NOTE: This post is to introduce you to the 43rd episode of François Matarasso’s and my monthly podcast, “A Culture of Possibility.” It will be available starting 16 August 2024. You can find it and all episodes at Stitcher, iTunes, and wherever you get your podcasts, along with miaaw.net‘s other podcasts by Owen Kelly, Sophie Hope, and many guests, focusing on cultural democracy and related topics. You can also listen on Soundcloud and find links to accompany the podcasts.
I was lucky enough to meet France Trépanier and Chris Creighton-Kelly at a meeting here in Santa Fe a few months ago. They are based on Vancouver Island, on the west coast of British Columbia, on the unceded land of the W̱SÁNEĆ people, the people of the salt water. France is an artist, a curator and a writer of Kanien’kéha:ka (known in English as Mohawk) and French ancestry. Chris is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and cultural critic born in the UK with South Asian/British roots. Together, they direct Primary Colours/Couleurs primaires, a multi-year arts initiative whose main objective is to place Indigenous arts at the center of the Canadian arts system through gatherings, public presentations, incubation projects, residencies, research and more aimed at generating new knowledge. When we met in person, it started an ongoing conversation about so many things—culture, policy, identity, language, and much more—that I thought we ought to take it public and include you too.
We asked France and Chris to start with their project Primary Colours/Colours Primaires because it has a website full of resources listeners may find relevant. Chris described its origins:
“We felt—France and I,” said Chris, “along with many of our colleagues—six years ago now that the conversation around post-coloniality, around this official Canadian policy called multiculturalism, around racism and anti-racism, and you have it in the United States and to some extent in the UK, Diversity Equity and Inclusion, DEI, we felt we needed to debunk this emergent paradigm, we needed to talk about the question of race in the arts in a decolonial kind of way. And so we started Primary Colours with the intention of bringing together artists mostly from across Canada, but occasionally from the United States and other countries to update the conversation, to critique concepts like multiculturalism and DEI and to put Indigenous practices, which at that time were re-emerging or being renewed in Canada, at the center of the Canadian art system. And we wanted to talk about the many other practices that have arrived on this land, and debunk a kind of Eurocentric idea of what art is.”
France added some important context. “When we started this initiative, it was coming after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that took place in Canada. In 2015 the report from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was published, and there were 94 calls to action. It was a really important moment in the imagination of what Canada is and can be. It was a very binary kind of conversation. It was either you were Indigenous or you were settler and it kind of split the country into two groups. It’s a difficult process. We’re still deep into it, because I don’t think that we went past the truth piece. We’re still working on the truth piece before we can go to the reconciliation piece. But what Chris and I wanted to do is to break that binary and to complexify a little bit the conversation, and to bring other people, people of color into the conversation, new arrivals, people that didn’t have the the identity of the white settler in Canada. We wanted to activate, if you will, ideas of polyvocality, of complexifying, of looking at the multi-level conversations that were happening.”
François expressed his hope that European listeners will stick with this conversation, since sometimes they don’t connect with indigeneity, the Sámi people of the far north of Europe being the last Indigenous group in that region. He pointed out that the idea of “settlers” may be transferable to conversations about population moving toward Europe, influencing local culture with imported ideas, customs, and so on.
Chris shared a story with a revealing punchline about just who is and isn’t implicated in indigeneity and colonization:
“A few years ago, France and I and others of our colleagues attended a conference in Vancouver, Canada, which was meant to bring European folks and North American folks to talk about some of these issues. We had presentations, and there was a small group, and beside me was an Indigenous person who I know and have known, and some European folks who I didn’t know. There was a person from France there. The conversation started just the way this one did, and he got a little bit frustrated, just exactly as you said. He said, ‘I don’t see why we’re talking about this. I came here to talk about art, and why are we talking about the colonial history? It has nothing to do with me.’ My Indigenous colleague, who was sitting right beside me, said, ‘Where do you think the fucking boats left from?’ And he got up and left the room. It was this moment of ‘Oh, I guess it does have something to do with me.'”
