Tales of an Empty Cabin

Joseph Tisiga flips expectations as he explores Indigenous identity with faux artifacts.

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From the late 1950s until 1981, a man named Oliver Jackson operated a museum in Kelowna, B.C., seemingly filled with Indigenous art. His collection boasted around 4,000 items he had handcrafted throughout his life – from beadwork and masks to moccasins and drums. The only problem: he was born in Britain.

After Jackson died in 1982, his family approached the Kelowna Museum to see if it wanted his robust collection. The museum didn’t have room and, in any event, was reluctant to show faux-Indigenous artifacts. Eventually, Jackson’s family talked to the Sncewips Heritage Museum operated by the Westbank First Nation on the other side of Okanagan Lake.

While the museum’s younger staff members voiced concerns about exploitation and cultural appropriation, the community’s elders said they respected Jackson. At a time when the Canadian government made it illegal for them to practice their culture, he had kept it alive, essentially creating copies – albeit crude versions – that served a similar role to photographs.

Some of these artifacts are included in ofTales of An Empty Cabin: Somebody Nobody Was, on view until May 6 at the Audain Art Museum in Whistler, B.C. The mini-exhibit of Jackson’s work, housed in a walled tent, is a thought-provoking addition to the show by 34-year-old Joseph Tisiga, from the Kaska Dena Nation, which includes parts of Yukon, British Columbia and the Northwest Territories.

“The work is Oliver Jackson’s but the conversation I’m interested in having is really with the First Nation and this gesture of resiliency and self-determination by controlling the dialogue,” says Tisiga. “I’m trying to introduce these objects and this collection of work as, hopefully, something that we can reflect on and have a conversation with.”

Tisiga, who was born in Edmonton, but now calls Whitehorse home, is just over a decade into his artistic career. He’s known for oil and watercolour paintings, as well as collages, all of which tend toward earthy tones and exude a youthful energy.

However, Tisiga got his start in assemblage and created a new series, Camps, Masks and Maps, while in Whistler.

These seven large wall works – which include items like golf balls covered in black paint and plaster casts of cigarette butts, all nestled on AstroTurf – are mounted near Jackson’s work, contrasting a British-born man’s idea of Indigenous art and an Indigenous man’s creative expression. The Kaska Dena were traditionally nomadic and, as a result, relied more on oral traditions than artifacts. To that end, the juxtaposition of the two installations becomes a tongue-in-cheek take on Indigenous identity.

Tisiga’s exhibition also includes large-scale, hand-tinted photographs from his series, No Home in Scorched Earth, in which he poses amongst trees charred by fire.

And he presents pieces from another series, A Prop for Reconciliation, which pictures characters from the Archie comic books interacting with symbols of Indigeneity.

The exhibition opens with a series of staged photos inspired by Tales of an Empty Cabin, a 1936 book by Grey Owl or Archie Belaney, another British-born man who assumed an Indigenous identity. In these images, Tisiga poses in different rooms of a rundown office building. ■

Tales of an Empty Cabin: Somebody Nobody Was is on view at the Audain Art Museum in Whistler, B.C., from Feb. 16 to May 6, 2019.

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