Reparations Art
by
Emily E. Mangione
AA Bronson, A Public Apology to Siksika Nation; and Adrian Stimson, Iini Sookumapii: Guess who’s coming to dinner?. Commissioned by the Toronto Biennial of Art. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid. Courtesy the Toronto Biennial of Art.
In her 1969 Manifesto for Maintenance Art, artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles sketches out two main modes of artmaking: Development and Maintenance art. Development, in Ukeles’s system, is guided by a single-minded pursuit of “pure individual creation; the new; change; progress; advance; excitement; flight or fleeing.” Perpetually in its wake is the work of Maintenance, which pursues “unification; the eternal return; the perpetuation and MAINTENANCE of the species; survival systems and operations; equilibrium.” Some fifty years on, I would like to propose a third mode: a kind of Reparations art. By this I mean to suggest an art of acknowledgment and apology, of repair and recuperation, an art that pursues change and progress not as ends in themselves or in the service of pure individual creation but in order to address those wrongs that prevent us from achieving equilibrium and maintaining the species not as it has been but as it ought to be: a more perfect unification not only among our fellow humans but also with the other entities with whom we share this planet.
The need for such an art is no way novel, but I would argue that today more than ever we are in need of projects that will counter a prevailing drive to move fast and break things with a commitment to trawl slowly the murky past in order to surface that which yet might be made whole again. It is exactly this vein of artmaking that answers the void at the heart of the present moment: a time in which traditional forms of art have become investments for the ultrawealthy, secure vessels for capital snuggly tucked away in freeports against the precarity of global economic currents, and traditional venues for art increasingly function as a means of tax-avoidance algebra and reputational artwashing. Even as we see an increased awareness of problems—spanning from racial and gender inequity to climate justice—in need of address, this has not been matched by an increased range of effective means by which to offer responses, and our conventional modes of apology have shown the strain of this increased demand.
AA Bronson, A Public Apology to Siksika Nation, 2019, multi-media project with publication, installation, and performative components in several stages. Commissioned by the Toronto Biennial of Art. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid. Courtesy the Toronto Biennial of Art.
An alternative mode of apology—one in the register of Reparations art—is articulated by AA Bronson’s A Public Apology to Siksika Nation and the response offered by Adrian Stimson’s Iini Sookumapii: Guess who’s coming to dinner?, both commissioned by and on view as part of this year’s inaugural Toronto Biennial of Art, The Shoreline Dilemma. For Bronson, this has been an apology some seven decades in the making. As a child, he was told stories of a great-grandfather, the Reverend John William Tims, an Anglican missionary who traveled from England to the traditional territory of the Blackfoot peoples, including Siksika Nation, to found a residential school. Opened in 1886, the Old Sun Boarding School was christened, perversely, after a revered medicine man, warrior, and chief of the Siksika Nation who himself never converted to Christianity—although he reportedly abided the Church’s work in the region, where he lived until his death in 1897. Old Sun was part of a system of around 130 institutions through which the Canadian government forcibly removed some 150,000 aboriginal, Inuit, and Métis children from their communities between 1831 and 1996. And it was from the inhumane conditions and physical, emotional, and sexual abuse perpetrated at residential schools like Old Sun that estimates suggest around 6,000 children died. Bronson began seeking information on his great-grandfather’s role in this system of mandatory “aggressive assimilation” as early as the 1970s, but it was only in 2016, after being introduced to Stimson, the artist great-grandson of Old Sun, by Biennial senior curator and citizen of Carcross/Tagish First Nation Candice Hopkins that A Public Apology began to take shape—a process that is still and will forever be ongoing.
What is on view at 295 Lake Shore Blvd East is only one iteration of Bronson’s Apology. The artist first orally delivered a wide-ranging meditation on what it means to claim ownership of place and be in relation to other claimants that serves as the project’s essayistic component at Siksika nation. This text makes clear the connection between historical crimes and contemporary injustices, addressing not only those Siksika citizens who would have interacted with Reverend Tims directly but also their descendants as well as refugees—those dispossessed of claim to any land—past and present. In two performative actions staged as part of the Biennial’s opening, Bronson declaimed the apology once more to Stimson and a group of Siksika Elders, all of whom are residential school survivors. After accepting Bronson’s apology, Stimson, in a very Ukeles-esque gesture, shook hands with everyone assembled, physically and personally bringing all present into this act of reconciliation.
Adrian Stimson, Iini Sookumapii: Guess who’s coming to dinner?, 2019, mixed-media installation, dimensions variable. Commissioned by the Toronto Biennial of Art. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid. Courtesy Toronto Biennial of Art.
An open invitation to this ongoing conversation around truth and reconciliation is offered by Iini Sookumapii: Guess who’s coming to dinner?, Stimson’s installation-based response to Bronson’s Apology. Under the literal spotlight of a light fixture procured from the Old Sun school (which became Old Sun Community College in 1971), are dinner settings for ten. In the conjunction of this opulent British colonial flat and glassware and the sparse wooden benches—modeled on historical residential school furnishings—we see the contours of what accepting such an invitation will entail: discomfort, if not outright pain, alongside the promise of coming together in community. Looking on, as we weigh whether or not to accept Stimson’s invitation, are the painted faces of a number of residential school students seated at similar tables and school photos of sixty-eight Old Sun pupils, brought into this conversation, it should be noted, with the subjects’ permission. Stimson’s offer of a seat at this table is also a challenge, and our decision will not go unwitnessed.
Outside of these and future performances (Bronson and Stimson plan to bring the project back to Siksika nation at some point following its presentation in Toronto), the text of Bronson’s Apology is reprinted in a small book, thousands of copies of which are available for free in open shipping boxes piled on palettes at 295 Lake Shore Blvd East. These are accompanied by a polyphonic installation of documentary ephemera assembled to tell the stories of Reverend Tims’s time in Siksika nation. Above vitrines filled with copies of Tims’s letters, phrenological studies, drafts of materials reshaping the Blackfoot language into English in order to introduce Christianity to its speakers, and ethnographic-style photographs of members of the Siksika nation are a series of panels containing excerpts from Siksika winter counts. Traditionally, a number of the nation members would be designated as keepers of the counts. As such, they were responsible for recording pictorially what they identified as each year’s most important event—the births and deaths of kith and kin, the selection of a new chief, epidemics, or battles. The tradition was ultimately discontinued in 1963, in part the result of the displacement of the Blackfoot language by English—a project that has its roots in Reverend Tims’s translated dictionaries and English-only classrooms at Old Sun Boarding School. As Peter Strikes With A Gun, a former Head Chief of the related Pikani nation, explains, “they are not real, these things that I know, after I start rethinking [in English] . . . Our language is most important in our life.”
Taken together, these two (ultimately incompatible) systems of storytelling suggest how other systems of knowledge and relations might emerge when Western models that privilege the “enlightened” vision of the settler colonizer fail to fully, honestly, and ethically grapple with the historical circumstances at question. Here other knowledges and relations emerge. Here emerges the potential, although not guaranteed, promise of a space founded in “respect multiple subjectivities and diverse conceptions of freedom, dignity, and sovereignty for living creatures, land, and water,” in the words of biennial curator Candice Hopkins and her co-curator Tairone Bastien. In Stimson’s work, the unique form of knowledge creation embodied by the traditional Blackfoot language is defiantly resurgent in the form of three large-scale sculptures, human-scaled articulations of Blackfoot pictographs that encircle the dinner table. It is precisely on these other systems of knowledge and relation that a Reparations art must be structured if it is, in turn, to honor the same multiplicity of subjects in their fullness.
Other acts of atonement and recuperation addressed to the land and its first occupants are proposed elsewhere in the exhibition. On offer from the New Mineral Collective—the self-proclaimed “largest and least productive mining company in the world”—are “geo-trauma healing therapies,” which, alongside other “counter-speculating operations” are documented in their video Pleasure Prospects. Lisa Reihana, a member of the Māori–Nga Puhi people, reimagines traditional Pacific Islander modes of addressing death and mourning in service of recuperating the site of an 1825 massacre in her two-channel video, Tai Whetuki—House of Death Redux. And a glimpse of the celebratory joy such Reparations art might ultimately produce is offered by documentation and ephemera from a two-part procession—featuring sculptures, banners, and wearables created by and for the Indigenous student members of the Embassy of Imagination—connecting the community of Kinngait on Cape Dorset in Nunavut, and Toronto.
But why now? More than five hundred years after the beginning of the occupation of the traditional territories of this continent’s indigenous peoples, why is it in this particular moment that we turn our attention to an art of apology and repair? A cynic might see in the co-emergence of these strategies and climate change a solipsistic answer: we find ourselves capable of empathizing with victims of past land thefts only in a moment in which we have somehow, improbably, managed to steal the land from ourselves and our children. (1)
Even setting aside the issue of motivation for the moment, a question remains of where a Reparations art goes from here. Although the shoreline of The Shoreline Dilemma—where the waters of Lake Ontario meet land—is one that connects Toronto to Western New York, south of the Canadian border it feels shockingly progressive to suggest something as low-stakes as land acknowledgment, never mind something on the scale of 2015’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada or the calls on governmental actors to apologize for laws, policies, and practices with staggering racialized impact contained in the more recently released Viens Report.
Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising; after all, we’re talking here about a country that, within living memory, has been engaged in what Vann R. Newkirk II has recently written about as a “war waged by deed of title [that] has dispossessed 98 percent of black agricultural landowners in America.” (2) The land beneath what would become the United States is one in which the crime of theft would only be compounded by the crime of human bondage, and it’s hard to focus on thinking through what reparations to first peoples might look like when you’re still actively waging a campaign to dispossess the descendants of the people whose forced labor made the theft of indigenous lands a winning economic proposition in the first place.
Emily E. Mangione is a writer, editor, educator, and very occasional curator.
(1) For instance, EPA analyses have determined that some twenty square miles of Atlantic shoreline—a chunk of land roughly half the size of the city of Buffalo—were lost—that is, converted to open water—between 1996 and 2001 alone.
(2) Vann R. Newkirk, “The Great Land Robbery,” The Atlantic (September 2019), https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/09/this-land-was-our-land/594742.
