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hi everyone um my name is lindsay sharman i am a curator at the art gallery of alberta very happy to be

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welcoming adrian stimson and our friends from cuban university um tonight we’re having a

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both in-person and online event and we have about uh 50 people sort of joining us online

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so the ata is situated on treaty six territory and edmonton is a traditional

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land of diverse indigenous people including the cree black

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nakota sioux iroquois inuit and ojibwe salto

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would also like to acknowledge all of the indigenous inuit and metis people who make their homes on territories that

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intersect the current borders of alberta me and my ancestors have a long and

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varied relationship with this land the first of my ancestors to arrive on tree six with my great great grandmother who

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arrived here in edmonton shortly after the signing of treaty six she came here with her family including my

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great-grandmother who i did have the opportunity to know and they settled actually just a couple

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of blocks away from where i live now in edmonton inspired by this exhibition inheritance

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that features adrian simpson and grapples with our shared history i have also done some

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uncomfortable digging into my own family tree and learned that my great-grandfather on

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a separate branch of the family tree who came from england taught in an anglican day school on

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treaty six for four years in the late 1930s treaty 6 is also where i was first

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introduced to adrian’s work and where when we were both studying at the university of saskatchewan

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adrian is one of three or adrian has one of three major installations in the exhibition

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inheritance which is up here at the aga on the third floor and is up until may 1st

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this exhibition forefronts historical facts that are often hidden or untold because they reveal that our shared past

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includes and is often based on acts and systems of brutality racism and

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oppression told by artists through research into the lives of family members and family

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allele connections the works in inheritance demonstrate that history continues to reverberate through time

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impacting the present and the future deanna bowen stephen ninota and adrian

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simpson respectively exposed shared histories of anti-black racism and the kkk in alberta the

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internment of canadians of japanese descent during the second world war and the indian residential school system

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so this evening adrian is joining us here at the aga and tomorrow he’s going to be spending some time at mcewen

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university with the students over there and we’re very happy to have worked with our friends and colleagues at mcewen to

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be able to bring adrian to edmonton so tonight as i said our program is

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online and in person um all of our online programs um are brought to you by the canada council so

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thank you canada council um so adrian is going to speak for about 45 minutes

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after which i’ll facilitate some questions uh and then the gallery is also open this evening so we’ll try to

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get everyone enough time to be able to head out to the show on the third floor after the talk so i

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would like to invite carrie lynn reeves who is assistant professor in studio arts at mcewen university and nevin

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jarvis who is a student at mcewan to come up and introduce adrian for us

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so um thank you lindsay and thank you to the aga i’m carolyn reeves assistant professor

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of mcewen university in the studio arts program soon to be the studios department of our

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new bfa um and i’m really happy to be here with adrian tonight i’ve known adrian for

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just over a decade first met him at an art residency in banff and we’ve crossed paths over

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over the years and over the territories so it’s nice to be here tonight and i’d

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like to introduce our student nevin jarvis who’s a first-year student

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in studio arts to introduce

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adrian simpson is a member of the six siga blackfoot nation in southern alberta

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adrian has a bfa with distinction from the alberta college of art and design and mfa from the university of

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saskatchewan he’s an interdisciplinary artist and exhibits nationally and internationally

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his performance art looks at identity construction specifically the hybridization of the

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indian the cowboy the shaman and the two-spirit being buffalo boy and the shaman exterminator

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are two reoccurring personas his paintings are varied yet his use of black and white monochromatic paintings

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that depict bison in imagined landscapes are melancholic memorializing whimsical they evoke ideas

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of cultural fragility resilience and nostalgia his installation work primarily examines

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the residential school experience he has used the material culture from old son residential school on his nation to

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create works that speak to genocide loss and resilience he was a participant in the canadian

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forces artist program which sent him to afghanistan adrian was awarded the governor general

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award for visual and media arts in 2018 reveal indigenous arts award petition

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foundation 2017. he was awarded the blackfoot visual arts award in 2009 the

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alberta centennial medal in 2005 and the queen elizabeth second golden jubilee medal in 2003. welcome adrian

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thank you nevin for that lovely uh introduction uh so great to have a student come in and introduce me so uh

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thank you carrie lynn for arranging that mcewen university uh for being a part of this uh also like to thank the art

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gallery alberta catherine crosston and lindsay sharman for including me in inheritance and inviting me here today

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to speak to you all uh to all of you in the room thank you for coming out to see

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see you and or partially because we’re still in the middle of it sometimes or sometimes right now and to all of you

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out in the dark good to see you not see you thank you for being here tonight so um

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here i go i’m going to uh do a powerpoint of my work and speak

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primarily to inheritance and the work i have in the exhibition but i thought i’d start

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kind of at the beginning and uh this is not to sapi uh chief olson he is my great great great

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grandfather uh because we’re an oral culture record keeping not being a big

