Critical land.
The myth of untouched nature

Sylvia Cunningham: Welcome to “Critical land”. I’m your host, Sylvia Cunningham.This is the first episode of a new English-language podcast from the Schirn Kunsthalle, debuting along­side its latest exhi­bi­tion, “Magnetic North: Imag­ining Canada in Painting 1910-1940.” This exhi­bi­tion, co-orga­nized by the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada, exam­ines modern Cana­dian land­scape painting from a contem­po­rary stand­point. “Magnetic North” comprises 90 paint­ings and 40 sketches from the Group of Seven, a collec­tive formed in 1920. It also features works from Algo­nquin-French artist Caro­line Monnet and Anishi­naabe film­maker Lisa Jackson.In this podcast series, “Critical land”, we’ll draw from some of the themes in “Magnetic North” to go beyond what is displayed on the gallery walls. Through inter­views with Indige­nous artists, activists and scholars, we’ll connect the exhi­bi­tion to art and envi­ron­mental move­ments going on today. In this episode, you’ll hear from a Lakota-Scot­tish professor in Canada whose research and teaching focuses on contem­po­rary Indige­nous art history.You’ll also hear from the curator of “Magnetic North” about the chal­lenges of presenting the Group of Seven to German and Euro­pean audi­ences for the first time. So that is our starting point today. The Group of Seven. Picture this. Vast, rugged scenery, stretching on for miles. A single tree, standing stead­fast in the cold and wind, despite all odds. Seem­ingly untouched wilder­ness, as far as the eye can see. This is Canada in the early to mid 1900s, through the eyes and brush­strokes of seven painters. More specif­i­cally, a collec­tive of white, male painters who called them­selves the Group of Seven. Their motto? “Less of a studio, more of a forest.”Here’s Martina Wein­hart, curator at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frank­furt. 

Martina Weinhart: They camped, they fished, they were portaging with their canoes over the hills and stayed outside. They really wanted to be these “tough guys.” 

Sylvia Cunningham: Wein­hart says this group of painters did not want to be the kind of “intel­lec­tuals” who met for drinks and social­ized in the city. The Group of Seven wanted to make art that was different from the art in Europe. So did they succeed? Well, that is compli­cated.

Martina Weinhart: They thought of them­selves of Candian artists but half of them were from England and a lot of them were trained in Europe, visited Paris, Berlin even. They were very well-educated in Euro­pean art history. If you look at their pictures, there are certain echoes of German roman­ti­cism, Caspar David Friedrich for instance, or you find certain rela­tions to French art and of course the Scan­di­na­vian arts, so these were the roots their art was based in.

Sylvia Cunningham: The exhi­bi­tion at the Schirn marks the first time the Group of Seven’s works are being shown in Germany.

Martina Weinhart: In Canada they are national trea­sures. They are icons. Every child knows them. In school, they learn about Picasso and they learn about the Group of Seven.

Sylvia Cunningham: That is not the case in Europe, Wein­hart says, where these painters are rela­tively unknown. But presenting the collec­tive to a German audi­ence for the first time is a tricky task. As always, context is crit­ical.

Martina Weinhart: All these paint­ings are very atmos­pheric, very beau­tiful. But they are empty. There are no people, and you find these kinds of paint­ings also in Europe, but in Canada, this approach gets a total different meaning because this land wasn’t empty. This was for years and years and thou­sands of years the land of the Indige­nous people.

Sylvia Cunningham: That is one of the blind spots of the Group of Seven, and some­thing the “Magnetic North” exhi­bi­tion wres­tles with. And in this podcast, “Critical land”, we will too.In today’s episode, we’re unpacking the idea of land versus land­scape with Professor Carmen Robertson, a Lakota-Scot­tish scholar from the Qu’appelle Valley in Saskatchewan in Canada. We’ll probe the myth of untouched wilder­ness and talk about the process of decol­o­nizing art. Carmen Robertson is the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in North Amer­ican Indige­nous Art and Mate­rial Culture at Carleton Univer­sity in Ottawa, Ontario. There she leads a large research team looking at the life and work of Anishi­naabe artist Norval Morris­seau. Morris­seau was part of a collec­tive of Indige­nous artists in the 1970s. That collec­tive was later nick­named the “Indian Group of Seven.” Professor Robertson started off by telling me what drives her and her research.

Carmen Robertson: I’ve been teaching Indige­nous art history since the early 2000s and you know I’ve always had a passion towards ensuring that Indige­nous arts are better under­stood within the context of art history more gener­ally and Cana­dian culture espe­cially and even posi­tioned within a global under­standing so whether it’s Norval Morris­seau partic­u­larly or contem­po­rary Indige­nous arts more gener­ally, my passion is to ensure that people under­stand what these amazing arts are and they’ve been so under­ap­pre­ci­ated for so long that it’s kind of exciting to see that there is change afoot.

Sylvia Cunningham: OK, so there has been change? Some move­ment in the past few years, would you say? Or has it even been decades?

Carmen Robertson: I wouldn’t say decades, no, defi­nitely not. But there is substan­tive change that we see occur­ring. For example the National Gallery in Canada has really made a mandate to ensure that they exhibit contem­po­rary Indige­nous art. “Abadakone” was a very impor­tant exhi­bi­tion – global Indige­nous exhi­bi­tion that was held in the last year there. So there is incre­mental change. That said there is not a real under­standing neces­sarily of what is behind that art, so that’s still to come.

Sylvia Cunningham: So we’re going to get deeper into this in a little bit. But first, I wanted to take a step back. When did you first encounter the work of the Group of Seven?

Carmen Robertson: Well prob­ably, I think for all Cana­dians, when they’re born (laughing) they just auto­mat­i­cally know who the Group of Seven is. You know, in elemen­tary school, it’s the only art. I grew up in a very small town in Saskatchewan and we saw almost no exam­ples of art but somehow, I knew who the Group of Seven was. And we knew that their land­scapes were iconic images of what Canada is. And yeah, so there’s always been an under­standing that that was really the most impor­tant art in Canada.

Sylvia Cunningham: Having grown up in Canada, did you connect with these land­scapes? Did you recog­nize the land­scapes in the art that you were seeing?

Carmen Robertson: Well, it’s unde­ni­able how beau­tiful their render­ings of land­scape are. But your term “land­scape” is an impor­tant one. They weren’t really painting the “land” as the way I connected with land partic­u­larly. But that sense of an empty wilder­ness is really an iconic aspect of their painting, and I didn’t know this in elemen­tary school, but I’ve come to know now that that’s really a colo­nial construc­tion that helped Canada really go forward with their colo­nial project, assuming that Canada was terra nullius or an empty land and related to you know, histor­ical issues like the “Doctrine of Discovery” that allowed Euro­pean coun­tries to feel free to colo­nize lands in the Amer­icas. So that notion of a wild rugged and empty wilder­ness is one of the funda­mental keys that has made the Group of Seven such a popular artistic “move­ment” in Canada, I guess you could say.

Sylvia Cunningham: So you would say that this idea and false notion, this fallacy of untouched land­scape, of untouched wilder­ness, that that was then exported to the rest of the world as quote, “Cana­dian art.”

Carmen Robertson: Absolutely. And of course it was heavily influ­enced by what was happening in Europe. It’s not a specif­i­cally Candian vision of the land, it’s very much…​you know, I think it was W.J.T. Mitchell who said way back in the ‘90s that land­scape is an example of Euro­pean impe­ri­alism, an artistic example of that. And I think that that really does mani­fest itself in the Group of Seven.

Sylvia Cunningham: So we’ve already talked a little bit about the differ­ence between land and land­scape, but can you put a finer point on the differ­ence of those terms to you?

Carmen Robertson: Right and so I’m going to sepa­rate the way I think of those from a Lakota or an Indige­nous way of knowing the land versus a euro­cen­tric or western way of knowing the land. So land­scape, you know it really is painting a posses­sion or a thing­ness of what land is, whereas thinking about land through partic­ular cultural ways of knowing, myself Lakota, but you know, Cree or Anishi­naabe — we think of Morris­seau — is a rela­tional connec­tion to land. Land is a living kin within a larger sense of living beings, so it’s not a thing, it’s not a posses­sion. It’s another living entity that you need to take care of and that will take care of you. 

Sylvia Cunningham: Some­thing that strikes me looking at the Group of Seven’s work is not only that it’s “untouched” and I say that with air quotes, is not just that it’s untouched, but that there’s this alone­ness. This kind of doing it alone, self-actu­al­iza­tion, self-deter­mi­na­tion. Do you feel like that’s all part of the narra­tive as well is that going out in nature is this solo activity? 

Carmen Robertson: Solo activity and also very much a male activity I think has a reso­nance for sure. So it helps to rein­force, you know, patri­ar­chal domi­nant views of what colo­nialism is about, what domi­nant Canada tends to be about, so yeah, absolutely there is a rein­force­ment of all those kinds of signi­fiers at play.

Sylvia Cunningham: Do you see that even then extracted to tourism, tourism liter­a­ture, marketing of you know, “Discover Canada,” or some­thing like that. I know you said you weren’t exposed to much art in your elemen­tary school within your small commu­nity but you saw the Group of Seven’s art. So does that idea permeate at a lot of different levels?

Carmen Robertson: Absolutely. Throughout popular culture in Canada, you see these ubiq­ui­tous exam­ples of using the land, wilder­ness, you know, the rugged­ness of it. The oppor­tu­nity to still discover the untouched aspects of Canada, and that goes through not only art of course as you say, also anything that was publi­cized in Canada for tourism or in the 19th century to come and home­stead or to move to Canada. But also if you think of the Cana­dian Broad­casting Company, the CBC, from their early roots, that was a mandate, the “Hinter­land Who’s Who” was this short bits that used to come on in Canada that would tell you little bits about untouched parts of Canada. The National Film Board of Canada had a similar mandate to show Canada to the world and part of showing that Canada was this really untram­meled and wild country, so it is really very much a part of Candian mythology.

Sylvia Cunningham: Do you feel like the Group of Seven accom­plished the goal that they set out to accom­plish? I’ve seen this term asso­ci­ated with the Group of Seven, that their style is “uniquely Cana­dian,” and again I put that in air quotes. I was wondering what that even means to be “uniquely Cana­dian”?

Carmen Robertson: Right, well and that’s such a compli­cated term because, you know, we live next to the United States which has always been such an over­whelming force for Canada, coming from an impe­rial rela­tion­ship with Britain and the Common­wealth. So Canada has tried very hard to carve out a sense of iden­tity and they’ve used the Group of Seven, and another art expres­sion that has been used heavily in Canada is Inuit art as well, to promote Canada as some­thing different. It’s easier to do with Inuit art because that’s an Indige­nous art – it’s not an Indige­nous art form because it’s sculp­ture or it’s print­making, but it has Indige­nous story­telling at its heart. Whereas Canada has claimed the land­scape in partic­u­larly the kinds of land­scapes that the Group of Seven did for them­selves as uniquely Cana­dian when we know in fact that it is a uniquely Euro­pean tradi­tion.

Sylvia Cunningham: Emily Carr is one of the painters who although she wasn’t tech­ni­cally a member of the Group of Seven, she is closely linked to this group. And she’s differ­en­ti­ated not only as one of the few women who was but also because she trav­eled to various homes and Indige­nous villages and depicted totem poles and such. How do you see her work?

Carmen Robertson: Right. Well it’s inter­esting because for years and years I’ve taught art history and so many students assume that Emily Carr is Indige­nous because of the sorts of topics and images that she painted. It’s always a little bit surprising to me, but I know that there is this miscon­cep­tion because she very beau­ti­fully captures that imagery. However, she does so within a land­scape tradi­tion. She was very closely asso­ci­ated, espe­cially with Lawren Harris and they wrote letters back and forth and things like that. Kristina Huneault who is an art histo­rian in Canada decided to consider the way Emily Carr painted land versus a friend of Emily Carr, a Salish basket­maker, Sewinchelwet, who made baskets but they also had a very close friend­ship. And so she compared and contrasted the ways that they talk and thought about the land through their partic­ular art forms and through their rela­tion­ship. And what became very clear to her, because she was trying to struggle as a settler art histo­rian herself, this notion of land versus land­scape, and real­ized that for Emily Carr even though she had an espoused spir­i­tu­ality connected to land, she very much saw land as a thing. This thing­ness of land sepa­rates the Salish under­standing of land as kin or rela­tion in a very inter­con­nected way which we see I think in the way you posi­tion your­self in a land­scape as a painter, you’re not part of that and it changes that rela­tion­ship. And it comes back down to epis­te­molo­gies or ways of knowing that land, two different ways of knowing that land. And I think that’s a key to shifting the way people under­stand land versus land­scape within the gallery setting.

Sylvia Cunningham: That’s so inter­esting to me that some of your students assume Emily Carr is an Indige­nous artist and then you start to ask more ques­tions about who she was and the time she was painting in. What are some of those ques­tions that come out in that discus­sion?

Carmen Robertson: Well, for example, a lot of the paint­ings that she is creating are sort of vestiges of former villages on British Columbia’s west coast and that notion of not having actual partic­i­pants in those paint­ings, not painting living villages but sort of a roman­ti­cized image of a past or the vestiges of a past really feed into a discourse about the quote unquote, “last of a dying breed.” A romantic image of a frozen-in-time space in which Indige­nous peoples were very much at that time situ­ated within, so real­izing that that kind of a discourse, and a visual discourse is part of the baggage you bring to looking at that work requires you to peel back some of those layers.

Sylvia Cunningham: Maybe now is a good time before we get into Norval Morris­seau because there are so many ques­tions that I have there. But first to talk about the different terms – about Native, Indian, Aborig­inal, First Nations, Indige­nous. If you could give a little guid­ance on the use of such terms.

Carmen Robertson: Well those terms are very politi­cized, they are external terms that have been imposed on Indige­nous peoples. The idea of “one Indige­nous perspec­tive,” of all Indige­nous peoples being a homo­ge­neous group is pretty ridicu­lous. So the idea of First Nations, of Aborig­inal, of Indige­nous. Those are terms that are useful but they don’t partic­u­larly speak to any indi­vidual. So there’s a real push right now as part of this decol­o­nizing effort to gain sover­eignty, sover­eignty over your own nation, iden­tity, being. So if, for example, I referred to Morris­seau as Anishi­naabe. At one time he was referred to as quote unquote “Indian,” another time he was referred to as “First Nation,” then he was referred to as “Aborig­inal,” then Indige­nous. People still call him Indige­nous, also Ojibwe which is an anthro­po­log­ical term. But Anishi­naabe, the Anishin­abek Nation is really, he is a member of that Nation. And so using terms that are from a partic­ular Nation have become far more used now in Canada and I think that’s a really good way to begin under­standing the 500 Nations that were here when this country was begun to be settled.

Sylvia Cunningham: So a perfect tran­si­tion to Norval Morris­seau, an Anishi­naabe painter. Can you explain who he was?

Carmen Robertson: He is the first Indige­nous artist in Canada who received an art exhi­bi­tion in a main­stream contem­po­rary art gallery in Toronto, Ontario in Canada in 1962. Until that time, no Indige­nous artist in Canada had received an exhi­bi­tion of that sort. Art was shown within museums. It tended to be known as “arti­fact.” So he was a real trail­blazer in that way. He’s consid­ered today to be the “Mishomis” or the “grand­fa­ther” of contem­po­rary Indige­nous art. He’s also the first Indige­nous artist in Canada who has received a retro­spec­tive exhi­bi­tion at the National Gallery of Canada. And that happened in 2006 at a time when the National Gallery really had only purchased one of his paint­ings in their history. His work was being collected at many art museums in Canada, but mostly at ethno­graphic museums, which is in itself very conflicted. So I think I would have to say the most impor­tant thing Morris­seau did was create a unique visual language and it’s a form of visual story­telling that you can under­stand when viewing his art, but it does not have any antecedents in Euro­pean or western art tradi­tion and to me that is funda­mental to his genius and his creativity.

Sylvia Cunningham: OK so for all of our podcast listeners, if you can attempt to do this very strange thing of build an image for us of what his art looks like. And of course people can go online, we’ll have a link in our show notes and all of that. But can you give us a bit of a visual?

Carmen Robertson: Well one of the things that he did was he drew from some Anishi­naabe ways of creating art that had been used for millennia. So he looked at rock art, vision quest sites. He looked at birch­bark scrolls, sacred scrolls, and he saw the way that they were using visual imagery. So he was influ­enced by that. But this thick black line that outlines all aspects of his figures, whether they be animal or trees or human, he always outlines all of his figures in a very thick black line and those lines then connect to every other living being within the painting to create this sense of rela­tional connec­tion or kinship, and it’s really diffi­cult, he uses bright, bright colors often and inte­rior segmen­ta­tions. He uses really inter­esting ways to connect the beings in his work and often those come from tradi­tional stories, so some­times he was referred to as a “legend painter” in sort of a discred­iting way but actu­ally he was also painting really contem­po­rary topics but those were kind of discred­ited in favor of you know, a painting of a moose for example.

Sylvia Cunningham: So why is it discred­iting, when you say he was called a “legend painter” in a discred­iting way. Why was that?

Carmen Robertson: Well again, that’s a compli­cated idea that goes back to prim­i­tivism and situ­ating Indige­nous art in certain boxes. If you think of the 1985 show, “Prim­i­tivism,” and how modern artists like Picasso or Klee were inspired by non-western art or art exam­ples, like African masks. This is the same where Morris­seau’s art was being confined within a discourse. So “legend” was used to discredit the way of thinking about a world­view or an inter­con­nected way, where story is very much a kind of theo­ret­ical way to orga­nize your ways of knowing.

Sylvia Cunningham: So as you mentioned in 1962 when he became the first Indige­nous artist to have his work shown in a contem­po­rary art gallery in Canada, of course his name recog­ni­tion, popu­larity skyrock­eted. Was that a double edged sword for him, posi­tives and nega­tives there?

Carmen Robertson: Absolutely. So first of all, you’ve got to remember that he grew up a time, he was born in 1932. He grew up at a time where he had to go to Indian Resi­den­tial School in Canada where he was sexu­ally abused and where he was phys­i­cally abused. And that took its toll on him. Luckily he went back to his grand­par­ents home commu­nity and lived with his grand­mother and grand­fa­ther. His grand­fa­ther was a shaman within the spir­i­tual Midewiwin lodge that is part of Anishi­naabe cultural, spir­i­tual pursuits and so he was kind of an appren­tice to his grand­fa­ther and trav­eled with him on the lakes and rivers. Learned stories of the lands and connec­tions and met with old people and had a real priv­i­leged life in that way. So there was this real sort of polar­ized way of thinking about educa­tion. So in a western sense, his educa­tion system was very low and was very much violent, yet he had these real oppor­tu­ni­ties to learn knowl­edge and his language where many other Indige­nous people didn’t have that oppor­tu­nity. So that’s conflicted in itself. And he was never a trained artist in the sense that he went to a western school. He created his own really artic­u­lated language, his own aesthetic. And many many Indige­nous artists, espe­cially Anishi­naabe and Cree artists from north­western Ontario followed that tradi­tion and expanded that aesthetic.

Sylvia Cunningham: So when he got that name recog­ni­tion, his popu­larity started to grow. All of that. Was his life opened up to basi­cally all the scrutiny in the world?

Carmen Robertson: Well yeah, and also it was a little over­whelming to him. He did have trou­bles with drugs and alcohol because of that, not surpris­ingly. He’s a two spir­ited person and that was a diffi­cult road within Canada in the 1960s and 1970s so that took a while to figure out who he was. And being pulled in direc­tions and put into boxes by art dealers, by the media, that also was very diffi­cult but in the end he has this amazing body of work that some of the greatest master works in Cana­dian art history I think are because of Morris­seau.

Sylvia Cunningham: And Morris­seau was also part of the Profes­sional Native Indian Artists Incor­po­ra­tion (PNIAI), which was later nick­named the Indian Group of Seven. Can you talk about what this group of artists did, give a little history.

Carmen Robertson: Absolutely. Well Daphne Odjig, who’s Odawa, is this amazing…​she would be the grand­mother of contem­po­rary Indige­nous art and knew Morris­seau and was influ­enced by Morris­seau. She owned a gallery in the 1970s in Winnipeg, Mani­toba, and she brought together these artists including Morris­seau into the PNIAI to try to find a way to make it easier for young Indige­nous artists in Canada to not have the diffi­cul­ties that this sort of foun­da­tional group dealt with. To open galleries for exhi­bi­tions. To open doors to artists to easily become artists and not deal with a lot of the frus­tra­tions that she and Morris­seau, Alex Janvier is another key member of that group. Uh even­tu­ally the group kind of didn’t really disband, but they moved into other realms and Morris­seau was not part of that after about 1975.

Sylvia Cunningham: What are some of those frus­tra­tions that you mention the artists felt?

Carmen Robertson: Well I did mention that their work was being collected not in art museums but through ethno­graphic collec­tions so that was key. Also to receive an exhi­bi­tion at a main­stream, contem­po­rary gallery was not easy. So some commer­cial galleries defi­nitely were open to showing that work, but they really wanted to control the way that art was being shown or the subject matter of that art that was on display. And if you just think of the amounts of money that artists were being paid for their work, Indige­nous art was very under­valued in compar­ison to their main­stream coun­ter­parts in Canada at that time.

Sylvia Cunningham: Bringing it to now. My last ques­tion, who are some of the artists that you look to today? Who are some people we should be following?

Carmen Robertson: OK well in addi­tion to being the lead inves­ti­gator on this study of Morris­seau, I’m also passion­ately excited about contem­po­rary beading expres­sions that are coming out of the Cana­dian prairies. And so Ruth Cuthand for example whose beaded diseases, a series called “Trading Series,” is an artist who I think is really leading Canada in an exciting way. And beading across Canada is really an impor­tant medium that has taken on such reso­nance. Nadia Myre, for example, out of Montreal, an Anishi­naabe is well known inter­na­tion­ally. And of course perfor­mance art, what’s happening in perfor­mance art with Rebecca Belmore, Kent Monkman are two inter­na­tion­ally known exam­ples. To me, one thing that used to happen in my class­rooms 10 years ago is I would intro­duce contem­po­rary Indige­nous artists and students wouldn’t know their names but today when I intro­duce contem­po­rary Indige­nous artists, they’re ready to move to thinking about their work in really exciting ways because they do know these artists and they’re following these artists because there’s much more avail­ability of their work and acces­si­bility to their exhi­bi­tions. So that’s good news.

Sylvia Cunningham: Carmen Robertson, professor at Carleton Univer­sity in Ontario. Thank you so much for your time today.

Carmen Robertson: Oh, thank you, Sylvia.