Foreword

For Indigenous Peoples across Canada and the contiguous United States, the 1960s was a time of emergence. In Canada, after generations of confinement on reserves by the colonial government through the draconian Indian Act of 1876, an example of cultural genocide that remains a legal and binding document today, the post-war years saw a new, more confident generation emerge. Changes to the Indian Act in 1951—including lifting the ban on Sundances and Potlatches, and the ability for communities to pursue land claims against the government—meant that the late 1950s and early 1960s witnessed the re-emergence of Indigenous artists, First Nations, Inuit, and Métis alike.

Examining culture and history through photographs, art, or written text prompts us to ask whether we would consider our ancestors modern and how did they come to accept the influences of new materials and ideas. The idea of being modern—absorbing new ideas and thinking in different ways—was likely not on the minds of the post-war generation. The impact of residential schools, a key tool in the cultural genocide carried out by the colonial government, meant that education had been weaponized and had become an effective mechanism for erasing Indigenous memory. Any reference to Indigenous history was more than likely expressed through the overdetermined and ideologically driven lens of Hollywood films, or through the interests of anthropologists who repeated their unconscious biases and reinforced assumptions of hierarchy. When I view documentation from this period, I see a changing world with little or no Indigenous cultural life.

By contrast, I would suggest that post-contact Indigenous artists, everywhere, enjoyed relative freedom of expression. Whether their art was for community purposes or trade with outsiders, these artists generally had strong cultural communities and their artistic expression reflected this strength. They were confident in the face of external forces intent on changing their way of life. I caution, however, that Indigenous people were also experiencing rapid population decline because of foreign diseases and they were having to give up their traditional territories through treaties; but, from a cultural perspective, artists were benefitting by readily incorporating new materials and ideas into their work. They may not have been creating works of art like Europeans or Euro-Americans, but they were contemporary with all that was going on around them. They were free to be their own unique form of modern. After all, being modern is about new ways of thinking and absorbing ideas.

It was during the Indian Act period that all this changed and Indigenous artists were restricted to participating in the new capitalist economy. The proceeds from sales of their work were considered making a living in the eyes of the government—in other words, it was legitimate. But Indigenous artists could not create art for their own reasons, which is to say for cultural and ceremonial purposes, and were forced instead to depend on the market economy. In Wabanaki′k / Atlantic Canada, this often meant relying on basketry sales to make a living, continuing a longstanding tradition and facilitating generative opportunities that continue today. Maintaining older practices while engaging in modern lifestyles enabled creative communities to pass on links to their Indigeneity to succeeding generations by coding traditional visual knowledge into market economy items.

Which brings me to Wabanaki Modern. Importantly, this book illuminates a post-war/post-reserve period when Indigenous Peoples everywhere had begun shaking off cultural atrophy. While knowledge keepers were far fewer and ceremonial life had largely been replaced by Christianity, certain pursuits, such as basketry, remained a distinctly local endeavour. The embedded and relational codes that evaded assimilation helped to support the resurgence of language and stories. These preserved communicative methods inspired the “Micmac Indian Craftsmen,” who worked out their own visual knowledge. The following essay describes an important new, openly modern chapter in the Indigenous visual knowledge of this land. Influenced by Western art and drawing upon the memories of an Indigenous past, the generation of the “Micmac Indian Craftsmen” succeeded in rewriting the possibilities of modernity. Looking back, it seemed easy for them to accomplish this task, because Indigenous Peoples needed only to remember their past to become the future.

Gerald McMaster

Professor, OCAD University

Director of Wapatah Centre for Indigenous Visual Knowledge