I don’t give a fuck what you think about me / And I don’t give a fuck ’bout the things that you do / And I don’t give a fuck what you think about me, what you think about me / So yeah, fuck you.
— Charli XCX, “What You Think About Me”
We are not the same.
Dear art,
It’s been a long time. I have to admit that I miss writing to you. You never made it an easy business though, reviewing the places where one finds beauty and the messy politics that get stirred up in the cyclical endeavor of making and responding to art. So much has transpired since we last spoke. A titan in publishing and Canadian art fell. COVID-19 measures closed the doors of galleries for a period of time. A recession looms (never a good thing in the arts). Still, here I remain, searching for truth. Too bad there’s no truth in art (it’s not like it’s Art).
As you may have garnered, dear reader, there are a few different characters in the mix. There is Canadian “art,” the industry wherein I work and have worked for a decade now. Canadian art is a network of galleries, critics, publishers, academics, artists, benefactors, collectors, and not-for-profit organizations. Of course, there’s also Art. What is Art? Entire classes are taught to answer this question. Art is pre-discursive and, to live artfully, is as innate to life as breathing and eating, if you ask me (that said, I’ve always been a romantic). Then, there is “Indigenous Art” and Indigenous art, a distinction I discuss herein.
Here I stand, facing you once more, cloaked readers and art lovers, and I’m at a loss of where to begin. I did, indeed, see some art since we last parted ways. I wish I could simply write about that art now. What’s it like to be in some faraway city with ancient architecture sinking deeper into the sea with every step you take on its land, with your parents footing the bill? What is it like to have the decadent time to search only for beauty and have no sense of what it means to live to survive? It’s not all dreary. Truth and love brought me here, too. At my core, I’m just another scene kid who gets my dopamine hits from looking at things. I don’t know where to begin because how can I simply talk about “Indigenous Art,” and Indigenous art, without acknowledging that the meaning of these terms are in flux? How can I talk about “Indigenous Art” without talking about the grief so many Native folks are contending with right now?
As I often do, I found some answers within cultural moments as of late. I’ve been watching the television series Ziwe, along with many others. Ziwe’s uncanny interview style is unsettling. There is never a moment where Ziwe breaks from the tense interrogation of her guests, as she forays into topics that might be uncomfortable territory for some. What’s arresting about this aesthetic is that it resembles the feeling of being a non-white person in a predominantly white-coded society. Everything just feels a little off in ways that are hard to describe using language. A little unsettling. A little uncanny. A little ironic. Think camp. Think John Waters. Think Stepford Wives. Think about the acid trip you had when you were sixteen. Ziwe is pushing the viewer beyond the boundaries of their comprehension, into a zone of discomfort that might be alien to them, but familiar to the so-called Other. However, there is certainly safety in the deliberately outlandish satire that enables these interviews. The guest will walk away from the interview unharmed. At most, they are the butt of a few good jokes about white people. The discomfort of the white viewer fades away as soon as the show ends. Black people in the workplace, on the other hand, have no reprieve from the quiet aggression of white-coded cultures in North American society.
Ziwe’s aesthetic is subtle, but it is one that undoubtedly questions the continued relevance of the European tradition in the US and Canada. “Equity and diversity” initiatives are on the minds of art institutions. Undoubtedly, with bones in their basements and “Indigenous Art collections” by artists with unclear connections to the identities they claim—even with their adherence to corporate equity, inclusion, and diversity narratives—Canadian heritage and cultural organizations are some of the greatest impositions on Indigenous sovereignties and healing in Canada. Within this dynamic, we are told that representation matters. We are told that seeing a painting at the AGO or the ROM will make Canadians stop murdering Indigenous peoples. Still, we are dying. Still, we are struggling to regain what is ours from these institutions. How uncanny valley.
I need to shift from talking to art to talking about art. We, in art, know that independent art publishing doesn’t exist anymore. We know that art galleries and their advertising keep the doors of art publications open, even those publishing self-proclaimed “radical thinking” about art. These organizations and their editors couldn’t imagine themselves out of the current art world if you gave them a cool mil. The fall of Canadian Art is evidence of that. They’d squander it all on fancy parties full of white people gawking at the few diverse ones for a night. Here, I mean Canadian art, and the industries that have both restrained and hurt me in their endeavors to “decolonize.” I need to start talking about Canadian art, and Art, to talk about a different temporality and spatiality of refusal in art publishing. I’m not belittling the writers and editors that have to make a living working for these publications. I care about systems, not how systems devalue the labour and spirits of the people that define them.
