For painter, curator, and art writer David Garneau, decolonisation is not only a matter of restoration of Indigenous lands. It is also a matter of Indigenous creative sovereignty, the conditions in which Indigenous contemporary art and culture are neither reconciled with the white Settler gaze nor subordinated to the ontological hierarchy of Western modernity. For Garneau, who is Métis – an Indigenous people whose name derives from the French word for persons with “mixed” European and Indigenous ancestry and whose homelands include much of central Canada and parts of the northern United States – this entails the development of Indigenous critique of Indigenous art, a project that he has undertaken for over two decades.
As he argues in ‘Can I Get A Witness’, his contribution to Office of Contemporary Art Norway’s 2018 publication Sovereign Words: “If our [Indigenous] labour is to be more than a tributary to mainstream art, and if our lives are to exceed the sum of our privileges… we need our work not only to be recognised by mainstream witnesses, but engaged, critically, by Indigenous people.”
One example of such engagement is his incisive and multilayered 2020 essay ‘Writing about Indigenous Art with Critical Care’, in which a close reading of The Scream (2017), a realist history painting of colonial violence by the well-known Cree artist Kent Monkman, plays a crucial role. Arguing against an ethical paradigm in art writing that, by uncritically affirming Indigenous identities, “positions us as permanently in a representational rather than a dialogic mode,” Garneau puts forward provisional strategies for what he calls “non-colonial forms of critical art writing” that aim beyond polite appreciation and the alleviation of white Settler guilt.
Garneau is currently professor and department head of visual arts at the University of Regina (whose main campus is on Treaty 4 lands, the traditional territories of the nêhiyawak, Anihšināpēk, Nakoda, Dakota, and Lakota peoples and the homeland of the Métis/Michif Nation) and in 2023, was the recipient of the Canada Council for the Arts’ prestigious Governor General Award for outstanding contribution to the field of visual arts.
In this conversation, which took place over zoom, we talk about the thin boundary between artist and artwork, the relative uselessness of Settler-authored reviews, and the global emergence, during recent years, of an Indigenous critical community.
You worked for many years as an art critic, writing and editing for a number of publications in Canada and abroad, and co-founding a magazine, Artichoke (1989–2005). In 2011, you stopped writing art criticism. Why?
I wrote and edited art criticism from 1987 to 2011: locally, in Calgary; nationally, for Canadian Art, Vie des Arts, BorderCrossings, C Magazine, Fuse, and others; and a few international publications. My primary interest was considering and promoting what I saw as underrepresented artists and media from my region: craft, especially ceramics; art by women and gender non-conforming folks; and by Indigenous artists. Most art reviews of that era and region were either promotional profiles that did not take the art seriously as thought or were ossified by academic discourse. I wanted to write accessible reviews that were informed by contemporary theory but did not grind reader into boredom.
In 1999, I took up a tenure-track post in studio art at the University of Regina. The new position, and a welcoming reception by Indigenous people here, had me shift my art making, writing, and later, curating, to focus on my Métis heritage and on Indigenous art more generally. As I became more involved in Indigenous art and thought communities, I questioned the value of adversarial critique. My method in the 90s was phenomenological. I rarely read what the artist or others wrote about the piece and I never talked with the artist. Perhaps I thought I could reach an objective truth through deep reading. As I began engaging Indigenous art, and other less familiar work, this method needed support if I was to understand the work within its larger context. I also needed more words. So, I gradually shifted to catalogue essays, features, public and academic talks, and book chapters.
I also eased out of reviews because while I value thoughtful, emotionally sensitive, intuitive, and clever writing about art, I derive less pleasure from dealing with the political and commercial side of the art world, where feelings can be hurt and status jarred by a perceptive sentence. I shifted to longer form critical art writing and academic-ish writing, so I could be less weather vane and more rudder.
You’ve also talked about being exhausted by playing the role of “Native informant,” noting that it positions the Indigenised subject in a representational rather than dialogical mode.
