![\"Njootli_Melanosite\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/90_DO06_Toulouse_Njootli_Melanosite.jpg\")
Melanosite performance residue<\/em>, aceartinc., Winnipeg, 2016.
Photo : courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
At this time in herstory, it is necessary to re-evaluate gender roles in contemporary acts of resurgence. By looking at the work of female Indigenous artists in light of certain interrelated concerns\u200a\u2014\u200acultural resurgence, matriarchy, and sovereignty\u200a\u2014\u200aI hope to raise questions about the role of Indigenous women both in decolonization and self-determination and in the surrounding discourses. The artists whom I discuss in this article, Maria Hupfield, Ts\u0113ma Igharas, Janice Toulouse, Jeneen Frei Njootli, and Olivia Whetung, represent great and fierce Indigenous leadership in various forms and offer a gendered perspective that reconstitutes Indigenous leaders as female, contrary to the popular image of \u201cIndian Chiefs\u201d as male. These artists participated in an exhibition that I curated, Ogema: I Am Woman, <\/em>that exemplified Indigenous matriarchy through art and performance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n New York\u200a\u2014\u200abased performance artist Maria Hupfield draws on her Anishinaabe traditions and the history of performance. She references matriarchal ways of being in her black-and-white print of a photograph taken in 2007, Married to the Matriarch, Nation to Nation <\/em>(2016),<\/em> in which two Indigenous women, Hupfield and Tania Willard, face each other in the kitchen of Willard\u2019s house in the Strathcona neighbourhood of Vancouver, in 2007. Hupfield states, \u201cBoth the pose and hand-taped line serve to disrupt expectations to complicate histories of representation, abstraction, authority of the document, and contemporary living. Presented as separate but equal, the double-taped line and body shown head to head function as strategies to present shared political positioning and ideologies between the two figures.\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Maria Hupfield, interview with the author, <\/em>March 9, 2016.<\/span> The Anishinaabe peoples valued the roles that women played in governance and community leadership. This image reaffirms the strong Indigenous woman by positioning two individuals against each other yet supporting each other through the mind and body. The grainy black-and-white photograph, through which we can almost feel and taste the presence of these women, reminds us of images of the past, of life on the reservation, of family.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ts\u0113ma Igharas (formally Tamara Skubovius) addresses her Tahltan ancestry and traditions in her multidisciplinary hand-made objects, paintings, and performances. She states, \u201cI am interested in how meaning is constructed and distorted by an ever-changing and ever-evolving society.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Ts\u0113ma Igharas, interview with the author, December 10, 2015.<\/span> The photographs in the exhibition, from the (Re)naturalize <\/em>series\u200a\u2014\u200aNo. 1 (Brick)<\/em>, No. 7 (Rebar), No. 5 (Foundation)<\/em>, and No. 4 (Recoil) <\/em>(all produced in 2016)\u200a\u2014\u200awere taken at a place in Toronto called Leslie Spit, an artificial spit made from industrial refuse that was taken over by nature and further reclaimed by the city as a city park. It was the ideal site for her work, as it contradicts and confuses the Neolithic assumption of the native body in, or as, nature, and places her in a post-industrial landscape. The figure in the photographs represents the vulnerability of Indigenous women and industrial survival. The woman in the images is the artist herself, depicted nude and crouched along the shore surrounded by rocks and pieces of rebar. She is painted the colour of copper to accentuate the body and reference the spiritual importance of copper to many First Nations in Canada. The images speak to the reclamation of matriarchal values during a period, from colonial times to the present day, when Indigenous women have undergone extreme oppression. Although this image shows a vulnerable woman, it reminds us of how far we have come and the prosperous future that awaits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As a direct descendant of Anishinaabe political matriarchs and chiefs, Janice Toulouse sees the concept of leadership as a meaningful subject. She paints images tied to the Anishinaabe culture and the teachings of her elders and ancestors. She believes that the public needs to actually see images of strong elders: \u201cPeople need to learn from the past, to know our stories, to be reminded of those who worked for the survival of our nations in the early years of settler colonization.\u201d5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Janice Toulouse, interview with the author, <\/em>January 15, 2016.<\/span> The artist\u2019s portrait of a matriarch, an elderly woman painted in monochrome, embodies the powerful nature of a leadership figure in Indigenous culture. The portrait is painted against a white background to maintain focus on the figure. Ogema Kwe<\/em>, the chief woman, is sitting straight, her arms folded on her lap gazing directly at the viewer. Her powerful gaze creates a visual allusion that invites the viewer to recognize her strength. She is dressed in a flower-print dress with motifs of Anishinaabe designs. The portrait of the chief woman standing alone speaks to ancestral forms of knowledge and strong bloodlines passed down through generations. The historicizing of Indigenous lineage ties directly to Simpson\u2019s theoretical framework involving an analysis of what she terms social mobilization, which she defines as \u201cgovernance that is localized within an individual\u2019s self-determination, the self-determination of families, clans and communities, as well as being localized within a given geographical region.\u201d6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Simpson, Dancing on Our Turtle\u2019s Back<\/em>, 85.