The intention(s)

By Peter Morin

The intention(s) to see the lived live(s) of Indigenous Artist Tools during:
This is what happens when you perform the memory of the land, part 1 & 2 (McGill University)
Hair (Thompson Rivers University)
This is not a Simple Movement part 1 & 2 (Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery)
*each of these performances took place in 2013

Over a period of one year, I performed these 3 interconnected performance art/works. I’ve had the opportunity to write about one of them in Arts of Engagment: Taking Aesthetic Action In and Beyond the Truth and Reconcillation of Canada (2016). I’ve spoken several times of them at different conferences and artist talks, and my dreams continually return to what was made through these interections.

The dream that started these 3 intereconnected performances (listed in the title) begins at the Reconciliation: works in progress gathering that took place at Algoma University in 2012. I was one of the invited speakers and spoke on a panel with Roy Miki and Paulette Reagan. It’s important to note how much I love Roy Miki. I read his poems first. I learned about his significant contributions to the Japanese Canadia Redress Movements in Canada. I read and learned from his scholarship. He was one of my teachers/elders even though I had only met him one time previous when we were at Shirley Bear’s birthday party. All of this conference conversations happened in a circle. For three days, we could all see each other’s eyes.  This intention was something different within an academic setting. This was transformative for me. 

On that first day, my contributions focused on my work with Indigenous children in the care of the Ministry of Children and Family Services. My job focused on how to support family reunification for these kids and their biologicial families; and everyday in this job I was thinking about the legacies of the Indian Residential School and how those histories were(are) deeply interconnected with childwelfare in Canada. One that day, I also offered reminders about the work of Indigenous artists and Indigenous Art/History. I know I said this: I’m going to make the Regalia that acknowledges our collective survival of the Indian Residentical School system. I’m going to make this Regalia and I’m going to burn it so that the kids who didn’t survive those schools would have something to dance in, if they needed/wanted to dance.  I said this in front of Roy Miki, there were other folks in the room of course. Roy didn’t know he became my unofficial Elder years previous. My mom Janell taught me to always tell the truth to Elders, and because I said this in front of Roy, I knew that I had to make this Regalia, and I knew that I had to burn this Art/Regalia as a transformative offering for the kids who didn’t make it home from those Indian Residential Schools who might (still) need Art/Regalia to dance in/with. Perhaps, it goes without needing to be said that making Performance Art is risky. Over these years, I’ve learned that it takes a community to make a Performance Art/Work happen. There is also deep and rich histories of Indigenous Performance/Art that are rooted in much of these territories now known as Canada. It’s important to acknowledge the fluid sophistication of Indigenous knowledge systems, and that Indigenous Performance Art has the ability to bring together multiple Indigenous bodies, along with their respective bodies of Indigenous knowledges, to collaborate on building beautiful unimagined possibilities. 

I want to admit here: this was a difficult essay to write. Its taken me 3 years to offer these written English words.

This essay starts with the acknowledgement that I am only one of the performing bodies in these 3 interconnected performance art/works. Each one of these performances was built in collaboration with the living and physical spirits of active collaborators also known as Drums, Rattles, Mask, Button Blanket, Eagle Fan, Fire, and Moon. This essay is my attempt to retifcy my not properly acknowledging these very real collaborators. I’ve realized that this oversight has left a deep hole in my understanding the work. Most people don’t realize that these Performance/Art/Works are connected, and most people don’t know why I undertook this series of durational performance/art/works. As I’ve mentioned I wrote about part one of this series in Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action in and Beyond Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation (2016). In this previous piece of writing, I focused on acknowledging my human collaborators – Ayumi Goto, Laura Hynds, Rande Cooke, Gordy Bear, Brianna Dick, Doug Jarvis, Barry Sam, David Melville, Robin Brass, Ashok Mathur, France Trépanier, Dylan Robinson, David Garneau, Elizabeth Kalfriesh, Beverly Diamond, Sam Mckegney, Bryan Dueck. For this specific piece of writing, my goal is to focus on the intention of making a mask and a button blanket that honours our survival beyond the Indian Residential School System. I offer these words, and these reflections, as medicine to my previously unnamed and unacknowledged collaborators – Drums, Rattles, Mask, Button Blanket, Eagle Fan, and Fire. These interconnected performances: This is what happens when you perform the memory of the land part 1 & 2, Hair, and This is not a Simple Movement part 1 & 2 could not have happened without their energies/offerings/love.

