0:07

so welcome to all of you here and online to the inheritance tour and i’m really excited to be with you to

0:16

guide you through the exhibit in my own way um i just wanted to mention that this

0:22

exhibit can be quite triggering uh when i first came to the show just after it opened i wept like that was the

0:31

word i had for i didn’t cry i wept and i needed kleenex so badly

0:38

um so a whole bunch of feelings just rose to the surface because

0:44

um a lot of what i had seen resonated with my own experience

0:49

so i encourage you to have your tissues and hankies or whatever ready um

0:55

in case something emotionally you know touches you so

1:00

please save your questions to the end to the q a it just makes it easier for people online

1:06

if everybody asks their questions at the same time before we get started with the actual

1:13

tour i wanted to um read a piece by chief dan george

1:19

um i can see a lot of you here will probably recognize chief dan george from

1:25

tv famous actor he was also a poet as well

1:30

he was given name at birth tesswano translates as thunder coming up over the

1:36

land from the water so dan george is also known as espanol

1:42

slahoot so this is his

1:49

uh lament for confederation which he believed in 1967.

1:56

how long have i known you oh canada a hundred years yes

2:01

and many many sealing them more and today when you celebrate your hundred years old canada i am sad for

2:08

all the indian people throughout the land for i’ve known you and your forests were mine

2:14

when they gave me my meat and my clothing i have known you in your streams and rivers where your fish

2:19

flashed and danced in the sun where the water said come come and eat

2:25

of my abundance i have known you in the freedom of your winds and my spirit like the winds once

2:32

roamed your good lands but in the long hundred years since the white man came i have seen my freedom

2:39

disappear like the salmon going mysteriously out to sea the white man’s strange customs which i

2:45

could not understand pressed down upon me until i could no longer breathe

2:50

when i fought to protect my land and my home i was called a savage

2:55

when i neither understood nor welcomed this way of life i was called lazy

3:01

when i tried to rule my people i was stripped of my authority

3:07

my nation was ignored in your history books there were they were a little more

3:12

in canada than the buffalo that ranged the plains i was ridiculed in your plays in motion

3:19

pictures and when i drank your fire water i got drunk very very drunk

3:25

and i forgot oh canada how can i celebrate you with this sanitary this 100 years

3:33

shall i thank you for the reserves that are left me of my beautiful forest

3:38

for the canned fish of my rivers for the loss of my pride and authority even among my own people for the lack of

3:46

my will to fight back no no i must forget what’s past and gone

3:54

oh god in heaven give me back the courage of the olden chiefs let me wrestle with my surroundings

4:01

let me again in the as in the days of my environment

4:06

let me humbly accept this new culture and through it rise up and go on

4:13

oh god like the thunderbird of old i shall rise again out of the sea i shall grab the instruments of the

4:19

white man’s uh white man’s success education his skills and with these new

4:25

tools i shall build my race into the proudest segment of your society before i follow the great chiefs who

4:31

have gone before us o canada i shall see these things come to pass

4:37

i shall see our young braves and our chiefs sitting in the houses of law and government

4:42

ruling and be ruled by the knowledge and freedoms of our great land so shall we

4:48

shatter the barriers of our isolation so shall the next 100 years be the

4:54

greatest in the proud history of our tribes and nations thank you

5:02

so i wanted to read that as um i guess a preamble and as a setup

5:08

because when i think of inheritance i think of

5:19

what has been okay these free apps are ridiculous

5:26

okay um so when i think of uh inheritance i think of it in different ways what’s

5:33

given what could be given to me what we give to others what we receive from others

5:39

and what kind of inheritance is this an inheritance of racial discrimination

5:46

and how do we move forward through this so

5:53

just kind of plant that little seed as we go in um one thing i wanted to point out

5:58

there’s a little sign here that mentions this um

6:04

so it says throughout 2021 and 2022 um the art gallery of alberta is using

6:11

typefaces designed or developed by women and members of the bipod community exclusively

6:17

which i think is a really major thing so typography basically is the type itself

6:23

um and there’s actually histories behind typography if you look

6:30

into it and one thing that i did find out was

6:37

and i found this in a uh on a website every font has a story

6:43

every typeface carries the culture marks of their makers along with the stories of the political

