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.