France described some of her interesting personal journey, in which the curiosity that drives her as an artist pulled her from running an artists’ space to a systems view of Canadian arts policy and from there to engagement with the Department of Canadian Heritage and Canada Council for the Arts. She explained that “we don’t have a lot of private money going into the arts in Canada, so the whole system is mainly funded through public funds, and the Canada Council for the Arts is the main body administering grants and contributions. I got involved in that kind of work, and then I came to curation out of frustration, because I was seeing the way that the work of Indigenous people was presented in many venues, the fact that most of those exhibitions were put up by non-Indigenous people. I felt that the story that was told was not exactly the right story, and I felt that the way that the work was presented was not at the best possible way. So I came to curation in a modest, humble way of just trying to tell the story from a different perspective, and to again, involve community in the object of curation.”
Once engaged in that discourse, and keen to bring complexity to simplistic binaries, some language that may be unfamiliar gets deployed. I asked about some of the terms that show up on their website, such as polyvocality, decolonization, indigenization, post-colonifality, conciliation, reconciliation. Chris brought it down to earth.
“it’s hard to do shorthand on very complex terms. The first thing that came to my mind was how intellectual these conversations can be, using concepts that many of your listeners may not be familiar with. So one word that I would add to that list, and it’s very relevant to the work you and François are doing, is the word ‘community.’ It’s a word that needs to be interrogated and needs to be understood in new ways, because sometimes…there’s a there’s a little bit of self-deception in our understanding. Like, who are we to decide we’re working with communities? And what does a community actually mean? People throw phrases around all the time, the black community, the Indigenous community. And obviously those communities are not monolithic. It makes me wonder, what exactly do we think we’re doing with community art? I know Arlene, you spent decades dealing with this and trying to understand this, and I think it requires a complexification, so that we can include the idea of multi- poly-vocal, or multiple voices, whatever pluriverse some people talk about, and at the same time create some kind of sense of community, which that word comes from, the root word of commune and communal, communication, all these words that are about unity.”
Chris concluded, “Art is not about giving answers. It’s about giving questions. We want an engaged citizenry that is asking questions about the world they live in, not giving simple answers to politics or sociology or whatever.”
Complexity led to a phrase that France and Chris use in their work, as France explained. “Generative discomfort. We use it as a principle of creating spaces where discomfort is recognized, is named, and where we can build a bit of stamina in sustaining the discomfort. Because in discomfort, there’s discovery as well. We live in a moment of poly crisis, and it’s really challenging for people to try to make sense of. Talk of complexity! Between the political crises, the the climate crises, the financial crises, it’s a lot to try to navigate. This is where I see that artists have a role to play, and people working in community have a role to play. And that generative discomfort, it might be a way for opening a space where people can recognize that and find a way within themselves to negotiate it, or to to hold it a little longer or a little differently, and to find a place to put it, instead of just trying to go to the simple solution, the strong man solution.”
That’s just a glimpse of the beginning of a very thoughtful and useful conversation, including things like “the five Rs,” five principles that guide our guests’ work and much Indigenous work, articulated in Decolonizing Methodologies by Linda Tuhawai Smith: respect, relevance, reciprocity, responsibility and relationality. Our guests have hosted many dialogues about key questions such as decolonizing funding and imagining a non-Eurocentric art system, consulted with many organizations, and have often focused on bringing to light the histories that underpin current and troubling policies and practices. You’ll learn more about all that. We talked about ways the “helping paradigm” promotes distorted power relationships; about remarkable projects such as Dreaming the Land—and much, much more. This was a really rich discussion. I have a hunch you will learn as much as we did, so please tune in.
From the late John Trudell, one of my favorite artists: “Crazy Horse.”
Order my book: In The Camp of Angels of Freedom: What Does It Mean to Be Educated?