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part of that uh determining the actual lineage to chief olson is a little bit

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of a task but i am part of this clan uh and uh is his

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grandson and uh he had a number of lives in his life and we’re still trying to

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determine which uh lion lineage i i come from uh but nonetheless he is my girl he

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uh was one of the chiefs at the time of signing treaty seven uh on sixica um he

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was known as oh he was a warrior uh a fierce warrior and i’ve been reading a bit of his

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history and sort of uh looking at it sometimes with a little bit of uh

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oh my goodness is that war exploits were a little uh

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brutal at times and so you know looking back at my own history and and and

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seeing that but uh he was very felt apparently and very athletic uh

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in those days i imagine a good catch so anyway that was my my uh great grand

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chief olson he was the leader of north camp which is where my family is located

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on the six again nation and he

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was was reluctant to sign treaty seven because of his warrior past he often

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preferred war to peace and it took the the um council at that

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time uh to get to to convince him and he became one of the signatures of

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treaty 7 and laid down the weapons of war for the weapons of

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peace and something we could all use in these days

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that’s where we’ll start today in terms of inheritance so in fact i have inherited his his history and a lot of

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it has ended up in my work here’s another image of chief olson and

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interestingly enough his garb what he’s wearing right now in in the previous image as well the plumage on his hat

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there are stories about that because it relates to the work that’s upstairs and a.a bronson

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who was the grandchild uh reverend tims who was the first anglican

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missionary on the sixth nation and it was a reverend tim’s wife who apparently dressed olson this way so interesting

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connections when you start sort of looking at history and and uh in the eyes of today and the

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connections we have today so there’s a number of things that have occurred that i find very interesting

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uh chief olson uh the first anglican missionaries to uh sixth ganachian first

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only had uh this monstrosity uh residential school was

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built in the early 1900s and of course the red brick institutional sort of building

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this is the building and it still exists on my on my nation it has since transitioned in the 70s uh to a

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community college so now infused with a different energy through time yet it still holds that energy of the of the

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past my father his sisters all my relations

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on the west side of the nation went to the school my reserve was divided

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in two and the east went to the catholics and the west went to the anglicans and the north camp happened to

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be in the west so my family all became anglicans and which is always an interesting sort

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of dichotomy in the sense of of one people two different religions

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overriding on top our own religion so it’s an interesting sort of conundrum when you think about it

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um i was for this presentation i start to look back and sort of think when is when did i really start

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delving into my history in relation to residential schools and it started in my undergrad

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at the now alberta university of the arts and it was there that i determined

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to be a painter i majored in painting and uh us when i first started painting

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uh i was actually working with on the bison primarily a lot of my work people are familiar with me are familiar

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with a lot of the bison work that i do and i’ll touch on that in a minute but i also sort of started delving into

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the residential school history and these uh four paintings i’m going to show next

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are from a series i called wake up they’re two feet by two feet and they’re that’s also when i started

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using white titanium oil paint mixed with graphite powder to create the different values and such

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and so i went to the paul little walker cemetery which is situated behind the olsen residential school

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where the majority of my family is buried and i started taking photographs and

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i often go there to be with my ancestors in relations

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it’s an interesting site in many ways and so from those images i did these

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paintings and then i whitewashed them i dripped white paint all the way down the top to

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sort of hide them and veil them somewhat and then that’s the first time that i really drew the red line and the red

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line shows up a lot in my work and um really the red line for me uh this

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series is called wake up uh wake up of course being you know wake up from the colonial

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project everyone and also the uh the sort of history of wakes i think

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in that uh ritual that occurs uh when people gather to celebrate and mourn uh

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their loss so for me um you know it’s one of the things living on my first nation and i can

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probably say a lot of first nations that death is close uh death is a constant companion sadly uh the trauma uh

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throughout time has taken its toll and there have been you know moments

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where you know there’s a funeral a week you know last year we had over 100

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members die you can imagine in a small community how much of an impact that is

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and really as part of our story uh and part of the history of colonialism and its effects

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so for me the idea wake up you know has that double meaning in the sense of mourning but also in that sense that

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let’s wake up and and really look and examine this history of colonialism

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and also too when you look at the red line it’s drawing the line and so don’t cross the line but also too when you

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look at the flat line uh it also relates to that i’m always amazed at at when

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other people come to me with their stories about what they see in the work and uh it’s always heartwarming and and

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and uh illuminating in so many ways so uh there were series of nine in this

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in this particular work and uh i know there’s a few in collections in in calgary

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but for me really a lot of the work sort of parallels the history of the slaughter of the bison

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for which existed on the plains i’ve always always say 75 million but i was

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corrected by a a friend of mine dr ernie walker who works at wannascale and he said there’s probably more like about 50

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million so millions a few millions off but i think that

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those are numbers that prove that the bison was a huge force uh in the americas

