#indigenous canadian illustrator

[sassafrasmoonshine]

Birdsong by Julie Flett

[arthistoryanimalia]

#WoodpeckerWednesday:

Woodpecker, 1974 Art Thompson (Canadian, Ditidaht, Nuu-Chah-Nulth, 1948-2003) serigraph, 58.5 x 44.4 cm Art Gallery of Greater Victoria 1998.035.024

[fatehbaz]

If you wanted to know more about the saga of protests and resistance against Canada’s open-pit copper mining in Panama:

---

Screenshot and headline from: “Canadian firm blames Panama for closure of copper mine.” AP News. 16 December 2022.

---

Headline from: “Panama: Canadian mining company First Quantum denied to expand copper exploitation area for alleged failure with environmental commitments.” Business & Human Rights Resource Centre. 26 January 2023.

---

Headline from: Valentine Hilaire. “Panama won’t allow Canada’s First Quantum to expand its copper mine operations.” Reuters. 26 January 2023.

---

Headline by: The Associated Press. “Panama reaches 20-year deal with Canadian copper mine.” As republished at ABC News. 8 March 2023.

---

An excerpt and explanation:

In Panama, a dispute has emerged of a type that is common to countries in Central and South America: a huge transnational company has invested in the country’s resource wealth, resulting in a conflict over suitable payments to the government that draws in officials from the company’s nation of origin in defence of corporate profits. In this case, the company in question is First Quantum Minerals, a mining giant with lucrative investments across the Global South -- and the country of origin is Canada.

This summer [2022], Panamanians rose up in nationwide protests against the neoliberal status quo imposed on the country by the government of Laurentino Cortizo.  Beginning on July 1, these protests brought together diverse groups including teachers, students, trade unionists, farmers, and Indigenous organizations [...]. The causes of the summer 2022 protests go back decades and help illustrate the dynamics of the current conflict between First Quantum (and their backers in Ottawa) and the Panamanian state.

Throughout the 1990s, Canada aggressively pushed for states in Central and South America to adopt neoliberal reforms that would permit more foreign investment and fewer regulations for transnational companies. [...]

Several protest movements emerged in Panama in the 2010s in opposition to the effects of free market reforms generally and the predominance of Canadian mining specifically.  At the heart of these resistance movements is the Canadian-owned Cobre Panamá mine, which is the largest foreign investment in the country [...].

---

Cobre Panamá was owned by the Toronto-headquartered Inmet Mining until 2013, at which point it was acquired by Vancouver-based First Quantum. In 2011, the Martinelli government attempted to limit the Indigenous Ngäbe-Buglé nation’s rights to autonomy and self-government in order to grant mining companies access to minerals on their land. Meanwhile, Martinelli repealed a law that prevented foreign governments from investing in the mining sector -- a gift to Canada’s Inmet Mining, which at the time was seeking financing from the sovereign wealth funds of Singapore and South Korea.

These moves sparked protests that continued into 2012. Martinelli responded to demands for the annulment of mining and hydroelectric concessions on Indigenous territory with violence by dispatching riot police. The police killed one protestor, injured thirty-two, and detained forty.  The protestors did not budge; instead, they blocked the entrances to Cobre Panamá and another mine owned by the Canada’s Petaquilla Minerals.  Eventually Martinelli relented and vowed not to approve mining projects on or near Ngäbe-Buglé lands.’

---

During the 2011-2012 conflict, nobody in the Canadian government issued a single statement on the matter.  When protestors took to the streets again in 2022, Ottawa released a statement that totally omitted the reasons behind the uprising.

Following the economic shock of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Cortizo government declared that Panama’s recovery would rely on incentivizing foreign investment in the mining sector. Social movements have by and large rejected this new arrangement due to the history of corrupt collaboration between state officials and foreign companies and the weakness of environmental protections.

---

For example, in April 2022 the Panama Worth More Without Mining Movement -- which arose in opposition to the Canadian-owned Cobre Panamá mine -- released a report that found over 200 “serious” breaches of environmental commitments by the project managers, including the breaking of reforestation promises, “the felling of 876 hectares… in an area of high biodiversity and international importance,” and “the discharge of waste from the tailings tank into natural bodies of water without official endorsement.”

