The Mystery of Hochelaga Rock

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Hannah Claus, “passage,” 2017

digital print on paper, 38" x 58" Photo courtesy Hannah Claus

Sometimes the question of what to do with colonialist monuments is simply answered: remove them. Unlike the Edward Cornwallis statue in Halifax, however, Montreal’s Hochelaga Rock is a colonialist memorial to Indigenous peoples, rather a trickier matter, and one that Hannah Claus, a Montreal-based artist of Kanien’kehá:ka heritage, addresses in her exhibition at Winnipeg’s aceartinc.

The memorial in question – a great boulder on the McGill University campus – was erected in 1925. Its commemorative plaque reads: “Near here was the site of the fortified town of Hochelaga visited by Jacques Cartier in 1535, abandoned before 1600. It contained 50 large houses, each lodging several families who subsisted by cultivation and fishing.”

Whoever these people were, they seem to have vanished between Cartier’s visit and Champlain’s in 1608. The word hochelaga is foreign to the Indigenous communities around Montreal; but on a visit to Edmonton, a Dene elder told Claus it is Dene for “where many nations gather” and that Dene traders once travelled to Montreal. The so-called St. Lawrence Iroquoians, Claus surmised, were probably Dene occupying a temporary settlement.

The show, on view until Sept. 15, examines this mystery in three series of works. The first presents the rock itself in five large digital photographs. The first is a plain, documentary view. With each subsequent print, however, the artist reanimates the text, digitally corrupting the characters and blacking in the loops of certain letters. In one image, the enlarged, corrupted characters are sprayed across the rock as if fired from a shotgun. In the final image, these same holes become small windows to other scenes or places.

A second series of seven digital prints depicts coloured texts superimposed upon a sort of palimpsest of the plaque. In the coloured texts, Claus recounts the elder’s words about the Dene traders, how they prepared for their long voyages, the items they brought, and how the Kanien’kehá:ka, the Mohawk people, received them.

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Hannah Claus, “going from one place to another,” 2017

acrylic sheets, laser cut and engraved, 24" x 39" each, photo by Karen Asher

The third series shows the plaque text laser-cut onto four acrylic sheets engraved with Kanien’kehá:ka words for elemental forces: ohóntsa (grass), ohné:ka (water), owéra (air/wind) and karahkwa (sun). Each text, front-lit and hung perhaps an inch from the wall, is echoed by its own shadow.

Whether this answer to the mystery will satisfy everyone remains to be seen, but it is surely true that the amount of trade among pre-colonial Indigenous communities, and the distances covered in conducting it, has often been downplayed. Despite its paternalistic tone, the rock invites speculation. This exhibition, with its compelling reflection on how writing connects us – often tenuously – with the past, certainly takes up that challenge.