CANADA
Straight
by ROBIN LAURENCE on SEP 17, 2013
Witnesses
At the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery until December 1
In Chris Bose’s video SavageHeathen, the voice of Stephen Harper sounds over altered historical footage of First Nations children in the “care” of white priests, nuns, doctors, nurses, and teachers. Images break up, overlap, and dissolve into brain-busting colours, while Harper delivers, in flat, businesslike tones, the federal government’s 2008 apology to the victims of the Indian Residential School program. Maybe it’s my personal bias (I’m not exactly a fan of our prime minister), but I had the impression that Harper would have brought more sincerity and depth of feeling to a reading of the 1954 Regina telephone directory. Still, the ghastly facts he alludes to—the abuses and deprivations, the deaths both physical and spiritual, the government’s stated intention to “kill the Indian in the child”—are undeniable. In Canada, for over a century, a campaign of cultural genocide was waged against the First Nations through their youngest and most vulnerable members.
Bose is one of 21 artists from across the country who are represented in Witnesses: Art and Canada’s Indian Residential Schools. Organized by the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, this is one of several shows intended to coincide with the Vancouver events of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (September 18 to 21). Most of the works on view are recent and contemporary, but a few were made in the 1970s and ’80s, when First Nations artists had begun to raise their voices politically through “nontraditional” means such as painting, printmaking, installation, video, performance, and photography. Some of the artists here experienced the residential-school system directly; others know of it through their own research or the stories painfully revealed by their elders.
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