Infinity First Dwells Within a Mortal Body: Jeneen Frei Njootli

Jeneen Frei Njootli’s body is a site of possibilities and limits. As a Two-Spirit artist with Vuntut Gwitchin, Czech, and Dutch ancestry, they situate their body as a necessary vehicle for engaging Indigenous ways of being and artmaking—binding it with notions of embodiment, labour, and reciprocity. Frei Njootli’s artwork integrates materials derived from the hunting and subsistence practices of the Vuntut Gwitchin, a self-governing Indigenous community in Old Crow, YT. These materials include dentalium shells, caribou antlers and bones, and porcupine quills. They also feature reclaimed objects from colonial encounters and re-code them: glass beads, plastic tarps, and baseball caps. As Frei Njootli wrote in the text for their 2020 exhibition at PLATFORM Centre, “small mounds of flesh form:”  “There’s romanticizing land-based pedagogy and then there’s getting chewed right up in clothes you’ve been wearing for three days and not minding it. Tiny mounds form on my skin as I walk through the tussocks.”¹

Frei Njootli’s artwork is often minimally constructed and presented—hung, draped, leaned against a wall, or resting on a dolly or chair as if placed inadvertently. Notably, they use absence to articulate (self-)representation, by eschewing expected motifs and techniques of Indigenous art; or alluding to a missing body, suggested only by clothing or grease prints left behind, and tightly cropped photographs of skin. These strategies of negation divert voyeuristic or colonial assumptions. Frei Njootli’s artistic interventions instead shift attention to the dilemma of Indigenous people and their belongings being seen as cultural “artifacts” while also being subjected to harmful present-day stereotypes.

The perpetuation of the “salvage paradigm” was consequential to the mainstream popularity of Northwest Coast art in the 1960s. Marcia Crosby, a Tsimshian-Haida scholar, argues that this paradigm (entrenched within a Western worldview) instrumentalized Indigenous artists—in her example, Haida artist Bill Reid—into figures of revival and heroes of their nations. The increased visibility of Haida art did not serve Haida cultural restitution; rather, Haida art was retooled using ancient or esoteric aspects and championed by select figureheads like Reid. Crosby’s essay “The Imaginary Indian” speaks to the persistent cultural attitudes within Euro-Canadian frames of authority, “which have declared that native people are a dying race, that our cultures exist only in an authentic past, that our contemporary existence is contaminated and therefore not ‘really’ Haida, or Tsimpsian, and so on.”² Crosby identifies the binds this paradigm puts on Indigenous artists, schematically constraining their work with predetermined historicization, leaving no space for new narratives and self-determination.

Despite the Canadian government’s declarations of recognition and reconciliation, the harm of colonialization has not ended.³ We must be cautious of surface-level tactics of “inclusion” that treat Indigenous aesthetics solely as a form of representation, detached from the material contexts and visual traditions that affirm Indigenous sovereignty and facilitate self-restoration. The proliferation of Northwest Coast and Coast Salish visual culture, for example, has reached a level of recognition where it is found on water bottles, tote bags, coasters, and Vancouver Police Department vehicles. Justin Trudeau has a tattoo of a Haida raven on his arm. When Northwest Coast and other Indigenous art is treated as a commodity, its consumption paradoxically begets apathy; the belief and knowledge systems inextricable to the artworks’ creation are reduced to being disposable, interchangeable, and merely decorative.

How does the colonial gaze sustain itself when it is accustomed to privileging an object or image over its creator? Frei Njootli questions whether it’s possible to experience an artwork—its origin, presence, and use—without thinking about the body of its maker(s). In the series Knowledge Transference (2017), Frei Njootli evaluates the use and display of beadwork they either made themselves or received as gifts. The crafting and design of beadwork contain important expressions of the continuation of Indigenous culture; the introduction and trading of glass beads by Europeans has been acted upon by Indigenous people through transculturation since contact. Beads can be exchanged through a conventional value system, but within an Indigenous framework, beads become collective memory, a way to record and transmit histories and spiritual beliefs determined through gathering, making, teaching, and storytelling. The finished beadwork can mark kin and belonging, serve in ceremonies, and make gifts, operating outside of a market structure.⁴ The beads also defy a conception of material as only a means to an end—some bead artists believe that every bead is a prayer, soul, and spirit.⁵ As such, the work is imbued with both its maker’s reverence and the resilience and perseverance of their culture.

Frei Njootli chooses not to show beadwork directly, renouncing the settler’s museological and anthropological impulse for spectacle. In an act of both refusal and sacrament, Frei Njootli presses the beaded items into their skin to leave an impression. The imprints are photographed, enlarged, and printed. The phantom beads—without their dazzling colour to define figuration—force the viewer to reconcile an assertion of Indigenous practices and culture that isn’t easily bypassed through visual or material pleasure. While recognizing the limits of the surface of the body for representing one’s embodied experience, Frei Njootli invokes Sto:lo intellectual Lee Maracle’s recitation in I am Woman (1996): “In the end, granddaughter, our body is the only house we will ever truly own…. What is more, in the end, command of it will only amount to the sacred right of choice.” Maracle’s quoting of her grandmother offers a directive for unruly self-governance in the face of oppression. An opening always remains to reclaim freedom, however small, of one’s own body. As Frei Njootli hints at in the title of the series, the act of creating these impressions on the skin performs not just refusal but also (self-)devotion. The beads are compressed bare to their skin, a personal but transformative action of spirit, love, and wisdom—ancestral and living.