This acknowledgment also turns towards Indigenous knowledge systems and the creation-acts that enable and activate the continuum of our Indigenous Knowledge systems. I can’t remember the full name of the Nisga’a Elder who first told me about the living spirits now known as Totem Poles. His first name was Larry. He was also an Indigenous Knowledge Leader and a language warrior who was fighting for the revival of our respective Indigenous language(s). We were waiting to go to lunch, when he shared this story about the alive spirit of the art. I won’t go into depth concerning the details of the story he shared that day. I will share the words have always stayed with me, and have contributed to my pedagogical and artistic work. These words are: the tree called back to the carver. This reflection honours the alive spirit of the materials that make the artwork. This reflection honours that the artwork has a job in our cultural/intellectual/spiritual epistemological matrix. Basically, Indigenous Art/Work and the Indigenous artist who make those objects now called Art need each other in order to build our collective survival. This collective survival also includes the intellectual and philosophical knowledge(s) that inform the creation of that art/work. In the 15 years that I’ve had to consider Larry’s story/gift/teaching, I’ve learned to honour how alive my artistic tools are in physical practice. I’ve also learned that this aliveness, along with the act of Art/Making, is instrumental to the continuum of Indigenous knowledge(s). But, its taken me a long time to realize that in the writing I wasn’t doing that. I didn’t know how to do that. And today, I’m learning how to start doing that. Thank you to the editors here, and the ICCA, for sharing this space for me to practice. These creative strategies were designed by our Ancestor Artists, along with aesthetic possibilities/traditions, to become a place for building future Artists, future Ancestors, and future carriers of these acquired knowledge(s). We need these written English words to become alive tools for carrying forward these possibilities.

Throughout this essay, I am using the phrase Indigenous Performance Art. I realize that there are several complications with putting these two ideas/practices/histories/personalities together. Perhaps in this formation, along with being embedded within this personal reflection, this world-ing offers a chance to expand our reliance on previous tools/structures for understanding art production in these territories now known as Canada. For the purposes of this essay, this formation offers a chance to be fluid because we are reframing our relationship to these particular Art/Histories and this allows for a deeper consideration of the lived experience of the Indigenous tools that are activated, with purpose, during Indigenous Performance Art.

I’m being careful here because I don’t want any of us to be weighed down by centering Western/European art history/thinking. While Indigenous Artists are continue to return, and deepening, and developing our current and inherited artistic skill sets, skills developed initially by our Ancestor artists, it’s been useful for me to consider what the English words are trying to do when describing the work of Performance Artists, and Indigenous Performance Artists. It goes without saying that Indigenous artistic production can still suffer underneath the weight of Western/European art systems’ expectations, especially when we remember/acknowledge/come to terms with all of the Canadian Governments interferences/attacks within our Indigenous world(s). Indigenous Performance Art brings bodies closer into a shared, visible, and experiential moment. Performance Art, and Indigenous Performance Art, reminds us that we must push ourselves beyond the learned, and inherited, Western/European walls that has a tendency to keep our understanding(s) of body, power, transformation controlled. Indigenous Performance Art is built with collaboration of artist with artistic tools. These tools are also often built by the hands of these artists and because of this become alive and active; and they want to be alive and active with us with share purpose. The tree called back to the artist.  The tools want to work with us. They have goals within a shared artistic process. This awareness stretches how we understand/experience the resultant artwork, especially when we come to realize how that artwork is alive. It’s also good to remember that Performance Art/History, and Indigenous Performance Art/History are two separate things that speak with each other and can choose to collaborate with each other. As an inheritor of Indigenous Performance Art, I know that this has been an established artistic practice, on these territories, for thousands of years. 