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and as we well know that with the uh uh coming of the settlers they needed to clear the

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planes and so for which the bison were slaughtered and almost to the point of extinction

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and that slaughter was deliberate and what it did it really sort of set up

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the stage for of course colonization and taking up the land but also the uh national dream the national railway

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as well so many sort of factors with that history the bison meant everything to the blackfoot people and any plains

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tribe people who relied on the bison for everything food shelter clothing tools

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you name it and mostly spiritual life the blackfoot are highly aligned with

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the bison our most one of our most sacred societies is the motto geeks and the moto geeks of the

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buffalo women’s society we are a matriarchal society and they lead us and they have very close connections uh

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to the to the bison and that filters down to all the other societies the horns the brave dogs the prairie

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chickens all the way down to the children the bumblebee societies and so in my earlier work i really looked at

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the idea of the slaughter from a sort of a physics perspective that we’re all made up of atoms

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and molecules and you know when we when we die that is released into the universe and so i see that slaughter is

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now that energy was released into the universe and i believe that that energy still exists in and around us and as an

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artist i get the privilege and honor of being able to reach into that ether and bring that energy into myself

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and create work and honor the history of the bison so after i always say that every time i

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draw act like or from anything to do with bison i’m honoring one of those 50 million bison that were

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slaughtered uh this particular work was actually uh debuted at the art gallery of grand prairie a number of years ago

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uh this was called tartan feathered bison and tarden feathered bison sort of came from

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the the movie little big man i don’t know if anybody’s seen that movie but when dustin hoffman and the the snake

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oil sort of medicine guy get caught and then they’re tarred and feathered of course the history of

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tartan feathering goes back to england when they used to pour hot vats of tar over the side of the building and set it

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on fire but then further from that used to tar people and feathers them as a punishment so in essence this is a

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punishment but also tar is a derivative of smoke and i think that sometimes uh

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when you look at things like tobacco smoke and the sacredness of of tobacco and stuff so also there’s underlying

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things in the work but uh this was from the uh from that exhibition and it was called tartan

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feathered bison and the beautiful thing about that exhibition is they let me tarn feather a complete wall of the

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gallery and that was something that you know us artists get to do and it kind of harkens back to being a kid

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i get to do this and anyway so this is another work that was in in that exhibition

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uh it also goes back to earlier paintings i did and this was an abstract painting i did of bones and so i was

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doing a lot of work around uh bison bones and this is about uh uh

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five feet by four feet and really comes from the historical

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images from piles of bones in different locations across america uh in canada regina being one of the most noted and

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saskatoon where they would have piles up to two stories high those bones were often shipped down east

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and ground into fertilizer or or even explosives interestingly enough

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or shipped across overseas and turned into fine bone china so fine bone china

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of that age may have bison remnants or bison dna in them so you think i find

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that very interesting as well again

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the bison bones and this is actually part of uh now part of the painting one of the paintings that’s upstairs uh of

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old sun i decided to create triptychs uh with those works and sort of bring uh

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bring more to life the uh the work itself um i also act like a bison from time to

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time and my alter ego or persona is called buffalo boy and buffalo boy was a

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character parody during my um uh research while i was doing my master’s

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at the university of saskatchewan i was looking at buffalo bill and his wild west shows the spectacle of it the

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exclusion the inclusion the spectacle of indigenous participation in those shows uh buffalo bill himself

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coming from a background of being a an indian hunter and a bison hunter and

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then sort of turning around at some point to become for first nations but uh a colorful character none

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nonetheless and so while i was sitting in my studio on the coldest day of of

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the year that year was minus 60 and uh basically i was thinking buffalo

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bill buffalo bill buffalo boy and that’s when buffalo boy was born and basically

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with the tenants of the disco cowboy hat the braids the the the um

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buckskin jacket with the fringe the bison corset the bison g-string fishnet

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stockings cowboy boots and pearls also a whip and because buffalo boy

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likes to exercise the colonial project talk back to the colonial project he’s naughty and has done a number of

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performances in his life he has been killed on a few occasions but he’s always come back and then he

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went and dreamt about four or five years ago and is still dreaming and actually

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next weekend buffalo boy newborn buffalo boy comes to be again as an older

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maybe wiser buffalo boy but still the tenants of buffalo boy and so that’s happening at the remy

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modern next week and friday night so anyway buffalo boy is still around with

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us and we’ll see what antics uh they get up to in the next little while

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uh buffalo boy uh uh often uses humor as a part of

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looking at the colonial project humor being um a coping mess mechanism humor

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being a way to open up spaces for people to talk um and so i often sort of looked at the

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archive uh healing rich comes from the first in indian residential or indian school

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mission school story on sixica and in the back there i don’t know if you can see here i’ll use my cursor and make a

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little circle around the reverend tim’s there’s the reverend tim’s again he shows up in a lot of the images and i