When I’m writing about the inequities of equity within the arts, I want to be clear that I’m talking about art institutions themselves. The people who govern art institutions aren’t untouchable, distant figures. They are the boards and leadership of any given organization. Over the past several months on social media, I’ve seen an individualization of the issue of pretendians. Pretendians are a newly known phenomenon among Canadians, well-known among Indigenous peoples for decades, wherein people self-identify as Indigenous to receive jobs in arts and culture, art exhibitions, and art funding, though their actual connection to the community they claim is tenuous. I know well from my experience working in Canadian art and publishing that putting the pressure of a systemic issue on a single staff member represents its own form of health and safety inequity. The responsibility should be placed on the organizations who have hired pretendians, and created the issue of pretendians to begin with, to be accountable to Indigenous communities. To this end, I will not name specific figures who frequently come up within conversations about pretendians in art. I don’t care if this is not “rigorous.” Without institutional accountability in Canada’s arts and culture sector, I am not safe to discuss the specifics of pretendians in the arts in Canada. However, to learn more about how I think about Indigenous identity, community, and nationhood, check out this recent piece I wrote on my blog.
Accountability is important. I’ve seen the term “accountability” semantically broken apart by young ideologues for years, mostly within queer social justice communities, and rightfully so. The language of restorative justice and accountability has been critiqued for its broad applicability and interpretation, which can result in punitive cultures within restorative justice processes. Yet, how else should Indigenous peoples respond to the appropriation of funds meant for their communities?
Funding for Indigenous peoples in arts was freed up as a federal response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action, as an act of reconciliation for the residential school system in Canada. In the Calls to Action, Call 68 “call[ed] upon the federal government, in collaboration with Aboriginal peoples… to mark the 150th anniversary of Canadian Confederation in 2017 by establishing a dedicated national funding program for commemoration projects on the theme of reconciliation.” As I discuss in my Yellowhead Institute brief A Culture of Exploitation, in 2017, the Liberal budget cited “reconciliation” and a desire to “support shared economic interests between Canada and Indigenous peoples.” As such, an $8.4 billion-over-five-years commitment was made to the CBC and Canada Council for the Arts to invigorate Indigenous culture. Indigenous artists would find themselves uniquely affected by the budgets’ calls to “preserve, revitalize, and enhance” Indigenous culture. Of the aforementioned figures, $9.4 million was invested in Canada Council for the Arts’s 2017 to 2018 grants programs under the Indigenous-specific funding program Creating, Knowing and Sharing: The Arts and Cultures of First Nations, Inuit and Métis Peoples; and, in 2018 to 2019, $12.2 million was channeled into the same program.
I interviewed Indigenous cultural workers who witnessed the implementation of these funds within Canada’s cultural organizations. Within these conversations, murmurings about who identified as Indigenous within Canadian art in order to apply for and manage these funds began to emerge. Over the last few years, individuals who previously claimed Indigenous identities to secure positions within art, and to secure Indigenous funding, reconsidered their identity claims. Slowly, a language that does not privilege the person who has done the harm, as so much reconciliatory language and Canadian nationalism does, has begun to emerge with one powerful idea at the centre: identity fraud. If these funds have been mismanaged, it is a continuation of a colonial legacy and there needs to be accountability in policy and governance. Not only was there a lack of oversight within the organizations who mismanaged arts funding meant for Indigenous peoples, there is now a lack of accountability or consequence.
Curators want viewers. They want people to walk through the door of their show and get that “wow” factor. This doesn’t always mean artists who have a clear connection to the Indigenous aesthetics they reproduce and yield profit from.
Instead of a carceral naming, I want to talk about structures and systems. The following bodies in Canada have naturalized an “Indigenous Art” that is administered by non-Indigenous peoples, whether that be non-Indigenous administrators or figures falsely claiming Indigenous identity. These structures might not be apparent to non-Indigenous peoples in art. Of course, there is still Indigenous art, which is not often seen within the networks of institutions I am about to discuss. Indigenous art is older than Canada. It exists in traditional styles and adaptations of those styles by Indigenous peoples. However, “Indigenous Art” is a creation of the institutions below, curated into exhibitions and collected into archives, an art that hasn’t necessarily represented the interests, or will, of communities of Indigenous peoples. The following systems form a powerful structure that enables ongoing Indigenous appropriation and cultural theft in Canada.