6:49

and cultural moment in which they were designed but to date those histories have been

6:55

largely devoid of experiences from black indigenous and people of color designers

7:00

so there was a survey done in the states and they found that out of

7:06

all the graphic designers so there’s about 9500 respondents

7:12

only three percent of those graphic designers identified as black

7:19

now i would say even maybe 0.5 percent are

7:25

typeface designers so how can you support these people use their phone

7:31

and the fonts that are being used um are by

7:37

um there’s uh montserrat how many of you have heard of montserrat okay

7:43

um so montserrat was designed by a woman who lives in buenos aires uh she is not black um but she’s

7:50

designed by a woman which i think is a she is a woman and what she said about the fund is that

7:56

it was based around her neighborhood montserrat so again there’s histories behind fonts so

8:04

think of that when you’re looking for fonts and stuff um so she was originally going to name

8:12

her font progress but that name was taken so she went to montserrat

8:19

so let’s go on in come on okay so we’re going to start with steven

8:24

nanota’s ninota’s exhibit stephen ninoda is japanese canadian

8:31

and you’ll see this card here

8:37

there are actually three types of identity cards that were issued to

8:43

japanese canadians based on their

8:48

based on their generation so first generation japanese would be japanese born they’re

8:56

called ise so if you know the japanese numbering system

9:01

at least one two three each nissan ise is the first japanese born

9:08

nisei is the first first-born japanese canadian

9:15

and then um son would be the following generation after that

9:22

so uh this is uh it’s a very interesting exhibit so

9:29

um yeah what happened was people

9:36

after the bombing of pearl harbor the united states ramped things up when it came to

9:43

detaining japanese people and canada followed

9:48

the united states so we’re going to go in here and just see uh

9:53

see stephen ganota’s exhibit and i’ll talk a bit about what it looks like so come on in

10:00

okay so this is steven nenota’s exhibit

10:06

and what’s interesting about it is

10:11

if you take a closer look you’ll see that

10:17

there are two sizes of houses all throughout

10:27

and there’s a ladder and the latter was

10:33

inspired by steven’s great grandfather who was

10:42

imprisoned in a camp in the rocky mountains but he also picked fruit in the okanagan and he needed a ladder to

10:48

pick the fruit um and steven’s daughter had asked even or

10:53

she had she had a dream actually about a ladder to the moon and so stephen incorporated those two

11:01

ideas into the ladder and the moon you’ll see that it actually changes so

11:07

you’ll actually see the phases of the moon these houses here are very symbolic in

11:16

the material that they’re made out of as well so

11:21

the internment camps uh they’re about 21 000 people evacuated

11:29

within a hundred mile distance of the west coast so

11:35

no japanese people at all everybody was cleared out

11:40

and so some people were given the option to be deported back to japan

11:46

um about 12 000 of those uh people ended up being in camps in the uh in the

11:53

rocky mountains and over to ontario as well

12:01

so these houses are made out of tar paper and tar paper

12:08

was used to build homes to seal homes um

12:15

and say homes they were shacks really um so shacks put together

12:21

and barracks um made out of wet wood or just tar paper

12:28

or having the tar paper over top of the wood to seal it because once wood dries

12:34

it you know it’s not going to be joined together you’re going to get cracks so

12:39

i’d like to think of what would that sound like you know in the middle of the night it’s cold outside

12:46

the wind is coming through you’re trying to keep your family safe and you’re trying

12:52

to survive under very unstable conditions because you

12:57

don’t know what’s going to be next for you um

13:04

and according to the canadian encyclopedia

13:10

um and this is a very harsh thing to

13:16

to know but there is there was an economic reason behind the detainment

13:23

um a general morris pope was disgusted when a bc politician saw war with japan

13:30

as a heaven sent excuse to eliminate japanese canadian economic competition

13:37

so um because at the time the japanese would

13:43

have had nice homes nice equipment fishing boats all of

13:49

these things well it was an excuse to just scoop all of that

13:54

so the japanese were evacuations and under international law

14:02

the internment and i i find internment just

14:08

not the best word to call this it was imprisonment um

14:13

refers to the detention of enemy aliens people from other countries that were at

14:19

war with canada so in world war one it was germany germans people from like

14:26

austria-hungary um people from the ottoman empire and in world war ii it turned out to be

