with moccasins on it. I remember being in awe of the beading on them and wanting a pair of them so deeply. This wasn’t the same as going shopping with my dad and asking for random trinkets; I felt this in my heart. I did not ask my father to get me a pair, though I told him how I really loved them. I returned to the table a few more times to look. To my recollection, this was the first time I identified something as Métis art. 

Métis material culture is very prevalent on the prairies. It is easy to identify for those who know the symbols and patterns used by the Métis. Decades later, I am still seeking out my culture through art. Contemporary Métis artists working in a variety of mediums teach me to understand my culture in a deeper, more varied way. Don’t get me wrong, I am still drawn to tables of beading, but this is paired with looking to Métis filmmakers, digital artists, performance artists, painters, printmakers, installation artists, and textile artists.

This brings me to the first time I recall seeing a Métis exhibition. In 2009, I was an Art History undergrad student tasked with writing an essay about an exhibition from a local artist-run centre, and I headed to Urban Shaman Contemporary Art Gallery. David Garneau’s exhibition “Métis/sage” was on display. This is another one of those moments that has stuck with me. I remember feeling awed by seeing these large-scale paintings that represented my and Garneau’s shared culture. The paintings reflected questions I was working through to understand about being Métis.

David Garneau’s work remains a constant that I return to, both for his art and his output as a scholar and writer. Seeing this exhibition was a formative experience because it inspired me to continue to seek out other Métis artists. The way these artists leave traces of our culture in their work continues to shape the ways I understand our histories, our present, and our futures.

Three Métis artists currently occupy a lot of space in my brain. Their different practices represent not only a continuation of Métis histories and futures, but their work is also integral to understanding how we individually engage and connect with our shared culture while also holding individual identities, values, and interests that intersect with it. These artists are Robyn Adams, Maria-Margaretta Cabana Boucher, and Rhayne Vermette. None of them are looking to create a clean-cut narrative of Métis culture, and–even better perhaps—they question if there really is one. But they are looking to our future while honouring those who came before us.

Robyn, Maria-Margaretta, and Rhayne each teach me something very different about Métis people. Despite these differences, one motif has come up in each of their work that I think is worth noting. In recent exhibitions, all three artists have used old family photos as a way of grounding the work. These photos gesture at how their families hold space in the artists’ present and how they move into the future. In her recent solo exhibition at Platform Centre in Winnipeg titled “reyv·payzaj | dream·scape,” Robyn Adams used a photo found in her grandmother’s possessions of a Red River cart moving across the prairies. Maria-Margaretta Cabana Boucher included a small photograph of her grandfather’s cabin in her exhibition “a memory with you: of holding, of carrying together.” For her installation in the Sobey Art Award Exhibition at the National Gallery this year, Rhayne Vermette used an old school photo of her father that she placed a mask on. In all three cases, these photos are not featured or placed in a central setting and they are the original photos. Each of the images has been modified or bears some trace of the artist but are nevertheless somewhat unassuming additions to their larger gallery exhibitions. These photos create intimacy, a reminder of who these artists are and where they came from.

Maria-Margaretta Cabana Boucher holds space in her practice for the women in her family. The women in our communities have been and continue to be crucial to the survival of the stories of our people. Past and present, they have been the ones who cared for these stories. We have a natural curiosity to know about the women of our past while actively learning from those who surround us. Maria-Margaretta exemplifies how this also extends to the children around us and honours their knowledge. As Maria-Margaretta holds stories, knowledge, and understanding of these women into her work, she creates work that embodies the way that understanding has flowed through her. Her work is full of family references and memories, often looking at everyday objects and marking them with special details. A body of work titled that old home of mine features many such objects, including a vintage couch with a floral pattern the artist has beaded over. Using clear and white beads, the labour is almost imperceptible until the light catches it. The traces of women’s work mark the domestic object as special or as having emotional value. I see this work as leaving traces of spirits we want to keep with us. Maria-Margaretta replicates this method with other objects such as rubber gloves, the floral beading on the gloves nearly blending into the object itself, subtly leaving both the literal traces of cultural knowledge and the spiritual traces of all of the women who had to exist and pass that knowledge down for it to eventually reach her. Maria-Margaretta’s exhibition “a memory with you: of holding, of carrying together” at grunt gallery in 2024 brings all of these ideas together. The exhibition is grounded in sharing knowledge with her daughter, including the cultural gifts that Maria-Margaretta carries as an artist, which she wants her daughter to see and understand. In looking forward to the future generation, ancestors are central to the exhibition. The artist seeks to understand how her daughter will hold memories and lovingly receive ancestral knowledge. Recurring across the work is a white gauzy fabric screen-printed with white flowers, some of which have been beaded over with clear beads. The exhibition is set up like a family camping trip with lawn chairs (the fabric of the lawn chairs is actually woven beads), chopped wood, and an axe. The beaded and screen-printed fabric shows up in several places, such as under the wood, placed on a chair like a blanket, and the material of a tent-like structure. The ancestors are always present.

