We Are Still Here

It was found in a farmer’s field near the town of Hanley, Saskatchewan, and is thought to have a connection to an ancient Indigenous people known as the Mississippians. I first saw the stone in the summer of 2016 when I arrived in Saskatoon to oversee the installation of my exhibition “The Dancing Grounds” at Wanuskewin Heritage Park. The exhibition was an extension of my powwow series, Strong Hearts, and my more recent research into the Mississippians.

Long before Europeans arrived at Turtle Island, the Mississippians flourished in what is now the central and southeastern United States. What I have learned about objects such as the stone, are the limitations one is faced with when trying to reconstruct the object’s provenance centuries later. What did the people use such objects for? Often we are only left with archaeological theories. I find it far more interesting to take an approach more consistent with the storytelling tradition I learned from my elders on the Six Nations Reserve.

I was born and raised in Buffalo; my grandparents moved there in the 1940s to find work, making me a first-generation urban Iroquois. While my mother and father were born on the reserve, they too lived in the city, struggling to negotiate the two worlds. This struggle is evident in the photograph I took of my father’s hand showing two rings: a Wolf Clan ring and a Masonic ring.

My father worked in the Chevrolet factory as a maintenance painter, hating his job, and struggling with alcohol addiction. Like many Indigenous families at that time, the legacy of colonialism and residential schools had severed the connection to our histories. Unaware of the reasons for it, I tried to make sense of the turmoil around me. One day my father took me to the library and, while he filled out the form for my library card, I sat down and began paging through an open book lying on a nearby table. The images could have been, or at least were like those, made by George Catlin in the mid-19th century. When my father came over to get me, I looked up from a painted portrait of a Plains Indian man dressed in tribal clothing and was startled to see that my father’s face resembled that of the man in the book. What had happened to the sense of power and presence so prevalent in the painted image? I began to search for answers.

In 2001, I was commissioned to curate a photo-based exhibition on residential schools by the Aboriginal Healing Foundation called Where Are the Children: Healing the Legacy of the Residential Schools. One of the objectives of the show was to open conversations about the continued effect residential schools have on people’s lives today. The challenge of using photographs intended for promotion of the school system was to now repurpose them and provide a platform for survivors to finally begin telling their stories. The residential school tragedy had remained silent because the children, now adults, were ashamed and unable to talk about their experiences.

In one section of “The Dancing Grounds” exhibition, I used a dual portrait of a young boy, Thomas Moore, who had attended the Regina Industrial School. On the left-hand side is a studio portrait of Moore wearing what resembles tribal clothing and long braids. On the right-hand side, Moore is seen once again but this time wearing a military-style uniform with his hair cut short. The portraits were used in the 1896 government sessional report on residential schools to illustrate the good work that the schools were doing—a juxtaposition of savage and civilized. The replacement of one culture by another. Moore was the poster child for the industrial school system, and his image became the foundation for my residential school project. The sessional report did not provide any individual information about him, as was the case with all the children in the sessional report photographs. They were invisible as individuals.

Indigenous children entered the residential schools with an education that had sustained them for thousands of years, but forced assimilation drove their imaginations into hiding. With no guidance to help them process the changes that were affecting their world in negative ways, they were forced to grapple with a new world order, one that would render their traditional teachings ineffective.

A few days after the Wanuskewin opening, I drove to Battleford to see the site of the former Battleford Industrial School. During my residential school exhibition research, I had read an account of children from the school who were forced to witness the hangings of eight Cree men at nearby Fort Battleford. These men had taken part in the Northwest Resistance in 1885. The only remnants of the old school were pieces of the foundation. As I wandered around the site, I tried to imagine that day—September 22, 1885—when the children walked the three kilometres from the school to the fort. Forcing them to witness the executions was meant to remind the children of the consequences of resisting assimilation. It is a message that has continued to reverberate from generation to generation. I was reminded of this several months later, while watching news reports coming from the North Battleford Court House over the killing of Colten Boushie by a white farmer, Gerald Stanley. Stanley was found not guilty by an all-white jury. History was repeating itself.

I thought about the battle that Indigenous people face every day on reserves and urban communities across Canada. Far too many of our youth are dying, whether from alcohol, drugs, suicide, or a farmer’s gun. They are struggling with a lack of role models due to the legacy of residential schools.

I too struggled as a young boy. I had not learned about my Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) history in school. We learned instead about European settlement, the grand narrative of expansion and civilization. Questions to my teachers and parents remained unanswered. What I saw and read in books about Indigenous people would always leave me with more questions: the books were all written and illustrated by non-Indigenous people for a non-Indigenous audience.

Yet I was very fortunate to have been raised for some years by my grandmother, my step-grandfather, and my step-grandfather’s sister, Emily General, at Six Nations. These elders instilled in me the principals handed down to them as part of the longhouse tradition. Emily General was a political activist, theatre organizer, and a former teacher in a Six Nations reserve school. My step-grandfather, Bert General, was a lifelong farmer and noted lacrosse player. Both were great storytellers. Some of the best stories took place in my step-grandfather’s pickup truck driving from the reserve to Buffalo. I would listen and look out at the night sky and imagine all sorts of new things.

My education included social activism, study of the land and our history, and the creativity embedded in storytelling. When I returned to the city with my grandmother, rather than being complacent and blindly trying to fit in, my life became one of resistance, exploration, and seeking knowledge and understanding. I took up the challenge to find balance as an Iroquois city dweller. I became a storyteller. I use my photographs in a way that pays respect to my Haudenosaunee ancestors who used wampum belts as visual elements to remember important events.