14:32

japanese people germans and italians

14:38

so why did these people escape that was one

14:44

thing that came to my mind because there were no prison walls but i found that no prison walls were

14:50

needed to keep people inside the camp since the isolated location rugged landscape and the hostile social climate

14:57

of the province were considered enough of a deterrent to

15:03

just eliminate any thoughts of escape so

15:09

imagine what it would be like to all of a sudden see no japanese faces on the street

15:18

um they’re not around the homes that they’ve built

15:25

it’s just a very shocking situation and i also found that the internment

15:30

between japanese canadians and japanese americans was very different

15:36

so japanese canadians were not allowed to fight in in world war ii for canada

15:43

because that would lead to them asking for voting rights and no one wanted japanese people to

15:49

vote whereas in the states

15:54

japanese americans were drafted but then a lot of japanese americans were thinking well

16:01

why should i fight if you’re putting me and my family in camps

16:07

um so i had a couple of things that i wanted to read off um

16:13

i thought they were very touching um one to just talk about

16:20

the um the experience of being

16:26

you know what what would be a draft dodger essentially and then

16:33

what it would be like having to defend yourself but before i get to that i’m just going to read you

16:39

some haiku because what’s interesting about the

16:45

german camps was that there were very little literary records

16:52

very little has been um written or saved

16:57

for two volumes of haiku poetry and it was one person who

17:04

his name was sam uh sakeo samoshima

17:09

he spent his final years in coal dale and he was part of a haiku club in the

17:16

tashme camp that he stayed at so at tashme they had this haiku club they

17:24

put together these collections of haiku and they’re some of the only remaining documentation

17:30

from the camps and they give you an insight into what life would have been during those times

17:36

a couple of them so you get it get an idea

17:43

i don’t know who wrote these haiku specifically they’re just all part of the collection

17:50

feeling sleepy our eyes on the stove as we huddle around it

18:01

regretting the year’s end i sit at home still unemployed

18:09

bedridden mother i hold her up to see the snowy town

18:17

cover of mist rising off the winter river let’s keep going

18:26

so i really like this exhibit here because it’s so clear

18:33

okay 20 minutes have passed okay so um

18:38

take a look around you are encouraged to take prints of each

18:45

it looks like just the ones in the middle are here so adrian stimpson is the t-spirit

18:51

i didn’t know until i started doing some research on him and so adrian stimpson

18:58

collaborated with a.a bronson who is also a queer artist

19:04

and their histories are very much in line it’s

19:10

very strange to see something like this because it actually reflects on a situation that i recently

19:16

had and now i kind of have to go and unpack it so adrian stimpson

19:22

he is a residential school survivor um

19:28

and a.a bronson um who has uh a stack of books right

19:35

there that is his contribution adrian simpson’s great great grandfather

19:42

his name was old son and he signed treaty seven

19:48

a.a bronson’s great great grandfather the reverend tims

19:53

ran the old sun residential school and now after how many years

20:01

these two descendants have come together which is really mind-boggling to me

20:09

um and i i actually think and this is just a theory

20:15

but i don’t think that this type of reconciliation

20:20

can happen with straight people i’m sorry

20:27

and the reason i say that is because for

20:32

adrian i would think that being two-spirit would be a struggle

20:38

and not only would he be indigenous and marginalized that way but also be

20:46

marginalized due to being two-spirit for a.a bronson

20:54

um he’s a gay man and

21:00

has you know a very interesting background and has experimented in different things

21:08

so bronson would probably be about 75-76 he would have been an activist

21:15

during the aids era so again marginalization

21:21

fronts so that’s how i could see the two

21:27

coming together from very extreme types of marginalization

21:34

when bronson approached adrian to do an apology

21:39

he took it adrian took it to his people and basically said well as

21:45

long as he walks the walk he’s fine and the apology with

21:52

so what i encourage you to do is just take a quick look around um because all of these are adrian’s paintings

