Electric Currents: Four Aboriginal Videos about Power

Métis art historian Carmen Robertson titled a recent talk “Red Renaissance,”[1] Lori Blondeau opened her profile of KC Adams with the renaissance analogy and, a few years ago, I gave a paper called “Aboriginal Renaissance.” Why are we attracted to this metaphor? Profound changes are occurring in First Nations, Inuit and Métis[2] art, curation, scholarship, reception and identity, and some have commandeered this familiar trope to indicate their hope that the current cultural flowering will be as momentous for us as the earlier rebirth was for Europeans. Just as the West rediscovered Classical knowledge buried during its “Dark Ages,” so too, Aboriginal people are regenerating traditional knowledge secreted during the colonial twilight.

However, ‘renaissance’ is an inadequate metaphor for a movement that promises to be more revolution than ‘rebirth’. Indigenous artists are not only recovering their cultures, they are revitalizing, hybridizing and reinventing them and themselves for contemporary times. They only look backward to look forward. Aboriginal people exist in a state of political suspense, an interregnum between the era of colonial management and the coming age of collective self-determination. A pioneering handful of “second wave” artists have long struggled in this breach to signify the endurance and humanness of Native peoples. Unfortunately, many of these artists feel that their efforts have been co-opted by the dominant culture.[3] Nevertheless, thanks to their pathbreaking struggles, the next generation is emboldened, encouraged and informed. A third wave is just beginning to flood the main stream with such numbers, force, variety, confidence and complexity that it will take years just to survey the damage. It seems that ‘the keepers of the keys’ are beginning to abandon sandbagging for channel opening.

Third wave artists are harbingers who have secured enough psychological and physical resources, time and Coyote vision to see beyond the horizon. They struggle to understand and symbolically refigure themselves, their communities, the past, present and future. Their discoveries, expressions and ways of being are often rebellious, unsettling and may seem chaotic and discontinuous. Some challenge secret keeping, taboos and protocols thought to be essential to Indian-ness (when many are, in fact, fundamental to conservative, colonial Christianity). Attention to the experiments and truth telling of even the most contrary artists is necessary if we are to know our times and better construct our futures.

Perhaps there is an Aboriginal word that captures this exciting but perplexing cultural moment/um. The name of the artists’ collective I belong to, ‘Sâkêwêwak’, broadcasts a sense of emerging hope. It is Cree for “they are coming into view.” However, the perpetual and passive deferral of arrival belongs to a waning conception of Aboriginality. What is Cree for ‘We are in view and online, now what?’

Urban Shaman invited Richard Fung, Cynthia Lickers-Sage and I to choose and comment on some important electronic media art by Aboriginal artists. The initiative responds to a frequent and loudly expressed need, that we write/right our art history.[4] Because a full account of this field is too ambitious for this modest space, our efforts are necessarily partial and personal. Given the affective nature of this work, and the reigning suspicion of authoritative N(arr)atives, perhaps the personal is an appropriate place to begin.

I am with cultural critic bell hooks when she says that works of art “canonically labeled ‘great’ are simply those that lingered longest in individual memory. And they lingered because, while looking at them, someone was moved, touched, taken to another place, momentarily born again.”[5] The works that linger longest in the memories of the non-Native “someone[s]” who write art history rarely include Aboriginal art. And what occasionally penetrates those imaginaries are not ranked among the masterpieces because these masters remain unmoved.