Following the summer 2022 protests, the Cortizo government announced plans to reform the mining sector by instituting greater regulations on foreign companies. In the meantime, the Panamanian state and First Quantum were in the process of negotiating a renewed contract. Jason Simpson, CEO of Canada’s Orla Mining (which is hoping to begin extraction at its Cerro Quema gold project), said, “The biggest story in Panama is Cobre Panamá, so as the government works through their renewed contract law for First Quantum’s asset there, that’ll take priority… We’ll be patient for that to be resolved and then we hope to get working on construction in Panama.”

The negotiations for the renewal of the Cobre Panamá contract began in September 2021. The two parties agreed that First Quantum would provide Panama with between 12 and 16 percent of its gross profit, a new rate that would replace the previous two percent revenue royalty. [...]

---

Much like Ottawa jumped to the defence of Centerra Gold following Kyrgyzstan’s nationalization of the Kumtor gold mine last year, the Trudeau government has taken a keen interest in Cobre Panamá and, according to the unnamed Reuters source, is actively backing the mining company’s position. Given Canada’s long history of support for neoliberal reforms and transnational investment in Central and South America, Ottawa’s support for First Quantum in these negotiations should come as no surprise.

---

Headline and text by: Owen Schalk. “Ottawa backs Canadian mining giant in dispute with Panama.” Canadian Dimension. 26 December 2022. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph contractions added by me.]

[queering-ecology]

Chapter 11. ‘fucking close to water’: queering the production of the nation by Bruce Erickson (part 2, final)

Land

First ‘canoe’ that European colonists saw were likely Mi’kmaq gwitnn, birchbark boats designed for both ocean and river travel (318)

The colonist’s name is mentioned but the natives in these stories don’t ever get their names so…the colonist realized that to go further inland he would need the gwitn,  he needed “the boat derived of the landscape realities of the new world” (Raffan 1999a, 24) (318)

the ‘canoe’ as a symbol unique to Canada (Jennings 1991, 1) (319), reworks essentialized aspects of indigenous cultures into a symbol of national health and success” (319) and as a “gift” from natives to settlers. The canoe as unique entity, because of the exploration done by canoe, the canoe is the guard that maintains the boundary of Canadian identity.

A vague connection could be made to the American symbol of the cowboy to the American west except the canoe is more ‘natural’ for being of the land and from the native people and further substantiated in its uniqueness by its use in colonialism.

Canada as a nation has ‘perfected’ the canoe; the only way the canoe can be made perfect is through its ability to be incorporated into European expansion (320) the connection of the land to the canoe as a discourse of inevitability illustrates the privileging of the European subject as the natural inheritors (indeed, the rightful inheritor) of First Nations land…and implicitly heterosexual and patriarchal subject (320-321)

Possibility

“We cannot possibly anticipate what might happen, if we were really to consider the ten million bodies at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean "(Shannon Winnubst, 190) (324)

“Rethinking nature that is not bent toward the utility of power” (324) Opening ourselves to the possibilities of history means addressing the ways in which the ideologies and concrete practices that have formed our current understanding of nature represent more about the desired human outcome than they do about anything nonhuman (324)

Similar to really considering 10 million dead bodies in the Atlantic Ocean, this would mean really considering (as a broad list) the malicious wars over land and fur, the forced conversions, the repeated exposure to flu epidemics, the establishment of reservations and classification of First Nations as wards of the state, and the widespread physical and sexual abuse in residential schools designed to assimilate and civilize a supposed “savage” population” (324).

The Kiss of the Fur Queen is a novel by Tomson Highway, Cree playwright and novelist. Two Cree brothers are taken from their parents to a residential school several hundred miles away at the age of six, baptized into the Catholic church and have their names changed, they forbidden to speak their language and are abused by the priests of the school. They are alienated from their parents by the education and sexual predation of the school priests, but also are disconnected from the land, language and culture of their people…(the canoe plays a central role in the story, where difficult conversations about their alienation take place). As they grow up one of the brothers finds “continual inspiration” from the traditional Cree culture and discovered a “need to know the cultures that were suppressed by the residential school”. “As the crowd dances to the migisoo, the eagle, Gabriel realizes its power: ‘Gabriel saw people talking to the sky, the sky replying.” (Highway 1998) (324-326) (this is a poor summary, i apologize.)