In anthropology, the Native informant is a go-between who shares their community’s cultural information to an anthropologist. They are usually not a central figure in their community. That they can communicate with the anthropologist in his or her language means they are already enculturated by the outsider’s ways of knowing and being and therefore may offer information selected, translated, and edited in a mode that the scientist can understand. To be a Native informant is to be never quite one’s self but always representing. The interpreter re-presents and does not produce something new.
For example, First Nations Elders are often invited by non-Indigenous institutions not for a discourse, not to figure things out together, but to explain their culture. That is the representational rather than dialogic mode. A lot of Indigenous folks find this tiresome. It assumes Indigenous knowledge is fixed, an artefact, a commodity. While it is important to share Indigenous histories and worldviews, First Nations, Inuit, and Métis also want to experiment, to play, to learn, and to get on with making things that are astounding to both Indigenous and non-Indigenous folks.
To what extent has your work as an artist informed your approach to writing?
I completed a Master’s degree in American literature [1993] rather than studio art because I was hungry for theory. Literary theory seemed to be ahead of visual theory at that time. I needed a parallel discourse to test art theory against. I also wanted to hone my writing and thinking skills. I was mesmerised by the idea that literary criticism and literature were conducted in the same medium, while visual art and its criticism were not. I was excited by what non-linguistic forms such as visual art could offer writers, theorists, and readers. My current paintings, and many of my past works, reveal little about myself and are not primarily designed for affect. They are meant to be aesthetically pleasing, but also thoughtful. I want to generate ideas and associations that have no confident linguistic or literary translation. I am currently working on a book, Dark Chapters, where twenty writers, mostly poets, respond to twenty of my still life paintings. I can’t wait to read what these folks make of/with the pictures.
As an artist, I am less moved by someone liking my work than I am in their attempting to read it. ‘Read’ in the sense of engage beyond subjective sensation and toward meanings that can be conveyed and shared. As a writer, I think, feel, sense, and intuit as deeply as I can with the work of art. My writing is a letter to the artist, a co-respondence that demonstrates – I hope – that I comprehend their project, perhaps even grasp something the work conveys but that they are not entirely conscious of.
An Indigenous point of view recognises that everything is animate and many things have personhood. Animation often depends on proximity to others, to use, and visiting. In every culture, works of art are ascribed being – ontological status – in excess of their status as mere real things. Art writing is a form of visiting, of animation, of bringing things to life. I am searching for a critical method that has care, that takes the artist’s personality and feelings into account, but that also includes critique – a potentially painful method that may stimulate positive growth.
While I abandoned reviews nearly about fourteen years ago, I still write some art criticism. ‘Writing about Indigenous Art with Critical Care’, for example, considers a painting by Kent Monkman. In part, the article models how we might write about Indigenous art in a way that understands the work’s project while also critiquing its delivery and aesthetics. Monkman’s painting and the traumas he illustrates [the Canadian government’s seizure of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children for incarceration and assimilation in church-run Indian Residential Schools] had become fused. To critique the art could seem to diminish the content. It is tricky business, but not impossible. I felt that, as in comedy, I was punching up not down. He is a public figure making public art that deserves public critique.
In that particular essay, which was first published in C Magazine, you put forward provisional strategies towards what you call “non-colonial forms of art writing.” How do you define a non-colonial approach, and in what ways do current forms and approaches to art writing reproduce Settler-colonial relations?
I used the phrase co-respondences earlier to describe my attitude to long form critical art writing. When in a non-colonial moment of writing, I am in a relationship with the work of art or exhibition. I understand the art things are animate. They have meanings and being. I try to correspond with them through language, find and describe the connection. Writing is correspondence with the work and with the artist. I find myself corresponding, aligning with what I see. There are dissonances too, which may be due to my insensitivity or a poor choice by the artist. This is a moment of equal meeting on a shared territory. We come to treaty, to understand each other, appreciate our distance/difference while sharing space.
A colonial critical attitude seeks to impose an order that is composed in advance of the encounter. It looks for rather than co-responds with. Non-colonial critical art writing is interested rather than disinterested. This is not to suggest that the only non-adversarial critical possibility is subjectivity. There are intra-subjective experiences that feel like truth. And there are truths that are local rather than universal. Non-colonial critical art writing has no will to an objectivity beyond fidelity.