The remaining parts of this letter, or whatever it is, is broken down by categories. The commonality between these themes is that they represent sites in Canadian art and “Indigenous Art” that reproduce anti-Indigenous cultures, cloaked in reconciliation discourse. These networks, peoples, and institutions reproduce anti-Indigenous attitudes by hiring, and protecting, pretendians in art, and failing to take institutional accountability for the widespread issue of pretendians in Canadian art (a problem that they have created).
“Indigenous” NFPs—In Canada, any group of peoples can start a not-for-profit to represent the interests of Indigenous cultural professionals. Several of these kinds of organizations have popped up over the last several decades. Over time, the organizations situate themselves as an administrative authority of any given “Indigenous” cultural field. However, many of these organizations do not have solid policies governing Indigenous identity (ideally independently defined by consultative processes with Indigenous communities), for their boards, staff, or members, and rely on self-identification to register. As such, individuals with unclear connections to the communities they claim are, at times, represented in their work, even as board members and key staff. Often, these organizations are founded at times when public and private Indigenous art funding is made available, and there is a desire to administer said funding. Further, because of the European perspective being the dominant perspective in Canadian art, these organizations can enact white-coded work (i.e. partnering with galleries and other Canadian institutions, so said organizations can also benefit from Indigenous art funding and equity and diversity fallacies). Often the last peoples who are engaged by their work are the Indigenous peoples, even the local communities who they purport to represent.
Biennial, Festival, and Opening Culture—Curators want viewers. They want people to walk through the door of their show and get that “wow” factor. They want viewers to look up at an aerial sculpture that takes their breath away, and to send details from their show across the web and into the phones of white art critics who will praise but not question. As such, they want only The Best aesthetics. This means artists who went to art school. This doesn’t always mean artists who have a clear connection to the Indigenous aesthetics they reproduce and yield profit from. This also means organizations hire “Indigenous curators” who, themselves, have unclear connections to Indigenous “identity” because they want aesthetic representation. They see our aesthetics as “on trend.” They want to cash Indigenous art funding. At the end of the day, it’s the Indigenous peoples these biennials, festivals, and swanky openings pay lip service to who lose out in this discourse. Our aesthetics are removed from its peoplehood, draped on the backs of primarily white-passing artists with tenuous claims to Indigenous identity, and we are silenced and de-animated, once more. Further, art tourism, itself, greatly contributes to global carbon emission and climate change that primarily negatively impact global Indigenous peoples. Biennials perpetuate European nationalism and sovereignty, and a paternalistic ownership of Indigenous aesthetics reproduced for the gaze of a global European audience (and order). I don’t have all the answers, but my desire is that industries at least question how decolonization has become just another aesthetic to fetishize the Other in Canadian art, and how we can live and act differently.
“Indigenous” Art Collectives—Indigenous art collectives have an important place within Indigenous resistance and community organizing in urban centres. When Indigenous artists meet in an urban centre, they often organize around a shared understanding of Indigenous sovereignty. In art, this has manifested as prominent Indigenous art collectives that changed the game. I don’t want to name positive examples in this article because I don’t want to associate any Indigenous artist’s work with a conversation about pretendians. However, the “Indigenous collective” model has been appropriated by art industries in Canada. After 2017 and the so-called reconciliation year—wherein Canada freed up a great deal of funding for Indigenous art as an act of reconciliation—several “Indigenous art collectives” popped up, specifically intent on applying as “collectives” to various modes of funding, and partaking in development projects on behalf of Indigenous communities. However, at times the administrators were non-Indigenous peoples or peoples with unclear Indigenous identities. Often these collectives are portrayed as independent, but actually have close relationships with Canadian art institutions, including in their outputs, and no relationship to surrounding Indigenous communities. The continued reliance on collectives to provide representation on the walls of Canada’s art institutions has meant that said institutions have avoided reforming their own internal structures and their cultures of colonial normativity extending from the European tradition. There are new “collectives” popping up all the time that use the language and the rhetoric of Indigenous self-determination to support the work of a handful of peoples and established cultural institutions in Canada, with little, or no, accountability to local Indigenous communities or Indigenous communities broadly, namely regarding the identity claims of their collective members.
I refuse to recognize institutions that negate my sovereignty using the money they were afforded to make amends for the babies they buried. Indigenous peoples need to move forward. Associate my work with something else.
