Lost and Found in Translation:
Language and Contemporary Indigenous Art

By Richard W. Hill

“I want to say my own things to the world, and so, of course, given history, part of ‘my own things’ is that you don’t let me say anything.” Jimmie Durham

I want to start with two autobiographies. Here is the first: I was born at the Royal Columbian Hospital in New Westminster, British Columbia. Our family doctor’s office was on Kingsway. I played on the banks of the Fraser River and in Queen Elizabeth Park. When I was in grade three my mother went to Simon Fraser University and when I got older I attended Britannia High School, which is in East Vancouver. When we went on vacation to nearby Victoria we saw the Royal British Columbia Museum and the Empress Hotel. By all this I only mean to say that I grew up in a matrix of colonial language that overwrote almost my entire landscape. In case you weren’t counting, those few sentences of geographic biography contain three general and three specific references to English royalty, six references to colonial explorers, three references to Britain in general and one reference to Westminster, the seat of the British parliament in London. And I didn’t even mention the Vancouver suburbs of Richmond, Langley or Surrey. Memorials built into the language of our environment function effortlessly in the background of our awareness. I grew up saying words like Kingsway, Vancouver and British Columbia thinking first that they signified only a street, a city and province. I hadn’t the slightest idea that I was memorializing explorers and paying tribute to the British monarchy each time I spoke.

I could have started this essay another way. Here is a different autobiography. When I was a very young child I was an Indian (well, a half-breed, as my grandfather would have put it). We knew we were of Cree heritage, but who cared what we knew? By the 1980s it turned out that we might be Native. I was also Métis for a while, which was a tremendous relief after being a half-breed, but then we moved to Winnipeg where I learned that Métis are people from very specific communities of mixed heritage. But that was okay, because suddenly we were going to be First Nations. Anyone who was born in Canada was a native after all. We tried capitalizing Native for a while to distinguish us very Native natives from other natives, but I guess it wasn’t enough. So into the breach came First Nations. Wasn’t that exciting? How politicized I suddenly felt. But then it turned out, at least according to some folks, that the only people who could call themselves “First Nations” were those who grew up or lived on their reserve. Foiled again. The latest terms to come to the rescue sound a bit anthropological: Aboriginal and Indigenous. I use them when I have to. (Indigeniety, on the other hand I have no use for. What could it possibly mean?) But I still have Cree, thank goodness. Or I should describe myself as Nay-hee-ya-wuk? Perhaps not, since it means “speaker of the Cree language,” which I cannot yet claim to be.

There are other biographies I could have begun with, but these two give a sense of how the complexity of colonial realities are not only reflected in language, but constituted through it. Many of us struggle with languages that are against us and live in the spaces of unsatisfactory or incomplete translation. Given this, we are perhaps fortunate that the arts have recently gone through a period in which language and representation in general have undergone an intense interrogation. We can trace threads of increasing self-consciousness about the forms of representation through modernity and into post-modernity and post-colonial theory. This is not the space to recite the various moves along this path, which I will summarize only be saying that many of us have set aside as inadequate the notion that the reality of the world is immediately available to us or that it can be communicated transparently. Furthermore, after Althusser, Foucault, Gramsci and Said we have a sense of language’s complicity with power in constructing dominant ideologies. That said I am not willing to follow Foucault and others in abandoning the idea of a correspondence between language and the world as it is altogether – I think that assuming that there is an external world that we bump up against in revealing ways is a profitable, even necessary leap to make, even if this world is inevitably filtered through our senses and the structures we impose in thinking and communicating, including language.