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could be related to a number of these individuals in this photograph but i was looking at this photograph and

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i thought well how could buffalo boy respond to this and so i did it myself i did a parody of

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that image image and in this one i actually solved the um the puzzle in the background because it

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hasn’t been solved but the funny thing is i solved it wrong so i was told that by a by a viewer of

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my work one day said you know that that formula that’s wrong oh no no actually that makes sense it’s

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good it’s wrong and the uh my uh my settler grandmother uh her um

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her china cabinet is called sketches of indian life and if you look through that book it was written by a missionary and

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it has titles such as the good indian the bad indian the really bad indian

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no i added that and uh so it’s it was obviously in itself you look at how literature forms our understanding of

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people and creates the biases that we live with today so i think for me that was that sort of moment of like oh

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this is the first anglican boy choir or in the school and again the

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reverend tim’s is sort of halfway in the back with the uh beard white beard he’s there again

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and uh so this was the first mission school and there’s buffalo boy onward upward uh i often uh

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include so the history of religion and as being complicit in the colonial project and particularly

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complicit in the residential day schools um again i’m just showing you some

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earlier work previous to this so you see context of how everything sort of fits together uh this is one of the first

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works i created during my master’s at u of s and this is called sick and tired

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as a younger person back home um my mom worked at the uh olsen uh college

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and one year went through some major renovations and all that stuff was just taking it out and thrown in the back dump

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so i used to get off the bus and sort of because we live now live in the olsen residential school uh garden which is

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down the hill in the valley in the bow valley from where the school is so i’d get off the bus and i would walk home uh

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and i’d always walk by the dump and i’d see all this stuff and it could be the hoarder in me i don’t know what it is or

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at that time i didn’t think i was an artist and i would drag this stuff home and put it into my mom’s garage and just say oh

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i’m going to use it someday for something and that’s where it all sat for many many years until i became i

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started doing my studies for my bfa and my mfa

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and so this one are three of the windows from olsen residential school and the bed from that school

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i have uh backfilled with feathers and backlit and then put a human sort of

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effigy on the bed and lit it from above to look like i didn’t put the mattress on because i deliberately

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wanted the springs to look like a stretched hide and uh this is sort of things i think about my

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father who went to that school and about uh seven years old was showering uh in the

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boys side one day and missed his family so much to decide to run away and at seven years old ran on

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camp to where my grandparents were naked and uh only to be brought back and i

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often that’s an image that sticks with me and my father and i imagine a lot of those kids looking out those windows longing to be home and that sense of

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smothering so therein lies the the feathers

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uh old sun is another installation i did and this is uh actually the previous is in the collection of the mackenzie art

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gallery in regina this is in the of ontario again uh this one is olson

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because the light came from olsen uh it was the light that hung above uh the children and artificial light and so that is part

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of the installation and a facsimile of a sweat lodge except the willow reeds are replaced by

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steel ribs steel sort of that relationship to to uh resource extraction and also the

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the national dream the railway and it sits above piece together bison robes and the way

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the light shines through the ribs is the shadow of the union jack which is a shadow that sort of haunts

25:35

the history of of of all of us and actually just a little note on this

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this particular installation they did at the ago it was hung in or it was placed in

25:46

the middle of the room with all the group of sevens and some other artists sonia sue and a few other people

25:52

and uh the painter in me was absolutely delighted because i actually loved

25:58

lauren harris and all these these painters in so many ways even though i know there’s history of problematics in

26:03

terms of the absence of indigeneity and and such in the paintings but from

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purely painting perspective i was quite delighted that my work was amongst them it’s one of those surreal moments as an

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artist as you move through your career is that there are moments that happen that you kind of shake your head and go what’s

26:22

going on here and that was one of those moments delightfully i have quite the archive of images from

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olsen residential school and this is just some of the photographs that are now in the

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exhibition um upstairs these are the olsen boys here’s a

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picture of my father at that time he was part of those images a young fellow

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who uh molson uh probably at about 15 or so

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they went down to saint paul’s in uh on the kainai first nation in southern alberta and did the work there and then

27:00

he’s actually working in the schools first as a mechanic and in the boiler room and then suddenly at that time because

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you know it was those times and first nations people would ver yet barely get any work he trained as a barber

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uh but uh then uh started to follow the administrator one of these residential schools and he started working in them

27:20

so complicated history at the time too was when the schools were being released from

27:26

uh the churches into the government so a change of policy was occurring and i know he

27:32

for for allowing children to go home and uh changing the system in itself

27:37

later years i you know would ask him we had a few sessions of unpacking the history and sort of asked him well you

27:43

know given the history in your experience why did you work in the schools and really it was it was

27:48

happenstance it was it was the times you know work uh the way people thought at the time too so it was

27:54

interesting uh to have that chat uh as you can see uh this is a postcard

28:00

from old son a christmas card in fact and i’ve always thought this was just

28:05

the most ironic and actually kind of tragic postcard for christmas because the the the parable or whatever suffer

28:12

little children and you know if we look at in context of today it kind of makes you head spin

28:18

a piece i did was called aggressive assimilation and this is me when i first started

28:23

attending residential day school in the gordon first nation in saskatchewan and my father when he was about to leave uh

28:30

residential school and we flank the old sun residential school which kind of were started all for my family

28:37

and uh sort of speaking to that innogen inter generational history and traumas that

28:42

get handed down from gender to generation to generation but in fact uh the traumas in themselves are inflicted

28:50

within those generations as well the next number of images is just part of that archive from from old sun

29:01

during a sports day these ones are interesting because a lot of them have movie cameras in them

29:08

so obviously they were documenting olsen at one point but i have not been able to

29:13

find any of this anywhere yet so anybody out there who may know where this these films exist and i’m thinking the

29:19

national film board or something i don’t know but really again if you take a look at this you know the staging of the

29:26

children and uh really quite um yeah eye-opening and again the the boys

29:33

dorm the beds that they were sleeping in um the agricultural sort of uh working

29:41

uh camps that they used to have um a lot of uh in particular

29:46

people on my nation ended up in ranching uh but enough

29:51

again we excelled at it in so many ways when we take on the western sort of

29:56

uh labor and jobs we excelled at it and so much so that the indian agents

30:02

were getting a lot of complaints from local farmers so sadly they sabotaged us so now we have few farmers on our nation

30:10

sadly but uh a huge a really big history of that i know my own grandparents were in the farming for a while

30:16

so one of the things i’ve done too is uh paintings and these are smaller paintings about

30:24

eight inches and these are just the architecture of of all the residential schools that i

30:30

that are relate to my history and my family starting with olsen the bottom two lines black and red are traditional

30:36

black foot colors often used on bottom of teepees and i love painting skies and

30:41

stormy skies and it’s one of the things i enjoy also interested in the architecture of

30:46

these buildings most of which are being destroyed and there’s been an interesting debate about should they be destroyed or not

30:52

i’m of the opinion that as hard as hard as it is there should be some that remain

30:58

i think they should remain quite simply because if we get rid of them all we forget we forget this history and and i

31:04

think it’s really important to maintain some of them in order to sort of not forget this history but i do know that

31:10

there are a number of people would love to see this building burned down i’d love to see it just demolished um but at

31:16

the same time it also has this new history as being a college on my first nation

31:22

uh here is saint paul’s in uh kainai first nation southern alberta

31:28

here is uh um uh oh i’m losing my mind uh in the sault

31:34

ste marie um i can’t remember this is the first time i’ve done an

31:39

actual in-person talk in all last long shinrok haircuts do have brain cells left and shin walk

31:46

was actually the residential school where my parents met and where i was conceived

31:52

so my history is very intimate with these these schools and then uh uh

31:58

not even a month after i was born uh we went up to james bay uh to uh at the

32:04

time place called fort george it’s now known as chisissippi and this is the first uh indian

32:09

residential school up there it was a wood building but since it’s been replaced by a brick building but i thought the wood building

32:15

was was was much more interesting so this is uh saint phillips

32:22

and then we moved to gordon’s first nation in saskatchewan and that’s when i first started attending day school i

32:29

went from nursery right through to grade half of about grade three

32:35

and then we moved to librette and that’s where i finished off grade four at le brett

32:40

indian residential day school again these paintings this one’s upstairs in the exhibition this is old

32:46

sun flagged by the bones again with old sun in the back a little bit more dramatic in the sense of the

32:52

bones in the forefront and some of the images that you may have saw seen earlier uh and the bison of course is

32:58

being a big part of that history be it a ghost or the white bison maybe it’s about hope

33:04

uh that’s the thing i i think i enjoy about painting is that i often have an idea about what the painting means but

33:11

it often i think it’s so important that the viewer bring their own history and their own thoughts to it and i’m often

33:17

amazed by what other people see again st paul’s and the kainai first nation

33:23

named after saint paul um i one of the things i think that’s interesting about being an artist and

33:29

creating work is that your your work is not static it’s dynamic and it moves through time and as it moves

33:35

through time different meanings and different things come forward and in particular this one i think of our current uh situation of

33:42

the um finding of the graves of the children and i think about the crosses

33:49

in those in relation to those schools

33:54

uh this was shinrok and i based the the sort of the beginning of my beginnings

34:00

and uh situated at the juncture of the great lakes and

34:06

as morley took off the writer said many years ago a good place to come from

34:12

and then um saint phillips in fort george and that’s when i that’s me as a child

34:20

with a lovely pose [Laughter] and a red hat and that’s actually the building that

