Kent Monkman’s Miss Chief Eagle Testickle: a Portrait (profiled in the May issue), left me wondering what has changed in how Canadian society imagines the Indian^{* (huh?)Just to be clear: The Indian here refers to Daniel Francis’s definition of “the Indian as the invention of the European . . . [and] anything non-Natives wanted them to be,” and is not to be confused with First Nations people living in Canada today.} since Paul Kane’s majestic braves captivated British North America in the mid-nineteenth century.

For the last three months, on my daily, three-kilometre stroll from Trinity Bellwoods to The Walrus office, the Indian has greeted me twice. Across the street from the Meeting Place, a drop-in frequented by addicts and the homeless, including some First Nations people, a bare-chested Indian stands on a tree stump. Leather straps, a shade darker than his bronzed skin, are knotted around his bulging biceps, a matching leather bag filled with tobacco drapes across his chest down to his green, fringed suede pants. He gazes up at the grotty Reverb nightclub, feather headdress tilted back, right hand blocking his eyes from the perennial sun. Red paint marks his handsome chiseled face like battle scars. His lips are perfect. At “West Side OPEN LATE Tobacco� the cigar store Indian kept a daily vigil (the store mysteriously closed up shop and left, with its Indian, last week). But no fear: the made-in-the-Philippines, cigar-store Indian marks a number of Toronto tobacconists. (Yorkville’s classy Thomas Hinds Tobacconist keeps its wooden Indian tastefully indoors.)

The cigar store Indian, a nod to the association of First Nations people introducing tobacco to explorers, has “been around for hundreds of years,� according to historian Daniel Francis. Francis opens part two of his book, The Imaginary Indian, with a riff on the wooden brave, holding it up as a symbol of the humourless Indian stereotype:

“The wooden Indian has come to represent certain ‘truths’ about Indians. On the negative side, the wooden-Indian stereotype suggests a lack of emotional range, a failure of feeling. Indians are made of wood… they do not experience emotions with the same sensitivity that a non-Native person does. On the positive side, this stereotype says that Indians do not wear their hearts on their sleeves; they do not reveal their emotions capriciously. They suffer injustice with a stoic resignation. They say little, but feel deeply. On the surface we might think they appear apathetic, even dull-witted, but inside we are convinced they contain all the world’s wisdom. Once again the Imaginary Indian is almost anything Whites want it to be.”

The next Indian on Queen Street West is easy to miss. Another stoic brave, this time its stern profile is etched in white on a glass pane hanging in the front window of Red Indian Art Deco. The design salutes the Red Indian Motor Oil brand, of which storeowner, Brad Hill, was an avid collector. Canadian oil company, McColl Brothers, launched the Red Indian Motor Oil brand in 1927. After Texas Corporation bought them out, the brand was gradually phased out in favour of Texas’s “Sky Chief� brand in the late 1950s. Operating for over twenty-seven years, a store worker says the shop has never had a complaint about its Red Indian moniker.

Naming an art deco store the Red Indian suggests, perhaps, that the Indian image is antiquated kitsch—so far removed from society’s current casting of the Indian as to render it cool décor. The Indian image sells: Ikea offers large black and white portraits of what look to be Indian chiefs (with large feather headdress of course) for $59.99. I, for one, would gladly wear my fellow Walrus intern’s belt buckle (a hand-me-down from his family), advertising a company that still exists:

But peddling commercial Indian images is politically uncouth: reference Seinfeld’s Cigar Store Indian episode. And off screen, Aboriginals continue to protest these images. In the US, activists have been lobbying for the removal of the Cleveland Indians’ Chief Wahoo mascot for over thirty years (not to mention the controversy over the Atlanta Braves and Washington Redskins)—a debate that pits political correctness against corporate branding (or freedom of speech, depending how it’s spun).

But in Canada, artists and writers are giving the bird to the White Man’s rendering of the Indian with acerbic wit, and a paintbrush, pen, or needle and thread. Artist Nadia Myre persuaded 230 of her fine arts colleagues at Concordia and bead workers from Montreal’s Native centres to help her bead over the fifty-six pages of the Indian Act; some pages are entirely beaded over, others leave bits of text. “The Indian Act is a document that controls Indian lives today,� Myre told a Concordia reporter, “but it was never translated into a Native tongue—yet it describes who and what a Native person is. Native people have a love-hate relationship with it, so to bead over it was to kind of reclaim it, and erase it.�

Writer and comedian Drew Hayden Taylor edited two popular books of essays by Aboriginal writers that take a playful, sometimes stinging aim at the staid Indian stereotype: Me, Funny (2006) and Me, Sexy (2008). Hayden Taylor created the books because of his “wish to educate the dominant culture about the varied and colourful… aspects of Aboriginal life. Society and its media machines have often painted us as being stoic, tragic, alcoholic and basically oppressed, depressed and suppressed. To a lesser extent, a lot of our literature has done the same thing.�

To my mind, Canadian artists’ clever subversions of the Imaginary Indian are more effective—and more fun—than political protests insisting on the removal of the Indian archetype from our landscape. Instead of erasing the history of the White Man’s casting of the Indian, they are spotlighting it—before tearing it to shreds.

Tags: art objects, cigar store Indian, Kent Monkman, The Indian Act, Walrus, walrus interns

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Posted on Monday, May 26th, 2008 at 10:40 am. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.