To Talk With Others

Exhibition inspired by documents about the Mackenzie pipeline wonders if things have changed.

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Lianne Charlie went down the Little Salmon River, in the middle of the Yukon bush, with her aunties, cousins, her baby boy, Luka – and her placenta. 

“We found the right tree,” says the Tagé Cho Hudän, Danish and Icelandic artist. “And we hung the placenta there.”

Weeks later, rifling through the whack of land-claims maps she’d printed in preparation for the ceremony, Charlie suddenly realized the narrow tract of land where she had hung her placenta was shaded purple – Category B land – meaning her First Nation of Little Salmon/Carmacks has jurisdiction over the surface, but the Crown has mineral rights to the subsurface. 

“In that moment, I was confronted with the complexities of Indigenous life under modern treaties,” says Charlie, who is finishing a PhD in Indigenous governance. 

By revitalizing the placenta ceremony practiced by her First Nation ancestors, Charlie was attempting to reclaim part of her heritage – “our way of being and our intention of being here forever,” she says. “Then here is this map that says that the state could literally undermine that.”

Working with these flimsy maps instead of traditional moosehide, Charlie created a fragile, beaded, papier-mâché baby belt for the group exhibition To Talk With Others. Showing simultaneously in three Dawson City spaces until Sept. 13, it will then tour to the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, where it opens Nov. 2.

“Using the maps to create this thing that we would literally use to carry our young, raises the question whether paper is actually going to be strong enough to do that, to protect our ancestral practices,” says Charlie. “I don't think the paper would hold up. And maybe this is what this exhibit is asking – is the paper going to be good enough?”

To Talk With Others is the brainchild of Victoria-based artist Valerie Salez, who, while working for the Tr'ondëkHwech'in First Nation in Dawson, discovered dog-eared minutes from a 1977 Whitehorse meeting between then-prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau and five Yukon First Nation leaders about the proposed Mackenzie pipeline. 

Stunned by how closely the minutes echoed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaking about pipelines with First Nations, Salez rallied a group of Yukon First Nation artists to create an exhibition that explores how the federal government’s relationship with Indigenous peoples has – and hasn’t – changed since the ’70s.

In Dawson’s airy ODD Gallery looms a life-size, pink papier-mâché moose with arrows in its haunch, which Charlie made out of the Umbrella Final Agreement – a document that finalizes self-government rights for most Yukon First Nations. 

Nearby, a white picket fence surrounds a heavy chunk of pipeline with a soft, West Coast-style copper carving by Tlingit artist Ken Anderson perched on top. 

“When I went through those 1977 minutes, one thing that Trudeau said about the pipeline is, ‘I wouldn't want that in my backyard,’” says Anderson. “That's what my piece with the fence is about.”

Anderson’s use of copper, a carving material he notes is part of his traditional heritage – “we did use stuff from the land and the subsurface” – informs the values Charlie is grappling with in her work. 

“For us land is creation,” she says. “This notion of dividing the surface from the subsurface, we don’t think of it that way. But this is how Canada thinks about land in the North. It’s what Canada values.” 

Showing To Talk With Others in a dusty Gold Rush town where miners still work the creeks compounds this tension. 

“Here you have resource extraction and ancestral practices right next to each other,” says Charlie. 

At the Dänojà Zho Cultural Centre – which showcases the history and culture of the Klondike’s first peoples – is another of Anderson’s pieces, The Mosquito Becomes Me. 

It features a slender, traditionally carved mosquito mask that viewers can stand behind to snap selfies, seamlessly melding past with present. 

Interpretive guides from the centre offer daily walking tours to the three venues, bringing Indigenous history and self-governance issues to an audience largely made up of tourists in town to pan for gold and watch can-can girls.

“Art is capable of facilitating learning that is transformative,” says Charlie. “And we need that to happen. We need to start behaving differently, because we need our land intact, and clean water – not just as Indigenous people, but as humans on this planet.” ■ 

To Talk With Others, a group show that includes Ken Anderson, Lianne Charlie, Fran Morberg-Green, Valerie Salez, Doug Smarch Jr. and Joseph Tisiga, is on view at the Dänojà Zho Cultural Centre, the ODD Gallery and the Yukon School of Visual Arts in Dawson City from May 23 to Sept. 13, 2019.

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ODD Gallery-- Klondike Institute of Art & Culture

2nd Ave & Princess St (Bag 8000), Dawson City, Yukon Y0B 1G0

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