Many of the stories in my Wanuskewin exhibition revolve around how Indigenous people navigate urban life. At the heart of the show is my interest in the Birdman, a figure that emerged from Mississippian warrior society. The rise of the Mississippians began around the 9th century and reached its apex in the 12th century. The Mississippian capital is just outside St. Louis, Missouri, and is preserved as a heritage park known as Cahokia. Some estimates put the population of Cahokia at its peak as larger than that of London, England. Unlike the view of Indigenous people promulgated by Europeans, Turtle Island was a complex and advanced world. It was an eye-opener for me, as an urban Iroquois, to know that urbanization was in our collective DNA.

What led to the development of the Mississippian world was the introduction of cultivated crops like corn. This allowed more leisure time to develop an elaborate society with civil engineering projects like mound building, a society built upon a chieftainship system, and a complex warrior society system. The Birdman is an amalgamation of warrior and bird of prey, a figure of resistance and resilience that connects to contemporary traditional powwow dancers. The Birdman became my avatar, a replacement for the male role models missing in my life. It also became a focus for telling my own story and constructing new narratives to help negotiate the urban environment.

In the eponymous work of “The Dancing Grounds,” I paired a copper plate image of the Birdman (perhaps made at the copper workshop at Cahokia) with a view of Monks Mound at Cahokia and an image of Jack Moore, Pima. The copper plate reminded me of the dancer, who I had photographed at the Grand River Champion Powwow at Six Nations in 1982.

After more than a century of suppression, the powwow began to make its appearance in New York State in the 1980s. I was fascinated by the dancers coming from all parts of North America. I was fascinated not only by their regalia, but the sense of self they exhibited on the powwow grounds. What I saw and felt had an ancient feel to it and would eventually motivate me to begin photographing the event. Not content to shoot from the sidelines with a telephoto lens, I began to talk to the dancers. This allowed me to move in close for my images. Jack Moore was one of the first dancers I worked with and, as I watched him transform from the everyday world to the dancer, each piece of regalia he added was done with a sense of reverence and respect. Each piece began to come to life as he walked onto the dance grounds.

In another panel, Birdmen (2015), the central image is a shell gorget (pendant) incised with two birdmen figures. On the left is a historical image of a Kiowa man in war dress, while on the right is a photograph of Michael White Eyes (Lakota) at a powwow, his bustle feathers visible behind him.

I wanted to find out more about the bustle/crow belt worn by contemporary traditional dancers. I was intrigued by the feather work and the feeling of flight it suggested to me. This would impact the way I photographed contemporary dancers, with a focus on their dance bustles/crow belts. In my research I learned that a man who had attained honors was entitled to wear an ornament called “the Crow” that was worn at the back and fastened around the waist by a belt:

It was made with two long pendants of dressed skin painted red or green, which fell over the legs to the heels. On the skin were fastened rows of eagle feathers arranged to hang freely so as to flutter with the movements of the wearer. An entire eagle skin, with head, beak, and tail formed the middle ornament; from this rose two arrow shafts tipped with hair dyed red. On the right hip was the tail of a wolf; on the left the entire skin of a crow.¹

The crow belt was the predecessor to the dance bustle worn by traditional powwow dancers. In the 2016 Crow Belt Wearers (2016), I make this link between the past and present with three crow belts. On the left is a 1904 image of Fred Murie (Pawnee) wearing a crow belt. On the right is a 1985 photograph I took of Gerald Cleveland (Winnebago) assembling his dance bustle as he transforms into Birdman. I included Cleveland because of what is not seen in the image—his children, watching their father. I recall feeling envious of them; what if that had been my father and he was passing on to me the traditions of our ancestors? How would that knowledge have helped me to negotiate the new urban reality? It was not unreasonable to imagine that lineage tracing back to 11th-century Cahokia and the gathering of Birdmen for their ceremonial dances.

In the centre of Crow Belt Wearers is an image of Barry Ace standing beside his work Urban Bustle at the Karsh-Mason Gallery in 2016. Constructing his bustle using both traditional (feathers, deer hooves, and deer hide) and contemporary (computer parts, video, and laser print) materials, Ace brings together the natural and machine-made to “map out a new Anishinaabeg cyber-territory.”² It captures the spirit of innovation and adaptation that have been integral to the survival of indigenous people and their cultures.

Objects like the stone tablet, the copper Birdman, and the shell gorget are symbols of strength and integrity; symbols of a time when tribal society flourished and prospered. The works in “The Dancing Grounds” from a narrative of resilience and survival. They link to the objective I have pursued with my work to say, “We are still here.”

My elder once said to me: “One day you will tell your own story.” When I returned to the city with my grandmother, my elder’s voice echoed in my mind as I looked around my neighborhood on a quiet late summer evening. What I thought to myself was this: “Remember everything you have learned—what you now see, hear, and smell—because this is who you are.” It was an Indianness I had never seen represented in books, photographs, or paintings.

The challenge my elders gave me is still a work in progress. I continue to gather new experiences and stories. I believe that Mississippian society and culture survived for a reason, just as the powwow serves a purpose, or an ancient stone found in a Saskatchewan farmer’s field tells a story, or residential school survivors who have now stepped forward to share their experiences. The challenge is how to incorporate these narratives into our own stories, to make, for example, the connection between an ancient stone and the fur cap of a contemporary powwow dancer. We are storytellers, and our stories of resilience will pave the way for our children to thrive in today’s complex world.

1. Alice C. Fletcher and Francis La Flesche, The Omaha Tribe (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1911), 441–442.
2. Anna Paluch, “Cyber Traditions.” Art and Science Journal. http://www.artandsciencejournal.com/post/97830692853/cyber-traditions-contemporary-odawa-artist-barry

This article is published in issue 35.3 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue