The Moonspeaker:
Where Some Ideas Are Stranger Than Others...

The Artists of the RCAP Report

When faced with acutely embarrassing and undeniable evidence of state-sanctioned crime, colonial governments with british heritage have a standard deflection tactic: establishment of an investigative commission. In canada, these are created as "royal commissions" on specific topics. Among the most famous are the "B & B" or "Bilingualism and Biculturalism" Commission and the "Bird" or "Commission on the Status of Women in Canada." Hence, the ultimate federal response to the resurgence into public visibility of Indigenous resistance to colonial violence and theft courtesy of the doughty Kanienkehaka of Akwesasne, Kahnawake, and Kahnesatake was the founding of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP), running from 1991 to 1995. This commission was co-led by Dene lawyer and politician Georges Erasmus and lawyer and judge René Dussault. To its credit, the RCAP commission and secretariat were committed to ensuring the subsequent report was comprehensive and thoroughly accessible to Indigenous people, including production of a glossy, 125-page executive summary book for the eventual five volumes of findings. The executive summary, titled People to People, Nation to Nation (People to People), is represented on the publications canada website by a disgraceful greyscale pdf. This wreaks havoc on the legibility of the photographs, graphs, and carefully selected artwork used to illustrate it. Besides disrespecting the achievement of this publication, including its unusual respect for the non-technical reader, it at best muffles the co-narrative created by the images. That is, there are at least three composed co-narratives: the main text, its apparatus of tables and graphs, and the artwork. "Artwork" is the best term to cover the different types of image subsequently photographed and inserted into the text.

People to People includes reproductions of seven different artworks by as many Indigenous artists, all held at the time of publishing by the then department of indian affairs and northern development. Each chapter ends with a reproduction one artwork, while the introduction and conclusion are framed by the endpapers, which reproduce a single artwork. Oddly, even though image credits for the artists and the photographer are duly provided on the last, unnumbered page of the main text, there are no artists's statements or biographies. Nor are the different artworks captioned, so unless the artist placed their signature and a title on the original work, the images are rendered enigmatic and mute to any but aficionados. This is quite a strange design choice, especially since in each case a caption could have been added at least at the bottom of the two-column layout after the main text. But then again, perhaps this would have forced captioning of the photographs by Fred Cattroll and Makivik Corporation. Those still could have been provided via at least an appendix with page number key. The photographs would be another project altogether. For now, let us turn to the co-narrative of the artists and their artworks, with at least less muffling. The images below are quotes of the photographs taken by Lawrence Cook at the department of indian and northern development, although it is not clear whether they were taken specifically for the RCAP report or derive from a collection catalogue.

Dans la maison d'Handiaouch, la petite tortue (1983). Mireille Siouï, Wendat.

Wendat multidisciplinary artist Mireille Siouï was born in 1950 into a large family including ten siblings. Her childhood was spent mainly on the Quarante Arpents and Lorette (now Wendake) reserves in the northern reaches of Wendat traditional territory in québec. To this day she remains a comparatively obscure artist, sometimes better known for her work in Wendat language revitalization than her art, which includes many pairs of moccasins Siouï made to earn a stipend during her art school studies from indian and northern affairs canada. Siouï has gone on to illustrate several books, curate expeditions, and design and write school curricula, as well as produce both commissioned and independent work. She has a particular love of intaglio engraving on zinc as a medium due to its subtlety of line and colour, although it is also an expensive medium. "Dans la maison d'Handiaouch, la petite tortue" is an intaglio piece, described by art historian Edith-Anne Pageot as "[Siouï's] great work, an engraving... [which] won a number of prizes and was made part of the travelling expedition Contemporary Indian and Inuit Art of Canada, planned and sponsored by the [federal] minister of external affairs in collaboration with the minister of indian affairs and northern canada, as well as the exposition Wendake, Sacred land, Living Land." Pageot quotes Siouï's description of this work, which literally translated is called "In the house of Handiacouch, the small turtle" referring to a Wendat story collected by anthropologist Marius Barbeau at the turn of the twentieth century. Whether or not a person is familiar with that specific story, they should be aware of the widely shared name for north america in Indigenous languages, Turtle Island. So it is that these endpapers covered in reproductions of this work remind us both that if we live in north america, we are living on Turtle Island, and that when we read the text of the RCAP executive summary, we are entering a smaller version of the very same place.

Moonstruck I (probably late 1980s). Joane Cardinal-Schubert, Blackfoot-Blood.

In vivid contrast to Mireille Siouï, Joane Cardinal-Schubert was a high-profile, controversial artist throughout her career, which began in the 1970s and continued until her untimely death from cancer in 2009. Born and raised in red deer, like many Indigenous people affected by the sexist blood quantum rules embedded in the canadian indian act, Cardinal-Schubert had to find her way back to the deeper artistic and spiritual aspects of her Blackfoot culture. This led her into study of Blackfoot history and their encounter with the genocidal residential school system. Indeed, her examination of residential schools spurred one of her most powerful, break through works, an installation and performance called The Lesson. As this suggests, Cardinal-Schubert, though primarily a painter, nevertheless maintained a vigorous multidisciplinary practice, as well as teaching, curating galleries and showings, and leading foundational work in the Indigenous art scene in canada. The edited memorial essay collection The Writing on the Wall provides enough examples of her paintings, installations, and mixed media works to identify Moonstruck I as likely dating to the late 1980s, since by the early 1990s her paintings had shifted to complex renditions of quilts and then swiftly into her Warshirt series. This painting, unmistakably located in somewhere between the red deer and bow rivers, is placed after the introduction and therefore just before Chapter 1 "Looking Forward, Looking Back" of People to People. So far it has not been possible to find what, if anything Cardinal-Schubert wrote to go with this piece, with its ghostly bison and view of the foothills rising up into the westmost edges of the rocky mountains. The bison could be representative of the past, yet as bison habitat restoration and reintroduction of bison continues, they are also a vision of the future. So too are the mountains of the background.

Raven Woman (1990s). Roger Simon, Elsipogtag Mi'kmaq.

A member of the prominent Elsipogtag family famous for its writers and educators, Roger Simon was born in 1954, passing away in 2000 due to complications of chronic arthritis. It seems that if an Indigenous artist is primarily a painter who makes strong use of colour lazy art critics have a habit of comparing them to Paul Gauguin, as this was done to both Cardinal-Schubert and Simon early in their careers. Frustration with such racist nonsense may have affected them both, as Cardinal-Schubert restricted her palette for a time and Simon entered a period of still bright-coloured by texturally hyper-real paintings. This did not prevent Simon from winning many commissions, and he received may requests to license his images for products such as post cards and book illustrations. In another parallel with Cardinal-Schubert, there is little information available about Raven Woman, including a lack of reflections or comments by Simon himself. It is a fascinating painting likely to be misunderstood as somehow connected to the northwest coast instead of the northeast, due to its name and the mask and carving in the foreground. Yet a more careful look immediately brings such an impression into question. After all the woman's clothing is certainly not consistent with the traditional regalia of her northwest coast counterparts, even before the colours and the basket of corn and squash to her right give the game away. How appropriate then that this painting precedes Chapter 2, "Restructuring the Relationship" and its emphasis on Indigenous nationhood, self-governance, the necessity for a just resolution to land distribution, and respect and support for Indigenous-led economic development.

The Visit (1987). Jim Logan, Métis.

Jim Logan is Métis born in 1955 into a middle class family in port coquitlam, british columbia, a part of the suburban sweep of Métis families and neighbourhoods around vancouver. He began his professional career as a graphic designer, building a market and client base for his painting until he was able to leave office work behind, moving to prince george, another old Métis community hub in the province. Much of Logan's work falls within a Métis-specific painting genre which could be called Métis "rurban" realism, due to how often it traces relationship through space and/or time between rural and city settings using an at once realistic and abstracted representation of people, spirits, and things. In this he joins the effective (though not formal) school established by Leah Dorion and Sherry Farrell-Racette, and all three are influenced by such woodland style artists as Norval Morriseau and Daphne Odjig. The relationships between urban and rural, or indeed Indigenous and colonist settings are not necessarily comfortable ones. The Visit just precedes his series "Requiem for Our Children" concerning the impact of residential schools as he observed it living in the village of Kwanlin Dün in the yukon from 1983 to 1988. There is something faintly uneasy about The Visit as a painting, typical of Logan's style overall, but in this case perhaps because it positions the viewer as the visitor, or is the family waiting for a different visitor? The home seems crowded and claustrophobic between the laundry line, woodpile, and six probably family members. The image sets the stage for Chapter Three, "Gathering Strength," which begins simply and bluntly by stating, "Aboriginal people endure ill-health, run-down and over-crowded housing, polluted water, inadequate schools, poverty and family breakdown at rates found more often in developing countries than in Canada. These conditions are inherently unjust. They also imperil the future of Aboriginal communities and nations." It is fair to say in this case the connection between image and chapter is blunt.

Buffalo Hierophany (1992). Jane Ash-Poitras, Mikisew Cree.

Jane Ash Poitras is one among many Indigenous people who on the untimely death of their mother ended up adopted out of her community and thereby disconnected from it and her culture during her early life. Her adoptive mother strove to ensure she was well-educated, resorting to home schooling when elementary school administrators initially insisted Poitras was "mentally disabled." After such a difficult start, Poitras initially focussed on other areas of study on reaching post-secondary education, completing a degree in microbiology. In the process of reconnecting to her heritage and community, Poitras also returned to her interest and love of fine art, pursuing study of print-making, painting, and sculpture. She too is a multidisciplinary artist, among whose works is an important series of complex prints with a distinctive, collage-style effect. Buffalo Hierophany is a lithograph print that is now part of the city of calgary's public art collection. The print reminds the viewer of the wanton settler destruction of the buffalo, which today many canadians understand differently due to James Daschuk's critical history of the Indigenous starvation policies of the John A. MacDonald governments, Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life (University of Regina Press, 2013). Yes, Poitras reminds us of the terrible slaughter on the plains, and also of sacredness and survival against all odds. There is both a stylized image and a clip from a photograph of a real buffalo in this image. Buffalo Hierophany introduces Chapter 4 of People to People, "Perspectives and Realities," which intends to demonstrate the diversity of Indigenous peoples and nations caught up within what is currently called canada. In other words, this chapter challenges stereotypes of Indigenous peoples and nations that deny their existence as such, along with their specific cultures, histories, and complex societies. Perhaps Buffalo Hierophany reminded many non-Indigenous people of the ersatz plains indians of westerns, which the various photographs intermeshed with descriptions of Inuit and Métis as well as First Nations promptly debunk. However, Poitras's print emphasizes the buffalo, and it is easy to lose the implied point that the buffalo also constitute a nation, one of the many nations of plant and animal beings on whose support humans depend.

Granny Teaches Grandchildren (1992). Elsie (Klengenberg) Anaginak, Inuvialuit.

Elsie Anaginak is one of the leading Inuvialuit artists involved in the world-famous Inuit art industry. Inuit sculpture and clothing had long been items of at least minor trade as more and more outsiders visited or intruded on their lands, but at first this was very minor. After all, the vast majority of these items were in fact part of an Inuit person's equipment, designed and required for daily life up north. But as colonialism and constant interference negatively impacted traditional economic structures, Inuit began rapidly adapting older skills and adopting those they found useful from the newcomers. With access to paper and the supplies for drawing, painting, and print making, the distinctive styles and iconography of Inuit artists soon drew considerable interest. Anaginak took part of much of this development from the start, as she was born in 1946 and began her own art practice in 1980 when she took up drawing. Having moved to Ulukhaktok, Anaginak joined the community of people working in the print studios. She, Mary Okheena, and Mabel Nigiyok developed a stencilling technique allowing production of prints with tones and layering in addition to flat washes, spurring an efflorescence of remarkable images. Many of Anaginak and other Inuit artist's prints feature in Inuit government documents, including such important publications as plain language guides to the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement. Granny Teaches Grandchildren gives a hint of Anaginak's broader ouvre, which ranges from scenes of day to day human life on the land to illustrations of Inuit stories to snapshots of animals engaged in their own activities and conflicts. Her print sets the stage for Chapter 5 of People to People, "Renewal: A Twenty-Year Commitment." Not so long ago in settler cultures as well as Indigenous ones, it was customary for elders to play an important role in the raising and training of children. They expressed their longterm commitment to their families and communities by doing these things, and in turn their families and communities supported and cared for them. People better understood that their love and care for their elders was not just about them as individuals or their families, but also about caring for their communities' survival into the future. Chapter 5 of People to People strives to express an analogous commitment together with a plan for the longterm work necessary to improve relationships between Indigenous peoples and the canadian state. The plan has regularly been sniped at by settlers for supposedly taking "too long" and being "too expensive" rather than the much desired cheap, feel good, showy fix to fob Indigenous peoples off again. Meanwhile, Indigenous peoples including those once portrayed as least able to understand and adapt "modern" technology let alone invent any, the Inuit, have demonstrated the exact opposite again and again, including the example of the printmaking techniques represented by Anaginak's print.

Mother Earth's Juneberry Soup (circa mid 1990s). Bob Boyer, Cree Métis.

Perhaps best known for his series "Blanket Statements," Bob Boyer was a prolific Métis painter born in prince albert, saskatchewan in 1948. He went professional in 1971, subsequentlyjoining the then saskatchewan indian federated college (SFIC) in 1978. With nearly a decade of further development as an artist combined with a growing reputation as an activist and powwow dancer, he began experimenting with abstraction and different supports for his paintings. His blanket statements began in 1983 and continued until 1994, painted on cotton blankets rather than standard stretched canvas. According to the art gallery biographies, his later painted blankets are less political than his earlier ones, by which they seem to mean white people are no longer their subject or even necessarily their audience. The juneberry, the succulent and beloved fruit of Indigenous peoples across the prairies and parklands, has many other names, including saskatoon and serviceberry. Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote a beautiful essay-ode to this berry for emergence magazine in october 2022 that has since been published as a chapbook. Wall Kimmerer's essay is also a profound meditation on sharing, gift-giving, and the meaning of a sharing and sustainable economy in both economic and especially social terms that include all people and other than human beings. Juneberries in soup, jam, or wonderful handfuls are popular feast and fast-breaking foods in Indigenous communities wherever they grow. Truth be told, I am not at all convinced this later blanket statement is less political than Boyer's first from 1983, A Smallpox Issue. By then he was already four years into his nearly twenty year tenure as department head of the department of indian fine arts at SFIC, and a revered instructor in art and art history. On reading some online biographies provided by art galleries, an unwary reader might conclude Boyer never travelled anywhere, or at least the writers were astonished Boyer resided for his whole life in saskatchewan. This is both quite unfair to saskatchewan, and a bit comical because among his most formative travels was his 1983 trip to mongolia with an SFIC delegation. Mother Earth's Juneberry Soup marks the end of the main narrative in People to People, and the reader is passed back to the Commission's framing of their findings.

The Commissioners spent considerable effort to downplay that the evidence they gathered had led them into a paradox, exacerbated by their own position. As they note in one of their own favoured pull quotes in the "Last Words,"

The changes we propose are not modest. We do not suggest tinkering with the Indian Act or launching shiny new programs. What we propose is fundamental, sweeping and perhaps disturbing – but also exciting, liberating, ripe with possibilities.

The Commission as a whole was a creature of federal legislation, with the official task of (capitalization and accents or lack thereof follow the original):

[I]investigat[ing] the evolution of the relationship among aboriginal peoples (Indian, Inuit and Metis), the Canadian government, and Canadian society as a whole. It should propose specific solutions, rooted in domestic and international experience, to the problems with have plagues those relationships and which confront aboriginal peoples today. The Commission should examine all issues which it deems to be relevant to any or all of the aboriginal peoples of Canada, and in particular, should investigate and make specific recommendations concerning...

Evidently this is no trivial remit. However, the practical desired outcome of RCAP's hearings and final report was to defuse the anger and energy of Indigenous peoples and thoughtful settler allies all over canada who wanted real change and an end to colonialism. There was no way the Commission could totally please everyone, nor could they state bluntly and without fanfare:

Canada has been and is now committing genocide against Indigenous people and it must stop.

So on reaching the last reader's page, with its wonderful photograph of a beaming child from fort chipewyan, alberta, many readers will be uneasy. But for those less inclined to sympathize with or take seriously Indigenous concerns, there is one more page with the image credits, and the last endpaper ornamented with Siouï's print Dans la maison d'Handiaouch, la petite tortue, stepping back out to the colonizer's world. Or have we?

Dans la maison d'Handiaouch, la petite tortue unlike the other selected images, has no edges. On closer examination, we can see Siouï's design allows for it to be tiled smoothly across a larger surface by repetition. And while I have mainly discussed its use on the endpapers of People to People, it was used on the front and back covers too. Whatever designer Miriam Bloom intended, the result is wonderfully subversive and pointed for any reader. North america is Turtle Island, the land remains Indigenous, it is colonialism and the state of being a "settler" that is fleeting.