34:26

now exists and in the background the planes are coming in from the south

34:32

the panther on the roof is an interesting one because my father had a pink snowmobile and on the pink snowmobile

34:38

was a black panther so he called the snowmobile the black panther and so i included that and then of

34:44

course the caribou and the geese and and and the fire which a lot of people gather around and also the uh the the

34:51

narwhals and the whales the two um uh pieces uh shadows are

34:57

actually of inuit sculpture of two bears polar bears and as a child i

35:03

did you know different than today we my parents would buy these things and then i would play with them

35:08

so i would play with these little stone sculptures and through time we still have these two in my home and i think

35:16

for me i think it’s like where i first sort of got my hands on art and started to sort of imagine

35:23

you know myself creating these things in themselves but so i thank the inuit and the

35:29

northern cree for that this is uh gordon’s uh residential

35:36

school in uh indian residential school and uh this is you know and i think for

35:41

those who are out there for those who are here there are a few things i will say that may be triggering and i and i hope that

35:47

that you have um you have resources to to to help but this is actually where a lot of my

35:53

abuse occurred uh in this uh in this institution and

35:58

one of the things that i’ll terms of given a signifier are the two gophers in the cage

36:04

at one point when i was being molested in this particular room there were they caught gophers and they

36:10

would put them in these cages and they sort of ran around these cages so i’d look over and see these little caged

36:16

gophers and it’s a memory it’s finally what stays with you when abuse occurs

36:21

and this is a memory that that has always remained with me and perhaps now why i have a very interesting relations

36:27

with gophers we have a lot of gophers around my home and during the pandemic i learned how to speak gopher

36:34

i learned their language i was learned their habits it was so interesting they’re the most incredible little

36:39

creatures and have an amazing relationship to bison uh there’s so many things that that that we

36:46

that that we know are part of the things that we need to bring back and and uh

36:52

help sort of create a more interesting and magical world and so for me the caged gopher in many

36:57

ways at that time sort of signaled my own self within those institutions and of course the hands on the wall and

37:04

coming down it’s that sense of surrender or that sense of arrest

37:12

and then librette was the last school that i was and i think this story i often tell people is that i don’t often

37:18

paint i don’t actually paint buffalo boy and anything and this is actually the first painting that i ever paid at

37:24

buffalo boy in and it was at librette and that was the last residential school we’re at

37:29

and i it was interesting because i think as a result of the abuse and i haven’t had any real psycho psychological sort

37:35

of anal analyzing of this but my personality split at that age

37:40

and i became adrian and adrianne and when adrian would leave the school and go over to where my parents were

37:48

um he would change into adrianne and the significant fringe jacket

37:55

and adrianne would go outside and sort of play with everybody as a girl and it was interesting because i often

38:02

think that’s where buffalo boys sort of began that that resilience that resistance

38:07

that sort of coping with that history and because buffalo boy today

38:13

wears fringe jackets and such and carries a whip and all that

38:18

sort of stuff but also the onslaught of bison that start to hide the school itself and then the two side panels

38:25

being the um the bison sort of flying around and then the breaking up of the line

38:32

i’m going to get now into the apology the work that’s currently ini sakumapi

38:37

guess who’s coming to dinner and it really began when artist a.a bronson who is a part of

38:44

general idea for many years reached out to me and he is the great great grandson of the

38:51

reverend tims and he has known his familial history

38:57

a bit of it but he didn’t really know a lot in relation to sixica and the blackfoot

39:03

and so he asked curator candace hawkins if he if she knew any blackfoot people that he could connect to and lo and

39:09

behold being another artist she connected him with me and we got to talking and we all of a

39:14

sudden found out that it was our grandfathers who were rivals and uh chief olson didn’t really like the

39:20

reverend tim’s it was like a frenemy and it was so funny because one of the stories was is that he didn’t like him

39:26

he only gave him i think eight eight square uh eight square meters by eight

39:31

square meters of land that he could be on because he knew he was gonna take it i just recently read that story and

39:38

thought it was kind of funny but uh a.a bronson and i i won’t tell his story

39:43

but he reached out to me and uh asked about uh um the possibility

39:50

of giving an apology uh to this excavation you know his own familial history the trauma that

39:56

occurred there you know translated to now to a time when he wanted to uh to

40:03

you know uh [Music] reach out and so what he did is i think that you

40:09

know he approached it in a good way in the sense that he came to us and asked us if he could make an apology

40:14

first so what i did is i started to facilitate it and i gathered uh residential

40:21

and invited him down to the first nation to have a dinner where we could discuss an apology and so you know being the artist that we

40:28

are i dressed up as buffalo boy and so we had the dinner at my place and i served

40:34

my buffalo boys famous buffalo meat pies and really had a very frank

40:40

emotional and important discussion about the apology he proposed and uh

40:46

it was a lovely evening of discussion and uh and fellowship

40:52

and uh and the beginning of our friendship and so that was just an image from uh uh

40:58

the toronto uh basically what we asked was that he the elders agreed and we took it to our

41:05

chief and council and they gave us the blessing to go receive the apology in toronto at the biennale with the caveat

41:11

that a come back to the nation at some point and give deliver it to the people during

41:16

one of our celebrations as we well know kovid stepped in and sort of stopped everything and it’s

41:22

something that still intended to do uh yet at the same time we you know time is moving on

41:29

uh so this is at the glembo archives where we’re looking at a number of reverend tim’s artifacts in history

41:37

ben miller who did the essay in a public apology to the sixth nation

41:44

uh some more information there interestingly enough the reverend tim’s collected a number or

41:50

either collected or given a number of blackfoot artifacts that he then loaned to the marquis of lorne and the marquis

41:56

of lauren stole it and took it to england and sold it to the british museum for like 100 bucks back then i had the

42:03

privilege of going to the british museum a few years back to actually look at that all in the british museum which was quite interesting

42:08

to see it there uh earlier image of a.a bronson

42:14

i think people are aware of the history of general idea and the aids

42:19

poster they have done here is the reverend tim’s

42:25

photograph of of him and his wife and family

42:30

here are some images also too if you have the opportunity to watch the

42:35

documentary in the making i did an episode they did episodes on

42:40

on various artists and they did an episode on myself and it just so happened that it coincided with

42:46

all this uh meeting with a.a bronson so we felt it was to to give

42:52

and there is buffalo boy in the kitchen making food uh there’s sean and ben and gregory

42:59

bigai one of the elders and uh this is that during the dinner when we were speaking

43:05

uh latisha redcrow and the romeo crow chief and myrna young man were also part of that uh dinner

43:12

and it was really during that that dinner and as i mentioned there was a number of emotional uh moments but

43:18

when uh a.a mentioned genocide and we spoke to that history as well as too my

43:23

husband happy grove is is in the photos as well

43:29

so basically from that i also the work i call the ini sakumapi which is blackfoot

43:34

for buffalo boys guess who’s coming to dinner and i think most of you may be aware of the earlier movies with sydney

43:40

pottier catherine hepburn’s master tracy guess who’s coming to dinner about the history of race relations and i think

43:46

it’s uh it was something that i often refer to either movies or

43:52

music in a lot of the work i do because it has not only a nostalgic but often

43:58

has a relational sort of element to the work i do and so uh in doing this

44:04

i was a and i talked and i was going to do a response to the apology and so all the work i did

44:11

in the exhibition above is upstairs is related to the to the

44:17

response so again the bison is something element uh occurs these little bronze

44:23

bison and there’s a setting of uh ten uh on the plates

44:28

and uh i put them on the plates uh sort of looking at the diner in a way

44:33

interrogating the diner but i often work with 10 as well because as we well know the childish song 10 little indians and

44:40

that song again that that indoctrination into killing off each indian as you go along so it’s well embedded in our in

44:48

the american in the canadian psyche uh of in our histories

44:53

so a great thing to overcome uh aaa produced uh

44:58

the apology but along with all the research that he did and timeline of

45:04

reverend tim’s and up to today and our meeting and uh he

45:10

i can’t remember exactly i think 20 000 copies of these and they’re given out at the be an alley they still exist

45:15

upstairs and i think people can take them away um but also when i presented this to our chief and council it was

45:21

really interesting at the time that they were looking at some of the information and said oh this information could help us in some ways like the research and

45:28

that’s so important is that research is so important and how it sort of can assist

45:34

this here’s the charm biennale aaa’s installation there which was mizotmi

45:41

with the pallets of books for people to take across from that was the work i did and here’s clearing the table a painting i

45:47

did uh of the girls uh cafeteria olson residential school

45:54

and it was interesting as i was painting this i i i moved between sort of realism and

46:00

abstraction i i don’t really know where to sit myself yet and um and for me as i was drawing this

46:07

and i have an elder who comes in my studio and i often ask her you know sometimes what

46:13

she thinks and there’s a point when i was thinking i had to refine the faces a lot more and she said no you’re done

46:20

so it was interesting the importance of feedback as from an artist’s perspective sometimes really

46:25

helps in in in a process but to gain that sense of of of those places

46:32

and it hangs again over with another light from old sun residential school

46:37

above the table fine china and the table itself uh under the finery is um

46:44

old replica of one of the tables that would have been an old sun and it was built by former olsen

46:51

residential school student gordon little light i asked him if he’d be willing to build that and he

46:56

did for me which is really wonderful roses with the one red rose the white roses

47:02

with the red roses the element that in the installation that uh needs often carried attention uh but

47:08

again that sense of assimilation and uh at the same time beauty

47:14

i see i work a lot with pictographs and uh um there are a number of pictographs

47:19

uh that i created into sculptures and this was uh i could not really find the pictograph of old sun and so i decided

