Lauren Crazybull

Alberta’s first official artist in residence creates territories in sound.

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Lauren Crazybull considers the relationships between place, language and sound in work made last year as Alberta’s first official artist in residence. 

The project, on view until Nov. 15 at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge, is called TSIMA KOHTOTSITAPIIHPA / WHERE ARE YOU FROM?

The same title is used for the main pieces within the show – a large-scale painting, along with an audio piece and accompanying photo book that documents a year of artistic research. 

Crazybull (who uses they/them pronouns) is based in amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton) and is of Niitsitapi (Blackfoot) and Dené heritage.

For the residency, they travelled around Alberta to research and document original Indigenous place names relevant to their family, which also became an act of reclaiming 16 years lost to the province’s child welfare system.

The show’s anchor is a large unstretched canvas reaching from floor to ceiling that remaps the cartography of Alberta from an Indigenous perspective. But Crazybull’s affirmation of Indigenous place names is not simply an exercise in linguistics – it also creates sonic impressions in the mind. What is the act of reading, if not speaking to oneself within one’s own auditory imagination?

Standing with this impressive work, I resist the settler tendency to lazily scan unfamiliar Blackfoot words. I give them the attention they deserve, letting the rhythms of these place names linger in my mind as I phonetically sound them out, slowly and deliberately. Sik-oh-ko-to-ki. Moh-kin-stis. Ni-na-sta-ko. These are places I’ve lived in and visited in Alberta over the last decade, but have only recently known by their Indigenous names

This type of thoughtful consideration reflects the care and attention that settler people must make towards decolonizing actions, now more urgently than ever. Building a conciliatory relationship between Indigenous and settler peoples takes time and dedication. There is no quick remediation to what has frequently been termed “the Indian problem” – when, in fact, efforts should be focused instead on addressing the “settler problem.”

In 1985, French philosopher Roland Barthes famously theorized the distinction between hearing and listening, with the former being a purely physiological phenomenon, and the latter a psychological experience. 

In recent years, numerous Indigenous scholars have elaborated upon this notion. Most notably, Stó:lō scholar Dylan Robinson’s 2020 book, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies, outlines colonial structures of “settled listening” and Indigenous principles of witnessing. 

Robinson explains that the Stó:lō concept of xwélalà:m involves a collective approach to listening, witnessing and the cultural work of the longhouse, where being called as witness is equivalent to holding the history and law of a people, becoming a living book of traditional knowledge.

Crazybull demonstrates the potential to enact this concept of a more ethical relationship with sound through listening to elders Jo-Ann and Jerry Saddleback, Martin HeavyHead Sr., and Sandra Manyfeathers. Their conversations, along with a score composed by musician Matthew Cardinal, yield a unique audio piece that falls somewhere between oral history and auto-ethnography. 

As I sit at the listening station and flip through the accompanying photo book, I am struck by Crazybull’s thoughtful consideration of the crucial role sound plays within processes of Indigenization and decolonization. I am also reminded that it’s not only Indigenous people who are called to practice listening-as-witnessing – settler people must learn these skills as well. 

As a person of settler ancestry residing in Treaty 7 territory, I become a signatory to this living document by existing on this land. Crazybull’s show “calls in” (rather than “calls out”) settler people, reminding us of our responsibility to listen to and honour these place names, and more broadly, to respect Indigenous peoples and their cultures.

The show is presented in an unusual setting – the gallery’s small library. Organized by Adam Whitford, the gallery’s curatorial and publications coordinator, SAAG’s ongoing art library project links curatorship and pedagogy. While bookshelves dispel any notion of a pristine white cube and the walls can pose challenges for larger works, the space creates connections between viewing art and taking action. Books and other reading materials connected to the show’s themes are near at hand. 

The library’s large window, which overlooks a Lethbridge park, is a reminder that the gallery is located on Blackfoot land and is neither objective nor neutral. Above all, this project underlines the need for cultural institutions to actively address the ongoing harms perpetrated by colonialism, including their own actions. ■ 

Lauren Crazybull: TSIMA KOHTOTSITAPIIHPA / WHERE ARE YOU FROM? on view at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge from Sept. 26 to Nov. 15, 2020. The audio piece and artist book can be viewed here.

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