Families often revere makers and lovingly pass on traditions, graphic motifs, techniques, and other closed teachings. For example, Andrea Flowers taught her granddaughters Veronica and Vanessa (V&V Crafts) the technique of sewing waterproof sealskin boots before she passed in 2019.^{1<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 1 <\/a> - See \u201cLearning the Disappearing Art of Black-Bottomed Sealskin Boots,\u201d Inuit Art Quarterly<\/em>, 3 November 2021, accessible online.<\/span> There is often a noticeable similarity between works presented publicly by some career Indigenous artists and pieces made by family members. Certain styles, aesthetics, and conceptual or narrative techniques are revisited by generations of artists. I argue that this should continue to be an apparatus for creative inquiry, as it has been for other non-Indigenous artist families, groups, and partnerships. Bringing together works by artists with shared familial experiences and perspectives simply makes sense. Emphasizing Indigenous art \u201cfamilies\u201d and kinship undoes the historical fissure caused by a restricted definition of family imposed by colonization and missionaries. Here, I borrow from Indigenous feminist scholarship and kinship studies to chart the development of familial practices and to demonstrate the strengths of family as an analytical tool.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Full disclosure: I was a member of the curatorial and research teams for the recent family exhibition Ashoona: Enduring Art Stories <\/em>(2022) at La Guilde, working alongside artist and curator Goota Ashoona, Pitseolak Ashoona\u2019s granddaughter. In the process of thinking about the similarities among artworks by family members and researching the extensive and complicated family tree, I could not help but think of other Indigenous artist families. This approach of drawing associations within wider kinship networks allowed us to put works from the same place in conversation with one another, providing both an actual family reunion and a unique convergence of artworks by members of the Ashoona and Pootoogook families.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This is not to fetishize the idea that creativity and artistic prowess are in a family\u2019s blood. For example, in recent correspondence, Cheryl L\u2019Hirondelle and Gabrielle L\u2019Hirondelle Hill confirmed that they are likely distantly related by fraternal great-grandfathers. I do not think it\u2019s appropriate to force their work into dialogue simply because of their familial relations, but reflecting on the family could bring the artists together if they should so choose. On this subject, interdisciplinary scholar Kim TallBear would note that Western settler society has a scientific obsession with quantifying Indigenous ancestry. This fixation with DNA\u200a\u2014\u200awith genetic or genomic definitions of Indigenous ancestry and populations\u200a\u2014\u200amisses \u201cindigenous articulations of indigeneity [that] emphasize political status and biological and cultural kinship constituted in dynamic, long-standing relations with each other and with living landscapes.\u201d^{2<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 2 <\/a> - Kim TallBear, \u201cGenomic Articulations of Indigeneity,\u201d Social Studies of Science<\/em> 43, no. 4 (August 2013): 509\u200a\u2013\u200a33; quotation from abstract, accessible online.<\/span> Settler colonialism, through Christian missionaries and violent educational processes, shaped many Indigenous communities into nuclear, heteronormative units on individual allotments, effectively splintering communal, tribal territory using \u201cfamily\u201d as a mechanism of land dispossession.^{3<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 3 <\/a> - Daniel Heath Justice and Jean M. O\u2019Brien, \u201cWhat\u2019s Done to the People Is Done to the Land,\u201d in Allotment Stories: Indigenous Land Relations Under Settler Siege<\/em>,eds. Daniel Heath Justice and Jean M. O\u2019Brien (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022), xi\u200a\u2013\u200axxviii; Mark Rifkin, When Did Indians Become Straight?: Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty <\/em>(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 19\u200a\u2013\u200a22.<\/span> In the genocidal settler-colonial imaginary, Indigenous blood was constructed as \u201cdilutable,\u201d a supposed imminent biological vanishing.^{4<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 4 <\/a> - Eve Tuck, The Henceforward<\/em>, podcast, <\/em>\u201cEpisode 4: Red and Black DNA, Blood, Kinship and Organizing with Kim TallBear,\u201d 25 July, 2016, accessible online.<\/span> However, many more family arrangements remain and continue to prosper within Indigenous communities, including extended, chosen, nuclear, biological, and adopted relations. Using the loose contextualizing lens of \u201cfamily\u201d to celebrate generations of Indigenous art is a simple and appropriate means for countering these past, present, and future erasures.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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