Rebecca Belmore: The Aesthetics of Indigenous Protest – 丽贝卡贝尔莫尔：本土抗议的美学

In the summer of 1990, the Canadian government deployed the largest number of troops since the Korean War. Tanks and guns and jackbooted soldiers arrived not overseas but in the small Quebecois town of Oka to enforce the construction of an additional nine holes on a local golf course. The extension of the leisure class’ grass playground would mean further destruction of The Pines, a traditional burial ground of the nearby Mohawk communities of Kanehsatàke and Kahnawake. In response to this threat, approximately 30 Mohawk men erected a barricade to block entrance into The Pines. After confrontation with local police, this blockade swelled. Canadian media and official record called it the Oka Crisis; for the Mohawks, it was the Oka Uprising. This, too, is how it is remembered by the hundreds of Native peoples throughout North America who followed the blockade on television, or travelled to join in arms, or learned about it years later, as I did from a future elder. As the artist Rebecca Belmore has said: ‘All Native people were affected by that summer.’ Like the shooting down of General George Custer during the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, it is one of our beloved victories.

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Rebecca Belmore, Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to Their Mother, 1991, performance documentation. Courtesy: the artist, Paul D. Fleck Library and Archives, Banff, and Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff; photograph: Pauline Martin

 

Oka made a lot of people angry. The settlers of Oka were angry that they couldn’t tee off on sacred grounds. Canadian liberals were angry at their government for marring their friendly image. Natives were angry about the continued settlement and desecration of their lands. Belmore, 39 years old at the time, was angry too, but after some reflection, she practised her own refusal. She turned away from the sociopolitical construct of Canada and looked instead to the land. The result was Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to Their Mother (1991): a sculptural installation and performance centred around a megaphone that could be used to project Native voices out over the landscape. Nearly two metres in both length and width, the wooden megaphone appears from a distance to be floating. (It is usually propped up on log supports.) Belmore constructed the sculpture so it could be easily disassembled and toured to different Indigenous communities, where she invited people to speak their Native language to the land. She gave no further prescription. Some placed their lips directly on its aperture, while others inserted an electronic megaphone – the kind used at protests – to amplify their messages. In a brief 1992 documentary, Marjorie Beaucage records Belmore’s installation of Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to Their Mother during a three-day visit to northwest Saskatchewan with the Protectors of Mother Earth Society during their blockade of Wiggins Bay, which at the time was being ‘developed’ by NorSask Forest Products. Development, like reconciliation, is one of many Canadian niceties for dispossession. In the documentary, one man leans into the megaphone and says, in English: ‘We are the future.’ Another group plays a fiddle jig. While being interviewed, Belmore speaks to her desire to make art not for the white critic but for the Native person, who can encounter and interact with the object as a critic in their own right. She does not eschew the aesthetic quality of the work but, rather, her landed practice argues that the aesthetics of Indigenous protest – what she has described as ‘poetic action’ – are best apprehended by those with the most at stake.

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Rebecca Belmore, Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to Their Mother, 1991, performance documentation. Courtesy: the artist, Paul D. Fleck Library and Archives, Banff, and Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff; photograph: Pauline Martin

Leanne Simpson, of Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg ancestry, writes in her 2011 book Dancing on our Turtle’s Back of Belmore’s ability to alter the landscape ‘to interrogate the space of empire’ and give a ‘glimpse of decolonized contemporary reality’. On the occasion of a career-spanning exhibit of Belmore’s work earlier this year at the Art Gallery of Ontario, ‘Facing the Monumental’, Simpson again reflects on the practice of refusal that animates the artist’s work in an interview with Belmore and the show’s curator, Wanda Nanibush. Though she has become one of the most famous Canadian artists, representing the settler-colonial nation at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005, Belmore will always be, to Simpson’s mind, an artist for her people, the Anishinaabe. It is, perhaps, Belmore’s turning away from the standards and judgements of the white art world that has made her work so compelling. When white people sense something is not for them, they either scorn or covet it. But, ultimately, their approval or acceptance is irrelevant to what Belmore’s work seeks to activate in Indigenous communities. In her ability to both turn away from and manoeuvre the colonial context of the white-dominated art world, Belmore is a model for Indigenous artists, thinkers and activists across borders, such as Joi T. Arcand and the Postcommodity collective. Indigenous artists can never completely undo the hundreds of years of settler domination and destruction, but they have found ways to create their own worlds in spite of those conditions. These are interruptions that, as Simpson says, ‘invite me into freedom.’

Published in frieze, issue 199, November-December 2018, with the title ‘One Take: Invitation to Freedom’.

_{Main image: Rebecca Belmore, Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to Their Mother, 1991, performance documentation. Courtesy: the artist, Paul D. Fleck Library and Archives, Banff, and Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff; photograph: Pauline Martin}