You do not need to be Native to appreciate and understand Indigenous art—but it helps. If things are to change, if the cultural works of First Nations, Inuit and Métis are to be re-cognized as the expressions of fully human beings, we need more empathetic and passionate Aboriginal art historians and curators. We need people who are receptive to the affect of these great works because they share their maker’s codes, modes and histories—people who are willing and able to articulate their moving and in/formed experience. But, we also need non-Aboriginal people who are open to being “momentarily born again;” generous and thoughtful people interested in learning Aboriginal perspectives. [6]

Births, rebirths, being born again, these are all joyous but also painful and anxious transitions. My first viewing of Zachary Longboy’s "Confirmation of My Sins" (1995), Thirza Cuthand’s "Helpless Maiden Makes an ‘I’ Statement" (2000), Kent Monkman’s "Group of Seven Inches" (2005) and Rebecca Belmore’s "The Named and the Unnamed" (2002) hit me hard. They made me laugh, cry, think, wince and mourn. Mostly, they made me uncomfortable. They pierced my skin like slivers. They itch, now and then, but I cannot tease them out. Eventually, they will be partially absorbed into my flesh, leaving small scars that I will consider from time to time. They are becoming part of me. I am grateful to these artists for expanding my sense of Aboriginality and humanity. They are the most affective agents of the Red Renaissance.

Re/births are passages from a reasonably stable but untenable identity into uncertain possibility—from stasis to dynamism. They are equally agonizing and exhilarating. Unlike the first genesis, the second is conscious—the act of an agent rather than a subject, and agency begets responsibility. The biblical account of the expulsion from the garden is a patriarchal compensation story. The children leave The Father instead of a mother’s body. In both cases, offspring are expelled because they out-grow the hortus conclus. Though, in the biblical narrative, maturation is figured as un-natural, as the sin of disobedience, a transgression of The Father’s will. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, human agency begins with noncompliance. Subsequent narratives divide between those who regret their differentiation and long to return to the garden and the brave who accept their difference/defiance, their humanness, and determine to establish their own “city on a hill.” [7]

Zachary Longboy does not confess personal offences in "Confirmation of My Sins." If the subject is not his violations of commission or omission, that leaves only the stain of original sin or primary difference. While not named, we can deduce from the video and his oeuvre that they are the a priori “transgressions” of being Native and homosexual.

The video begins with two old women. “Granny,” through a translator says, “There are people nowadays who say that they are just like white people, just like white men. They forget that they are Indians and they forget the customs that our people had. We teach our children and the rest of our family that we care about them that we love them and not to let that part go.” This is followed by a clip of Dorothy Strain, a Caucasian woman who is applying make-up and explaining that she is the artist’s adoptive mother. The pairing is painful. The son of two mothers symbolically brings his progenitors together, without comment or judgment. He leaves that to us: ‘If the community loved baby Zackary, why was he given up to a non-Aboriginal family? What motivated these White people to adopt him? Is his story part of the larger, ‘60s Scoop history? [8]How does he negotiate his Aboriginality, his doubleness or tripleness?

Longboy gives us plenty of time to wonder as his camera searches the sky. A Hollywood “Indian” says to Jimmy Stewart: “You have learned to speak our language well. But you do not yet think like an Apache, but you are not distant from it.” Can Aboriginality be learned? Who qualifies? Are there degrees of being or not-being Native?

The camera pans from the sky and stumbles through tall grass toward trees and a river. Interspersed over scintillating water are mid-twentieth century illustrations showing children how to dress up as “Indians.” At first, this looks like an ironic stab at the quaint racism of a previous era, but it becomes poignant when we imagine that this sort of degraded medium might have been the boy’s only access to his heritage. The soured joke is spiced up by a lingering shot of two half-naked boys applying make-up to each other’s bodies. It is an innocent drag scene. And then again…just as the masquerade Indians might have offered the young Zackary dim clues of Aboriginality, this homosocial encounter might also have figured same sex desire. Fused together, the image engenders both humour and pathos.

The camera resumes its search, now penetrating an old-growth forest for something never found. Screening the view are family photographs that fade in and out of memory: a Native boy in a White family. Everyone looks as comfortable or as uncomfortable as people do in this genre. Once again, Longboy creates the images, we provide the narration. Is it only a discriminatory imagination that prefers to place like with like? Would the boy have been happier in an Ab/original home? Does love conquer all?