Some well-meaning Settler art writers are so concerned about the prohibition on ‘telling the story of another’ that they retreat into a hyper-subjectivity. One that, ironically, re-centres themselves rather than being decentred by an Indigenous presence. As per the colonial project, the Settler consciousness is restored as the subject and the Indigenous artwork returns as the stimulating object. Autofiction and related styles are important disorientations of colonial forms of writing, but this resurrection of the author needs to be threaded to robust collective counter-narratives if it is to rise above entertainment and become critical and actionable. The task is to create a text that is self-conscious – in the sense of showing its strings, its constructedness – but also its alignment to narratives beyond itself. It indicates the situatedness of the author while presenting truths that resonate beyond that author, that subject, that artwork, to other people and artworks that have yet to be produced.
An allure of high Modernist criticism – Clement Greenberg, etc. – is that personal preference was welded to a coherent worldview. One convincing enough to inspire art production, not just report on it. Non-colonial critical art writing and making has a similar possibility except that, unlike Modernist critical thinking and making, it is more interested in communities rather than isolated artists, and in representation rather than a retreat from the real.
In that essay, you also emphasise description, which is often diminished in today’s discussions about art writing, as key to writing with critical care. It’s a way of humbling yourself before the object.
Description is the effort to re-present what you see while restraining the impulse to explain what you know to be there. It is a humility before the object. It is observing your mind’s struggle to be objective. The impossibility of the task does not mean we should not pursue it. The effort reveals your desires, preferences, ideology, and blind spots. The attempt is to make denotative descriptions, descriptions every reasonable person can agree upon, that then allow you to build toward more connotative accounts that are rhetorically, intellectually, and emotionally convincing. Description slows things down, has us understand the work before inscribing our projections it. Description is seeing with rather than looking for.
You distinguish between Native, Aboriginal, and Indigenous, terms that many readers would consider synonyms. Can you elaborate on the differences and overlaps between these categories – when and how they might be useful?
It began for me as a curatorial problem. Starting around twenty years ago, I noticed Indigenous curators pulling together works that were unrelated beyond Indigenous authorship and, sometimes, formal qualities. Fishing nets were hung alongside video art. While all the artists were Indigenous, their differences were more evident than were their similarities. The curatorial desire was to erase divisions between creative activities as colonial impositions. Similarly, self-taught, rural makers and urban artists with MFAs were brought together for openings and panels. Here, the differences were the most poignantly pronounced. They barely talked to each other. Their discourses were as different from each other as were their lifeways. Clearly, we need to name and understand these differing modes of Indigenous being.
Each of these seeming synonyms actually correspond to different time periods and identities. Indian was a colonial term used from 1692 until the 1960s. It was gradually replaced by Aboriginal then First Nations and First Peoples. Indigenous has been the preferred term for the past twenty-five years or so. Native is a more general term to cover all three identities. Native or First Peoples is a political designation to cover a huge range of people. These folks use these catch-alls as well, but prefer to have their local names also announced: Cree, Tahltan, etc.
Indigenous art is not one thing or simply numerous things, but three modes and discourses. Traditional, customary, or cultural works are creative things made by a community for their members or as gifts. Traditional or customary refer to this internal intellectual and aesthetic economy. For example, Haida [whose territory is in modern-day northwest British Columbia] make totem poles, masks, and regalia whose designs are proprietary, usually hereditary. Only select makers can produce and reproduce certain imagery. Copyrights are internally controlled. Innovations are permitted, but restricted. Outside criticism is completely irrelevant.
