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.
Not long after I left my ancestral Mi’kmaq Newfoundland and Labrador territory, I took a bus from Oshawa to Peterborough to be closer to lakes, as I was growing estranged from the land in big-box shopping-strip Ontario. As I walked into Artspace, and its recent exhibition “Olivia Whetung: tibewh,” I felt an ancestral embrace—the same feeling that overcomes my body when standing at shoreline and looking into the horizon beyond water. Indigenous art is a point of entry, and offers an imagined space of arrival.
Anishinaabekwe artist Olivia Whetung’s “tibewh,” which translates from Anishinaabemowin to “a body of water, or shoreline you are in, or on,” taps into an ancestral re-mapping of the Trent-Severn Waterway. 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.
Through beadwork reinterpretations of each of the 42 locks along the 386 kilometres of Trent-Severn Waterway, Whetung’s Anishinaabekwe practice suggests a connection to the land that reaches far beyond confederation’s understanding of Turtle Island. The artist asks viewers, What is land? What is water? Who does it belong to? And also: What are our responsibilities to these lands and waters we occupy? How do we mark and enact that responsibility?
As a member of Curve Lake First Nation, roughly 25 kilometres northeast of Peterborough, Whetung makes work that takes root in the lands and waters of her ancestors. “tibewh” is a stunning beadwork re-orientation of the Trent-Severn Waterway, while also being more than that: namely, an exhibition that charts an Indigenous relationship to colonized waters.
Whetung witnesses each of the locks, and the bodies of water they separate, along the Trent-Severn from a bird’s-eye view. These beaded waterways are images not from the lip of the shoreline, but from above—almost as if from the Creator’s vantage point. They remind viewers we are all bodies locked by land, yet made of water.
Just as each square in this exhibition is uniquely beaded, each viewer must assess their own unique relationship to the bodies of water depicted, and consider the physical, ecological and emotional dimensions of that relationship. Whetung invites us to consider the water as body, and land as canvas.
Given that Ontario tourism imagery tends to embed the narratives of colonial Canada, Whetung’s careful beading over of each body of water also reclaims what has become a cultural signifier of Peterborough and the Kawarthas. The Trent-Severn Waterway connects Niigaani-gichigami/Lake Ontario at Trenton in the southeast to Naadowewi-gichigami/Lake Huron at Port Severn in the northwest, and it meets the Kawartha Lakes, Zaagaata Igiwan/the Trent and Odoonabii-Ziibi/Otonabee Rivers, among others. The Trent-Severn Waterway has status as a National Historic Site, and it is protected through Parks Canada, yet on the 150th anniversary of Confederation—another act of assimilation and Indigenous erasure—Whetung’s work reminds that this system of travel has, for millennia, been filled with Indigenous species, spirits, waters and rivers.
Despite a limited access to the Anishinaabe language growing up, Olivia Whetung started reclaiming her ancestral tongue during her BFA at Algoma University in Sault Ste. Marie, where she minored in Anishinaabemowin—a means to root herself and her practice in the language of her ancestors. As a recent MFA graduate from the University of British Columbia, Whetung makes beadwork that embodies what it means to speak as an artist from Anishinaabe language; her art becomes both decolonial act and decolonial witness.
It is worth noting, too, that the Trent-Severn Waterway was originally a military route; issues of colonial mapping and control also come up in the very form of Whetung’s work. “tibewh” features 42 canvas cloths hung horizontally, all perfectly aligned on the walls of Artspace Gallery. Yet the lines of beads on each cloth tend to curve and bend, with straight lines mostly surfacing in spots where the Trent-Severn splits or divides water and land.
As a result, “tibewh” suggests how intersecting passages of water have been colonized in attempt to contain, control and exploit. Though her source imagery for each lock is drawn 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.
As part of a decolonial practice, Olivia Whetung works with the land, her ancestors and traditional knowledge systems of the Indigenous people of the Anishinaabe territory. In “tibewh,” she fuses ancestral knowledge and contemporary technology to create an exhibition that is both political and provocative—an artistic retelling of traditional territory and settlement.
Month: June 2017
mutual: just blocked a mutual
me after seeing that post on my dash: omg.. it was me
Boozhoo (hello), my name is Ken, I am a disabled Ojibwe artist from northern Wisconsin. I am writing this post because I am having a hard time making ends meet and any donations I could possibly receive at this time would be greatly appreciated. Recent events have left my bank account depleted and my cupboards bare, I have some food but it will not last and I still do not know how I will cover all the utility bills.
I do have PayPal, that is really the best way to donate at this time, the email I use for that is: baapimakwa@gmail.com, or you can click here.