22:00

there are these all monuments

22:06

and i would encourage you because they’re around the room maybe their sentries

22:11

maybe their protectors and look at the symbol with symbols within them

22:18

because you’ll see indigenous symbols along with symbols of the so-called new

22:23

world right but then you see symbolism of the new world that’s also

22:29

been incorporated into indigenous culture so for example you’ll see the

22:35

hat there’s a hat a cross and a pipe right here

22:44

so depending on where you’re culturally situated you’re gonna see different things

22:50

so some people just might see hats cross pipe that’s it i’m good

22:57

but i know for me when i first saw this i saw like um like a medicine man

23:04

medicine woman um with you know the pipe filled with medicine

23:11

so as you take a look around you’ll see these different things um adrian also used a lot of buffalo

23:18

imagery he initially started to romanticize the buffalo

23:23

but actually is started using it as a symbol of strength

23:29

this table setting is really interesting i found out that

23:34

the table and the benches were made by a survivor of old son

23:40

adrian commissioned the table and the benches from him this is to

23:47

replicate the seating at old sun this is how the staff would have eaten

23:53

which is very far removed from what the children would have eaten at that time um also at old sun there was an uprising

24:02

because of a wave of tuberculosis many children died the reverend tim’s

24:08

would not send them home to their families and this is how this whole apology came out

24:16

was for the atrocity that happened at old sun and if you notice the buffalo

24:22

the biston um you see it everywhere and it’s on the tables

24:28

the bison are facing you as to interrogate you so why are you

24:33

sitting there right and there is one red rose to simulates

24:39

to symbolize assimilation so bouquet of white roses with one red one

24:48

um let’s see two we’ll go and see uh deanna bowen

24:53

next i just had one more note about

24:59

sorry the collaboration between um

25:04

between adrian stimson and a.a bronson so stimson was asked to prepare a

25:09

statement about the abuse um in residential schools

25:15

he had gone to three of them in his life and he realized that working with bronson

25:22

through this apology actually helped him heal from the trauma that he

25:29

was suffering from his own residential school experience

25:34

uh deanna bowen is another queer artist which wouldn’t know just from walking in here so i’m very

25:42

excited about that as well um and so

25:48

i love what deanna does because she works with archival material and i think

25:54

um you know as we’re looking at

26:00

um i hate these words diversity equity and inclusion ah

26:06

um that we have to look at diversifying our archives

26:12

um and like because who runs the archives determines what’s

26:17

important and what’s not uh one thing that i heard actually was that

26:23

i and i have not found any way of corroborating it was that um archival material

26:30

uh about black communities was actually destroyed within the province of alberta

26:38

and that could also relate to other folks as well i haven’t found

26:44

any evidence to that but that’s what i was told so i’m just going to take that for what it is

26:49

um so this actually this speaks to me a lot

26:56

because there’s a whole lot of things going on here so this is a 1911 petition

27:03

against black immigration to alberta so this is archival material

27:09

um i was with there’s a another

27:15

curatorial assistant here and he actually knows steven nanota for one

27:22

because so we had this long conversation like oh my god what and then he was saying that he’s been in

27:27

this room so long that he’s looked at all of these to look for names so think about it

27:36

i mean it’s going to take a long time there’s about 15 to 18 names per page

27:42

and i noticed on one of them and it’s on several actually that the

27:48

writing is the same for different names so it’s like oh i think you know i’m gonna put down my friend too

27:57

uh which i thought was really weird and just some of the names that you see

28:03

uh maybe some influential names that you might see around the city

28:10

just sing i’m not gonna say any names and get into any sort of lawsuit or anything

28:15

but yeah just wanted to bring that to your attention uh also another thing with

28:22

um because this is not the only petition there are petitions from all over canada

28:28

um and even the the famous five got all caught up in there too

28:35

which is really um i’m a very strong feminist i always have

28:40

i think i was born a feminist when i popped out and

28:46

um my family you know moved here and i

28:51

really wanted to get to know like you know who were the black people who came before me

28:58

and you know doing this research and you know doing this research way back when and then i’m like oh my god

29:06

nelly mcclung and emily murphy and all those folks on the petition not even wanting us here

29:13

but they’re fighting for suffrage i don’t get it and also she was

29:19

a fan of eugenics which is pretty scary anyway um

29:25

but this brings like the sense of exclusion for me for sure i mean when my family uh my parents moved

29:32

to england they had me and another sibling but before they had me

29:38

the only house that my parents could find was one that was haunted for many years and no one lived in it but that

