Home and Away. Oh, and Land.

Rick Monture and I gave a talk today at the McMaster Museum, where my people (pictures drawn by artists on Cook's ship, including one of a wahine Maori, and one of Omai) and his people (the famous 'Four Kings' series of 4 full-length portraits featuring 3 Mohawk and 1 Mohican diplomats who travelled to London) are currently staying. The Maori portrait is from 1773 and the Kings turned 301 last year!

It was my first opportunity to speak in the general Toronto neck of the woods, and I was super-pleased and humbled that this first talk was alongside a local person (Rick is from Six Nations, a Reserve near Hamilton; this makes him tangata whenua) and in the company of a combination of students, staff, even a student I knew at Vic who is now doing his PhD at McMaster, and surrogate whanau of my own (Nadine and Sarah).

I have to say it was a great success: everyone seemed happy with how it went, and Rick and I enjoyed ourselves... including laughing a bit about how very different our styles are... testament indeed to the diversity of Indigenous people!! ;) About 50 people (according to my rough count) attended the talk, which was a fabulous (and also a little unexpected) number - apparently more than the opening of the exhibition of which these are a part! (Not that it's a competition of course - but we were just so stoked that there was such interest in Indigenous perspectives on this art.

Here's the promo poster:

I'll tell you what was funny, though. And not surprising when I think about it. But striking at the time. Oh, and totally unplanned and unscripted. Both Rick and I, as we talked about our engagements with these eighteenth century portraits of our ancestors, talked about history and representation... but also... drumroll please... land.

Neither of us had talked about land when we met a couple of weeks ago to talk about the paintings and plan the session - perhaps when two Indig ppl are talking about these matters this connection is taken as a given - but when the time came for us to talk publicly about these paintings this is what centred out talks. I asked Rick about it afterwards, publicly, in the Q & A session when the crowd had run out of questions and we were just about to wrap things up. I asked him why it was that we had both talked about land, and he was his usually clear-thinking and direct self.

We look at these ancestors and realise the sacrifices they made for us, and recognise that we in turn are charged to make sacrifices for the next generations. In the time since these were painted a lot has changed but the struggle in which they were engaged is also inherited by us. We also know that when we look at our ancestors we remember who we are. And who we are is where we are: land.