Art Schools—Universities run on metrics. Universities want more “Indigenous” professors in their faculties and “Indigenous” students in their seats to meet the requirements of the equity and diversity initiatives of post-secondary funders and their own institutions. However, art schools are an environment rich for the appropriation of Indigenous knowledge. In art school, dialogue and critique is central. Within these dialogues, processes of self-actualization can occur. In short, I have witnessed many of my colleagues in art school have some form of awakening, wherein they shifted to become the most Indigenous I have ever met, and then proceeded to make their entire art and/or curatorial practice about Indigenous identity and/or sovereignties. Similarly, we are in a moment where art schools are desperately trying to hire Native talent. The result is “Indigenous” academics with prestige who are awarded publicly funded chairs, infrastructure funding, and lucrative partnership grants and commercial partnerships with art organizations. All worth millions of dollars in public funding. All without ever defining how they are Indigenous and who claims them as part of an Indigenous peoples.
Digital Redface—The anonymity and viral nature of digital cultures online has resulted in widespread appropriation of Indigenous aesthetics. Recently, an “Indigenous” meme account was under scrutiny because its lead administrator could not clearly identify where she was from and claimed to be Blackfoot. While the meme collective running the account refused to respond to the claims to protect their anonymity, the person in question, until that point, had the meme site in their professional bio for a long period of time. What’s troubling about this occurrence is how easy it was for the administrator of the meme account to pick up Native vernacular and regurgitate it. The increasing dissemination of NDN memes means that it’s easy for those who want to appropriate our culture to pick up cues and wear them as a form of digital redface. Further, communities like “Native Twitter” and “Native Instagram” benefit from the parasocial relationships they create, wherein no one really has to be accountable to kinship and identifying where they’re from to gain influence and notoriety on the platforms.
Indigenous Branding—Indigenous branding is everywhere. It’s all over Toronto. I think about it most whenever an art biennial or all-night festival comes around. I see de-animated Indigenous aesthetics plastered all over Toronto: on flagpoles, as newly-erected monuments, and on signs and promotional materials. Often these public aesthetics are from “Indigenous” peoples who have no connection to the territory where they are erected. They are installed without the consultation of the local community. Yet, they exist as public monuments, sometimes indefinitely. I don’t know if there is a better representation of visual appropriation (the opposite of visual sovereignty). Indigenous branding is innately connected to the IndigiBosses who produce and disseminate Indigenous aesthetics. Don’t get me wrong, I know I could fit into this category because of my work as an academic. I’m sure many an Indigenous youth have called me this or something similar (and good because how else do I stay humble?). Still, I can’t deny that commodifying Indigenous resistance risks bringing us back to a place wherein the representation of our aesthetics replaces meaningful change in Canadian society that would reduce the harm Indigenous peoples endure daily. I think about the Indigenous fast fashion brands on Instagram, for instance, and their relationship to digital redface. How can we ascertain if all these businesses, and their collaborators, are truly Indigenous? When it comes to selling Indigenous aesthetics online, as a commodity, unless you know what to look for, there is no way to guarantee that you are benefiting Indigenous artists and communities. It’s an unfortunate reality, but one we need to face in an era of e-commerce where we no longer have to walk up to a vendor’s table and introduce ourselves before buying their work.
Indigenous communities have lost their trust in Canada’s art and culture institutions. Oral histories tell me that these industries in Canada have, for decades, been distributing funds in ways that do not honour Indigenous sovereignties. The above systems are a continuation of that paternalistic history, which began when the first settlers stepped foot on Turtle Island and sought to make a cheap buck off our stolen objects. Of course, there’s room for all of us. You’d be hard-pressed to find a segment of my own work that isn’t about lifting up other Indigenous peoples. But these people aren’t us. This isn’t lateral. As Winona Wheeler has said, it’s most definitely gendered, though, considering the peoples who are predominantly taking funds and positions meant for Native peoples are white women.
So, I refuse to recognize institutions that negate my sovereignty using the money they were afforded to make amends for the babies they buried. Indigenous peoples need to move forward. There is so much more to our cultural lives than our requirement to constantly speak to the peoples who have taken up too much undo space. I don’t want my work or the work of my colleagues to be about pretendians, anymore. All I can do is urge you, dear reader, to no longer associate me with this movement of work I have described above. I don’t want to have to draw that line in the sand, to quote Dr. Jolene Rickard, but it appears I must. I can only speak for myself and my own ethics. Moving forward, I won’t be swayed by the “Indigenous” art curation in art schools, galleries, and art NFPs across the country. Associate my work with something else. Associate my work with NDN artists who are repped by their communities. Moving forward, “I Saw Some Art” will be a regular column centring the work of these NDN artists. The only way forward is reclamation and reallocation, even if that means distinguishing a movement of NDN artists apart from the institution of “Indigenous Art.”
xoxo Jas
