2019
I returned to still lives at the the o k’inādās, Kelowna still life paintings. I painted this series when I was artist in residence (along with Rebecca Belmore and Adrian Stimpson) at the University of British Columbia Okanagan, in the summer of 2016. I decided to illustrate some of the thoughts and feelings I had while at the residency through still life compositions. Some refer to my relationships; others reflect on talks given there.
“Displacement: Indigenous on Indigenous Scholarship” and “Metis in the Academy” belong to a series of still life paintings I have been making since the winter of 2019. Through the genre of still life paintings, the series describes the complexity of being a contemporary Indigenous person, academic, and artist. Many of the paintings feature books, rocks, and twine arranged to represent these joys and struggles. Indigenous knowledge keepers often feel conflicted about the need to share their knowledge and a concern that turning it into English and a text might not do the knowledge justice, and that books might displace them. “Empathetic Conformation” (2019), for example shows a black book (book learning) and a rock (grandfather/Indigenous knowledge) on a table. The book leans toward the rock, perhaps altered by their proximity. “Indigenous Research Methodology (I)” (2019), shows a rock on a book, suggesting that Indigenous knowledge is more than what can be contained in a book, or that Indigenous is a combination of teachings from a specific earth site and from books.
This still life consists of a stack of books on a rock. The rock is beside First Nations University. The books are First Nations and Métis authored literature and research stacked on an old, settler authored picture book about the “Vanishing Indian.” The suggestion is that land-based knowledge grounds Indigenous ways of knowing and being, but that books authored by Indigenous folks are also required if we are to provide truer representations of Indigenous people and knowledge. The choices of books—theory, biography, and literature—show the growing richness of Indigenous writing.
