DECOLONIZING THE CANADIAN MUSEUM

In the soft hours of a pristine morn, mountainous clouds greet the crags of Lake Superior’s rocky coast. A stark-white reflection of a young sun floats atop the smooth water currents in the tranquil scene. Reposeful rock mounds puncture the wet surface, basking in the forenoon heat, still and untouched amongst their barren landscape. Dim shadows of obscured light rest in the background of blue and pearl-white paint. Canadian painter Lawren S. Harris captures the serene convergence of land and sea in his 1920s work, Morning, Lake Superior.

The peaceful scene hangs in the Claire and Marc Bourgie Pavilion, the gallery of Quebec and Canadian art at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal. Contrasting its quiet blues with the sharp green landscapes or harsh, icy mountains of its neighbouring images, Morning, Lake Superior draws museum-goers in with its poetic essence. Traversing the first-floor gallery of early Canadian modernism, one can find Harris’s piece beside other works from its artistic school of origin, the Group of Seven.

In the 1910s, the Group of Seven began as an unofficial social group for artistic discussion before being halted by several members’ participation in the First World War. The school of artists reformed after the war and achieved its real celebrity status in the 1920s when they began exhibiting their landscape paintings across the nation.

With sweeping strokes of bold paint, exaggerations of colour and shape, and expressive depiction of the country’s boundless regions, this inventive, modernist visual style was hailed as a uniquely Canadian artistic language. The paintings reimagine the landscapes in romanticized abundance—an elegy to their idyllic fruitfulness and poetic possibility.

These seven artists—Franklin Carmichael, Lawren Harris, A. Y. Jackson, Frank Johnston, Arthur Lismer, J. E. H. MacDonald, and Frederick Varley—are forever cemented as ubiquitous figures in the cultural lexicon of Canadian art.

But in glancing back at these triumphant images, a thrum of cultural absence pounds against the paint-packed canvas. The Indigenous groups who populated and developed these lands are painted out of Canada’s narrative history.

Decades after the formation of the Canadian Confederation, the Group of Seven sought to create a distinctly Canadian style, a physical representation of the country’s burgeoning settler-colonial identity and an assertion of their cultural sovereignty. In expansive portraits of the landscape’s balance of dynamism and repose, this school of artists found a recognizable mode of depiction as an assertion of Canadian nationalism in paint.

However, these romantic, visual odes to the lands upon which the settlers stand, steal, and proclaim independence uphold the "Pristine Myth" an outdated perception of pre-settlement territories as untouched wilderness. The visual lexicon of Canadian landscape art erased Indigenous histories—their dense populations and spiritual connections to the land—while justifying settler-colonial expansion. Indigeneity was painted over in these nationalist landscapes, left to buzz in the periphery of a visual 'Canadianism'.

This is not to say that the Group of Seven’s artwork intentionally sought to erase the evidence of Indigenous existence, but their impact is clear. Their works were symptomatic of a cultural mythmaking—a fabrication of colonial presence within the land’s storied past. Though breathtaking, they exist as products of didactic Canadianism that set out to establish ideals of their growing confederation.

With an awareness of harmful language present in the Group of Seven’s landscapes, sinister qualities appear atop the canvas.

Lake Superior, also known as ᐊᓂᐦᔑᓈᐯ ᑭᒋᑲᒥ Anishinaabe Gichigami, or ‘Anishinaabe’s Great Sea’ in Anishinaabemowin, has had an Indigenous presence for over 9,500 years. Morning, Lake Superior, though aesthetically stunning and contextually historic, silences the voice of Indigeneity into mere hushes across the canvas. In depicting the landscape as totally barren, the image morphs into a scene of colonial violence and a representation of the cultural idealism of systemic erasure. These paintings are simply another mode of colonial, institutionalized control—a visual oppression of Indigenous existence. In denying Indigenous presence, these images continue cultural genocide. It is a visual ignorance of the physical harm inflicted on Indigenous groups in land dispossession. The hum of colonial cruelty only lies dormant until woken by a critical lens.

What does it mean to be visually Canadian in the wake of colonial violence and systemic erasure? How does one grapple with the inherent violence of Canada’s art archive?

The visual language of erasure has been a stain on Canadian artwork since the beginning of settler-colonial art production and acquisition. In depicting absence, settler-colonial Canadians preserved the belief that the land was theirs for the taking. Writing Indigenous Peoples out of history and altering the truth of settler-Indigenous relations became a strategy for dominion and control.

Canadian history maintains that colonial encounters with Indigenous Peoples were peaceful—a diplomatic bestowal of land granted as a gift to newcomers. This epistemically violent belief revises the history of the 19th and 20th-century Numbered Treaties: Indigenous Peoples actively took part in legislation for land cohabitation, but were misled into signing documents that facilitated their dispossession. Museums—houses of history—have continuously perpetuated this myth of gifted land, remaining ignorant of the violence behind settler-colonial possession.

Reilley Bishop-Stall, assistant professor of Canadian Art and Visual Culture at McGill, who specializes in the art production of Indigenous and settler histories, spoke with The Tribune about this culture of representation.