The Cherokee artist Jimmie Durham has long struggled to elude the traps set for us in language. Many of these are particular to the colonial context, but others are problems with language in general. Following Michael Taussig in Mimesis and Alterity, Durham is concerned with the human imitative capacity in the transmission of culture. Durham is especially concerened by our propensity to favour un-reflective repetition over examining a situation afresh in a new context. He considers this especially to be a problem for language and argues that visual art offers avenues of intellectual exploration that are not primarily linguistic and which can be used to open up extra-linguistic knowledge. It should not seem a contradiction that Durham is also quite a prolific writer – not despite his suspicions about language, but because of them. We cannot jettison language, but, as he says, we can be “un-reconciled” to it. Much of his writing and art provide models for being suspicious of and un-reconciled to conventional meanings in language, or the transparency of language itself.

Given limitations of space I will not pretend to survey all of the important ways in which visual art and language have come together in contemporary indigenous art, nor am I going to provide a more comprehensive theory of language than the sketch above, although I will look at particular theories as they apply to specific works of art. Through the art of Edgar Heap of Birds, Rebecca Belmore, Jimmie Durham, Jane Ash Poitras and Carl Beam I will explore the overwriting and attempted eradication of indigenous, languages, including a further discussion of how this process is spacialized. Nadia Myre’s Beaded Indian Act provides an opportunity for a critique of the alliance of colonial power and language while Durham’s work plays on the disjunct between art and language and the slipperiness of the processes of signification in general. The work of Durham and Kent Monkman also humorously raise questions about the dualisms that underpin colonial language. Lastly, I will attempt to find a productive way through our current situation and the fact that many of us now, myself included, know our traditional cultures only in translation.

Simultaneous with the inscription of colonial language onto the landscape was an attempt to eradicate indigenous languages. Even as Canada was making official French and English bilingualism a celebrated official policy, our languages were still under withering attack. This imposed, accelerated forgetting was meant, among other things, to erase indigenous knowledge of and claim to the land that is embedded in indigenous languages. When I look at a map of the Americas now I imagine indigenous words set beneath the “official” text of the map. Sometimes they appear faint or blurred, like the persistent imprint of words scrubbed with an eraser. In other places, such as the territory of Nunavut, indigenous words have re-emerged in clear black print as official place names. It feels good to say Iqaluit, instead of Frobisher Bay, doesn’t it?

In 1991, artist Edgar Heap of Birds created a site-specific sculpture called Native Hosts on the grounds of the Vancouver Art Gallery. Like many of Heap of Bird’s works, Native Hosts appropriates the medium of the public sign to create an assertive intervention into a public space. It is the nature of signs to condense information into a form that is quickly assimilable and difficult to miss. Heap of Birds’s choice of text addressed the Indigenous absence from both literal and conceptual maps of the North American landscape in a way that was both comprehensible at first glance and poetic enough to provide troubling afterthoughts. On each work the colonial name “British Columbia” is used to address the colonial inhabitants of that province, but the text is printed backwards. Each sign goes on to identify an indigenous nation of BC, in this case: “Today your host is Musqueam.” Native Hosts trades on a number of inversions. The most obvious is the backwards text that de-centres a transparent sense of what it means to be a British Columbian. That identity is further challenged by the designation of the Musqueam as “Hosts”, suggesting that, on some level “British” Columbians will remain forever visitors to this territory unless indigenous rights are recognized and justice done. These works also invert expectations about their mode of address. The use of text renders them starkly anti-primitivist, dead set against any hint of neo-expressionist affect that fans of primitive authenticity find so charming.

Much of Rebecca Belmore’s work has been concerned with the question of who is given voice and where and how they are permitted to speak. In a series of performances called Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking To Their Mother, beginning at the Banff Centre in 1991, Belmore tied the question of voice provocatively to the land. Her vehicle to this end was a gigantic megaphone built on a plywood framework and lined on the inside with cork and wood veneer. In places it was decorated with geometric Nishnaabe motifs. Built into the base of the megaphone was a loudhailer. Belmore toured the megaphone across Canada, often stopping in Aboriginal communities where the megaphone would be set up facing a significant part of the landscape and people invited to come and speak their mind to the land. In the context of both the silencing of indigenous voices and the struggle over land claims the land itself became a court of last appeal when the Canadian political system gave no satisfaction.

