Hearing language and Launch a Feast for Scavengers
- An example of Indigenous listening of an Indigenous story in Western contexts

BY PETER MORIN

It’s Sunday, ten o’clock in the am, and I’m already half an hour late for Rebecca’s performance. So. I get ready. Get into the car. Drive to the coffee shop. Grab a sharp double-long Americano and a delicious example of white flour breakfast, and head to the beach at Beacon Hill Park, where the performance is scheduled to take place. On the drive over, I can’t help but think about community stories and home territories and Rebecca’s performance on this island beach.

I had met up with Rebecca earlier in the week, while she was hanging out with some FN high school students at market square in downtown Victoria. She was participating in a residency for the Victoria Art Gallery and creating this new performance, Launch a Feast for Scavengers. i  I happened to show up on the day the students were interviewing her for an indigenous magazine show. As a way to introduce performance art to the students, Rebecca played video documentation of two past performances, spoke about her history as a performance artist, and answered questions on why she chooses to utilize her body to convey meaning in her work. And, during the interview with the students, she spoke about this new performance work, and some of her decisions in its creation. I was intrigued to hear Rebecca say she’s chosen a small beach in Beacon Hill Park as her performance site, specifically since I had just recently read that Beacon Hill Park was a former village site to the Indigenous people here, and that this beach was specifically a trading site for the Indigenous groups on the island. When Rebecca talked about the site, she mentioned, she was imagining the view from the deck of that ‘Original Captain Vancouver’ ii ship, trolling past this specific beach and seeing something evocative of their far-a-way-home.

At this point, back to the journey of getting to the performance, I am finally able park my truck, but I’m still not totally sure where the right beach is. When I get out of the truck, I hear the music of bagpipes. iii  So. I walk towards the sound. Soon enough, I see a bunch of Victorians gathered at the crest of the cliff, looking down at the ocean. They are looking at something in the water. So. I walk towards the people. When I get to the cliff edge I see a small Rebecca standing in the cold ocean, and another small head swimming back and forth from the edge to the middle of the cove dragging something behind it. The other performer looks much like a beaver when dragging wood across an anonymous body of water.

I want to be down at that beach where Rebecca is in the water, not looking down at her. I start walking around this lookout, following the concrete path and looking for the stairs. Rebecca’s marked the path to the beach with three small bait herring; the best way to attract scavengers is to leave bait. And yet as I pass over these fish I understand them more as payment fish left on my behalf by the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, as acknowledgement by the establishment to this artist for sharing her story with us. Later on, I remembered them as my favourite fish eulachon, included in this performance by Rebecca as an acknowledgement to the eulachon trading that happens up and down these island chains as a way to honour the past and the act of fishing.

From the beach, I can see she is moving net floaters and bait herring into the water, towards a wet-suited swimmer, who is swimming the floaters and line out into the middle of the cove. This movement takes about thirty minutes to unfold, and all the while Rebecca is in the water her bagpipes play on. After, when all of the line with the herring is in the water, Rebecca leaves the ocean and moves towards the bagpipe player, who is standing on a rock outcropping beside the water. Rebecca comes and sits by his feet. The raising Sun behind Rebecca makes her look like the cover art on the book Copper Sunrise.iv  When the song is over the performance ends.

Later on, while sitting there watching the net, a young Victorian family, who happened by, asked me, “Can you tell us what’s is going on here?” I explained that the artist Rebecca Belmore, an Anishinabe artist, was invited by the Victoria Art Gallery to create a new performance, which she was calling Launch a Feast for a Scavenger. I went on to explain that she is sending this floating line strung with herring out into the cove, and invited scavengers to come and eat. The family responded with the perfunctory ‘hmmm… that’s interesting, only including themselves in the performance for a moment before continuing on their way around the rocky beach.

*It curious to me that I was able to communicate so much about the performance, even without knowing much of the details or reasons behind the actions. I wasn’t there during the planning stages with Rebecca and her curator. And any conversation or details made available to me were brief at best. As I was sitting there, watching Rebecca carry these net floaters loaded with herring into the water, I realized I was there as a cultural participant to a cultural story. From the moment I entered the scene I was enacting what I was taught from my home community when witnessing someone from another indigenous culture sharing a story; lessons about ways to participate respectfully. Each lesson had enacted itself quite naturally into how I was engaging with what Rebecca was doing at the beach that day. As for the young family, also a participant in the larger story of engagement with cultural actions, within an even larger story of a colonial Canada, was enacting a part of their role by asking the questions and then moving on towards a larger goal. But I wondered what was missing from my sharing of the performance that could have connected to a deeper level for them.