“Indigenous Peoples were dispossessed of the land, liberty, and territorial rights,” Bishop-Stall said. “The extensive collections of Indigenous cultural materials in museums across the globe cannot be detached from the history of salvage anthropology and the belief that Indigenous Peoples were destined to ‘disappear.’”

This distortion of representation was a strategic process of elimination and a propagation of Indigenous disappearance for the justification of settler-colonial land development.

Historically, the acquisition of Indigenous art was often intertwined with violent narratives of systemic displacement. Artworks were looted and stolen during land dispossession. The existence of these pieces in museums preserves harsh narratives; for a time, these art objects were the only trace of Indigenous presence in the Canadian museum.

The distinction of these works as “artifacts” rather than “artworks” reflects the institution’s control of Indigenous history and the ethnographic gaze. This classification and the lack of contemporary Indigenous artworks instill in the public a perception of Indigeneity as something historical—an artifact itself.

“We were always portrayed as people of the past, relics of the past,” Celina Yellowbird, Curatorial Assistant of Indigenous Cultures at the McCord Stewart Museum, said in an interview with The Tribune. “Everything was setting us up as if we’re no longer existing today.”

Indigenous histories in the Canadian museum were recorded by colonizers, resulting in homogenization, misrepresentation, and erasure of provenance. The lack of provenance led to grouping all Indigenous art together instead of recognizing diverse tribal cultures. This created both exoticization and systemic inequality in the museum space.

Contemporary curatorial practice and institutional self-criticism have led to progress in the decolonization of museum spaces.

In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Canada published its final report, outlining 94 Calls to Action for the Canadian government to amend its colonial and contemporary wrongdoing through reconciliation and protection of Indigenous Peoples. The 67th Call to Action directly addresses these institutional misrepresentations, stating, “We call upon the federal government to provide funding to the Canadian Museums Association to undertake, in collaboration with Aboriginal peoples, a national review of museum policies.”

Now, the practice of Indigenous art curation has taken steps towards creating a dialogue between the museums and the Indigenous tribes represented in their archives.

In conversation with The Tribune, Jonathan Lainey, the Curator of Indigenous cultures at the McCord Stewart Museum, said, “The major change is that now Indigenous Peoples have more room. We give them more space to actually tell their own story, their realities, their voices.”

The McCord Stewart Museum’s permanent Indigenous art exhibition, Indigenous Voices of Today: Knowledge, Trauma, Resilience, was curated in conversation with the tribes from which the displayed artworks originate. The exhibition’s accompanying video piece features interviews with Indigenous spokespeople of Quebec, platforming their experiences alongside their artworks. Amplifying the archival voice of those systematically censored throughout history, the display of Indigenous objects by Indigenous curators and tribes reformulates their presence in the Canadian museum.

“The museum’s voice is really not visible. All of the texts [on the museum walls] are written in the ‘we’ form,” Lainey said, describing the permanent exhibition. “So it’s us. This is what ‘we’ are. This is what ‘we’ went through. It’s the voices of Indigenous people.”

That does not mean all museum reconciliation work is complete. The sheer existence of art objects in the museum is a symptom of colonialism that still requires addressing.

Repatriation is another important method for institutional decolonization. The question of object ownership looms over museum institutions today; though in many instances, due to the altered or unrecorded provenance of Indigenous objects through regional generalizations—such as ‘North’ or the ‘Plains’—repatriation is a highly complicated process of return. By breaking down the walls of the museums and inviting Indigenous groups into the archive collection, work can be done to identify and address these gaps in information.

The weaknesses and disparities of the archive are not solely a Canadian issue. Having been raised in northern California, I have witnessed firsthand similar archival disparities present in American museums. Western hegemony over the objects in the museum archive has preserved a distorted account of Native histories. Just as Canadian museums are working to dismantle colonial history, American institutions have worked to uncover modes for proper representations of Native art histories.

Rosie Clayburn Katri, a Tribal Historic Preservation Officer in California, works directly with federal institutions and groups to further rectify the systematically silenced past of Native peoples. She highlighted the importance of respectful methods for exhibiting Native art in museum spaces.

“It’s consent. [....] You have to have the full consent of the community and to be working with actual First Nations governments,” Clayburn Katri said.

Providing platforms and creating agential positions for Indigenous and Native people to interact and reassert their presence in the foundationally colonial space is absolutely necessary. Indigenous histories must be told, this time, in the original voice of the land. Allowing access to these archives for interaction is fundamental to healing the reverberations of colonialism.

It is the role of the museum to dehistoricize the language of Indigeneity, to provide space for exhibiting contemporaneous Indigenous art practices alongside historical pieces.

“Reclaiming our identity and asserting ourselves in the museum is also getting hands-on access to these items, and being able to look at them and relearn our way of life,” Clayburn Katri said.

As a public, it is our duty to critique a history preserved by those in power. We have to change the way we look at art and the methods for display. We cannot take down settler-colonial art pieces; we should instead reframe and recontextualize them.

In every museum we walk through, we must apply a critical lens to the practices of displaying artworks. We can still look at the work of the Group of Seven as an important contribution to modernist painting styles. However, we cannot ignore its colonial undertones and textual language of erasure. History belongs to everyone, but it has long been told by those in power. It is everyone’s job to identify and dismantle the systems that perpetuate distortions of Indigenous existence.