As I mentioned previously the goal of this series of interconnected performances was to make a useful set of Regalia, or Ceremonial Gear, for the children who didn’t survive and weren’t able to return home from the Indian Residential Schools in Canada. In the first performance This is what happens when you perform the memory of the Land (part 1 and 2) we helped a carved mask come alive, and in the last performance This is not a Simple Movement (part 1 and 2) we placed that very alive mask into the fire. In part 1 of This is not a Simple Movement we helped a button blanket come alive. And, in part 2 of This is not a Simple Movement, we placed that very alive button blanket into the fire. We put these artworks/tools for creation into the fire because the fire would remake these artworks/tools and place them in the hands of our relations who died at, or were murdered by, the Indian Residential School system. Fire has also been unacknowledged collaborator here. 

At this point, I turn towards Mvskoke Creek poet Joy Harjo, who in her recent book titled Catching the light: Why I write (2021) , offers these guiding words for the folks who follow this type of path with us. 

She writes: 

Because of the violent interference of aggressive settlers who took over our lands in a relatively short time, we appear to be culturally gutted. When sacred places cannot be maintained, we wander. The sacredness is put away until the songs can be heard again, in the right order, and when the precise unfolding of time is most nourishing. We continue to carry these places and possibilities in our songs, our poetry, and our instructions. Our imaginations are ripe with teachings, with love and respect for those ancestors who knew and still know the particulars of how to be human. (49)

It is also important to consider Audre Lorde’s reminder about the master’s tools (1976): 

For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support. (42) 

And this, a reminder from the same 1976 Audre Lorde speech for deeper consideration: 

Within the interdependence of mutual (nondominant) difference lies that security which enables us to descend into the chaos of knowledge and return with true vision of our future, along with the concomitant power to effect those changes which bring that future into being. Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged. (41)

These offerings from Harjo and Lorde become instrumental to the larger contemplations of Indigenous Performance Art, and how English writing systems are always trying to take centre stage. Some of us, Indigenous and Non-Indigenous, have never held a drum or a rattle or a mask or a button blanket before and the result of this means we come to these words and stories of Indigenous Performance Art with a limited imagination of the possibilities of these artist tools. Some of us Readers probably have no awareness of how these tools are making creative choices within the production of the artwork because we’ve never held a drum or a rattle or a mask. This acknowledgment isn’t about assigning a fault. This acknowledgement is focused on our collective experience of colonialism in Canada, and how Canada benefits from telling a one-sided story that prioritizes itself. This limitation affects our ability to come in closer to what the Indigenous Performance Artist is achieving within their artwork because of the collaboration, and shared intentions, of artist and their artistic tools.

Stó:lō scholar Dylan Robinson in his book Hungry Listening (2020) offers:

To experiment with different forms of writing resonant theory that consider intersubjectivity between listen, music and space and reach beyond adjectival reliance, I engage in what I call apposite methodology. Apposite methodologies are processes for conveying experience alongside subjectivity and alterity; they are forms of what is somethings referred to as “writing with” a subject in contrast to “writing about.” They also envision possibilities for how writing might not just take the form of words inscribed on the page but also forms that share space alongside or move in relationship with another subjectivity. “Writing” in this sense might be considered either a textual or material form: song writing, sculptural writing, and film writing. At the heart of these experiments in resonant theory are anticolonial epistemes for sharing experience, that emerge out of the history of performative writing. (81) 

Tahltan Elder Artist Dempsey Bob shares with us, in his recent book Dempsey Bob: In His Own Voice (2022):

One Sunday morning I was just sitting, having coffee, and he just came to me. I thought, who’s going to know in the future? There was this guy called “the smart one”. I thought I better carve him. (109) 

 Dylan and Dempsey’s words, and books, are good reminders about how we must work to build our collective futures. I would add that their words also offer some guidance about standing in the river to develop/expand our experience(s) of Indigenous knowledge/practice/production through the matrix of performance art. You must reimagine the start, and you must reimagine the result. Dempsey’s words also bring to the front of our collective minds, the importance of risk(s) that artists must take. It is an artist that takes on the role of making the first, and sometimes, only version.

