Qumaq Mangiuk Iyaituk and her sister, Passa Mangiuk, were only little girls when they saw a man boiling wood by the shore in Ivujivik, a northern village in Nunavik, Que.
Their work in the Our Land, Our Art exhibit, currently displayed at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, reflects this memory.
In the exhibit, Iyaituk and Mangiuk describe wondering what the man was doing. The man explained that boiling wood makes it easier to construct kayaks, known as qajaq in Inuktitut, allowing their grandfathers and uncles to bring food from the ocean to share with the Ivujivik community.
This memory became the essence of Iyaituk and Mangiuk’s work as visual artists, knowledge carriers and teachers in their community, as they shared traditional Inuit knowledge with others in and outside the gallery.
The central themes of family, community and the land inspired their three paintings featured in the Our Land, Our Art exhibition, open to the public until October.
Reminiscing on their shared memories, the sisters drew a motorized canoe and a qamutik (dog sled), both essential means of transportation in their community. The drawings demonstrate their deep connection to nature and community life.
The sisters’ work sits among many others created by Inuk artists displayed in Our Land, Our Art, an exhibition developed by the Avataq Cultural Institute to protect and promote the Inuktitut language and the culture of Nunavimmiut (Inuit of Nunavik).
Through different forms of artwork, including photography, visual art, performance art and throat singing, the artists featured in Our Land, Our Art showcase individual connections to Indigenous land. It highlights different aspects of Indigenous experiences – each perceived uniquely by individuals within and beyond the gallery system.
The exhibition is just one example of a movement of Indigenous people in Canada who are using art to express narrative sovereignty to reclaim their voices and identities.
These artists are actively dismantling the stereotypes that continue to be perpetuated throughout popular media and are working to show the entire depth of the Indigenous experience often missed by news media.
According to Duncan McCue, a journalism professor at Carleton University and award-winning CBC journalist, narrative sovereignty is the ability to tell one’s own experiences, define one’s world views and share stories close to one’s heart without competing against pre-set stereotypes.
“There’s sovereignty on the land and political sovereignty, but there’s also narrative sovereignty,” McCue said.
He added that narrative sovereignty involves Indigenous peoples’ taking back their own stories. This can be seen through artwork countering the one-dimensional ways in which Indigenous peoples are often discussed in Canadian media.
“The power to own our own story, and that’s where artists come in.”
Stereotypes in Canadian media
In his article, “What it takes for aboriginal people to make the news,” McCue calls attention to media tropes involving Indigenous communities.
McCue said the only way Indigenous peoples make it on the news is if they are one of the W4Ds: warriors, drumming, dancing, drunk or dead.
Beyond the stereotypes, myths and prejudice associated with these tropes, McCue emphasized growing concerns of internalized beliefs within Indigenous communities.
“Indigenous peoples have internalized some of these aspects of this portrayal of ourselves,” McCue said. “We also judge ourselves the way that we have been judged.”
The unconscious process of making these stereotypes part of someone’s belief system can prevent the individual and the community from evolving, according to an article published in Unconscious Processes.
McCue added that an Indigenous person playing the grand piano should not be considered “more white,” reiterating that Indigeneity is an expansive experience that is “not frozen in time — it’s evolving, it’s growing, it’s changing.”
Popular media is not open to illustrating the entire scope Indigenous experiences, and current coverage is usually narrow and focused on conflict, McCue added.
“There are many different aspects of the full range of life experiences encapsulated in Indigeneity,” McCue said.
“The news needs to start reflecting that.”
Pushing back through art
With projects such as Our Land, Our Art, the Avataq Cultural Institute aims to highlight Inuit culture through artworks that advocate for dismantling ingrained stereotypes and recreating Indigenous narrative sovereignty.
Similarly, Carleton University Art Gallery’s (CUAG) 2023 fall exhibition showcased numerous visual artworks, from Christian Chapman’s humouristic paintings to Jin-me Yoon’s reflective video and photographs to the healing force of the late Norval Morrisseau’s work.
Each piece draws underlying connections between Indigeneity and settler-colonial culture.
Carmen Robertson is a Carleton art history professor who researches contemporary Indigenous arts and constructions of Indigeneity in popular culture. Her research, which focuses on how Morriseau is represented in the media as an Anishinaabek First Nation artist, prompted her to co-curate Morriseau’s work alongside Danielle Printup at the CUAG this year.
Morriseau, also known as Copper Thunderbird, was responsible for founding the Woodland Style art movement. His art is recognized through its thick black lines and striking colour, often exploring themes of balance in living beings: good and evil, day and night, heaven and earth.
Robertson said her interest in Morrisseau’s work led her to investigate Indigenous tropes present in Canadian media. She wrote a book titled Mythologizing Norval Morrisseau in 2016, analyzing the representation of Indigenous peoples in Canadian newspapers.
According to Robertson, present Indigenous artists speak out and challenge stereotypes “far more effectively than [Morrisseau] was able to do in the 1960s and 70s.”
Chapman, a contemporary Anishinaabe artist, is also disrupting colonial narratives of Indigenous representation in his paintings. To infuse humour into his work, he blends iconic elements of popular culture with references to contemporary Anishinaabeg experiences.
Due to the long, complex history between the Canadian government and Indigenous peoples involving controversial legislation and discrimination, Chapman said his identity as an Anishinaabe artist automatically adds a political layer to the artwork he produces.
“For me, it’s not like I am intentionally out there trying to change the world or anything,” Chapman said.
“But as an Indigenous artist, you’re political no matter what.”
On the other hand, Yoon’s work explores Indigeneity through a foreign lens by linking two sites that have become bird sanctuaries on either side of the Pacific Ocean.
Yoon said her experience as a settler of colour from Korea is tied to Indigenous histories of colonization in white-settler Canada.
The biodiverse Korean Demilitarized Zone is pictured on one end, and the Maplewood Flats within the unceded ancestral territory of the Tsleil-Waututh nation in British Columbia on the other.
“It’s about a very contemplative mode of thinking about the problems of the world and the trouble we’re in but also the love and beauty of ways in which we can learn from each other,” Yoon said.
Looking ahead
The fight of Indigenous people to reclaim their stories in popular media is an ongoing effort.
Evoking his deep understanding of his community and the journalism industry, McCue created an online guide for journalists to “decolonize journalism” through their reporting on Indigenous communities.
“Indigenous peoples’ experience is vast,” he said.
“Indigeneity has many, many different qualities to it: there’s sadness, there’s hope, there’s joy, there’s trauma.”
For many artists, the way to explore the vast qualities of Indigeneity outside the confinements of stereotypes is through art. Artists such as Yoon continue to share their pieces in venues where the public may become increasingly receptive to the artwork and stories.
Yoon said she encourages visitors to attend upcoming events to further their contemplative attitude toward the works on display.
“I hope the viewer feels they have the time and space […] to slow down and to just open themselves up to be with the work.”
Featured photo by Abyssinia Abebe/The Charlatan.
