a traditional shed for food storage on the property of the family of Mary John
Geoffrey Thomas, Rita Thomas & Susie Antoine at Stoney Creek, Saik’uz First Nation 20 July, 2011
Anita’s kitchen window, Stoney Creek, Saik’uz, July 2011
Stoney Creek, near Vanderhoof, British Columbia, is a historic site of modern aboriginal resistance in Canada with the struggles of the 1980s described in two books by Bridget Moran, Stoney Creek Woman, about activist Mary John, and Judgement of Stoney Creek, about the broader community resistance to police violence and assaults on traditional language and culture. I went looking for overlooked aesthetics of resistance, and a new aesthetic of ‘The Rez’ beyond abjection. I began to find it. And the struggles continue. For example, the Saik’uz First Nation is part of a province-wide coalition to stop the construction of the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline that threatens their lands with some major public interventions such as those below.
“Describing their opposition to Enbridge’s Northern Gateway project as an unbreakable wall, native leaders say they will physically block the project if regulators allow it to proceed.
‘I am going to stand in front of bulldozers to stop this project, and I expect my neighbours to join me’, Jackie Thomas, chief of the Saik’uz First Nation, part of the Yinka Dene Alliance, said on Thursday when asked what will happen if regulators approve the proposed pipeline.”
Wendy Stueck. Oil pipeline: Native leaders vow to block Northern Gateway pipeline. Globe and Mail (December 2, 2011)
“‘Enbridge has always had a strategy of offering money to lots of First Nations. Lots of First Nations have refused this money’, Chief Jackie Thomas of Saik’uz First Nation, said in a statement, adding that Enbridge is using a ‘divide and conquer’ tactic in an attempt to win over its critics.”
Wendy Stueck. 2011. First Nations group signs deal with Enbridge. Globe and Mail (December 3, 2011).
This essay consists of photographs made on an old cell phone with sensors and a lense with very limited accuracy producing a small file. These ’sketchy’ and painterly renderings, taken in the summer of 2011 while I was on an aboriginal team working with the Saik’uz Nation, celebrate the village of Saik’uz or Stoney Creek. South of Vanderhoof BC and about 150 kilometres south-west of Prince George, Saik’uz has a particularly historic place in late 20th Century Canadian aboriginal activism. For years, one of the poor Reserve communities in BC, Saik’uz was one of the first native communities in Canada to consistently challenge the RCMP around abuse and deaths in detention while, not coincidentally, creating community-based institutions to support the local language, the Saik’uz dialect, and culture of the Carrier Dene. One of the community leaders to rebuild the community, Mary John, could one day be remembered as a kind of Nelson Mandela-type figure in the decolonization of north-central BC. Mary John was the subject of two books, from two decades back, Stoney Creek Woman and Judgement At Stoney Creek, copies of which are still not regularly sold in the Vanderhoof area in part because of the portrayal of the area’s violent, apartheid-like conditions that extended into the 1980s.
Today, Stoney Creek is a highly organized and functional community that, as education levels have increased and social marginalization of aboriginals have declined, has been losing population as people move off-reserve for better jobs and opportunities. More traditional kinds of livelihoods and activities and associated skills such as horse-training and guiding are also in decline. Similarly, the landscape vernaculars are changing from traditional shacks to decaying track homes to new, and sometimes more creative forms of contemporary architecture. But after a quarter of a century of efforts to protect the Carrier language, fewer and fewer people are speaking it on a regular basis.
Through this essay, I explore the rise and now decline of the currency of Vancouver-based notions of photoconceptualism. This essay on Sai’kuz traces the disintegration of the photographic imagery, especially the decline in the currency of large-scaled realistic depiction and presentation (huge photographic prints that dominated photographic conversations in the 1990s and early 2000s) and the rise of a culture of digital snap-shots coupled with the fading and ‘re-use’ of indigenous languages and local dialects, such as Saik’uz, as new forms of cultural (re)production. In other words, when a language is not used by a community on a day-to-day basis, and when it becomes increasingly ceremonial, the capability to transmit information, feelings, and metaphors shifts from a highly accurate, big photograph to that more like a sketchy (but sometimes beautiful and powerful) cell-phone snapshot. And both the bits of language and little photograph files are at least partly salvageable and relevant in the context of globalizing culture.
Saik’uz: Tracing Stoney Creek revisits, challenges and then reworks notions of documentaries of aboriginal communities and ethnographies. Visually, we focus on fragments of narratives that are quite different from those associated with earlier forms of photorealism. Focused on combining two media: photography and recorded speech, this project is comprised of three explorations.
1. I couple the continued loss of fluency of one indigenous language (the Saik’uz dialect of Carrier, an Athabaskan language in north-central BC along with ways to assert that language through contemporary culture) and the recent global shift away from highly accurate, photo-realist imagery (including Vancouver-based photo-conceptual) towards small-file, digital photographs (that are evocative of sketches and paintings). While these small images may be less ‘accurate’, they may well be more cogent.
2. I revisit the parallel and intersecting roles of language (spoken and written) in experience and ‘cognition’ of photographic imagery – especially after the primacy of photo-conceptualism. In particular, the exceptional amount of information in big-print, high-detail photographs, often generated through a large print of a detailed file, has sometimes functioned to obscure the role of a simpler visual language in the experiencing of a reproduced image. No manner how precise (or fuzzy) is a particular photographic image, its reading is always linking to experiences of particular language (and set of symbols and concept) – with assertion of local, aboriginal languages acts of cultural resistance.
3. This essay is part challenging the dominant iconography of aboriginal adjection (’The Indian Reserve’ or ‘The Rez’) and asserting a more critical ‘Reserve Aesthetic’ as some aspects of these places are quite beautiful. Next to crack houses and penitentiaries, Indian Reserves are considered some of the most hellish places in the iconography Canada’s media and cultural institutions. Some of this depiction of abjection can be strategic such as in the initial October and November 2011 coverage of the housing crisis in the Northern Ontario, Cree village of Attawapiskat. But the depictions of the dire poverty at Attawapiskat also became an easy way for an embarrassed federal government to penalize native governments. And this heavily cultivated aesthetic of abjection conflated, with despair, often functions to obscure and divert attention from successful and often more creative forms of resistance and community building.
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The Attawapiskat scandal has highlighted how little money actually goes into housing and municipal infrastructure on Canadian Indian Reserves — roughly 50% of the average that other Canadians enjoy. So that the relatively good shape of community life in Saik’uz represents a remarkable level of political cohesion and local self-management (that are effective subsidies to the broader area around Vanderhood). (graphic courtesy of Creekside Blog via Judy Rebick)
So while these communities may be relatively poor, in terms of cash income, Indian Reserve communities in Canada can still provide new models for community and self-government. And some aspects of life on reserves such as Saik’uz are quite beautiful and warrant wider celebration – for native communities and for all Canadians.
I grew up in a community on southern Vancouver Island that looked a lot like Saik’uz and now live in a artist live work studio in a conflicted building (a former fish warehouse) on a block on Vancouver Harbour to where my father often left our home and went to work and to engage in maritime union organizing. To me, Saik’uz felt a bit like home – and given their political victories of recent decades, curiously reassuring.