A short note about the phrase come in closer: I’ve spent over 20 years developing art and pedagogy that focused on decolonizing methodologies. In my recent graduate class called Indigenous and Decolonizing methodologies (2022) for the Interdisciplinary Masters in Art, Media and Design program at OCADU, I turned my focus away from centering decolonizing methods as a primary goal of the shared learning within the graduate class, and specifically moved the shared learning towards amplifying Indigenous power. I found that this turning of pedagogical tools acknowledges the creative agency of our human bodies, and in practice opened a space for consideration(s) of meaning in the physical space(s) in between Indigenous knowledge/practice, Western European knowledge systems, and Global Ancestral Systems for knowing. Becoming a human being within these colonial systems continues to be a complicated mix of collective poor imagination, fear of our personal power within a capitalist system, and not realizing our personal unlimited potential. The consideration of Indigenous artistic tools and what they are able to accomplish, because they are alive with agency during an artistic acts, requires an awareness, or even an inkling, of realization that there are unimagined possibilities. Western/European culture might use the word ‘chance’ here instead of ‘unimagined possibilities’. Their type of ‘chance’ is actually frozen and has a tendency to undermine the transformation power of a creative act/action. A shift away from these oppressive systems and a turn towards amplifying Indigenous power, and being open to coming in closer to unimagined possibility could mean transformation. This is the start of coming in closer and is the start of realizing how much Indigenous power is/has affected your current living/being. Audre Lorde’s clear words about the limitations of the master’s tools, and how the use of those particular tools won’t be able to shift the dynamics of power within Western/European systesm, does open up a space for us to imagine how Ancestor artists used tools to build future(s) for our collective bodies. its also nice to imagine those artists and their dreaming/building of a tool that is an active contributor to making an artwork come alive for future generations.

Here I turn towards an offering shared with me by Mi’kmaq Elder artist and thinker, Peter Claire. We were visiting with Peter and Shirley at their home. While visiting with these Elder Artists, I was sharing about them about my recent performance Singing Home (2015). This performance took place in Sydney Harbour, in Nova Scotia. At the beginning of the performance, I sang a song to honour the salmon beings who were stolen away from these shores. aAfterwards, I put on my time travelling gear, time travelled to the moment that early colonizer wooden ships arrived at that particular shoreline and proceeded to throw 150 stones at those wooden ships. Peter listened to my sharing, and reflected on what I shared by asking me, what would your Ancestors have made if there wasn’t any colonization? 

I want to admit here: what a scary, and beautiful, question. 

Here it seems appropriate to start offering strategies for acknowledging the real lived lives of Indigenous artistic tools for the viewers of Indigenous Performance Art:

Collaboration is also Witnessing. Witnessing is not extraction. 

I am connected to territory that is shaped by the meeting of the Stikine and Tahltan rivers

For me, this starts with the place where the two rivers meet. I collaborate with those Rivers.

Those rivers collaborate with me. 

We are responsible for each other’s future, we are responsible for each other’s safety. 

The river is not a highway like so many anthropologists might suggest. 

The river is not the land. The river and the land collaborate. They are one body.   

We need to do this visioning before I can invite you to hold any of the artistic tools, physically and/or conceptually, that helped to create these experience(s). 

We need to do this so that the drums/rattles/masks/button blankets/eagle fan/fire will know that you can see them, I mean actually see them.  

These alive tools need to know how to trust you, and you need to learn how to trust them, and talk with them.

Remember that land becomes a fluid alongside the river’s movement. 

Remember that collaboration starts by acknowledging that performance kinships between the physical performing bodies and the performance art tools emerges because performances art/works are relational/shared and fluid worlds. 

