![]() “Struggling to get Indigenous artists recognized and accepted into the mainstream art world, that took decades. It was Houle who recommended McMaster for his first curatorial job in 1981 at what is now the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Que.īut he wasn’t being invited into an art gallery – he was being asked to curate Indigenous art in an institution that, in those days, considered it to be ethnographic material. He is not the first Indigenous curator to revolutionize settler art institutions, crediting Tom Hill, former director of the Woodland Cultural Centre in Brantford, Ont., and artist Robert Houle as the real pioneers. (It was named for the source of the paper, the pages of settler account books.) It made sense to McMaster because he has researched 19th-century ledger art, the transitional art of the Plains First Nations that mainly recorded battle exploits. Maybe we’re contributing a new, additional meaning to the notion of drawing.” So, I thought, maybe we’re on to something here. “When I looked up drawing in the dictionary, not one connotation indicated that drawing was a truthful act. Tapasinahike might be better translated as making a truthful mark or doing something in a truthful way. McMaster had always thought the Cree word, tapasinahike, which he had known since childhood, just meant “drawing.” But researching the language as an adult, he realized there were subtleties not contained in the English translation. It’s exciting because it’s much richer.”Īnd it can have critical implications. I think that’s the direction which we’ve been moving toward. “If you come to Canada, it is an Indigenous lens through which you are going to be seeing, and being presented with.
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