Before colonisation, Indigenous Peoples living in Northern Turtle Island [Canada] did not understand themselves as a single People. They were as separate as the Finnish are from Southern Italians. Upon contact, these diverse groups became one conceptual and political people: ‘Indians’. Soon, these folks began to regard themselves as politically aligned insofar as they recognised that they had more in common with other First Peoples than with their colonisers. By the middle of the last century, ‘Indian’ was replaced by ‘Aboriginal’. I see this word as marking an identity shift rather than just a semantic one. An Aboriginal person is a First Nations, Inuit, or Métis who identifies with their construction within the Canadian state. They struggle between their traditional identities and communities and assimilation. Aboriginal art, though it may reference the artist’s home community’s traditional art and knowledge, typically uses Euro-American contemporary mediums and is informed by those traditions. But its main feature is that it is produced for non-Indigenous museums, art galleries, offices, and homes. Aboriginal art discourse is also non-Indigenous. Because Aboriginal art is primarily made for Settler consumption, it is available for Settler collection, curation, and criticism.
What are you referring to when you use the word Indigenous?
Indigenous refers to First Peoples who connect not only with other First Peoples living under the same colonial regime – say, Canada – but also align with First Peoples around the world. While this identity has been brewing in Canada at least since Expo 67 [in Montreal], it became more visible in 1992 with Indigenous artistic and curatorial responses to Settler celebrations of [Christopher] Columbus. It was cemented by the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007. The main feature of Indigenous being is self-consciousness, collective consciousness, and a drive for decolonisation, including the restoration of Native title [Land Back], self-governance, and cultural and creative sovereignty.
Indigenous folks understand themselves to be formed by a traditional culture and within colonisation – a condition that shapes not only the individual, but also their community, and other individuals and communities under the same or similar colonisers. We are not the same people, but we are formed within similar colonial institutions. In terms of art, the drive to self-governance has led to rise in Indigenous curation of Indigenous art, including large, international, exhibitions and Indigenous writing about Indigenous art. We see each other’s exhibitions, read each other’s books and articles. We connect online and in person when we can. Indigenous is a blanket term for all First People, but I use it to signal a different consciousness and mode of being.
Let me illustrate what I have been taking about with my personal account of transforming from Aboriginal to Indigenous. I grew up in the Canadian Prairies. I hadn’t travelled much. I understood myself as a Métis person with certain meanings and relations. In 2008, I was invited by the Indigenous Curatorial Collective to join five other Aboriginal curators to travel to Australia to meet Aboriginal curators and artists there. My meeting with First Nations and Métis curators the previous year was a jolt. I recognised that we had similar backgrounds and missions. I now saw myself as Métis but that description had to be expanded to include Aboriginal as a marker of my new understanding and new relations.
Australia provided another shock. Upon arriving, we met with Elders in a circle. I could have been back home. They describe near identical forms of colonisation: genocide, Indigenous abduction into residential schools, stolen generations, continuous racism, segregation, poverty, out-sized incarceration, etc. And when I saw the art and met with curators, it was clear out missions were identical. We were Métis and Cree, Bininj and Arrernte, Aboriginal, but also Indigenous. I have returned more than a dozen times to visit, give keynotes, co-curate exhibitions, and learn.
In ‘Can I Get a Witness’, you argue for the establishment of an Indigenous critical community – a critical discourse that centres Indigenous subjectivity and is written by the community for the community, sheltered from the white Settler gaze – grounded in Indigenous creative and territorial sovereignty. What indications are there that such a community is developing?
Indigenous represents a turn from Settler discourse and institutions as the source of legitimation. Indigenous artists, curators, writers, and academics continue to work within Settler institutions but turn to each other for information, affirmation, status, and critique. Indigenous often also includes a turn from Western institutions and a re-turn to Traditional Native sources for knowledge and community. This includes learning original languages, protocols, customary art materials, methods, and meanings, and other cultural forms lost or disrupted in the great erasure of Indian Residential Schools and other means of aggressive assimilation.
Indigenous, however, does not usually entail submission to local – colonised – Aboriginal political authority. So, there are two types of community for Indigenous artists: the international Indigenous community of artists, curators, writers, etc., and the individual artist’s link to their home community. As things progress, I see fewer Indigenous artists chasing the cosmopolitan mode. Many travel, to be sure, but are looking to be grounded, to make art that makes sense within their local community and connects with others who engage their own local communities.
Can you give an example?
There are so many. The tip of the iceberg includes the large national and international Indigenous-curated exhibitions of Indigenous art, for example: Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art [2013] and Àbadakone | Continuous Fire [2019] both at the National Gallery of Canada, Puhoro ō mua, Puhoro ki tua [2019], at Waikato Museum, Wellington, Aotearoa/NZ, the National Indigenous Art Triennial (Australia). But there are numerous other Indigenous-curated exhibitions – a phenomenon unthinkable thirty-five years ago.
A lesser-known but foundational project is Métis artist Christi Belcourt’s Walking with Our Sisters [2012-2019]. I hesitate to say Christi Belcourt’s. While she initiated and shepherded the project, the work was distributed among numerous people and more than two dozen communities. In 2012, Christi put out a call through social media for folks to bead six hundred pairs of vamps [the top part of a moccasin] to honour and commemorate murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls. The response was overwhelming. She had to stop receiving vamps when they reached 1,725 pairs. Beading circles sprung up. Folks were excited to engage their traditional culture, join a local community of beaders, have their and their loved ones’ voices heard, but also to participate in a large art project. I, who had never beaded before, made a pair. The vamps were collected and toured to twenty-five communities. The exhibition took over art galleries and community halls. Each site was managed by a team of women who ran the site according to local Indigenous protocols, which included smudging, skirts, visiting, etc.
The importance of this project is impossible to describe in this short space. It begins with Christi Belcourt initiating it, but stepping back to let communities do the work as they thought best. It is also remarkable that folks not used to dealing with art and art institutions managed to curate these exhibitions and negotiate novel use of these spaces with the art galleries. It was thrilling to see the range of beaded works which were strong in themselves but jaw-dropping in the aggregate. One of the long-term consequences is a resurgence in Indigenous beadwork, including contemporary high art forms. There have been several remarkable exhibitions of contemporary beading that includes traditional and contemporary work, the most important being the currently touring Radical Stitch, curated by Sherry Farrell Racette, Cathy Mattes, and Michelle Lavallee.
To me, [Walking with Our Sisters] is the best form of the Indigenous I have seen, as not only is Indigenous art curated by Indigenous curators, but the art engages both traditional forms and contemporary content; it attracted both art audiences and local community members; the artists and artworks were democratised by the larger cause and the non-hierarchical display methodology – both the works and artists mixed well! – and the project inspired countless artists and related projects.
You also claim that Settler-authored criticism, no matter how empathetic or solidary, is of limited use to the broader project of decolonisation.
Non-Indigenous allies are essential to non-colonial futures. Settler and Indigenous folks alike struggle with their oppression under colonisation, and will both benefit from a more equitable and sustainable future. However, the struggle is uneven. Settlers have the added pressure of the temptation of slipping back into old habits and privileges if things get tough in a way Indigenous folks cannot. Settlers – that is, people who wittingly or unwittingly identify with and perpetuate the colonial project – have to be kept from some aspects of the Indigenous. Irreconcilable spaces of Indigeneity include secret and sacred knowledge and ceremony; Indigenous-only gatherings, including talking circles.
However, once an Indigenous artist presents their work beyond their Traditional community bubble, once it enters the non-Indigenous art world, it is subject to critique and interpretation. I would rather have non-Indigenous folks consider this work, critically, than ignore it. They may miss some aspects, but they will perceive others. It only becomes a symptom of the colonial attitude when that gaze attempts to be conclusive, authoritative, and seeks to own, control, or otherwise claim it.
I rarely use the word decolonisation because it describes an indefinable and therefore impossible project. At least in Northern Turtle Island, it cannot mean Europeans restoring our lands and returning home. That ship has sailed. Everything after that is a compromise to Indigenous fundamentalism. To some minds, Indigenous is the opposite of Enlightenment, capitalist, patriarchal, etc., thought and behaviour, and decolonisation is the restoration of Indigenous order in Indigenous territories. This requires great feats of Romantic imagination and repression.
