“Reclaiming Indigenous Territories, Bead by Bead” is a review of “Olivia Whetung: tibewh,” a show at Toronto’s Artspace in 2017. It’s also one of the texts I need to read for the course I’m taking. The reviewer, Shannon Webb-Campbell, a Mi’kmaq writer, begins by stating:
As a conversation between body, land and water, art by Indigenous women is potent medicine—it combats the colonial agenda and penetrates a monolithic art world. In waterways, there is a constant flow of intergenerational knowledge passing through the lakes, rivers and oceans; every body of water holds a spirit, a history and informs the land. Various landscapes and bodies of water shape our identity, culture and sense of belonging—and in turn, Indigenous art can offer an embodiment, a re-mapping and a reclaiming of our traditional lands, waters and bodies. (Webb-Campbell)
So the stakes of this work are high—higher than art made by settlers, it seems. No wonder Indigenous art can seem so powerful. I can’t imagine suggesting that anything I made or wrote offered a reclamation of anything.
Webb-Campbell says that walking into “Olivia Whetung: tibewh” felt like “an ancestral embrace—the same feeling that overcomes my body when standing at shoreline and looking into the horizon beyond water” (Webb-Campbell). “tibewh” translates from Anishinaabemowin to “a body of water, or shoreline you are in, or on,” and the show “taps into an ancestral re-mapping of the Trent-Severn Waterway” (Webb-Campbell). “Much like the linked-locked waters it depicts, ‘tibewh’ honours a shared shoreline between Indigenous and non-Indigenous vistas—yet it also questions viewers, and asks settlers and non-settlers to consider their relationship to these unceded and unsurrendered territories,” Webb-Campbell continues (Webb-Campbell). (That’s the first time I’ve seen the word “non-settlers” in print. I’m not sure I like it—the centring of settlers is a problem—although perhaps the point is that some people who are not Indigenous are not settlers, either.)
What is the art that generates this reconsideration? Whetung’s show presents “beadwork reinterpretations of each of the 42 locks along the 386 kilometres of [the] Trent-Severn Waterway” (Webb-Campbell). Whetung, Webb-Campbell suggests, asks viewers several questions through this work: “What is land? What is water? Who does it belong to?” And, most of all, “What are our responsibilities to these lands and waters we occupy? How do we mark and enact that responsibility?” (Webb-Campbell). Whetung, a member of Curve Lake First Nation, presents “a stunning beadwork re-orientation of the Trent-Severn Waterway,” but the show is about more than that: it “charts an Indigenous relationship to colonized waters” (Webb-Campbell). “Whetung witnesses each of the locks, and the bodies of water they separate, along the Trent-Severn from a bird’s-eye view,” Webb-Campbell continues. The work presents “the Creator’s vantage point” and “remind viewers we are all bodies locked by land, yet made of water” (Webb-Campbell).
Each of the 42 squares in the show is unique, and according to Webb-Campbell, they force each viewer to engage “their own unique relationship to the bodies of water depicted, and consider the physical, ecological, and emotional dimensions of that relationship” (Webb-Campbell). Aside from one trip to Peterborough, I don’t think I’ve really thought much about the Trent-Severn Waterway, and so I wouldn’t be able to come up with much in the way of a relationship to those rivers and lakes. “Whetung invites us to consider the water as body, and land as canvas,” she continues (Webb-Campbell). The Trent-Severn Waterway, which connects Lake Huron to Lake Ontario, is a National Historic Site, protected by Parks Canada, yet “Whetung’s work reminds that this system of travel has, for millennia, been filled with Indigenous species, spirits, waters and rivers” (Webb-Campbell).
Whetung studied Anishnaabemowin at university. She is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of British Columbia, and she “makes beadwork that embodies what it means to speak as an artist form Anishinaabe language; her art becomes both decolonial act and decolonial witness” (Webb-Campbell). Because the Trent-Severn Waterway was originally a military transportation route, Whetung’s work speaks back to that colonial history, suggesting “how intersecting passages of water have been colonized in an attempt to contain, control and exploit” (Webb-Campbell). Even though she sourced her imagery from Google Maps, “Whetung’s reworking of this imagery offers an attempt at re-writing, re-mapping and re-tracing the ancient memory of water” (Webb-Campbell). Working with the land is a decolonial practice; Whetung also works with her ancestors and traditional Anishnaabe knowledge systems, fusing “ancestral knowledge and contemporary technology to create an exhibition that is both political and provocative—an artistic retelling of traditional territory and settlement” (Webb-Campbell). I wish I’d seen it; I wonder if it would’ve been more meaningful in Peterborough or some other city on the Trent-Severn Waterway than in Toronto, a city that is rather withdrawn from the places Whetung’s work references.
Work Cited
Webb-Campbell, Shannon. “Reclaiming Indigenous Territories, Bead by Bead.” Canadian Art, 27 June 2017, https://canadianart.ca/reviews/olivia-whetung-tibewh/.