<\/span> Toulouse creates work that functions as both activism and feminism, fostering critical consciousness by attending to the meanings of history and social relationships in order to encourage a dialogue on political possibilities.7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Shari Huhndorf et al. (eds.), Indigenous Women and Feminism: Politics, Activism, Culture<\/em> (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010).<\/span> This portrait of Ogema Kwe is a symbol of power and matriarchal lineage that needs to be perpetuated today.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n In her work, Olivia Whetung reflects upon the historical and contemporary gender roles in various First Nations communities through her individual acts of resurgence\u200a\u2014\u200ain this case, through beadwork. Whetung\u2019s series of prints titled Beaded band<\/em> (2016) was inspired by the history of Ojibwa patterns as presented in a book titled Crafts of the Ojibwa<\/em>. The prints derived from the book are black-and-white rhythmic, sculptural patterns that are reproduced in identical multiples. (Or are they identical? The abstract quality of the prints allows for individual interpretation in personal engagements with the images, which give the illusion of moving: the longer one looks at the patterns, the more they are transformed.) Beaded band<\/em> is a critique of cultural appropriation: the sale of generic beading kits based on Indigenous methods. Ojibwa beading is an art form that is passed down from generation to generation, and it has now been reappropriated into Indigenous culture. The role of the colonial power has made its way into the design and culture of beadwork, but Whetung is exemplifying the role of Ojibwa women and reclaiming the art form as her own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jeneen Frei Njootli uses sound tools such as dehumidifiers, amplifiers, and deer antlers that are scraped along the gallery floor in many of her performances in order to articulate her Gwich\u2019in ancestry. Her performance From one element to another. Back and forth forever (Sound tool)<\/em> (2016) places the Indigenous female body in a vulnerable space surrounded by the gaze of a non-Indigenous audience. She directly challenges the history embodied in Indigenous voices and what they mean to her heritage while simultaneously exerting her own voice as a Gwich\u2019in woman living in a contemporary setting inside a gallery space. By manipulating various objects in unconventional ways, she creates ephemeral sounds that do not necessarily correspond to what might be expected in traditional Gwich\u2019in performances. Scholar Frantz Fanon states, \u201cThe colonized intellectual, at the very moment when he undertakes a work of art, fails to realize he is using techniques and a language borrowed from the occupier.\u201d8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - Frantz Fanon, the Wretched of the Earth<\/em>, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 160.<\/span> Although Fanon believes that the colonized intellectual performing this \u201cborrowed\u201d work is himself behaving like a occupier, I think that the Indigenous woman who is creating art to communicate a political action is only partially using settler media to achieve her goal. As seen in Njootli\u2019s work, when non-culturally specific objects are used to communicate sounds it returns control to the Indigenous person by challenging preconceived notions of what a Gwich\u2019in woman might perform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The title of this essay, I Am Woman<\/em>, comes from a book by Lee Maracle, who writes about the raw reality of growing up as a Native woman in a patriarchal society.9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - It is also the title of an exhibition that I curated: Ogema: I Am Woman <\/em>(Vancouver: Winsor Gallery, 2016).<\/span> The works by Hupfield, Igharas, Toulouse, Njootli, and Whetung embody Indigenous female agency and confront historically male or white contemporary notions of what it means to be an Indigenous leader from a female perspective. The artists articulate different aspects of the self through their work, specifically to demonstrate the decolonial process of regaining cultural strength. In this case, the process consists of artmaking to address the roles of womanhood in First Nations societies and how these have changed shape throughout history, from political strength, to colonization, to regained leadership. Each artwork represents Indigenous matriarchal power in various forms and various stages in herstory. The role that women hold in Indigenous resurgence is well articulated by professor Glen Coulthard: \u201cWomen are the most central to my mind. Colonialism and its associated violences purposefully attacked the status of women in our communities as a means of gaining access to our territories and undermining the health and well-being of our nations. In such a racist and heteropatriarchal system, it will be women that lead us to freedom. It is our job to listen, learn and follow their lead.\u201d10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 10 <\/a> - Glen Coulthard, interview with the author, January 15, 2016.<\/span><\/p>\n![\"Hupfield_Married](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/90_DO06_Toulouse_Hupfield_Married-to-the-Matriarch-scaled.jpg\")
Married to the Matriarch, Nation to Nation<\/em>, 2016, Maria & Tania t\u00eate-\u00e0-t\u00eate 2007, Strathcona kitchen.
Photo : courtesy of the artist & Galerie Hugues Charbonneau, Montr\u00e9al
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Ogema](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/90_DO06_Toulouse_Ogema-Kwe-Shingwauk-scaled.jpg\")
<\/strong>Ogema Kwe Shingwauk<\/em>, 2014.
Photo : courtesy of the artist
<\/strong>
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Whetung_Beaded](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/90_DO06_Toulouse_Whetung_Beaded-Band-scaled.jpg\")
Beaded band<\/em>, 2016.
Photo : L\u00e9a Toulouse<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n