What is called Indigenous in academic circles is a selective construction well-informed by socialist feminisms. The narrative does not resemble what you see on reserves. Things are messy. Most First Nations, Inuit, and Métis have large helpings of European genes and have adopted, or were forced to accept, Western languages, values, technology, and so on. These things cannot be teased apart. I prefer non-colonial as a way of describing a possible future that restores what we can salvage from pre-contact Indigenous ways of knowing and being and that can be adapted to meet present and future needs. It is neither fundamentalist nor Romantic. Decolonisation is about undoing. Non-colonial is about doing otherwise.
What are talking circles?
A talking circle is a meeting method I know from the Plains. In one version, a group of people form a circle and take turns speaking. A person talks as long as they need to without interruption and then off goes the next one, clockwise, until everyone has had their say. Another version has a small centre circle with concentric rings of observers. A round may take an hour or several hours. They might go through several cycles. The idea is that everyone is equal, is seen and heard, without interruption. There are all kinds of wisdom in the design. It is a form of collective critical thinking. Indigenous scholars, curators, and artists frequently use this method in addition to others. Whatever the method, for the last decade or so, groups like the Indigenous Curatorial Collective, and Indigenous academics, have gathered in Indigenous only, or Indigenous with very select allies, to think through issues of contemporary modes of Indigeneity.
You didn’t use the word separatist, but –
I recognize irreconcilable spaces of Indigeneity as a form of necessary separatism in that these are the only sites protected from the colonial gaze and physical intrusion, and the source of Indigenous past, present, and futures. At the same time, I see Settler and Indigenous futures as entangled. Treaty is necessary but not all-encompassing.
The Westbank First Nation in West Kelowna, British Columbia, was a poor community until they settled their land claim. Now they are rich landlords. While capitalist, they have not rejected the communitarian and environmentalist aspects of their Indigeneity. They are providing for the community, are restoring the salmon run, etc. They have a small museum. While it features the Sncewips language, English is equally present because they want to be legible beyond their borders. They are sovereign, self-governing, but neighbourly.
You mention legibility. What role does that play in negotiations not only internally among Indigenous communities, but with communities on the outside?
The great challenge, here, is between legibility and legitimation. We want to be understood but not appropriated, visible but not consumed. This means being seen but not owned, enjoyed but not taken away. Again, artworks are beings like people. For people with a history of having their land, best things, and people taken, contemporary Indigenous folks are sensitive about how they and their things are treated. The current need is for Indigenous folks to handle Indigenous belongings and people.
You’ve likened the dominant art discourse to a necropolis. Given this, to what extent might Settler publications – major international ones such as Artforum, but also smaller platforms such as Kunstkritikk – support the development of non-colonial art criticism?
I was referring to heritage museums as necropolises if they value the dead over the living; if they preserve rather than re-create Indigenous belongings; and if their present is dominated by desires and policies from their ancestors. I suppose the same holds true for art publications. It is interesting to see how previous critics shifted from othering Indigenous art as either primitive or, if contemporary, not authentic, not primitive enough, to, under Modernism, seeing it as art if only approached formally. I can imagine a future where art magazines do more than showcase Indigenous art and thinkers, when they engage in a transformative discourse. While I advocate for sovereign Indigenous display territories – Indigenous curation and critique of Indigenous art – once non-Indigenous folks educate themselves and have something to offer besides space and money there will be grounds for collaboration. In the meantime, space and money are a start. Decolonisation is impossible without Indigenous occupation and transformation of Settler institutions, including critical ones.
Non-colonial criticism of Indigenous art by non-Indigenous folks begins by not assuming that the necessary engagement is between the coloniser and the colonised. How interesting it would be, for example, to have a Nigerian art critic read a Peter Morin [Tahltan] performance!
Under what circumstances would you return to writing art criticism?
If I were to return to writing reviews, I would establish an ethical guideline. I would have to be seized by a sense of mission with each piece, be able to articulate why I am engaging the work. I would need the writing to have value beyond expression and evaluation. It would have to serve that larger cause, whether that was revealing aspects of colonialism or a glimpse of Indigenous ways of knowing and being through the artwork and its/our articulation.