A short acknowledgement of the time and lived experience(s) offered to these 3 interconnected performances: 

At the start of this essay, I wrote about how I missed acknowledging all of my collaborators within a series of interconnected performances that took place in 2013. This is also an acknowledgment of the time offered/shared by all of the human/non-human collaborators to these 3 interconnected performances. Each of these 3 interconnected performances holds an inmerable amount of time/skill/expertise/love/dreams from each of the human collaborators. Rande Cook carved the mask over months. Bear Sam carved the culture gun over months. Valerie Hawkins grew her hair over years and offered it. France Trepainer grew her hair over years offered it. Laura Hynds made the rattles over months. The video’s made by Brianna Bear, Gordy Bear, Doug Jarvis, France Trépainer, and Ayumi Goto, took time. the singing by Robin Brass and Chery L’Hirrondelle took time and energy. The witnessing by David Garneau, Ashok Mathur, Keavy Martin, Adrian Stimson, Jaimie Isaac, Tania Willard, Alison Mitchell, Helen Gilbert, Sam Mckegney, Beverly Diamond, Elizabeth Kalfrisch, Byron Dueck, Skawennati, Kyoko Goto.   There were two performance sketches that happened before the Hair performance. These performance sketches added spiritual energy and grounding towards Hair. It’s important to acknowledge both of those performance sketches: Singing to Drums and Land Drumming. These performances included offerings from: Clement Yeh, Adrian Stimson, Leah Decter, Ayumi Goto, Mimi Gellmen, Ashok Mathur, Gabe L’Hirondelle Hill, Tania Willard, Greg Young-in, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Keavy Martin, and David Garneau. This is not a simple movement (part 1 and part 2) included contributions from: Bo Yeung, Cecily Nicholson, Lisa Ravensburgen, Corrina Sparrow, Gerry Ambers, Juliane Okot Bitek, Ayumi Goto, Ashok Mathur, Karen Duffek, Dana Claxton, Grandma Dinah Creyke, Mary Lux, and these two young children who volunteered to help me with handing out envelopes during part 2, and the 75 witnessing bodies who carried, and placed, spawning salmon envelopes into the fire with us. 

Another short acknowledgement of time involved in making:

Two button blankets with braided hair, one button blanket with no crest design, 

culture gun carved by Barry Sam, 7 rattles made by Laura Hynds, rattles made and gifted to me by Indigenous kids who I worked with who were in foster care, two drums covered in red earth paint, a mask covered in horse hair carved by Rande Cook, a song shared by Robin Brass, 

and 3 object offerings that were included from Ayumi Goto to part 1 of this performance: 

Jibun, Obe, Geta, 7 picking-up the pieces drums made from elk/deer/moose, 

28 stones found on the campus while walking from the artist residence to the studio at Thompson River University, a wooden box painted in black and gold,  wrapped in Japanese paper and filled with her washed and cut off hair, cedar boughs collected from cedar trees around the gallery, a button blanket covered in human hair and mother of pearl buttons, eagle fan beaded by Judy Elk, 100 spawning salmon hand-printed envelopes, tobacco. 

It is at this point; I turn towards Joy Harjo and her words in Catching the Light (2022). She writes, “the root languages of the Western Hemisphere are indigenous languages. These languages carry in them the plants of the area, star maps and meaning, directions concerning danger and safety, the how and meaning of becoming” (9). This words are a reminder to take care of you and me. 