Over these last scenes, a male voice repeats, “sorry, sorry, sorry….” The audio slows to an unnerving moan. What is he sorry about? Being who he is? Sorry, for the sake of others, that he can’t be otherwise? The effect his stories may have on the feelings of his family and community? Is he tired of being made to feel sorry? Is he mocking the Catholic confession? Significantly, Longboy’s title references the rite of confirmation not confession. He confirms that the traits thought of as sin by some belong to him. He explores the consequences this burden has had on his formation, but he is not looking for atonement—which requires the promise to “sin” no more. In the final scene, the mother goes into the garden while the son stands his ground.

In traditional Aboriginal societies, Two-Spirited people[9] are valued because they are considered less interested parties, somewhat outside of conventional entanglements and able to see things from multiple points-of-view. Some marginalized people gravitate to the arts in the hopes of escaping specific (negative) identities; others look to refigure identity perceptions. While there is always the danger of becoming a spectacle for mainstream assumptions and pleasures, some multiple-consciousness people learn how to play on and upset these expectations and insert their wisdom, humanity, difference and defiance into their instructive confessions and real fictions. In “Through the Looking Glass,” Alice (Thirza Cuthand) tries to negotiate a promised regal space from the Red and White queens who reject her with a variety of absurd arguments. Both want the biracial princess to settle the colour question by choosing a side. She likes being not-quite one or the other. Just as troublesome is her sexual preference. The Red queen (Lori Blondeau) declares lesbianism ‘not traditional’. Alice retorts that the Red queen’s “view of ‘traditional’ has been heavily Christianized….I tried to explain that, traditionally, I would have been sacred and a leader of the community.”

I first saw Cuthand’s videos in the 1999 exhibition Exposed: Aesthetics of Aboriginal Erotic Art[10]. While this show was ground-breaking in its depiction of Native sensuality and sexuality, Cuthand’s videos were a complete shock. I squirmed with the Kookums during her monologues about being an under-aged “Baby Dyke” attracted to older women. My face heated as the initially polite ladies struggled to their feet and the exit as the camera lingered on Thirza’s pierced labia. Or was it when, while licking the blade of a really big knife, she said:

“At my best, I am a naive, foolish little girl with misguided crushes. At my worst, I am a psycho-sexual stalker ready to plunge you into a hellish vortex of warped desires, because there is nothing more frightful than a teenage girl with a hard clit. I would vamp you if I could but the art of seduction has never been my forte. If it was, maybe it would be easier. You could blame your desire on me. You could be a victim and not be brave and say out loud that you were interested in teenaged pussy. I would even pretend to stalk you if it would ease your mind. I care that much.” (Untouchable 1998).

These early videos pack so many punches that at least one is sure to land on your jaw and put out your lights: Naked Indian, pow! Underage sexual desire, bam! Lesbian sadomasochistic fantasies about Disney’s Evil Queens, wham! But most electrifying is the canniness of her intelligence. Cuthand sends up her own precocity in “Colonization: the Second Coming” when she fends off alien invaders by reading to them from bell hooks (Yearning, Race, Gender and Cultural Politics, 1990) explaining post-colonial theory. They get headaches and politely flee this superior life form that is resistant to colonization.

Refreshingly, only a few of Cuthand’s videos are primarily about race. Unlike mainstream artists, who are not expected (and expected not) to make art about Whiteness, Native artists are under constant pressure to make “Indian” art—as though that’s all they are about. Similarly, there is an assumption that, unless they refer to traditional stories, their works will be non-fiction. "Helpless Maiden Makes an ‘I’ Statement" is a rare work of Aboriginal serio-comic, confessional fiction, a genre busting essay on power.