In 2003, just before leaving the Art Gallery of Ontario it fell on me to install the AGO’s Fudger Gallery with works from the Canadian Wing, which had been closed in preparation for the building project. I decided to play the entire installation off of Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking To Their Mother, which was centred in the room and surrounded by a concise history of Canadian landscape paintings. Each painting was then open to being re-thought from the perspective of indigenous activism. I was especially interested to see the Group of Seven works re-contextualized. Having spent a number of years at the AGO I had witnessed the cult-like affection visitors had, particularly for those landscapes that were empty of people. As art historians such as Scott Watson, and Jonathan Bordo have noted, where previous artists like Cornelius Krieghoff salted their landscapes with picturesque Indians, the Group were most admired when they emptied theirs out. This paved the way, so to speak, for Canadians to naturalize and indiginize their relationship to the landscape as a source of national identity. As though to prove this point, when news of the Canadian wing closure was released there was an explosion of outrage, almost all of it focused on a perceived public need for access to the group of Seven, as though the nation would disintegrate without regular exposure to stylized paintings of Algonquin Park and the North Shore of Lake Superior. To add insult to injury, one visitor wrote on a gallery comment card that the megaphone impeded her appreciation of the landscapes and ought to be moved in with the Inuit art, “where it belonged.”

In the exhibition Building a Nation held in the fall of 2006 at Matt’s Gallery in London, Cherokee artist Jimmie Durham filled a large room with what he described as an “anti-architectural” environment. This environment became the setting for a series of quotations about indigenous North Americans. In the gallery were platforms, tables, car parts, walls, a stone monolith made of wood and formica and quite a lot of laminate flooring. (you could walk through most of the walls – does a wall by definition need to be a barrier?) Every text was accompanied by a mirror. These constructions seemed always to be on the verge of resolving themselves into something recognizable but never quite getting there.

Durham and I both collect horrible genocidal quotations by famous Americans. Our collections are substantial because there is no shortage of musings on the mass-murder of “Indians” once you go looking. Perhaps, despite the lessons of experience, we believe that with enough evidence the rest of humanity might abandon the dreadful mythology of cowboys and Indians. Durham made a collection of these quotations into one centre of this exhibition by scattering them on objects throughout the gallery. There was President Theodore Roosevelt: “I don't go so far as to think that 'the only good Indians are dead Indians', but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn't like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.” And John Wayne: “I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.” And even Frank L. Baum, author of the Wizard of Oz: “The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians. Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are.”

Durham also emphasized the quotations through a series of weekly Saturday afternoon performances over the month long process of installation. During the performances he worked on the installation for an hour or so and then spoke about ideas related to the exhibition, read quotations and sang racist or Christian triumphalist songs. As an audience we were witness to the complex poetics that emerged out of the interaction between a series of disturbing texts and the process of building an undisciplined anti-architecture that would both display and undermine them. Some of the quotations are from well-known political figures, but the most sinister, in my opinion, are songs for children. They are a reminder, despite the Anglo-American penchant for categorically distinguishing public and private life, that nation building is an intimate affair, completed one mind at a time in the “privacy” of your home as you acquire and first use language.

In Western cultures there have come to be a very hard and fast distinction between the animate and inanimate, which can be understood in one sense as a regulation and management of the proper domain of agency. Architecture is inanimate – the more so the better. National monuments are built from the largest, heaviest stones possible to give them an aura of inevitability and permanence. Many indigenous North American traditions have a different understanding of agency in spatial terms. Anthropologists use the inadequate term “animism” to describe a sense of the liveliness of the world. As oral cultures we also have a tradition of viewing the landscape mnemonically, using many different features of our environment as triggers to remind us of particular stories and concepts. These two methods of reading signs in a spatial environment combined with a post-modern critique of how we are socially disciplined by our built environments, create a powerful analytical tool. So when a sheet of formica that Durham is working with cracks up the middle and he says, “It didn’t want to be in the show, it thinks it’s too nice to be used this way”, I do not take him exactly literally. But I appreciate his ability to read and animate for us the traces of human agency that have found their way into our built environment and act on us constantly. The spaces we create are alive around us in processes of signification that it is urgent and liberating for us to recognize. There are nations that need un-building.

