A Canada that Honours Indigenous Art and Oppresses Indigenous People

It’s a strange moment for Canada and Indigenous people.

On one hand there are gallery exhibitions, honourary degrees, film openings, interviews and accolades for Indigenous artists and filmmakers.

On the other, a Cree young man is shot at point blank range, and his killer acquitted. The staggering numbers of missing and murdered Indigenous women across the country is an ongoing source of horror, and the rates of youth suicide in northern communities continue to grow.

On Saturday, Coast Salish artist Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun will be awarded an honourary degree at Emily Carr University. Dzawada̱’enux̱w First Nations artist Marianne Nicolson will also receive the school’s Emily Award for her body of work.

And Peepeekisis First Nation filmmaker Tasha Hubbard’s documentary nîpawistamâsowin: We Will Stand Up, which recently opened the Hot Docs Documentary Film Festival in Toronto, will be shown at DOXA Documentary Film Festival in Vancouver next Wednesday and Thursday.

At the Bill Reid Gallery, qaʔ yəxʷ - water honours us: womxn and waterways, a major new exhibit from First Nations Women artists, joins other shows of Indigenous work on offer at the Museum of Vancouver and the Belkin Gallery.

Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun is painfully blunt about the twinned realities of Canada, where truth and reconciliation are espoused in speeches and press releases, but, in many parts of the country, the reality is very different.

Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun, who graduated from Emily Carr in 1983 with an honours degree in painting, has never been one to play it safe. (See his work by going here and clicking the "Look Closer" button.) While talking with The Tyee, he moves from anger to laughter and then back again in dizzying succession. It’s a challenge to keep up with the flood of ideas, ranging from the vagaries of the art world to the political truth of this country.

He’s brutally honest about what he calls the “apartheid” system in Canada that enshrines the right to oppress Indigenous people, as well as the difficulties of capturing this reality in traditional forms of artmaking: “How do you carve a graveyard at a residential school or a pedophile pole? That’s not traditional,” he says.

During our conversation the story of Colten Boushie comes up right away. The artist says this about the legal precedent established by the verdict in Boushie’s death: “The right to shoot Indians on sight” doesn’t fit exactly fit with Canada’s policy of Truth and Reconciliation, he says. “This is the treatment, and that’s my job as an artist, to record it.”

The same schism between real and pretence permeates Tasha Hubbard’s extraordinary film We Will Stand Up. Hubbard’s work, like that of Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun, comes from a deeply personal place.

“I want my son to know all that was done to ensure his survival,” she says at the start of her film, explaining that she was compelled to document the story of Boushie and his family because she didn’t know how to keep her own son and nephew safe as they grew into young men.

The facts of Colten Boushie’s case are familiar to most Canadians. On a summer day in August 2016, after swimming and partying at a nearby river, Boushie and a group of friends drove into the yard of a local farmer named Gerald Stanley. Boushie had been asleep in the backseat of the SUV when an altercation broke out.

After shots were fired by Stanley, Boushie jumped into the front seat of the vehicle and attempted to drive away. A few moments later he was dead, shot at close range in the back of the head. After an all-white jury acquitted Stanley of the charge of second-degree murder, Boushie’s family took their fight for justice all the way to the United Nations.

Hubbard’s film captures the family’s struggle for justice, but it also goes much deeper than the details of the case, illustrating in clear and concise fashion how oppression and racism are foundational in Canada.

The Red Pheasant Reserve where Boushie grew up is close to the site where the terms of Treaty 6 were first negotiated. As Hubbard explains in her plainspoken narration: “Our leaders realized we needed to find a new way to live, they came together at Fort Carlton and Fort Pitt in 1876 to meet the Crown’s representatives. They negotiated our future through Treaty 6, a nation-to-nation agreement. Our people were told that the newly arrived North-West Mounted Police were there to protect us. Livelihood, education, health care, hunting rights and more were all promised in exchange for sharing the land to the depth of a plow. We were told we kept our freedom. No one knew that the Government of Canada was preparing the Indian Act at the same time, which said Canada could dictate our lives.”

Shunted onto reserves and starved into submission, the people rebelled, and in 1885 a group of warriors killed nine white settlers near Frog Lake, Alberta. Eight Indigenous men were executed in a public hanging. Native children from a nearby residential school were forced to witness the event — and taught what happens if they stood up for themselves.