Chained in a dungeon, a naked girl (Cuthand) makes a video letter to her captor, a wicked witch. Her monologue is interspersed with clips of sexy movie witches and their enslaved maidens, including Anjelica Huston in The Witches (Nicolas Roeg 1990) and assorted Disney characters. Surprisingly matter-of-fact about her incarceration, the maiden describes her initial attraction to the queen. You get the feeling here, as in her other videos, that Cuthand’s characters are as attracted to the power, knowledge and experience of these older women as much as their sexuality: “I wanted to know everything about you. I wanted to feel things as passionately as you did…. I wanted to be like your equal….I thought I could be your companion but it seems you relegated me to the dungeon.”

Soon her musings turn to an analysis of the queen’s fragile ego, appetite for destruction, puzzlement that people hate her and ultimate immolation. A highly intelligent observer of her own experience and others, the maiden’s compassionate insights perturb the master-slave relationship. Her calm precision de-eroticizes the scenario, making her an unappetizing sexual subject but potentially a good friend, if the queen can change her ways. As with the colonizing aliens, the maiden believes that her freedom is dependant on her captor’s enlightenment. In this sense, Aboriginal struggle is not just for self-improvement, but the advancement of everyone.

The eroticization of ‘the Native other’ is also parodied in Kent Monkman’s "Group of Seven Inches." This beautifully produced black and white video is a silent era ‘salvage’ anthropology film with a queer twist. The star of this burlesque is Miss Chief Eagle Testickle—Monkman inspired by Cher’s “Half-breed” (1973) phase, complete with Bob Makie-esque white fluffy “Chief’s” headdress, sequined head band and white platform shoes. The large lashed Miss Chief rides a white horse on the lookout for young European men. She finds a pair, brings them back to her studio, gets them drunk and poses them for paintings in less than dignified and accurate manners.

The film’s title cards are based on the journals of “Indian” painters George Catlin (1796-1872) and Paul Kane (1810-1871). Monkman simply replaces “European male” or “white man” for “Indian” or red man:” “I have for many years contemplated the race of the white man! But alas, they are changing through contact with the red man! They now favour our style of dress. It has been my life’s work to make a record of them before they are obliterated…Completely!” The reversal extends to the studio where the “Indian” is the commanding painter and the White men are barely clad, savage subjects.

The iconoclastic Miss Chief enacts her primal (ob)scene in the studio of Canada’s beloved art hero, Tom Thompson. His likeness is cut repeatedly into the orgy, making him, initially, a shocked observer and then a virtual participant. In her questionable quest to preserve the “The European male [ ] forever in my pictures as living monuments of a noble race,” Miss Chief creates a pictographic oil painting on a flat rock. With heavy-handed irony, she claims, “I never romanticize my subjects. I paint each sitter with profound feeling for his dignity and individuality.” A scene showing the naked men bent over trunk and spanked with a paddle, frying pan and snowshoe follows this text. She licks the alcohol off their chests and slides on down…. What follows is out of focus, and then fades to black.

The next day, the pair rise from their stupor ashamed of their condition. The camera pans the studio showing Monkman’s large paintings that imitate 19th century Romantic European versions of the Western landscape with copulating and S/M cowboys and Indians in the foreground. The pair, realizing the part they are expected to play, dress up accordingly in incongruent “European” costumes from a mix of places and centuries. The joke is on European painters and photographers who often made “authentic” portraits of Indians in borrowed and inaccurate clothes: “I have procured authentic examples of their costumes for the amusement and instruction of future ages.” The farce concludes with Miss Chief having the men doing “European” things like playing a piano, marching like a soldier and dancing.

"Group of Seven Inches” satirizes racist attitudes and visual conventions. Its hilarity comes from the slick production, iconoclastic setting and subject, and the over-the-top attitude. While funny, it is also deeply instructive about the uneven power relationships between representation maker and subject. In some ways, the video ridicules an easy target, the racial positions most reasonable people have long abandoned. However, Monkman goes much further by also sending-up cross-dressing, homoerotic clichés and the image of the serious Indian artist—Miss Chief retains a wooden face throughout. Yet, behind the camera, you suspect that he is laughing. It is difficult not to laugh along and want to join the posse.