Robyn Adams works in a variety of mediums, including beading, printmaking, digital imagery, and film. A graduate student of architecture and landscape architecture, the work she is building through her practice is joyful and inquisitive. I am captivated by Robyn’s cyanotypes. Printmaking in itself is an act of leaving traces, an act of reproduction. Cyanotypes are not about creating a perfect representation of what is being captured. Some details are lost, but new knowledge can be found. Robyn uses native plants to create large-scale cyanotypes with striking contrast between the blue and white hues. I asked Robyn if the cyanotypes, their colours blue and white, were referencing the Métis flag, to which she laughed and said no. The prints are not about telling a straightforward story of Métis nationalism but instead about the complex and deep-rooted relationship we have with the land. Robyn’s work is not heavily conceptual, but it does make references in an unassuming way. Métis connection to our homelands means many things to different people. The cyanotypes invite exploration of Métis relationships to the land in a variety of ways. We can look to histories of how our people began, which most often involve our political histories, which in turn involve the lands our ancestors shared. In Métis thinking about the land, its political dimension is always present, butted up against colonial histories. In Robyn’s work, there is something gentler at play, a way to understand Métis relationship to land that does not need to include those colonial histories. The elements needed to create these prints are the plants, the sun, water, and Robyn—the cyanotype colouring is the only thing not fully provided by the lands. The plants used by Robyn all come from the territories considered the homeland of the Métis. Robyn is building on an understanding that the lands are part of a larger system that includes the skies and waterways and all they contain. She reminds us that these lands exist in cycles: cycles that seem never-ending; cycles of light, seasons, seeds, death, and rebirth; cycles that expose us to unwritten histories, showing us these plants were here before us and will be here after us, telling their stories to future generations. These plants know what they are, that they belong here, that they come from a long line of plants before them. There is no way for Robyn to fully represent the plants, or their histories, or their connection to the lands they grew in, or their relationship to the water that feeds them. Robyn does not attempt that, but rather builds her own relationship with them and, through the prints, attempts to document that relationship. The imperfectness of this method of documentation is the reality of trying to share the story of any relationship. In the gallery setting, Robyn works to have viewers build their own second-hand relationship with the plants and the lands they came from; the prints are a vehicle for knowledge sharing. When Robyn is present in the gallery, she will share what plants were used and where she harvested them, who was with her when she made them, and why she was on the territory she was on. The stories Robyn shares are plentiful, humble and full of love. Robyn helps others identify the plants that have been used for prints and shares knowledge about those plants. Similar to Maria-Margaretta, Robyn’s imagery can be seen as physical traces of a history. By pairing these traces with knowledge sharing and a celebration of the joyful moments of connection among Métis people on our homelands, they become part of the traditions of our people and make them present today.

For over a decade, I have been thinking of the layers in Rhayne Vermette’s films, photos, and prints. These layers materialize both in the visuals and in the narrative she creates with this imagery. Rhayne has made experimental short films for the majority of her career. Although she has begun making feature films, she has not left behind the medium of shorts, and her features approach narrative in an experimental way. These layers, and her experimental method of presenting a narrative, may not evidently hold Métis stories within them. In many of her short films, Rhayne is not explicitly bringing in our culture but simply is a Métis filmmaker. This is precisely why I come back to her work over and over. Rhayne’s early films were the first time I engaged with art by a Métis artist where I was not immediately finding references to our culture. Her films are exactly what she wanted to make, and this did not mean explicitly exploring her heritage, sharing stories of Métis histories, or using traditional ways of making. Not once have I questioned whether or not this is Métis art. As someone who has worked to understand what it means to walk through this world as a Métis person and be recognized as such, it was eye-opening to see this work not needing to do that. There is no obligation to perform being Métis when you are Métis. And so, through Rhayne’s layered films, I saw Métis life. This life creates images of everyday labour as a filmmaker through experiments like her series of desk studies, where she documents the objects on her desk. Here, the layers of contents on her desk flash by in an intimate portrait of her process. We see photographs, film reels, scissors, cameras and–when we are lucky—a cameo by her cat. The quick raw images are part of the research process for the short films she makes. Rhayne is dedicated to working in the medium of film and pushing its boundaries. Domus (2017) is a beautiful example of this dedication. Images pass by at a rapidly changing pace, changing from frames made using scratch animation to using film as an object on the screen as it is layered on a surface, with its image captured by the camera. She animates using photocopied images and then layers other images on top of the photocopies that move around the screen. The soundtrack layers sound and voiceover narration by the artist. At one point, Rhayne talks about how architect Carlo Mollino’s work is just an intricate collage of his memories, referencing herself in this statement as much as she is Mollino’s work. Her films are filled with layers of her thoughts, her memories, her voice, and her daily life, all leaving the trace of a Métis filmmaker.

Red River Métis, Michif, Bois Brûlé, Otipemisiwak, the Flower Beadwork people, Half Breeds: we have many names, but we are the culmination of our histories in the present. We are each what Maria-Margaretta calls the “Michif self-archive,” which she defines as a way to document her own personal experience as a Michif person rather than speaking to the experiences of the Métis nation as a whole. When we look to our histories, we are searching for these traces of individual stories to understand Métis life in the past as a method of navigating the world today.

---

Jennifer Lee Smith is a Red River Métis Curator, Writer and Arts Administrator living on Treaty 1 Territory/Winnipeg. Her work focuses on the relationships between Indigenous artists, connections to land and material culture.

This article is published in issue 42.1 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue