Cover Up
an exploration of the Indian Act and cultural genocide
as perpetrated by
the canadian government, the british empire, and the catholic and protestant churches
This show is meant to be an invitation.
An invitation into a world that has had little conversation outside certain circles. It moves towards the underbelly of things, the places we would rather hide away from.
This invitation focuses on the country we call canada and the foundations that made this country what it is. Some of these foundations are good and I feel privileged to live here because of them. Other pieces of canadian history like the Indian Act were and are still rooted in colonialism, colonization, racism, genocide, and assimilation. The Indian Act and the attitudes that have surrounded this piece of governance have impacted the Indigenous peoples of canada, the effects of which are very much felt to this day. Racism is woven throughout it and into the relationships between the government of canada and the Indigenous peoples of this land. Racism was written into law, policed, and actuated by the various governmental parties, bodies, and individuals of canada. It was pervasive. It was built on the assumption that the colonizing empires, mainly britain, had it all figured out. Their culture and ethnicity were seen by them as the best and as such canada needed to ensure cultural homogeny. With this focus the government pushed, prodded, cajoled, bribed, bullied, terrorized, killed, confused, fought, and argued with the Indigenous population.
Let it be said up front that I do have a bias and that most of my writing is to provoke thought rather than purely represent fact. I have tried my best to do both, but fact is hard to pin down sometimes. I would also like to take a moment to point out that my writing will sometimes follow a flow and grammar that you are used to and at other times it will not. I have intentionally written the names of countries, titles, and religions in lower case in protest to the deference a capitalized noun creates. An aspect of this show speaks to decolonization and I want my writing to reflect this process.
Due to our governments historical policies my family on my father’s side has struggled. I have witnessed it my whole life. We are Indigenous peoples, Tl’azt’en. We are/were culturally distinct. We were healthy. We were working a many thousand-year relationship with this land and had found rhythm and contentment with her. This is no longer the case. We as a people are reeling from the effects of the treatment of this government whose heart still beats to the rhythm of an ancient british war machine. It was in violence that this country was settled, and the violence still ripples out into the present. Modern affect has taken on a more subtle version of the hatred, fear, and ensuing control that make up the bones of our country’s governance, but it still exists. The Indian Act is still a perplexing, complex and difficult document and set of ideas to navigate. It lies at the heart of this art show.
I am attempting to explore my relationship to this document, my relationship to the outcomes that my family and myself continue to live with, my anger and hate and vitriol around the evil treatment of my father, uncles, aunts, grandparents, cousins, and other relatives. I am attempting to synthesize these feelings, to filter the all too real difficulties me and my people live with so that I can move forward, holding these atrocities in front of me and saying, “I’m still here!”
I want to live well. I want peace, love, and kindness. I want my family to have health and wellness. I want to live in love and kindness with my many diverse neighbours. It is my belief that we need to share our pain with one another if we are to truly move forward in these loving, kind ways.
So, let us converse then shall we in this odd amalgam of word and image, oral and written and imagined history, present, and future. Using these images, I invite you towards a mind that is full of curiosity and empathy. I have used a medium that is approachable, that attempts to conduct one side of the dialogue in a nonverbal way using images. I have attempted to become the mimic, the trickster, the comedian, and the satirist. I have used the vehicle of comic books and their covers because of their popularity in our culture, because of their ability to load all sorts of information into one image, because of their ability to pull us into the story beneath the cover. I have taken on the difficult task of making the covers like a funhouse mirror, like the original but sometimes very different to speak to the universality of this struggle. There are echoes of it everywhere and with small tweaks we can uncover some of the hidden stories and lessons.
This is not an exploration of racism within the comic book worlds of DC and Marvel, Image, and Indie titles, though those have existed. Instead, it is a celebration of the genre. Instead, it is pulling from the power I felt these mediums have had on me in my life. Comic book covers invite you to look deeper, to pull the book off the shelf and find out what the story inside is. These covers are meant to do the same with the stories that fuel the struggles of the Indigenous peoples of this country as they relate to our government, our governmental agents, and the racism that we have dealt with for hundreds of years.
Almost every north american knows what a comic book is, the variety of comic books ranging from Archie comics through to the superhero comics like Superman and Batman. In recent years, the rise of the superhero movie genre has brought these characters and stories to a whole new level of fame. All these stories had their humble beginnings in comic books.
As a child and young man, I was thrilled by the stories and art in comic books. They brought me to a different world, a fantastic world, and it was the covers that initially pulled me in. The better and more intriguing the cover art, the more likely I was to buy and read the comic.
If you have read comic books for long enough, you realize the universes they depict have a peculiar quality to them. There is a culture of revisiting stories and retelling them, tweaking them, creating a whole new universe that tells a similar story, but it is entirely different in the retelling. Recognizable but different. Some of the comics I enjoyed the most engaged with some of the most pivotal decisions and actions that had happened to the title character and her/his supporting cast being reimagined. Marvel had “What if...?” DC comics had “Elseworlds”. Over the years origin stories have been told and retold, reimagined, and tweaked. I loved these reimaginings as they allowed for completely new and different stories to be told. They were mystical, fantastic, imaginative, and deeply intriguing.
This peculiar quality alongside my deep working of the intergenerational traumas that were created by the Indian Act and our government's application of the racist and genocidal ideas within it got me thinking about the unique conversation we could have as a community about this difficult subject if I created some sort of artistic mash up. What if I reworked the images that pre-existed in comic book cover art to address some of the complicated, unusual, and deeply disturbing aspects of the Indian Act and the treatment of Indigenous people in this country? What if I used the culture within comics that allowed for that historical reworking? If I mimicked the cover art closely, would it hold some power in explaining both the ethereal nature and the very real impact of the story that is our history? How different would things be if we did things another way? How close are all our stories and the futures they create if I can take a purely fictional image with a story that is completely unrelated to the one I am telling, yet I can find a way to have it closely mimic the real story of Indigenous peoples in this country?
There is an incredible power to storytelling, to changing stories a little to fit our agenda, to thinking about all the potentials that exist within this framework that is our reality. It allows us to reflect on what has been done, how we could have done it differently, and the importance of our decisions that we make in the here and now.
This show is me using this unique history, my Indigenous heritage mixed in with my love of storytelling through comics and the unique quality of a comic cover being able to draw one into the story just enough to get them to buy it and read it. It is an homage to the art form that I grew up with. It is using the vehicle of popular culture to engage the audience, using a recognizable medium to pull one into a little-known story. It is reworking iconic comic industry imagery and cover art imagery to spark the qualities of juxtaposition and mimicry, to get one thinking about the power of decision and engagement or lack thereof, to pluck at the threads of reality with the thought of sparking conversations. It hopes to inform about the past, to make it approachable and provocative, to get the viewer to want to know more with the intention of creating meaningful space for us to make better, kinder, and more empathetic decisions as we move through this life. It is working my trauma and my people’s trauma in a way that is responsible but gives voice to the deep pain, confusion, anger, and resentment that exists and needs to be voiced, to be heard. It is my story. It is our story. What are you/we going to do with it?
With the art, I have included some of the information that has fueled it. I will point out aspects of the Indian Act, some of the history and players involved, and as much information as I can in this short window of time you take to view the art with the hope that some of you will continue to educate yourselves. By no means is this small amount of information and the links to information definitive, but it is a start. By informing ourselves I believe we create some better understanding of one another. We can see one another better. We can then have the opportunity to converse, laugh, cry, grieve, and hold one another. Maybe make a friend.