Rebecca Belmore is a very different from the first three artists. She is serious and ‘straight’. Her empathic style, her deep sense of pain and anger, does not often incline her to the comedic. I include "The Named and the Unnamed" (2002) because it chokes me up whenever I see it. Belmore reminds us that there is still so much to do. Many are not being re-born; they are dying.

The video documents her performance, “Vigil,” which took place on a sidewalk and alley in Vancouver’s downtown Eastside. One of the poorest neighbourhoods in Canada, it is the frequent site of drug abuse, violence, and the location where many women went missing throughout the 1990s. In short hair, white tank top, jeans and sandals, Belmore arrives carrying two pails of water and a bag. A crowd of about forty people watches as she empties the bag’s contents, puts on rubber gloves and sweeps then scrubs the sidewalk. While this action echoes feminist performance art scrubbings of the 1970s, it is not only about women’s work and cleaning up the neighbourhood, it is also about making this a sacred site. The work is a vigil and memorial site for the missing women, most of whom were Aboriginal. She furthers this concept by removing her shoes, washing herself and lighting votive candles.

After this action, she calls out the names written on her arms: Sarah, Helen, Andrea, Brenda, Wendy, Mona, Theresa, Frances, Deborah, Maria, Angela, Shelia, Ruby, Ingrid, Katherine, Lee, Diana, Jacqueline, Inga, Tiffany, Patricia, Tanya. Her voice is powerful rather than plaintive. Each rupture is a deep, strong shout that is chillingly effective at evoking the absent. These are the names of the missing (murdered) women. As she calls them, Belmore strips roses of their flowers, leaves and thorns with her teeth. They cannot hear or respond. Her gesture calls them up to our collective consciousness, making them visible. By naming them, she says that these women are people. For those who know themselves to be persons—who have their humanity reflected back to them by respectful and loving others—the invisibility of those who are not so regarded is nearly impossible to conceive. The struggle to have the humanity of the disenfranchised recognized is an incomplete project.

Belmore puts on a red dress over her clothes, removes her pants, and washes her face.
She goes into the alley and nails her dress to a telephone poll, rips herself free and repeats this action several times on another pole and a fence. She leaves shreds of her dress at each site until she is in her underclothes. Belmore works intuitively. She brings props and a few ideas to the site but lets events unfold as they must. Her method projects a feeling of inspired spontaneity and fearsome possibility. This powerful action suggested for me both Christian and Aboriginal traditions. There is Christ nailed to the cross to redeem our sins analogy. More powerfully, for me, when she nails the front of her red dress to the pole and pulls away with all her might, I think of the Lakota Sundance ritual. The event concludes with Belmore putting on her pants and shoes and looking back over the site as James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s World” plays over a car stereo.

Belmore bridges the second and third wave artists. Like the earlier generation, her work is rooted in the dehumanizing pain that words (like colonize) only sanitize. She does not offer a utopic vision nor anesthetize action by retreating into metaphysics or a mummified past. Her work is about calling out the present, making a record of/for those who cannot. Cornel West advises that “a central preoccupation of black culture is that of confronting candidly the ontological wounds, psychic scars and existential bruises of black people while fending off insanity and self annihilation.”[11] Belmore does this for Aboriginal people. She also belongs to the third wave by not becoming embroiled in the past but by being a witness of today. She is interested in how history writes on present bodies, but by focusing not on root causes but present injustice, her every action feels like it has immediate, searing implications for the participant. She makes us responsible.