29:44

was the only place that we could live my mom was pregnant at the time and she they were able to find council housing

29:51

and move but if she wasn’t pregnant they would be in a really run-down house

29:57

with an outhouse in the back like it’s terrible terrible and we were up in the north like

30:03

yorkshire i mean sorry hi yorkshire okay

30:08

so [Laughter] so feel free to take a look at the names see if there’s any names that you

30:14

recognize

30:20

and then i’ll meet you around the corner

30:36

uh

31:08

i just wanted to just read a quick quote from deanna

31:14

every community like every family needs an archivist oh no this is a a quote about a deanna

31:22

every community like every family needs an archivist know deanna to be able to work to think to laugh to drink to

31:29

gossip with her is to be reminded that the everyday acts of quiet resistance

31:34

queer kinship and black joy that makes up a collective life will be the meaning to those who come after us even if they

31:42

are only belatedly by the careful listeners among us

31:48

and rather than tell her audience what to see bowen asks us to look to truly look at the ways images have

31:55

real tangible and sometimes violent effects on their subjects so her work helps us to see

32:02

how art might matter in a civic sense so

32:08

we’ve come from the petition to public safety right um and just

32:15

being able to just live freely so

32:21

uh quickly going back to the petition i had a couple one more question about that

32:29

so or two questions so yeah do you see a name you recognize and it’s funny i did

32:34

find a george bush who lived at 1019 jasper avenue um

32:40

but what if one of your ancestors signed that maybe they did what would that mean

32:47

um a clan comes to town that’s what this

32:54

this exhibit is clan comes to town um

32:59

and this is a recreation of a cbc

33:05

show uh from i believe nineteen

33:11

well i’m not going to save the year i believe it’s in the 1960s so these are actors

33:18

recreating the conversation and this

33:23

is the actual set that they sat on which is pretty interesting so i was

33:30

when i first came in i thought why are these what do i go up there you know there’s no rope

33:37

but yeah this and like with an ashtray too just recreating that whole set and

33:43

that conversation so you could sit and listen

33:48

and almost feel like these people are standing are sitting right beside you

33:55

very interesting um for the clan outfits

34:01

the first outfits of the kkk so there’s actually two editions of the kkk

34:07

i didn’t know this um but the first outfits of the kkk came

34:13

out in the 1860s 1870s and they wore white

34:18

just like the white hood the white robes um

34:24

these are outfits from the second kkk which started in 1915

34:32

and um yeah

34:39

i i found uh information that says that the second kkk was heavily influenced by fraternal

34:46

societies of the early 20th century so

34:51

that inspired like their codes and rituals and all of that stuff they just wanted to be

34:58

phi kappa phi but triple k instead

35:03

um and

35:09

there are independent clan groups as well that may have their own um

35:17

colors and symbols but generally speaking white robes uh and

35:23

were pretty much a rank and fall member you’re a gen pop and so

35:29

there’s not a lot of decoration on the material it’s it’s very plain

35:35

um but as you can see it’s like you could come around the corner and think are you wearing a ribbon skirt

35:40

because you know um it looks very similar to the

35:46

stylings of a ribbon skirt that an indigenous woman would wear so i

35:53

don’t i don’t get that anyway um so white robes rank and file and green

36:00

robes were in uh in many clan groups

36:06

the green robes were for grand dragons so this is a grand dragon um

36:14

there are black robes as well black robes are for nighthawks

36:21

uh clan security guards yeah you see anybody walking around

36:28

black hood nighthawk with a k

36:33

um let’s see and then leaders or imperial wizards

36:40

they can choose a variety of of colors but yeah they they can wear

36:46

like a variety of stripes sashes

36:51

emblems i would think and this is just a guess

36:57

that some of the symbols might be related to individual clan groups

37:04

um kind of like football teams yeah um

37:10

so very unusual um exhibit these are replicas they are

37:16

not um the original um clan outfits but

37:23

i don’t know just imagine what it would be i don’t know it’s just sit down like at

37:29

your sewing machine and like sew in an outfit for yourself this is really strange

37:36

um so do you want to close this off and then

37:42

take any questions it was a real pleasure thank you so much thank you

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