On and On

On and On  by War & Pierce 

(C Pierce, S Ward and J Faber 2016)

We’re calling… Out to you!

Everybody!  We got to move!

Sunny War and Chris Pierce

We’ve been down… Way too long!  

It’s our right, to right the wrong!

We’re gonna walk!  
We’re gonna crawl!

Gonna make it, through it all!

Through the fire… through the rain 

Won’t stop fighting. 
Until we’re free again

On and on, the tears will flow 

On and on, that’s all we know

On and on, still so far to go

On and on, the tears will flow 

On and on, that’s all we know

Tears will flow that’s all we know  

And we have so much further left to go

Stand up. We all belong!

Up on the hill, that some live on.

Keep on strong!, Keep on proud!  

Tell the truth, say it loud!

We’re gonna walk!  We’re gonna crawl!

Gonna make it ,through it all!

Through the fire… through the rain 

Won’t stop fighting. Until were free again

On and on, the tears will flow 

On and on, that’s all we know

On and on, still so far to go

On and on, the tears will flow 

On and on, that’s all we know

Tears will flow that’s all we know  

And we have so much further left to go
On and on....

These are the lyrics to a new song and video by blues singer/songwriter duo War & Pierce.  I found this on an email from Playing for Change accompanied by this message:

      “On and On” is a powerful testament to how far we’ve come as a human race but             also speaks to how far we have to go in order to reach freedom and justice for all.           Let us not forget that WE have to be the change we want to see in the world and as         the song says, “It’s our right, to right the wrong.”

The video includes black and white footage of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s interspersed with footage of Indigenous people, a Stop the Pipeline poster held by a young girl, a recent march to protest Trump’s anti-refugee stance, a Union march and a Black Lives Matter poster.  The song and the video capture the pulse of these times and link it to the past.  War & Pierce help to tell this old and new story of people walking, marching and standing up for the rights of each other.  It is a story in which “we all belong.” You can view the video here.

Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience

Kent Monkman

Canada is celebrating its 150^th birthday this year.  A quick look on-line, shows hundreds of celebratory events.  Our National Parks are free this year so we can enjoy the beautiful land that we live in.  And there will be fireworks galore.  Back in 2014, Barbara Fischer, the director of the University of Toronto’s Art Museum had her own idea.  She commissioned Cree artist Kent Monkman to create a Canada 150 project.

A lover of art history, Kent and his team searched museums to curate this project.  However, Monkman writes, “I could not think of any history paintings that conveyed or authorized Indigenous experience into the canon of art history…… museums across the continent hold in their collections countless paintings that depict and celebrate the European settler’s expansion and ‘discovery’ of the North American landscape, but very few, if any, historical representations show the dispossession and removal of the First Peoples from their lands.  This version of history excised Indigenous people from art history, effectively white-washing the truth from Canada’s foundational myths and school curriculums.”

And so he created his own paintings using the styles of classical and modern art to fill in the missing pieces of Canada’s visual history.  He recreates and reimagines famous paintings using “humour, parody, and camp” to confront “the devastation of colonialism.”  His alter ego, the “gender-bending time-traveller,” Miss Chief Eagle Testikle, “embodies the flawed and playful trickster spirit, teasing out the truths beyond false histories and cruel experiences.” (all quotes from the exhibition Brochure) 

 One painting called The Daddies  recreates the famous Robert Harris painting of the Fathers of Confederation.  However, in Monkman’s rendition, Miss Chief sits naked before the Fathers wondering how to get a seat at the “table”.  In an interview with Metro News, Monkman says, “There was no thought towards Indigenous people in that meeting.”

The Daddies, Kent Monkman (photo Globe and Mail)

As I walked through the exhibit, I saw images that dealt with sexual exploitation, murdered and missing Indigenous women, addiction, the slaughter of the bison, treaties and the fur trade.  Eventually I wandered into a small room painted in blackboard paint.  At the far end, brilliantly lit, was a painting called The Scream (after the famous painting by Edvard Munch).  The painting depicted Mounties, nuns and priests dragging children away from their parents to take them to residential school.  It is painful and heart wrenching to see the faces of the children and parents who are almost life sized.  On the side walls are mounted antique cradle boards found by Monkman and his team, that used to hold babies.  In between the cradle boards are some spaces.  Upon closer inspection, I saw that there were chalk marks outlining cradle boards that were missing.  We all know that chalk marks in movies are used to mark murder scenes so the message was crystal clear and chilling. Monkman, whose grandmother went to residential school, cuts through the rhetoric and touches the very core of this truth of our history.

Kent Monkman with The Scream  photo:Toronto Star

Despite the sad stories from this part of our shared history, Monkman is not telling a deficiency narrative.  The exhibition is entitled, Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience.  Just like Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, this show is accompanied by Miss Chief’s journal in nine chapters.  In Chapter VI, Miss Chief writes, “ So many of our people grew up broken – is it any wonder that they fill the prisons, crowd the wards, and line the sidewalks, lost in the cycle of self-loathing, trauma, and addiction?  I shine brightly for these souls through the darkness, slaying savage masculine force with the dazzling power of my beauty and allure.  I am the light, the two-spirited gentle man and fierce woman.  Walk towards me, my children, fall into step and let the drum guide you.  You will be reborn free to rise again with the buffalo.”

Seeing Red, Kent Monkman

Here in Seeing Red  Miss Chief stands down a Picasso bull with a Hudson’s Bay Blanket instead of a matador’s cape.  The matador lies on the road attended be two Indigenous healers (after Manet’s Dead Toreador).  Monkman writes, “Picasso’s phallic bulls and his butchering of the female nude were contemporatous with the European aggression against the female spirit (homophobia, violence against women) in North American Indigenous societies, many of them matrilineal. ”  In this painting, Miss Chief  takes over the matador`s role as bison return again and people in bison masks dance in the background.

Monkman writes, “I wanted to activate a dialogue about the impact of the last hundred and fifty years of European settler cultures on Indigenous peoples, and about Indigenous resilience in the face of genocide.”  He is sure to succeed in this mission.  The exhibition is filled with images and dioramas that cut through what we thought we knew.  Using visual cues from European art and our own Canadian culture as well as Indigenous images he challenges the colonial mindset.  One has to interact with the art to try to understand the message and this is definitely a decolonizing experience.  One has to make space inside for the new information and space to rearrange the previous pattern set down in our childhoods in history class.  It has been said that we are a country reconciling with our own history and this Canada 150 exhibition helps us to do that.

image: CBC

Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience will be travelling across Canada for the next few years, activating the dialogue that Monkman wants us to have, helping us to re-story our national story and setting Indigenous history firmly in the canon of art history. 

You can find out where the exhibition is, view images and read the brochure with all of Miss Chief`s journal entries and Kent Monkman`s foreword by clicking on these highlighted words.

All That We Are is Story

Author Richard Wagamese

“All that we are is story. From the moment we are born to the time we continue on our spirit journey, we are involved in the creation of the story of our time here. It is what we arrive with. It is all we leave behind. We are not the things we accumulate. We are not the things we deem important. We are story. All of us. What comes to matter then is the creation of the best possible story we can while we’re here; you, me, us, together. When we can do that and we take the time to share those stories with each other, we get bigger inside, we see each other, we recognize our kinship – we change the world, one story at a time…”

Richard Wagamese    

Changing the Story from Fear to Love

Disaster and chaos can provide openings for change.  The anti-Muslim rhetoric in the US and the horrible shootings of men praying in a mosque in Quebec last week have disrupted the anti-Muslim rhetoric that Stephen Harper used in the last federal Canadian election.

As Canadians reacted to the US ban on people from seven predominantly Muslim countries which was supposed to protect Americans from ``Islamic terrorists`` the story was turned upside down by a French-Canadian man who committed an act of terrorism on Muslims at prayer. This disrupted the narrative that talked about people in Canada being afraid of Muslim terrorists since this terrorist was non-Muslim.  The story changed to Muslim Canadians who have already been threatened by hate crimes, now being afraid of Canadian terrorists.