I really think that
My greatest inspirations are
Kokum, my mother, then me.
That’s it. v

When I go to performance art by Rebecca I can’t help but see Rebecca’s grandmother standing there, in the room or on the beach. And because I see this grandmother, and remember my own First Nations grandmother well, I have a way to connect with what indigenous perspectives and history I know Rebecca has addressed in these past works. This acknowledgment is the strongest way that I am able to articulate the vision and strength of our indigenous worldviews and how the play out in our realities. I also know that because I see this grandmother, I need to engage with these stories in the way that I was taught by my community. I am an aboriginal viewer first and foremost to any aboriginal art or aboriginal performance. This position as a viewer to art can make response quite difficult to articulate. Firstly, this position is directly connected to a larger, and fuller, understanding of the relationship between the aboriginal body and a colonial Canada. Secondly, I struggle with articulating the Tahltan meaning and systems of knowledge that I’ve grown up with but aren’t able to articulate because of not growing up in relationship to our original language.

Within the Launch a Feast for a Scavenger, and with past performance works Ayunee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to their Mother, 33 pieces, the Named and the Unnamed, Fountain, the viewer is witness to the points of connection in the relationship of First Nations to the landscape and the colonial experience on the First Nations body.
The viewer engages on a deeper level, perhaps an even unknown-to-self level, within the performance by providing a contemporary body to move within the space articulated by the performance. And by just being as a casual viewer, or a viewer of art, their bodies in the space add to the significance of the story/action within the performance. As an aboriginal viewer to some of these performances, I connect with a quality of articulation similar to the storytelling that I see play out in our home communities, and reaffirm those connections by being in the space. Within both, there is very purposefully revealing of the truths and untruths, as perceived by the storyteller; each re-affirming the silent connections of that shared colonial space and the land.

When we looked closer at the component actions within the performance Launch a Feast for a Scavenger, there are parts and parts in movement. We first see a contemporary aboriginal woman, wearing all black, in the cold ocean water. From any available view, we see she is putting something into the water and moving it into the middle of the open water. She stops occasionally to watch seagulls’ circle overhead. When she is finished and there is no more to put into the water, she watches the net. As a viewer of performance work, we see each segment carefully. We know that she has orchestrated the purposeful leaving of bait for ‘something’ to eat. We may know that a little bit about how First Nations used to fish in place like these, and in this case the action of putting the net floaters into the water, within its historical significance as a place of food gathering and trade, helps to informally recall the historical relationship of local indigenous cultures with place. Within the context of the gallery, that relationship is subverted to take on a metaphorical aspect of the native body in conflict with a physical manifestation of colonization.

Throughout the performance, Rebecca stays in the cold water, facing the cold, and moving enough net to catch something big. I admire that strength and endurance. I think she must want to catch the ghosts of those first colonizers to this place. The performance seems to subvert that historical imperative of catching food for survival to capturing the things that are ailing our First Nations bodies. Then, I see her stop and watch a lone seagull circle overhead. It occurs to me that she is not waiting for that seagull, but that this seagull is reporting to her about those large ships looming on the horizon. When she is finished in the water, the story splits for me. I see her sit at the edge of the water, watching the work she’s accomplished and I am reminding of my own experience of fishing for food at the river near Telegraph Creek and the waiting involved. She has created a return to that environment, and its subsequent movements, recalling a very positive experience of working to collect food for my family. At its basis, this action of a First Nations woman returning to a historic fishing village site, and enacting a historic-land-memory-connection, is necessary for creating a new story for our collective memory. The factors involved in the telling return the site back into a living and breathing location of importance; a role that our art is able to make possible. As the sun rises further and the work for the morning is done, there again is a very real sense of a grandmother standing there watching to see that the work was done right.

I am using my body to tell a story vi

We read many things about the work of Rebecca Belmore; including this piece of writing. Each work points the reader in one direction or another, posturing some interesting (or not interesting perspectives), and leaves the reader with not much more than what has begun. Yet, the writing allows for our bodies to travel to the sites of performance with the artist, allows us to gain access to some insights to her perspectives, and allows us to determine our own relationships to what the artist is revealing with her performance.