Having an extremely hard time right now, my father and I both have impaired mobility, I can’t bend or lift and he needs both of his knees replaced, we had a family member staying with us who did much of the cleaning but now that it’s summer they’ve been gone, the house is falling apart and we desperately need to bring someone in to clean. It’s very embarrassing and there is only so much we can do.
Thoughts on Chicago Dykemarch?
1) It sounds like these organizers have a long history of playing particularly despicable exclusionary identity-politics games that prioritize looking attentive to the issue of the day over running an event for your community (getting into fights over the word ‘dyke’ and whether it’s an exclusively lesbian word, getting into other fights over which groups the march is for, getting into fights over their social media presence).
2) It is despicable to ask people to leave your pride parade for having a rainbow flag with a Magen David.
3) The justification employed here – this form of Jewish expression looked like a form of Israeli expression, and some people here find Israeli expression triggering plus this is a pro-Palestinian march, therefore it has to be disallowed – suffers from like four distinct errors of reasoning which I think have mostly been adequately picked apart.
4) BUT, some of the picking apart drops the ball on one point. Supposedly the organizers approached the Jewish women to ask what they thought about Israel, and the organizers say they would not have removed them if they’d thought something appropriately pro-Palestinian. Lots of people have (correctly!) observed that no one ever asks people who aren’t Jewish what they think about Israel, that this is a litmus test applied only to Jews. This is true and it is wrong.
But it would be wrong even if it were applied to everybody. If the Dykemarch started diligently asking every person who showed up what they thought about Palestine, and turned away all of the problematic ones, then they wouldn’t be anti-semitic but they would still be doing something wrong. They would still be creating a culture of exclusivity and rigid ideological policing, injecting polarization into spaces for fostering community, and making access to events conditional on having the right leftist opinion on an issue completely unrelated to whether one would benefit from support from Chicago’s LGBT+ community.
They have the right to do that, of course, but it is a wrong course of action; it is poisonous; it means that many people in need will not have access to communities because those communities are demanding political purity on issues they’ve had no time to research or form an opinion on, and it means that those communities will be weakened by the intense policing for political conformity and the rejection of valuable community members who happen to be unwilling to take a stance on Israel or to have a complicated one or just to be turned off by everything implied by asking.
So, yes, it’s worth pointing out that leftist spaces that quiz Jews for political purity on Israel/Palestine only quiz Jews. But it’s also worth pointing out that they’re doing something objectively unhealthy and a terrible idea, and which would remain one even if they stopped targeting us with it!
“Making access to events conditional on having the right leftist opinion on an issue completely unrelated to whether one would benefit from access to _____ community” is something that I really dislike. Women are more pro-life than men: banning pro-life women from the women’s march is…questionable. I really do believe in focused and specific activism that handles one thing at a time, rather than trying to take on every problem. This is part of why Occupy, a glorious movement, failed to get any political change.
Bernice Reagon was right when she wrote “I feel as if I’m going to keel over any minute and die. This is often what it feels like if you’re really doing coalition work. Most of the time you feel threatened to the core and if you don’t you’re not really doing no coalescing.” (Essay here; it’s quite good.)
Pride is a little bit a safe space but it is a lot a coalition space, and what being a coalition space means is that the leathermen have to put up with the anti-porn feminists and the anti-porn feminists have to put up with the leathermen, the trans people have to put up with the terfs and the terfs have to put up with the trans people, and if Courage gets its act together and wants to hold up signs that say “We’re LGBT Catholics And We Don’t Like Homophobia Even Though We Think God Has Called Us To Celibacy” they should be allowed to do that, as long as they can tolerate the shirtless glittery men dancing and kissing each other. Because coalition space is scary and threatening, that is what coalition space is, and you cannot cannot cannot be intersectional and only be around people that make you feel comfortable. Not how it works.
heres a radical idea, teenagers still deserve a fucking livable wage when they’re doing the same goddamn job an adult is. this idea that “teenagers first jobs” should be paid down and less meaningful is
1) completely fucking fabricated and
2) completely fucking ignores the fact that many teenagers NEED INCOME TO SURVIVE they’re living on their own, they’re going to college, they’re helping support their families
AND REGARDLESS OF ALL OF THAT… They’re still doing the same fucking work as an adult, they’re still putting their time and effort into a service our society requires at the moment to function you worthless fucking assholes disagreeing with me on this.
they deserve livable wages shut the fuck up and get the fuck away from me with this bullshit.
literally fuck yourselves.
What would you do? You choose what path your character takes in Episode – download the app now!
this is too meta i need to lie down
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
You must be logged in to post a comment.