47:26

to create one uh it’s one of the honors i have now i’ve been working with pictographs and looking at the

47:32

similarities through time but also the differences and what pictographs sort of hold as a single symbol is so

47:39

interesting and so i’m doing that right now and embarking on another project where i’ll deeply go into the blackfoot

47:45

pictographic system or language i should say our fathers these again from the archive

47:52

that i have and as i was looking at these boys these old sun school boys from about 1955 56

47:59

my father included i couldn’t help but sort of think now these are our dads these are our fathers

48:05

now and so that’s where the title came our fathers i’m sorry the i don’t have a really good

48:11

image of the reverend tim’s or short robes we have a backflip pictograph of the first anglican missionaries and i

48:18

might have it someplace down the road or you can see it upstairs i forget it’s right here in the building

48:25

and uh it is uh a short robes the first angler commissioner so i say it’s miss it’s reverend tim

48:31

uh i uh wrote or created a book of the ole sun boys in conjunction with a.a bronson

48:38

and it has all the photographs of the boys and their names alongside i deliberately didn’t put the names uh

48:45

beside or all part of the installation upstairs for a number of reasons

48:50

nation itself this was taken i can believe at the remy modern which is that now it’s part of their collection it’s one of the things

48:57

that i have to say about institutions and art galleries that become the repository of artists work that they’re

49:04

in there for safe keeping and i’m so grateful for that so thank you to all organizations who collect my work

49:11

another uh image from the table i’m going to start flying through these

49:16

images another installation this one uh pictograph it actually exists too what

49:21

actually happened is that the reverend tim’s uh his his piety and

49:27

not allowing the children to go back home because of fear of them turning back into heathens

49:32

a number of children were sick and he wouldn’t allow them to go home to die so you can imagine the anger that that created within the parents

49:39

and the parents decided that they were going to kill the reverend tim so the reverend tim’s was warned and he fled i

49:45

believe to uh tsutino or sarsia at the time and uh burnt and burnt the school down

49:52

and burnt his residence down it was our first rebellion of sorts and actually it’s interesting that even in his

49:58

journals that time is ripped out or taken apart are not in there and so this history is not known and it’s one of the

50:04

things that was revealed as part of the a’s research which i think is so interesting and it is part of our oral history we

50:10

know that there was a conflict and we know the school was burnt down but the details of course are lost in time

50:19

and an alley in toronto and a.a delivered the apology and i brought a delegation

50:26

with blessing of our chief and counsel at the time to receive the apology and to take it back again

50:32

indicating that it would be followed up with i won’t go too much into these because it’s upstairs

50:39

but uh thank you again uh to katherine and to lindsay for including me uh in this exhibition i’m very honored to be a

50:45

part of it uh a hard history but an important one and in part of this uh

50:51

uh uh installation i included three new uh works uh called forgiveaway uh

51:00

an apology asks the question will you forgive and that’s an interesting question because i think reconciliations

51:06

really has a lot to do with that and you know there’s a lot of things that in history that are unforgivable

51:12

but you know we it’s important in our time to to learn to get along to learn to create a

51:18

society that’s much and i think you know part of that

51:24

is ingrained within indigenous ways of the giveaway the potlatch uh

51:29

many of our customs where we give everything away and so for me i created these images and then created little

51:36

takeaways in sort of the traditions of gonzalez torres and and other artists

51:41

that have things for people to take away and so in front of each one of them is a replica of the painting and it’s about

51:48

giving away and so these ones are basically based on

51:54

a game uh pictographs uh and i often work in the sense of past present future

52:00

and so this is the past which is sort of looking at the little sort of horned character which is the bison and also

52:06

inspired by uh waniskawin and the discovery of their uh pet

52:12

and the split hoof tradition from the past of where uh little effigies were scraped

52:18

into into uh rock but also the cracks in the rocks were also the mysterious place what we

52:24

like to call the great mystery that in those cracks perhaps with whole other worlds

52:30

and so this is the past uh this is the present so again that

52:35

sort of tension between sort of the history of of indigeneity and settler

52:41

history and again the crack and this is gold leafed and then the past or the future sorry

52:48

the future is like the past i often see things that way uh for the blackfoot people notions of time are interesting

52:53

and it’s something i’m still working through to understand but we only have two days behind us and two days ahead of

52:59

us that’s the past and that’s the future so really when you think about it everything is really present

53:05

and everything that’s happened will happen again or if we have if we learn maybe not so i

53:12

think it’s really something that i i find very fascinating and something that i i look forward to uh

53:19

delving into more as an artist and that’s where i’ll end

53:24

so uh thank you uh for having me and i hope i’ve enlightened a bit of the

53:29

work that’s upstairs but also my relationship to the my own history and own my own inheritance so thank you

53:36

thank you for that

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