The discrimination in representation, she advances, is one of class, gender and ethnicity. Ethnicity, it so happens, is a main issue in our next readings and will be a recurrent theme of my panel presentation, so please allow me to get ahead of myself.
Emily Carr was a painter of a silenced minority in early 20th century Canada: The Aboriginal.
I don't even know where to start.
My personal experience with native issues doesn't extend very far, but has a few landmarks nonetheless. Growing up, I heard of Native issues between the cracks of adult conversations: My Acadian family is tied by its roots to the lobster fishery and would talk of what I later learnt as being the Burnt Church Crisis. Despite this, my direct parents still had good things to say about the native community, saying that "Acadians and Natives had always gotten along" and that the Aboriginal had helped us hide in the forests during the Great Upheaval of 1755. I was told I also probably had Mi'kmaq blood running through my veins through my paternal grandfather's grandmother, which means he could have gotten his status card had he wanted to. I found this all a little magical and, with no living relative, part of some other world.
I grew up. After being flagrantly disillusioned by the pre-medical program at Université de Moncton, I enrolled at the NB College of Craft and Design in my hometown of Fredericton. The program was great and my class varied in age, gender and (more than before) in ethnicity. At the end of the year, two mature Native students blew our minds with the subject of their final presentations: The story of their lives and of their childhoods through residential schools.
I had never heard of the Canadian Indian residential school system before. If you haven't, look it up, read about it, and then talk about it. It is one of the greatest travesties in Canadian history. The last one, Gordon Residential School, was closed in 1996.
I was shocked, deeply moved and speechless by my classmate's accounts. What they shared was raw, thorough, unashamed, and honest. They spoke of child mortality and physical and sexual abuse in the schools. They spoke of families being ripped apart. They spoke of losses of identity and of belonging to what were thousands of years of culture, arts, language and traditions. They spoke of living in a society that abided to different social rules and laws than those they lived. One went to jail, arrested by an officer that was convinced he was doing something wrong and convicted by a no lesser racist jury. The things they spoke about. The presentation went on for four times the time allotted and past break time, but none of us cared.
What to say? What to say when someone has poured out their heart to you? Especially if you, like me, happen to symbolically be the descendant of the oppressor, of the fortunate, of the privileged? I don't really think you say anything. You listen. Well. And you say thank you.
I am so glad to be holding these conversations and seeing in this institution even only the tip of this iceberg. I don't really know what the answers are, but the questions keep an exchange going, and I feel that this is incredibly important. Canada needs to be careful, because a lot of its inhabitants have been hurt very deeply. Lastly, I just want to say that I really hope this will be a century of healing; celebrating a culture that is not and never has been dead.
I only really meant to show you the website of this artist, but I guess I had to get there first:
Hunter Whitefeather, regardless of any of the above, is an accomplished contemporary artist and ex-executive director of the Charlotte Street Art Centre in Fredericton, NB, amongst many other things. She is currently based in Montreal, and she happens to be Aboriginal. Her performance "Fixation Station" is one of my all-time favorites. Check her out, she's an art bomb.
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