Although Canadians might like to think that things have improved, the reality is that things in rural Canada have gone retrograde. The story of Colten Boushie made this clear.

This isn’t news to Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun, who has dedicated his career to capturing different species of hypocrisy and hatred in surrealist imagery that integrates the art-making practice of the Coast Salish people with the European tradition of painting. Works with titles like Christy Clark and the Kinder Morgan Go-Go Girls and Fucking Creeps They’re Environmental Terrorists are pointed about the nature of capitalism. Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun explains that painting is a means of mirroring the true nature of Canada.

When Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun started studying at Emily Carr, the idea of a First Nations modernist painter was unheard of. “Forty years ago, at Emily Carr there were five of us,” he says. “At the time, there wasn’t anybody to follow.” The predominant tropes of European painters — Michelangelo, Vermeer, Picasso, Van Gogh, Manet, Bruegel, Bosch — still held on. First Nations art-making was similarly locked into traditional practices that were particularly confining. “Tradition is limitation. You could carve a Thunderbird, a bear, a salmon, but you couldn’t carve a clear-cut, or a priest raping a child.”

As a political painter and self-described “shit disturber,” Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun is adamant about the ability of art to act as a form of translation to the dominant culture.

“I’ll never be invited to the Biennale,” he laughs. Instead, his work captures the bloodletting that is the ideology of capitalism. “The God-given right to kill everything in the National Interest. This is what I get to paint.” He has paid particularly close attention in his work to the political, cultural and economic landscape of Canada.

A large portion of Hubbard’s film is dedicated to dismantling this same reality.

After Gerald Stanley was acquitted by an all-white jury, Boushie’s family met with representatives from the Canadian government to ask for justice. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott are all featured in Hubbard’s film, as well as NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, and the then newly minted premier of Saskatchewan Moe Scott. They all promise that change is coming, that Boushie’s death would not go unnoticed, and that his case would bring about a reappraisal of the justice system in Canada.

But even as that story was unfolding, another reality was taking place on social media, with anonymous posters writing ugly messages directly to Colten’s family. A brief selection:

“There [sic] lucky only one drunk native was killed. I am not sure why Gerald’s even on trial.”

“Them buggers get all kinds of welfare money. So that is all they have to do. Booze drugs steal. We need hand guns for protection.”

“Shoot, Shovel, Shhhhhh!”

As Hubbard’s film makes clear, what is voiced in government speeches and what really happens to First Nation people is an old story in Canada. It’s a history that Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun also intimately understands.

“Reservations are the oldest living concentration camps in the world,” he says. “Residential schools destroyed our culture, this was done under Canadian government, and the Government of British Columbia. This bullshit rules our lives.”

But in such a fractured reality, what can art do?

Things like honourary degrees, film festival screenings and major exhibitions are important because they are a way of ensuring a fuller story is told. In this light, the timing of Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun’s degree at Emily Carr is interesting, coming during a time of political uncertainty in Canada, but also, more critically, at a period when things seem like they might be in the process of shifting backwards.

The election of Jason Kenney in Alberta, and the odious Andrew Scheer have focused attention on the growing culture of hate in Canada, much of which is aimed at Indigenous people.

Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun is forthright in stating that Trudeau is the lesser of two evils, and that bringing back the Conservatives is potentially very dangerous. He quotes Stephen Harper’s infamous statement about the inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women not being on his radar.

In the face of official government doublespeak, art can be a potent force, a way to present the fullest scope of experience.

As Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun says, “Canada has to grow up, to realize I’m a human being. A free human being. But you cannot be free with the Indian Act. We are prisoners of colonialism. You put a thermometer in the mouth of Canadians and take the temperature of their sentiments. Truth and reconciliation don’t really exist. Canadians will always be racist and bigots under a colonial system.”

Boushie’s story brought this reality home with agonizing force. It is impossible to watch Hubbard’s film and not feel the full weight of his family’s suffering and grief sink right into the centre of your own body.

The Cree word nîpawistamâsowin in the title of Hubbard’s film translates roughly to the idea of a small group of people standing up for a big group. It’s a fitting description for what artists can do — stand up and speak out so that all Canadians can understand.