I want to be down at that beach where Rebecca is in the water. I need to be closer to the performance site. My heartbeat starts to roar through my body. I feel like this whenever I enter into the big house or the Pow Wow grounds. There is a resonance to Rebecca’s movement like a big drum. I start walking around this lookout, following the concrete path and looking for the stairs. Imagining stairs. Rebecca’s marked the path to the beach with three small bait herring; the best way to attract scavengers is to leave bait. Launch a Feast for Scavengers. And yet as I pass over these fish I understand them more as payment fish, left on my behalf by the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. This is their payment to use the Land on this day. These fish are a payment to the ancestors of this land. Later on, I remembered them as three eulachon, an acknowledgement to the eulachon fisheries that happens up and down these island chains. The fish brought the people together.

It seems that scavengers remind us of our humanity by demonstrating their inhumanity.

She sits on the rocky outcroppings, searching the ocean horizon.

She has come to this beach, this protected cove, and set a line, watching and waiting, for our dinner to get caught in her net. The performance ends when the bagpipes stop singing.

really think that my greatest inspirations are: Kokum, my mother, then me. That’s it.(7)

Later on, after the action that shaped Launch A Feast for Scavengers was completed, I stayed to watch the net floaters dance on the ocean currents. I wondered what scavengers would come? The seagulls were circling.

This young Victorian family, walking by, stopped a moment and asked, we noticed the large group of people, and the bagpipes, can you tell us what happened here? I told them about Launch a Feast for Scavengers. Rebecca Belmore, an Anishinaabe artist, who makes performance art, presented a new work. She sent out this floating net line, heavy with herring, into the water. I said Rebecca was inviting many scavengers to eat.

Unfortunately, the family wasn’t caught. They continued down the beach.

Me. I was caught.

Throughout the performance, Rebecca stays in the cold water, facing the cold, and moving enough nets to catch something big. I admire that strength and endurance. At times, I think she is after the ghosts of those first colonizers. I am sitting beside this history, knowing that at one point aboriginal fisheries were illegal, and aboriginal art making was illegal.

The performance subverts that historical imperative of catching food for survival to capturing the ships and ghosts that haunt our First Nations bodies.

Then, I see her stop. She turns to watch a lone seagull circle overhead. It occurs to me that she is not waiting for that seagull. The seagull is not the scavenger, but is more likely reporting back about those large ships looming on the horizon.

When she is finished in the water, the story splits for me. I see her sit at the edge of the water, watching the work she’s accomplished and I am reminded of my own experience of fishing for food at the river near Telegraph Creek and the waiting involved with gathering food. She has created a return to that environment for me, and her subsequent movements recalling the hard work involved. At its basis, this action of a First Nations woman returning to a historic fishing village site, and enacting a historic-land-memory-connection, is necessary for the continued creation of new stories for our collective memory. The factors involved in this, return the site into a living and breathing location of importance. Its history continues to be significant because she returned and enacted these actions. This site was a place of trading by Indigenous people. As the sun rises further and the work for the morning is done, there is a very real sense of ancestors watching to see that the work was done right.

When aboriginal artists share narratives about home, there is vulnerability. The story can become like dynamite. In this case, Launch a Feast for a Scavenger teeters on some undeclared edge. It can easily become a fog of symbols, a fog that rolls into this cove. It can also become a real conversation about shared histories. And yet, for the viewer, as well as the maker, the words and actions gain significance because of this tension. Rebecca’s performance creates meaning because the body helps us to read information that isn’t always easy to put English words to. We may not always have the words to describe the ceremony but after 500+ years of colonization, we still have our bodies. Launch a Feast for Scavengers reminds us that we don’t have to be afraid of the history that lives underneath our feet.

To travel without a map, to travel without a way. They did, that long ago. That misdirection became the way. After the Door of No Return, a map was only a set of impossibilities, a set of changing locations.

 

It is 4:45 a.m. I am doing what I do every time I drink too much wine and wake up suddenly at 4:45 a.m. I read. Eduardo Galeano falls open at this time: “I’m nostalgic for a country which doesn’t yet exist on a map.” Dear Eduardo, I am not nostalgic. Belonging does not interest me. I had once thought that it did. Until I examined the underpinnings. One is mislead when one looks at the sails and majesty of tall ships instead of their cargo. But if it were a country where you were my compatriot, then I would reconsider it. (85)(8)

 

A map, then, is only a life of conversations about a forgotten list of irretrievable selves. This self which is unobservable is a mystery. It is imprisoned in the observed. It is constantly struggling to wrest itself from the warp of public ownership. Its own language is plain yet secret. Rather, obscured. (224)(9)