The primary mechanism for eliminating indigenous languages was, of course, the residential school. My wife’s mother’s boarding school had a system of merits and demerits for kids who could go all day without speaking “Indian,” as they put it. Of course we all know stories of kids who were put into the care of genuine monsters to be coerced less subtly. A friend of my brother’s had needles pricked into her tongue each time she was caught speaking her language.

I do not think it is a coincidence that some of the most interesting works to deal with the residential school experience have addressed it through collage. Both Jane Ash Poitras and Carl Beam have played the linear signs of boarding school authority against the fragmented and overlapping modes of collage. In Poitras’s Family Blackboard of 1989, we see the neat rows of letters on a blackboard that students absorb through seemingly endless mimetic repetition until the forms “come naturally” to the hand, as people misleadingly say. Poitras recalls sitting in class as a child and yearning to be able to draw on the blackboard, which was her teacher’s exclusive domain. In the final line of text the artist has taken over the classroom and switched from letters in the Roman alphabet to syllabics. Below is a riot of signifiers, including family photographs, pictographs, Egyptian Hieroglyphs, among many others. They are largely ordered according to the cacophony of everyday life, but are held in part within the orbit of a personal photograph.

Carl Beam was a non-linear thinker in a profound and fundamental way. In his art he was obsessed with subverting regulatory systems. His imagery is replete with sinister clock faces, meters, traffic lights, graphs and rulers. The latter he could constantly found in the act of burying. Against this linear organization of time and space - which he associated with the imposition of colonial rule (including his own experience in residential school) – he set out a vision of history and experience as collage. This was not a linear narrative of history, but history as we experience it in our lives: fragmented, personal and political, often covered over and partially obscured by repression, neglect or the simple loss of memory over time.

The silencing of indigenous languages was also a form of dehumanization that justified colonization: no characteristic is more distinctly human than the capacity for language. Indigenous North Americans are the most fictitious peoples in the world. We are not obscure – thanks to Hollywood and the centrality of the American national mythology almost everyone has heard of us, but almost nobody actually knows anything about us or more importantly, from us. There is a trope of the popular image of the Indian that suggests that what we have to say is known in advance to be not worth hearing. This is the strange tendency of Indians to say “Ugh.” The Disney cartoon Peter Pan makes the a priori irrelevance of indigenous languages even clearer. In the song “What Made the Red Man Red?” the Indians sing about themselves, asking important questions about “the Red Man’s” language, such as “When did he first say “ugh?” They go on to sing: “Hana Mana Ganda, We translate for you, Hana means what Mana means, And Ganda means that too.” This lets us know that their language is simply a potentially infinite chain of meaninglessness, a kind of hideous unwitting parody of Jacques Lacan’s insistence on the unconscious as an endlessly sliding chain of signifiers that are never anchored to a stable signified.

The Indian Act, the document codifying Canada’s relationship with Aboriginal peoples, is a piece of definitional violence and authority that many Aboriginal artists have spoken back to. As far as I know, Nadia Myre, a Montreal artist of Algonkin-Québécois heritage, is the first to have represented all fifty-four pages in beads. Seeing page after page lined up in double rows on the wall of Gallery Oboro in Montreal, it was difficult not to simply wonder at the labour: all those little beads, placed one after another. And yet the work, titled simply Indian Act, turns on the fact that the beads are not really small enough at all. The pages themselves are reproduced to scale and each letter of each word is represented by a single white bead set off against a background of red beads. The text becomes an abstract, beautifully incomprehensible series of dots and dashes. The pixilated quality of the beading tends to simultaneously give the impression of low and high tech, and the effect is like trying to read text on an absurdly low-resolution computer monitor.

If a legal text like the Indian Act (where the state acts and the “Indians” are acted upon) is a pure case of language functioning as an arm of the state, then there is a special power in transforming that language into something else, something at once contemporary and “traditional.” Of course the failure of beads to be words speaks eloquently of cultural difference and the estrangement of the language of the Indian Act from those it is meant to govern. The development of the Indian Act itself was a sign of the state’s increasing unwillingness to engage Aboriginal communities on their own cultural terms. Previously, European states and their settler colonies often went to great lengths to use Aboriginal political documents, such as wampum belts, in their political relationships with First Nations. The shift to incomprehensible, one-sided documents like the Indian Act was a deliberate signal, a failure to communicate that was meant to communicate a great deal.

But if Myre’s work takes not understanding as a starting point it quickly moves forward from there. The process of turning the Indian Act into its liberated, beaded form is as important as the end product (and all those beads keep reminding us of the process). Myre sought out help, inviting friends to do a page, holding beading circles and otherwise drawing professional and amateur bead-workers into the process of creating this work of art. Beadwork has traditionally been a women’s art form, but Myre invited men, non-Aboriginal artist friends and others to participate. Beaders worked directly over top of 8 ½” by 11” sheets of paper, each printed with a page of the Indian Act. They sewed through the paper to the fabric below until the paper was no longer visible behind a field of beads. The process exposed them to the document and then engaged them in the act of effacing it through the long labour of beading. Letter by letter English text disappears and bead-by-bead it is replaced with a tactile, visually demanding object as the workers learn (or renew their acquaintance with) the art of beading. It is an Indian act.

People often comment on the futility of writing about art and in a certain way I agree. Obviously one cannot reproduce the experience of art in language. To express this I have heard people say, “Writing about art is like dancing about architecture.” We could only hope this were so. What could say more about architecture than the movement through it of the human bodies it is built for? It seems to me that there is something in this process of translation itself – both between different languages and different media that is potentially productive. The liminal sites where different media or different languages intersect provide a viewpoint from which each begins to reveal, through interaction, their potential and their limitations.

A number of Durham’s works deal with a disjunct between sculptural objects and written language. The 1991 work Red Turtle is one of my favourites. Pinned to this sculpture is a hand-written text written in the voice of a colonial educational authority. It reads:

We have tried to train them; to teach them to speak properly, to fill out forms. We have no way of knowing whether they truly perceive and comprehend or whether they simply imitate our actions.

This is the inevitable complaint of failed mimicry described by Homi Bhabha in his essay “Of Mimicry and Man.” Here Bhabha describes processes in which the colonizer attempts to assimilate the colonized as colonial “mimicry”. The process is ideological – an attempt to produce very particular types of subjects. On the face of it, these subjects are meant to mimic their cultural “superiors”, to adopt Christian civilization and forgo their primitive ways. The catch is that this mimicry cannot afford to be perfect; it is based on “the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite.” Colonization, after all, is rationalized precisely on the grounds of European superiority, based on the primitive/civilized dichotomy. If the colonized is too good of a mimic the dichotomy will collapse and along with it the presumption of superiority. Bhabha therefore argues that, “in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference.” .