Canadian politicians were quick to stand with the Muslim community and distance themselves from the rhetoric that feeds such acts of violence.  On social media, all kinds of Canadians showed support for the Muslim community including donations for the families left behind.  Tens of thousands showed up for vigils and gatherings in the days that followed..  The CBC website listed acts if kindness following the attack. For instance, Grace United Church in Dartmouth which recently sponsored a Syrian family changed their sign to read: “We preach love and respect for all.  Today we are Muslim.”  Someone else left roses and a condolence card outside of a mosque in Dorval, Quebec. which has been threatened in the past.  A Toronto high school teacher asked his class to write letters to the local Islamic  Information and Dawah Centre.  Grade 4 students at the elementary school in St. Foy near the mosque where the attack took place placed cards in the snow outside under a banner which read “All United”.  And a Muslim-Jewish couple set up a Go Fund Me page to raise money for the families.

On Friday, there were remembrance ceremonies and prayers in mosques all across Canada to which people of all faiths were invited.  People that had never been in a mosque before attended and were warmly welcomed. On the website of the mosque in the city where I live, was posted a thank you message.  It read:  "Thank you all again.  We are deeply touched!  Visitation on Friday Feb. 3, 2017 by so many persons/organizations whom we knew before and those not known before.  This affirms the Unity, Care & Unconditional Support of our Community of Barrie/Simcoe at large."

in Toronto, Rabbi Yael Splansky organized “rings of peace” where Jewish and Christian congregations physically surrounded six Toronto area mosques so that those inside would feel safe while they prayed on the first Friday since the attack.  She got the idea from about a thousand Muslims who surrounded an Oslo synagogue which such a “ring of peace” in 2015 following a string of anti-Semitic attacks in Europe. You can see pictures of the Toronto ring here. 

The need for sympathy to turn into action was highlighted in call-in-shows following the tragedy.  The importance of educators in educating themselves and their students about respect for all people was repeated.  

On the Tuesday following the massacre, I read in the Metro newspaper, advice from Amal Rona, a Vancouver based Musilim poet, educator and community organizer on three practical ways to ``show you won`t stand for Islamophobia – that you care.``  Entitled Be a Good Neighbour, she recommended: 

                 Ask – Across the country, it`s time to start `hard conversations`around              dinner tables and in classrooms.  Talk one-on-one about the real-life                  experience of Islamophobia and the negative stereotypes people hold                about Islam.

          Create Safety – Talk to local business owners about making your                      neighbourhood coffee shop, corner store or restaurant into a "safer zone"          where people know they can take shelter if they’re feeling harassed..                               Check in – Look in on your Muslin neighbours and see if there`s anything        they need: some company, a walk to school or work, or a hand with the            kids.  This week of terrible news has been deeply traumatic Rana said,              and trauma tends to be isolating.  Being a friend can lighten the load.

I also saw on facebook, a post called A Bystanders Guide to Standing up Against Islamophobic Harassment (And Other Types of Harassment, Too) by Maddy Mers.  You can view it here.

It basically describes what to do if you witnessed a man being verbally abusive to a woman wearing a hijab on the bus or subway.  Maddy recommends going to sit beside the woman and say hello, trying to look calm.  Then start talking about a random subject such as the weather, that you like something they`re wearing, etc.  Keep eye contact with the woman and ignore the attacker the whole time.  A lack of response will encourage him to go away.  Stay with the woman until the attacker leaves and then escort her to a safe place.

I heard over and over again that although there are some individuals who do not want to live peacefully with their neighbours, the majority of people do want to live in communities that show respect, understanding that we are stronger because of our differences.  It really seems to be a time when this majority needs to not only speak up, but to show in actions that this is true.  The steps that many of us took this week can be followed by others.  As we empower ourselves to live our truth, our communities will be stronger, more loving and open for all of us.  This could be our chance to tell a new story.