Frei Njootli further complicates the connection between the beads and their body by using grease to transfer the imprinted surface of their skin onto wall-sized steel sheets in wind sucked in through bared teeth (2019). This evanescent method of documentation is unpredictable and intentional—”depending upon humidity and temperature fluctuations, the spectral floral patterns might approach the viewer or recede from view.”⁶ Despite being transferred on a one-to-one scale, the grease print remains a fragmented representation showing only where Frei Njootli chose to make contact—the viewer must decide to either reconstruct their body or accept this abstraction. In the same way, Frei Njootli exhibits personal articles of clothing, trimmed with materials such as ribbon, quills, fur, and beads in the Untitled series (2017–18). Hoodies and ballcaps draw the eye with unique embellishments, hanging on the walls or suspended in the air, far removed from a wearer. The juxtaposition of streetwear with the artist’s gathered materials reveals disparate acquisition methods. The readily available and mass-produced contrasts with the finite that must be sourced, gesturing to the physical labour of the body. 

The intimate contact of the skin with steel plates, clothing, and gathered materials isn’t just a marker of presence in lieu of the body—it leaves behind the detritus of the artist’s body, bearing their secretions and microbiome. In introducing biological elements, Frei Njootli transgresses colonial desires for sterilized cultural and artistic production, rendered pristine through the denial and erasure of bodies and embodiment. Skin often is the starting point to delineate between the inside and outside of the body and self, but it is also the surface on which subjectivities are mediated: how we feel about each other. For some bodies, the surface is forever sullied, tied up in menacing Western equations of moral virtue with cleanliness, wielded to classify and segregate groups of people. Frei Njootli confronts this structural violence and the racialized moral panic about contamination that casts Indigenous people—and by extension their bodies—as socially, culturally, and physically abjective via poverty, addiction, trauma, and disease.⁷

Through selective concealments and displays of their body that stirs its affective relations, Frei Njootli challenges the piecemeal use of Indigenous aesthetics and the attendant selective acceptance of embodiment that circumvents cultural anxieties towards Indigenous bodies. They call on the recognition of corporeality in all its facets as a condition to access understandings of Indigeneity. 

Frei Njootli’s works become sites of contact for ongoing confrontations: friction between the abstract and concrete, Indigenous ways of being and settler-colonial power structures, and demonization and romanticization of Indigenous bodies. They dissolve these dichotomies by centering the plurality of Indigenous relations of the body to land, land to art, and art back to the body. Frei Njootli guides the viewer towards an entanglement that conveys the complex relationality—individual and collective—experienced with and through the body. Sara Ahmed notes: “[I]t is through emotions, or how we respond to objects and others, that surfaces or boundaries are made: the I and the we are shaped by, and even take the shape of, contact with others.”⁸ Frei Njootli often includes this note in their exhibition statements: “You strain to see, but some sounds are part of blood memory and are better felt than gazed upon.”⁹ In the act of looking, we may only see a surface as a medium of containment of contamination—we must extend beyond this permeable threshold to make contact with each other and ourselves.

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Trey Le was born in coastal Southeast Vietnam and immigrated and settled in Canada as a child. He is a cultural worker and writer and has held roles with Western Front; the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia; PuSh International Performing Arts Festival; Out on Screen; and Toronto International Film Festival.

1. Platform Gallery, “small mounds of flesh form,” https://platformgallery.org/exhibition/small-mounds-of-flesh-form/.
2. Marcia Crosby, “The Construction of the Imaginary Indian,” Vancouver Anthology: The Institutional Politics of Art, ed. Stan Douglas (Vancouver: Talon Books, 1991), 284.
3. Glen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
4. Malinda J. Gray, “Beads: Symbols of Indigenous Cultural Resilience and Value” (Master’s thesis, University of Toronto, 2017), https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/82564/3/Gray_Malinda_J_201711_MA_thesis.pdf.
5.  “Every Bead is a Prayer: Jazenta Saultier Speaks about Indigenous Beadwork,” Moose Jaw Today, September 30 2022, https://www.moosejawtoday.com/local-news/every-bead-is-a-prayer-jazenta-saultier-speaks-about-indigenous-beadwork-5892969.
6. Kimberly Phillips, “my auntie bought all her skidoos with bead money,” Contemporary Art Gallery, https://cag-website.vercel.app/exhibition/jeneen-frei-njootli.
7. Arianne Des Rochers, “‘i am / virus to the system’: Indigiqueer Abjection and the Queering of Language in Joshua Whitehead’s full-metal indigiqueer and Jonny Appleseed,” Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne, 46(1), 23–42. https://doi.org/10.7202/1086608ar
8. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 8.
9. Macaulay & Co. Fine Art. “LUX | MAM.”https://mfineart.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/jeneen_frei_njootli_lux-mam_2017_press_release.pdf.