There is an exponential growth in contemporary Aboriginal art making, particularly in video. The potential of this movement is endless. There are so many stories and histories yet to be told, and so many ways to tell them[12]. I am most excited by a post ironic trend that might constitute the emergence of a fourth wave. Rebecca Belmore and Thirza Cuthand’s work, for example, features very little distinctly (traditional) “Aboriginal” content and yet “Aboriginality” courses through it all. That is, they have not only moved beyond fluff and feathers but also beyond mocking fluff and feathers. There is a movement away from deconstructing ancient stereotypes through satire (though I suppose this sort of work is never really finished!) and towards constructivist work that considers larger human and global issues from an Aboriginal point of view. This trend frees up artists from the tedious role of history lecturer and broadens the possibilities of the Red Renaissance.

1. Robertson, Carmen. “Red Renaissance.” Lunch time talk at the Regina Food Bank. Jan. 31, 2008.
Blondeau, Lori. “Profile of KC Adams.” BlackFlash, vol 24, May, 2007. P. 36-7. Garneau, David. “Aboriginal Renaissance,” Emerging Discourses: Community Identity and Place in Recent First Nations Art and Curatorial Initiatives, Panel. University of Lethbridge, Dec. 2, 2005.

2. I am less familiar with developments in Inuit art but was knocked out by the fabulous contemporary drawings by Napachie Pootoogook curated by Leslie Boyd Ryan & Darlene Coward Wight for the Sherwood branch of the Dunlop Art Gallery and the success of Sobey Art Award winner (2006), Annie Pootoogook. For more recent Inuit art and reception, see Karlinsky, Amy. “Land of the Midnight Sons and Daughters: Contemporary Inuit Drawings.” BorderCrossings, vol 27, no. 1, Feb, 2008. 66-83.

3. Joane Cardinal Schubert credits Alex Janvier with coining this phrase. Cardinal Schubert, Joane. “Flying with Louis.” Making a Noise: Aboriginal Persepectives on Art, Art History, Critical Writing and Community. Lee-Ann Martin, ed. Banff, Canada: The Banff International Curatorial Institute. 2004. P. 42. “As the “second wave”…, we became exotic fodder for an existing system. We were ‘discovered’ by non-Aboriginal people. We were gathered together as “ten little Indians’ and participated in several national exhibitions—an Art Tribe. No real examination was made as to our artistic beginnings and hardly any examination of the ‘first wave’ was realized. I maintain that our efforts have been misunderstood; we have been co-opted” (42).

4. Cardinal Schubert, 47-8.

5. hooks, bell. “Altars of Sacrifice:Re-Membering Basquiat” (1993). Art on My Mind: Visual Politics. New York: The New Press. 1995. P. 35.

6. This is a pluralized version of Alfred Youngman’s idea that North American Indians and their objects should not be considered apart from those peoples’ own thoughts about themselves and what they do and make. It is a call for inclusion, listening and dialogue. Youngman, Alfred. “The Metaphysics of North American Indian Art.” Indigena: Contemporary Native Perspectives. Gerald McMaster and Lee-Ann Martin, eds. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre/Canadian Museum of Civilization. 1992. 81-99.

7. Mathew 5: 14-16. This biblical metaphor is also a perennial favourite for Americans who see their republic as a fulfillment of prophesy.

8. This is the informal term for the mass adoption of First Nation/Métis children in the 1960 and 70s. Of the more than 11,000 officially recorded adoptions, 70% of children were placed with non-Aboriginal families and many were taken without significant consultation with families and communities.
See, for example: Fournier, S. & Crey, E. Stolen from Our Embrace: The Abduction of First Nations Children and the Restoration of Aboriginal Communities. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre. 1997.

9. Gilley, Brian Joseph. Becoming Two-Spirit: Gay Identity and Social Acceptance in Indian Country.
Lincon, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press. 2006.

10. Lee-Ann Martin and Morgan Wood curated this exhibition for the Mackenzie Art Gallery, Regina, 24 September to 5 December, 1999.

11. West, Cornel. “Black Strivings in a Twilight Culture.” The Cornel West Reader. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999. 102.

12. A longer list of “third wave” video artists would include young local (Regina) heroes like Merelda Fiddler, Gabriel Yahyahkeekoot and Elwood Jimmy.