I want to return to the river collabation as a strategy here (for a moment). This fluid nature of the river enables the unimagined possiblitity for us (collectively), and will help us to make a space for how these more than human contributors (artistic tools made to contribute to Indigenous performance/art) speak/perform meaning within the production of experience that happens when these artistic tools are activiated within Indigenous Performance Art. The river has different rules for determining meaning, and these rules do not centre the human. There is river time. The river’s edge creates new worlds. The river remembers back to the beginning of human time, and beyond human time. You are not standing in the river. The river subsumes you, and your human-ness, and the river adds this energy into its knowledge production cycle. I may not have an answer to Peter Claire’s question about the continuum of artistic production by Tahltan Ancestor artists without being overly determined by prioritizing Canadian colonization, but I do have the example of how the river creates without giving away too much intellectually, and physically, to resource extraction. These objects speak more than human language, they speak and perform meaning. Our human ability limites all the ways that these alive tools are offering ways to be more expansive. As a strategy for including the more-than-human words, here, I turn to performance art as a research methodology. I take a red cloth. I tie this cloth around my eyes. I take a second red cloth and tie around my mouth. I activate my muscle memory of holding the mask and the button blanket because I have the priviledge of that experience. I ask the mask and the button blanket to contribute to this essay, acknowledging how limited human words are. 

I want to admit here: I’m not going to try and interpret these words for you. I AM going to stand in the river of meaning offered by these creative offerings from these more-than-human artistic, and very alive tools.     

Mask: 

Warm face touching my skin

One dance

One sadness I hear this little light of mine 

Warm tears touching my skin 

I hear them 

I hear them because there aren’t multiple worlds for me 

There is only one world 

I see them reaching their hands towards me 

I will go to them and dance when they need to dance 

These don’t have to be secret ceremonies now 

Button Blanket:  

Ha jump ha jump ha jump ha jump ha jump ha jump ha jump ha jump ha jump ha jump ha jump ha jump ha jump ha jump ha jump ha jump ha jump ha jump ha jump ha jump ha jump ha jump

Ha jump ha jump ha jump ha jump ha jump ha jump ha jump ha jump ha jump ha jump ha jump

I want you to jump 

I want you to jump  

I want you to jump 

I want to jump with you 

I want to jump with you

I want jump with you 

I don’t want you to cry 

I want you to jump up

I want you to jump away

I want you to feel the pain fall away 

I want to admit here: In writing this, I’ve also come to realize that fire is also an unnamed and unacknowledged collaborator. The Moon was an unnamed and unacknowledged collaborator. The territories that grounded these performances – Tiohtià:ke, Musequem, Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc, have also remained unacknowledged as collaborators until now.

To end, I dream the ghost hands of our young relations, the ones who didn’t return or were murdered at the Indian Residential Schools, holding these objects in their hands. I dream that they are dancing and singing.  This helps.  

I put tobacco on the land on behalf of all of us standing in the river, I do this acknowledging the aliveness of these artistic tools and their contributions to the creation of this Indigenous Performance Art

Bibliography

Bob, Dempsey. Dempsey Bob: in his own voice. Exhibition publication. Whistler: Audain Art Museum, 2022.

Gay, Roxanne Ed. The selected works of Audre Lorde. New York City: WW Norton Company, 2020

Harjo, Joy. Catching the light, the 2021 Windham – Campbell lecture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022. 

Robinson, Dylan. Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,. 2020. 

Peter Morin is a grandson of Tahltan Ancestor Artists. Morin’s artistic offerings can be organized around four themes: articulating Land/Knowing, articulating Indigenous Grief/Loss, articulating Community Knowing, and understanding the Creative Agency/Power of the Indigenous body. The work takes place in galleries, in community, in collaboration, and on the land. All of the work is informed by dreams, Ancestors, Family members, and Performance Art as a Research Methodology. Initially trained in lithography, Morin’s artistic practice moves from Printmaking to Poetry to Beadwork to Installation to Drum Making to Performance Art. Peter is the son of Janelle Creyke (Crow Clan, Tahltan Nation) and Pierre Morin (French-Canadian). Throughout his exhibition and making history, Morin has focused upon his matrilineal inheritances in homage to the matriarchal structuring of the Tahltan Nation, and prioritizes Cross-Ancestral collaborations. Morin was longlisted for the Brink Award (2013) and the Sobey Art Award in 2014/2023, respectively. In 2016, Morin received the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Outstanding Achievement by a Canadian Mid-Career Artist. Peter Morin currently holds a tenured appointment in the Faculty of Arts at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto.