I wanted to kick in the doors and fight

These were the words that Rebecca Belmore uses as she playfully muses on why she created Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to their Mother, a performance and articulation of presence that transits both time and space. Yet even here, Belmore is speaking to issues that permeate far beyond the individual motivations behind her creative practice. Narratives of violence and marginalization are often the currents many Indigenous creators are forced to contend with, as they find their traditional lifeways increasingly enclosed within colonial states and the Eurocentric frameworks they operate under. How then, does Belmore choose to ‘fight’ these forces?

One important aspect that is often embodied within Indigenous pedagogical knowledge are the ties between human beings and their nonhuman relations, bonds that continue to be threatened by colonial expansion and the violence it enacts. It is these relationships that Belmore chooses to strengthen in Speaking to their Mother, in which she creates a giant wooden megaphone that travels between Indigenous communities across what is now Canada. Initially conceived as a response to the Oka ‘Crisis’ in 1991, Belmore often poses the sculpture on sites that have been fraught with tension between Indigenous communities and settler interests.¹The situation at Oka was triggered when Haudenosaunee land defenders resisted the expansion of a golf course onto traditional burial grounds. The Canadian military was called in to ‘defuse’ the situation, which only served to further inflame tensions between Indigenous peoples and the settlers of Oka, Quebec. Quotes are my own addition. Many Indigenous people saw the phrasing of the events as a crisis as yet another colonial construction that minimizes the lopsided violence enacted by the settler state against the Kanien’kéha:ka at Kanehsatà:ke. Understanding this context is critical in examining Belmore’s work through the lens of Indigenous land rights. She does this by inviting individuals to speak to the land, and hear it speak back to them. In doing so, she facilitates the process of allowing Indigenous people to enact reciprocal relations between themselves and their territories in ways that have been threatened by the Canadian state. Through her choice of materials, sites, and the medium of performance, Belmore uses language to channel a communal practice of presence in an act of solidarity and protest that uses art to resist the erasure of Indigenous peoples and their cultures.

Performance and interactivity have always been key components in Indigenous expression and is an art form that many Indigenous artists have gravitated towards in articulating their unique systems of relationality and ideology to land and self. Critical to this articulation are ideas of presence and resistance against the reductivism that is endemic to colonial conceptions of Indigeneity. Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor states that these narratives of survivance are rooted deeply in a sense of self that is impossible to alienate from their experiences within the natural world.²Gerald Vizenor, “Aesthetics of Survivance,” in Native Liberty : Natural Reason and Cultural Survivance (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 88. In the eyes of Carla Taunton, the very act of performance is a continuance of oral traditions, ones that can encapsulate the lived experiences of Indigenous peoples in their own words.³Carla Taunton, “Embodying Sovereignty: Indigenous Women’s Performance Art in Canada,” in Narratives Unfolding: National Art Histories in an Unfinished World (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017), 326. In essence, the performances that Belmore chooses to facilitate in Speaking to their Mother inscribe the work with powerful significations of presence against the fringing of Indigenous pedagogy by settler institutions such as the museum and archives, instead creating a living archive that is independent from state narratives. It is this living archive that brings Indigenous experience into the contemporary moment.

In asserting the independence of Indigenous narratives from colonial epistemologies, Belmore can begin to use her work as a means of negotiating relationships between the land and Indigenous peoples. Outside of the praxis of coloniality, Speaking to their Mother provides a platform for Indigenous peoples to articulate their connection to land in ways that would not be possible outside of the art of performance. This is largely because the interactions enabled by Belmore’s work between individuals and particular sites allows for a continuing articulation of sovereignty that transcends time, space, and place. In appraising Belmore’s artistic practice, Jolene Rickard speaks to her work as a ‘performance of power’ that refuses the historic erasure of Indigenous voices on the lands they have inhabited since time immemorial.⁴Jolene Rickard, “Rebecca Belmore: Performing Power” (2005), 2. The temporal nature of Belmore’s performances allows them to have a mediative effect on the sites they are performed in, strengthening Indigenous relations in ways that are antithetical to the ephemeral nature of colonialism. In this, Belmore’s choice of performance makes it an effective vessel of sovereignty and existence that counters the reductive paradigms of erasure often practiced by the forces of settler colonialism.

Land has always been an integral component to Indigenous ways of being, and much of their traditions draw from this relationship. Understanding what makes Speaking to their Mother effective in articulating Indigenous sovereignty and protest is knowing why and how land is important to these lifeways. Anishinaabe scholar and artist Leanne Simpson speaks to this in her essay Land as Pedagogy, where she highlights the stark contrasts between settler-colonial and Indigenous methods of learning and knowledge keeping. In it, she describes the processes behind the accumulation of what she terms as ‘Nishinaabeg intelligence’ and how nonhuman relations play an important role in one’s sense of being and place.⁵Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious Transformation,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3, no. 3 (November 21, 2014), 2. One anecdote she cites is the Anishinaabe tale of Kwezens and the Sugar bush, where a young girl visits a sugar maple tree, and learns the secrets of its cultivation through synthesizing information gathered from relations between herself, the spirit/animal worlds, and networks of love and care. Simpson cites the didactic power of these relationships as a model Indigenous peoples must return to in order to facilitate their resurgence against colonial frameworks. She goes on to draw from personal experience, describing how colonial systems of education have alienated Indigenous peoples from the systems of knowledge transmission they have relied on to survive.⁶Simpson, 4. Central to this alienation is the emphasis of how Western pedagogy often decontextualizes knowledge into units that are not grounded in the natural world. The acts performed in Speaking to their Mother are a direct repudiation of this framework, returning to a more relational method of knowing, where the land becomes the context that binds all knowledge.It is this disconnect that Belmore seeks to mend in Speaking to their Mother, in which she uses art to negotiate and address the ongoing displacement of Indigenous peoples from the land, and by extension the intelligences that are integral to their identity.

The context of land is important in the reading of Belmore’s work, as it provides the foundation of understanding Indigenous lifeways and how they have been disrupted by the politics of the Settler state.⁷Important also is her choice of materials. The megaphone was constructed entirely of materials found in the natural world. Fittingly, Belmore chose Banff National Park as the inaugural site of her performance, as it is a site that embodies the destructive gentrification of the natural world by the Canadian government. Taunton recounts Belmore’s opening words as she speaks to the pastoral landscapes of Banff:

My heart is beating like a small drum, and I hope that you mother earth can feel it. Someday I will speak to you in my language. I have watched my grandmother live very close to you, my mother the same. I have watched my grandmother show respect for all that you have given her …Although I went away and left a certain kind of closeness to you, I have gone in a kind of circle. I think I am coming back to understanding where I come from.

-Rebecca Belmore

Critical here is Belmore’s personification of earth as a Mother figure that she posits as one of her living relations. This is because the manifestation of Indigenous ways of being can be traced back to the land itself, and that it can be read through the lens of performance and ritual.⁸Simpson, 10. Simpson specifically mentions that performance allows one to access the spirit world, the realm of dreams where knowledge that was lost to colonialism can be accessed once again. As her voice reverberates off the landscape in conversation, Belmore invites others to experience the visceral nature of hearing the land speak back to them. In doing so, she uses the performance to facilitate the process of ‘finding one’s voice’ across landscapes that are now occupied by the settler state and their body politic.⁹Language is also important in Belmore’s work, as some of these connections can only be articulated in the unique forms and morphologies that are present in Indigenous languages. In other words, it would not be possible to express them in English. This is evidenced, as many of the performers in the work choose to speak in their own tongues instead, another powerful reminder of presence over absence as Vizenor stated. In turn, these processes of learning from the land become critical in the mobilization of Indigenous knowledge as a radical act of resurgence.

Speaking to their Mother is a performance that resists the compartmentalization and innate hierarchies of Western modernity. It is less a singular work of art, but a movement that facilitates the collective mobilization of Indigenous resistance across multiple spaces. Critical to its function as such is the fact Belmore elects to divest her authorship over the work, choosing instead to allow individuals to bring their own meanings to it.¹⁰This was why I decided to open my essay with this particular phrase. Belmore transforms personal anger into a collective fight that replaces Western individualism with a pan-Indigenous vision of the future. Returning to her initial response to the events at Oka in 1991, Belmore’s original intent with the megaphone was to direct it at the government in Ottawa in anger and protest. However, Belmore later decided it would be more effective to direct it at the land itself in a collective act of resilience. In doing so, Belmore repudiates the hyper individualism of Western capitalist systems and its tendencies to view art forms through a biographical lens.

This refusal of being contained by colonial systems of meaning is precisely how Indigenous art becomes so effective in articulating communal acts of protest. Curator Wanda Nanibush refers to the fact that Indigenous art forms are inherently political, as they are a response to colonial enclosure.¹¹Wanda Nanibush, “Lessons from #IdleNoMore: Rethinking Indigeneity, Decolonizing Feminisms.,” Panel (March 28, 2014). Forced to contend with issues such as land dispossession, the corralling of Indigenous peoples into reservations, and the incarceration of their lifeways, Indigenous cultural expression has evolved into what Jarrett Martineau and Eric Ritskes refer to as a ‘fugitive’ aesthetic that evades its colonial oppressors.¹²Jarrett Martineau and Eric Ritskes, “Fugitive Indigeneity: Reclaiming the Terrain of Decolonial Struggle through Indigenous Art,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3, no. 1 (May 20, 2014), 1. The evasive nature of decolonial aesthetics is embodied in Speaking to their Mother, which  rejects the commodification of Indigenous art by being transient across multiple spaces, yet remaining deeply embedded in the sites it manifests itself in. It also rejects the cultural stability of modernity by allowing the latent potential of the work to be activated by many different authors.

The multiplicity of narratives that individual Indigenous people bring to Belmore’s performances and their subjectivity is what activates its true power. Rather than being confined to hegemonic stereotypes, Speaking to their Mother articulates collective Indigenous resistance against domination, while maintaining the diversity of Indigenous lifeways as fluid and dynamic. The following year in 1992, Belmore took the sculpture on tour to various Indigenous communities, creating ‘sites of gathering’ that served to illuminate the experiences of different individuals, and their diverse relationships to the various territories the work was performed in.¹³Taunton, 346. Language was also key in Belmore’s performance, as these differing contexts allowed the work to confront linguistic genocide by rendering the performances as illegible to the Western academy, facilitating the protection and survival of the various systems of Indigenous Knowledge.¹⁴Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Our Elder Brothers: The Lifeblood of Resurgence,” in Lighting the Eighth Fire (Winnipeg, MN: ARP Books, 2008), 79. In creating these sites of mediation, Belmore facilitates a vision of community and mobilization through the sharing of story, which in the eyes of Simpson is crucial in the practice of resurgence and protest against colonial marginalization.¹⁵Simpson, 18.

The work of Indigenous mobilization must not be tied to a particular place or time if it is to resist the imposed order of marginalization. This is the concept that allows Rebecca Belmore’s Speaking to their Mother to rise above the stable forms of colonialism and articulate a new vision of Indigenous existence outside Western narratives of victimhood and dispossession. While the work was created as a response to the conflict at Oka in 1991, land dispossession to this day continues to be the most egregious attack on Indigenous systems of knowledge.¹⁶Simpson, 21. Belmore’s work is an effective defense against this strategy, because it operates in a realm that evades the colonial academy, allowing it to exist outside the binary oppositions of the state and Indigeneity.

Gerald Vizenor wrote that Indigenous survivance is not a mere reaction to events, but an active repudiation of dominance; a practice that Speaking to their Mother continues to facilitate.¹⁷Vizenor, 100. Its timelessness can be attributed to the fact that it continues to open new discourses about Indigenous experience in a testament to its infinite potential. But the value of the work does not simply serve to evade settler colonialism. It also engages with a non-Indigenous audience in a way that forces us to confront our own complicity in the marginalization of Indigenous people in what is now Canada. By opening these discourses and creating a greater awareness of the issues that continue to affect Indigenous people, Belmore invites us to engage with the structures of coloniality in a critical manner. Facilitating this dual act of evasive performance and creating awareness is how Speaking to their Mother successfully functions as a practice of protest and survivance. It is then, this self-determined expression of communal Indigeneity that Rebecca Belmore chooses to use in fighting colonial domination, and in service to the pursuit of truth and justice.