The visual centre of Red Turtle, is a turtle shell that serves as an intersection point for a number of painted sticks. Four are straight and painted black. They are set in a rough X shape. Another curving stick with a snake’s head appears to be winding its way snake-like through the shell from left to right. As Laura Mulvey suggests we can read this X, which you can see doesn’t quite line up, as an error mark of the sort a teacher might apply to an incorrect answer or as X that one might sign to a form or treaty if they were not literate. X, we also know, marks the spot, staking a claim to a place on a map. However we read the X, it seems to be on the side of the text and by extension, colonial authority. The shell and the snake seem to be about something else. As Mulvey says we may read the turtle shell and the snake in specific Cherokee contexts, such as turtle shell rattles and the dances associated with them – in which case the X functions as a crossing out of indigenous religions. Yet the shell refuses to be buried below the X. You will also notice that this tricky snake moves from left to right through the shell, against the right to left flow of written English. Not only that, but he manages to go into the shell yellow and come out blue. Is he the victim of enforced change or merely sporting some new camouflage? I’m betting on the latter because while the X seems to be stamped down and static, it is evident that we have caught this snake in motion, eluding an authority that fails to grasp it in both senses of that word. In this case the sculpture is not an illustration of the text, but a sly, multi-faceted counter to it – an alternative and superior form of Trickster intelligence.

In the series of drawings Six Authentic Things, Durham reveals the slipperiness of language as we shift between linguistic and extra-linguistic forms of signification. Much of this dynamic can perhaps be best understood as revolving around near-anarchic play between a referent and what linguistic philosopher C.S Peirce distinguished as indexical, iconic and symbolic signs. For Peirce these categories indicate varying degrees of abstraction away from the referent. The most concrete is the indexical sign, in which the signifier has a direct connection to the referent. Indexical signs include things like smoke and footprints, measuring instruments or even pointers directing you to something. An iconic sign resembles or imitates the referent in some way, such as a portrait or an onomatopoeia. Symbolic signs have no mimetic relationship to the referent, they are arbitrary and conventional. This includes all language and alphabetical characters except for onomatopoeia. As Peirce noted, these categories are not always discrete and in Six Authentic Things Durham has created interweaving and in cases tangled knots of signification that, oddly enough, perhaps more accurately reflects our experience of meaning making than a more orderly system.

In the centre of sixth image, for example, is a piece of flint in the shape of an arrowhead that is labelled, with comically exaggerated emphasis, “Real Flint.” This arrowhead is integrated into a fairly crude colour drawing, creating the deliberately unconvincing illusion that the arrowhead is in the process of piercing the chest of a US Calvary soldier. Therefore we have the referent, flint, present itself, but also staged as an indexical sign of itself. We also have symbolic signs, written words, that are part of arrows that indexically point to a referent or other signifiers. The flint is shaped into an actual arrowhead that is also a symbolic sign of an arrow. Lastly we have the haemorrhaging soldier, a not terribly convincing iconic sign.

In the first drawing the “real” thing referenced indexically are the words, symbolic signs themselves, one sentence “relating” or “referring” indexically to another and then to the arrows that point from one sentence to the next in a humorous regression away from the initial referent. Durham describes the deliberate crudity of this work as also playing with the signs of the primitive, a category that he hopes to render absurd. Indeed the complexity of signification that is occurring under the cover of this faux-primitivism makes Joseph Kosuth’s installation One and Three Chairs, an icon of cool conceptualism exploring differences in modes of representation, look like a reductive oversimplification.

The works also include Cherokee words that tend to be set offside of each drawing’s central object, a parallel but to many viewers a mysterious counter-discourse. According to Durham the significance of these words is less what they signify in Cherokee, but that, to non-Cherokee speaking viewers, they signify that viewer’s lack of knowledge about the Cherokee language. (You might feel I have done something similar to you with all this semiotic jargon. Sorry.)

It is not a coincidence that all this play with slippery language has fallen under the ironic rubric of authenticity. As Durham has said many times authenticity is an internalized colonial standard that “we have inflicted on us” to limit our agency and keep us in the primitivist margins and “out of the world.” Trinh T. Minh Ha frames the problem of the relation of margin to centre in a way that is I think profitable:

The margins, our sites of survival, become our fighting grounds and their site of pilgrimage. Thus, while we turn around and reclaim them as our exclusive territory, they happily approve, for the division between margin and center should be preserved, and as clearly demarcated as possible, if the two positions are to remain intact in their power relations. Without a certain work of displacement, again, the margins can easily recomfort the center in its goodwill and liberalism; strategies of reversal thereby meet with their own limits.

It is all too easy to become trapped in such dualisms, which European languages provide in abundance.

In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche wrote that, “the belief in antithesis of values” is fundamental to Western metaphysics. Yet, he tells us, “It may be doubted, firstly, whether antithesis exist at all; and secondly, whether these popular valuations and antithesis of value on which the metaphysicians have set their seal, are not perhaps merely superficial estimates, only provisional perspectives…” While some superficial estimates may be handy tools, the dichotomies of Civilized versus Savage, Christian versus Heathen or Nature versus Culture have done us enormous violence.

In 1992 Durham created an untitled sculpture exploring dichotomy through the figure of Janus, the double headed Roman god of gates and doorways and beginnings and endings. The centre of Janus’s body is made of pvc pipe, which turns in both directions at the top. This double “head” is wrapped in duct-tape and topped with large ears or horns – in many indigenous visual systems horns on humans or animals signify a supernatural being (in so far as the idea supernatural makes sense in an indigenous context). Attached to this body is a text that reads:

“Good afternoon. Would you please pretend for a few moments that it is actually me, the piece of art, that is talking to you?

Thank you, you are very kind.

I just think it may be easier to explain myself directly. I am a representation of Janus, the two faced god. Please do not confuse my doubleness with duplicity, however, or with palefaces who speak with forked tongues. Actually, the Europeans usually depicted me as having red faces.

Anyway, I am the guardian. Seeing, as it were, with future hindsight and historical foresight. I must naturally attempt both action and the blockage of action. In other guises I’m called Romulus and Remus, the twins, Charon, Cerebus the two or three-headed dog, Anubus, and Coyote. You can see then dear spectator, I am also the god of passage, and the god of the unification of opposites.

Sorry folks! This is the artist Jimmie Durham interrupting here! As soon as Janus mentioned opposites I could see he was going in the wrong direction. Humans and their gods seem to naturally create opposites-as-a-system. When one thinks “white” one’s next thought is usually “black,” for example, and then one declares a polarity that may not necessarily reflect a natural truth.”

Durham makes a similar point at the beginning of his essay “The Search for Virginity”, where he writes:

“The teacher said that black was the opposite of white, sweet was the opposite of sour, and up was the opposite of down. I began to make my own list of opposites: the number one must be the opposite of the number ten, ice was the opposite of water, and birds were the opposite of snakes.”

So much for the dichotomy as a natural category.

Cree artist Kent Monkman’s short film The Taxonomy of the European Male was shot during a performance at the opening of an exhibition that Jimmie Durham and I curated at Compton Verney called The American West, which was an attack on American Cowboy and Indian mythology. Compton Verney is a private art museum located in an historic Manor House in Warwickshire. In the performance Monkman was in his persona as Miss Chief Share Eagle Testicle. On her trip to Europe she has just scouted out two Merry Men whom she hopes to paint. All of her dialogue is taken from the Indian painter George Catlin’s writings about Indians, with Monkman merely substituting “European” for “Indian” throughout. In the performance Monkman plays with various forms of authority and objectification, including the detached and authoritative commentary in faux BBC4 middle-class English. In this case an act of inversion does more than simply turn a hierarchy on its head in the way that Heap of Birds’s Native Hosts series does. Monkman’s sly humour leaves the dichotomy in campy ruins, the language too patently absurd to sustain itself when applied to fully human beings.

I’ll end, or begin to end, with a third and final bit of autobiography. We can call it my autobiography as lost in translation. Not all of the Cree words and phrases that my mother knew were insults, but my favourite was. I can’t recall the complete phrase anymore. I remember one compound word: mistahi-muskwa, or “big bear.” For a long time I didn’t know what this phrase meant, only that my mom would use it on my brother and I when one of us was in a particularly foul mood. It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I asked her, “What does that mean anyway?” She appraised me for a moment, considering, and then shot back, “It means you’re as cranky as a grizzly bear with a torn asshole.”

We left it at that. For all I know she may even have been telling the truth. Or she may have made it up on the spot.

I have almost come to appreciate this muddy and sometimes muddled space of faulty or deferred translation. Despite all the bad colonial history (and wishing very much that I did know more Cree) it still feels like home. Yet the hybrid quality of this space means that it is often treated by purists as the crash-landing site after a tragic fall from grace: the fiery descent from noble savage to colonized, acculturated Native-Canadian. Some of us wander around in the aftermath a little embarrassed at our own lack of authenticity, a little worried that we are bereft of exotic knowledge that we can trade in the marketplace of ideas. Our authenticity seems to be somewhere behind us rather than something we carry around here and now. If we need to recover our languages and histories, we also need new means of expression that can articulate and translate our own experiences, even (or especially) when that experience is estrangement or not understanding. However much we have lost, Homi Bhabha suggests that functioning in translation also creates a critical opportunity. He writes, “The great, though unsettling, advantage of this position is that it makes you increasingly aware of the construction of culture and the invention of tradition.”

I doubt that when Kent Monkman thinks about the Cree language insults are the first thing that come to his mind. For much of his childhood, Cree was the vehicle for the word of God. The God, the big, all encompassing, apparently very jealous God of Christianity. The God who seems to have so much to say about whom one ought to have sex with and how. Monkman’s father was a minister and his father’s Cree congregation read a Bible printed in Cree syllabics and sang hymns from Cree hymnals. It is widely believed that the Cree syllabary was invented by a missionary as a way putting the Bible into any easy-to-learn form that could handle the polysyllabic tendency of Cree. There are Cree who dispute this, claiming that we had independently developed the syllabic system for traditional religious purposes, but whatever the case may be, the syllabary played and continues to play an important role for Cree Christians. Monkman’s approach to the Cree language is unsentimental and matter of fact. He can’t speak or understand it, so for him Cree has not been the gateway to or preserver of traditional culture. It was the vehicle of Christianity. If this is a surreal colonial paradox it is also a mundane lived reality.

In his series of paintings, The Prayer Language, Monkman creates multi-layered juxtapositions of the Cree syllabary and images of eroticized, grappling male bodies. The surfaces are highly complex, built from many layers of paint of varying degrees of transparency. Some markings have clearly been painted on and then wiped away while half dry, leaving only rough, ghostly outlines. The transparent layers and the changes in matt and gloss create an ambiguous field of activity in which syllabics and bodies seem to often occupy the same space, floating in and out of focus as the eye moves across the canvas. Each painting is titled after a hymn, which can be read as a cheeky sexual double entendre, pushing back hard against Christian sexual morality. For example: When He Cometh, Softly and Tenderly and my personal favourite, Oh for a Thousand Tongues. Monkman’s lack of fluency in Cree means that the syllabics become strangely objectified, detached from particular meaning to become at once abstract designs and meta-signs of Christianity. Perhaps more importantly, they are signs of his very inability to read them.

It is unclear whether the homoeroticized body and the Cree language are liberated in this collision of syllabics and bodies, or whether that is even entirely the exercise. Monkman wants us to spend some time in this territory to get a feel for its ambiguities. Are these men fighting or fucking? Or perhaps a bit of both? (This is not the first time that sex and power seem impossible to untangle.) Is the Cree language recoverable for him beyond its Christian appropriation? Perhaps this question does not do justice to what is at stake, which is getting down the complexity of a lived experience. If recovering our language and culture doesn’t also involve locating our own experiences, probing the social technologies that have created areas of knowledge and ignorance within us, then all we will ever be doing is recovering the past. There is no future in not having a language with which to speak to the present.