It goes without saying that the First Nations Maker’s impetus to creative action, as intended by their Indigenous culture, is very deeply rooted in relationship to environment, to training, and to materials. This relationship, between body, environment and materials, enacts itself in the traditional context as storytelling, oratory, dancing, singing, hunting, fishing, food gathering, moose hide tanning, beadwork, snowshoe making; the list could go on. In the global context, this creative action has a propensity to be classified as specialized knowledge and place towards the margins; but this is the most general way to describe a very complex system of power and privilege. There is, however, no mistaking that these stories/performance/objects are our art and represent significant guiding contributions to the global narratives of creation/art/history.

When aboriginal artists choose share our narratives about home in these post-colonial contexts, there exists a sense of vulnerability within the words of the story. This is there because there isn’t always a guarantee that anyone is hearing past the old colonial construct that First Nations voices are ending/dying. There isn’t any guarantee that the story or performance can be anything more than a traveling show. In this case, Launch a Feast for a Scavenger can very easily become a fog of symbols that roll into the cove, a fog filled with old ghosts, and the viewer is left to their own devises to pursue some meaning through the beach, over the debris, and into the water. And yet, for the viewer, as well as the maker, the words and actions gain significance in creating meaning because they are acknowledging something that isn’t always easy to put English words to.

If you are really preparing for groundlessness, preparing for the reality of human existence, you are living on the razor’s edge, and you must become used to the fact that things shift and change. Things are not certain and they do not last and you do not know what is going to happen. vii

This self which is unobservable is a mystery. It is imprisoned in the observed. It is constantly struggling to wrest itself from the warp of public ownership. Its own language is plain yet secret. Rather, obscured. viii

i  The performance took place on one of the beaches, in Beacon Hill Park. During the hour that I was present at the performance there seemed to be only two seagulls that were interested in the fish that Rebecca was sending out into the water. At one point a fisherman showed up in his metal boat to check out what was going on. As I was leaving the performance site, there were whispers of a seal. At this point, in the writing of this essay on indigenous listening to indigenous storytelling, I began to change my relationship to the word Scavenger and what meaning Rebecca was communicating with the choice of that word. In the deeper analysis of the word, and the choice of the word in relation to this performance work, I began to awaken to the idea that scavenger wasn’t always about conjuring up the negative, as proposed by our relationship to its English meaning usage. If I reflect on my indigenous world-view, spoken to my by my elders, the ‘scavenger’ plays a really important role in the cycle, one that helps to keep the cycle moving.

ii After the summer surveying season ended in August, Vancouver went to Nootka on Vancouver Island, then the region's most important harbour, where he was to get any British buildings or lands returned by the Spanish. The Spanish commander, Bodega y Quadra, was very cordial and he and Vancouver exchanged the maps they had made, but no agreement was reached; they decided to await further instructions. At this time, they decided to name the large island on which Nootka was now proven to be located as Quadra and Vancouver Island. Years later, as Spanish influence declined, the name was shortened simply to Vancouver Island. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Vancouver

iii And at this point in my life I can admit that I’ve never wanted to walk towards the sound of bagpipes but for aboriginal art I will.

iv  Copper Sunrise is a children's novel by Canadian author Bryan Buchan. It was first published in 1972. The book tells a story about the early colonization of Canada. From this First Nations perspective: there are two moments in the book that would go far to illustrate the prevalent perspectives of the story. First is the decision by the newly settled town folk to leave poisoned meat for the natives as a way to kill them. The second moment that sticks out for the Aboriginal reader is the massacre of the young native boy’s people. In 2003 I attended an education conference held at SFU, in which Mohawk educator Patricia Montour spoke about her daughters experience with this book and her efforts to get it removed from curriculum of that school district because of its racist content.

v Rebecca’s response to a question asked by one of the audience members about the inspiration she finds to create her work, Transporters symposium, University of Victoria, November 3, 2007.

vi Quote from artist presentation, Transporters symposium, University of Victoria, November 3, 2007

vii  Chodron Pema, quote, page 207, Hooks, Bell, Teaching to Transgress, Routledge, New York, 1994.

viii Brand, Dionne, A map to the door of no return, Doubleday Canada, 2001.