I've just come from my seminar in First Nations art. One of tonight's presenters spoke about the artist Edgar Heap of Birds after critiquing a reading on the indigenous people from the Plains who were incarcerated at Fort Marion (near St. Augustine in Florida) in the 1870s and posed a question relating to freedom - is Edgar Heap of Birds more free than the Fort Marion artists. My response was yes, certainly. Edgar Heap of Birds, by virtue of not being in prison and living in the 21st century and all the accoutrements that come with it, can afford to be more overtly political, than a prisoner under guard, producing art as a kind of social penal reform experiment. A classmate of mine disagreed, but she wasn't able to articulate what she was disagreeing with - that he's not a prisoner or that he isn't overtly political.
My argument was that Edgar Heap of Birds is a contemporary artist who has done billboard-size art and outright says that all "official signs" ought to be questioned, can effectively use the fact that he instantly has a larger audience that way to start a conversation, get people talking. I didn't, for instance, know that he was the artist who did the signs around UBC (Source: UBC Faculty of Arts Web site: article dated 09.11.05 by Robert P. Willis entitled "Renowned artist to donate art installation to UBC"). When I first saw them a couple of years ago, I remember my first thought was WTF?! And then I remembered, Oh, yes, this used to be native land. And that's pretty much where my thinking stopped. The point I was trying to make in class was that what Edgar Heap of Birds is doing is exactly the kind of dialogue that is useful. In this day and age of political correctness, most of us in Canada, if not North America are a product of this "let's not offend anyone" policy - and it's not a bad policy per se, it's just that as a result of not saying anything bad, you end up n
ot saying anything at all. Edgar Heap of Birds's art is absolutely in your face, unapologetic. His works can spark reaction whereever it is installed, be it beside the Mississipi in the state of Minnesota commemmorating the death of 40 men hanged in Fort Marion between 1862 and 1865 by the presidential orders of Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson (Building Minnesota, 1990) or insurgency billboards in downtown Toronto in 2006/2007 with billboards saying things like I've posted here (Source: University of Minnesota's Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies). The artist crosses the US/Canada border in his art and in my mind it poses a question: does "native" equal "native"? Generally I would say no because there are hundreds of indigenous tribal nations all across North America (and not limited to this continent), but in his art, I think Edgar Heap of Birds can speak of a shared experience by most (if not all) nations: every one of them has been dispossessed of their ancestral lands, if not completely, then in part. And this is a shared experience for all people of First Nations today, irrespective of what side of the 49th parallel they live: they are the descendants of the dispossessed and it is a meaningFULL experience for them. And this brings me back to the idea of political correctness.
People know that the land on which we live was once tribal land ("canada" comes from an indigenous word, "toronto" comes from an indigenous word, "kitsilano", "capilano" - cities, land masses, bodies of water; a part of every aspect of Canada has been influenced/inspired by this country's indigenous people), but they don't KNOW. They haven't experienced this loss and so for the current inhabitants of the land, it is meaningLESS. It is certainly PC to care, or at least give the illusion that one cares that "we" live on conquered, colonialised land, but in tonight's class I also caught myself putting air quotes around the word "issue" as it relates to land. By doing so, I am doing the matter a disservice and perpetuating the meaninglessness; the issue does not deserve air quotes. Land is very much an issue - after our first class during which a Metis classmate said the First Nations longhouse was on unceded land, I actually had to look up that term. And, you know what, I'm thankful to her for having brought that to my attention and to the class. That doesn't mean you'll find me at a protest rally anytime soon, but at least I'm a little more informed, and hopefully a little less ignorant about the issues.