“The movement between tradition and innovation is always fluid and uncharted” (327)

“Thus, while as a quirky national joke, the idea of making love in a canoe surely belongs to the post-sexual revolution of the later twentieth century, we need to remember that as a national symbol, the connection it strives to make between the canoe, nature,  and nation signals a sexual politic that was born of the age of imperialism. “

“As Foucault reminds us, the legacy of the Victorian repression of sexuality is held within the resistance of the sexual revolution that fails to move outside the biopower networks of modern sexuality.” (327)

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Malcolm Clark

Published: Jul 18, 2023

The LGBT movement is beginning to behave more like a religious cult than a human-rights lobby. It’s not just the Salem-like witch hunts it pursues against its critics. It’s also its flight from reason and its embrace of magical thinking.

This irrationalism is best illustrated by its recent embrace of the term ‘two-spirit’ (often shortened to ‘2S’), which in North America has been added to the lobby’s ever-growing acronym, meaning we are now expected to refer to – take a deep breath – the ‘2SLGBTQQIA+ community’.

The term two-spirit was first formally endorsed at a conference of Native American gay activists in 1990 in Winnipeg in Canada. It is a catch-all term to cover over 150 different words used by the various Indian tribes to describe what we think of today as gay, trans or various forms of gender-bending, such as cross-dressing. Two-spirit people, the conference declared, combine the masculine and the feminine spirits in one.

From the start, the whole exercise reeked of mystical hooey. Myra Laramee, the woman who proposed the term in 1990, said it had been given to her by ancestor spirits who appeared to her in a dream. The spirits, she said, had both male and female faces.

Incredibly, three decades on, there are now celebrities and politicians who endorse the concept or even identify as two-spirit. The term has found its way into one of Joe Biden’s presidential proclamations and is a constant feature of Canadian premier Justin Trudeau’s doe-eyed bleating about ‘2SLGBTQQIA+ rights’.

The term’s success is no doubt due in part to white guilt. There is a tendency to associate anything Native American with a lost wisdom that is beyond whitey’s comprehension. Ever since Marlon Brando sent ‘Apache’ activist Sacheen Littlefeather to collect his Oscar in 1973, nothing has signalled ethical superiority as much as someone wearing a feather headdress.

The problem is that too many will believe almost any old guff they are told about Native Americans. This is an open invitation to fakery. Ms Littlefeather, for example, may have built a career as a symbol of Native American womanhood. But after her death last year, she was exposed as a member of one of the fastest growing tribes in North America: the Pretendians. Her real name was Marie Louise Cruz. She was born to a white mother and a Mexican father, and her supposed Indian heritage had just been made up.

Much of the fashionable two-spirit shtick is just as fake. For one thing, it’s presented as an acknowledgment of the respect Indian tribes allegedly showed individuals who were gender non-conforming. Yet many of the words that two-spirit effectively replaces are derogatory terms.

In truth, there was a startling range of attitudes to the ‘two-spirited’ among the more than 500 separate indigenous Native American tribes. Certain tribes may have been relaxed about, say, effeminate men. Others were not. In his history of homosexuality, The Construction of Homosexuality (1998), David Greenberg points out that those who are now being called ‘two spirit’ were ridiculed by the Papago, held in contempt by the Choctaws, disliked by the Cocopa, treated by the Seven Nations with ‘the most sovereign contempt’ and “derided” by the Sioux. In the case of the Yuma, who lived in what is now Colorado, the two-spirited were sometimes treated as rape objects for the young men of the tribe.

The contradictions and incoherence of the two-spirit label may be explained by an uncomfortable fact. The two-spirit project was shaped from day one by complete mumbo-jumbo. The 1990 conference that adopted the term was inspired by a seminal book, Living the Spirit: A Gay Indian Anthology, published two years earlier. Its essays were compiled and edited by a young white academic called Will Roscoe. He was the historical adviser to the conference. And his work on gay people in Indian cultural history – a niche genre in the 1980s – had become the received wisdom on the subject.

Roscoe’s work had an unlikely origin story of its own. In 1979, he joined over 200 other naked gay men in the Arizona desert for an event dubbed the ‘Spiritual Conference for Radical Faeries’. It was here where he met Harry Hay, the man who would become his spiritual mentor and whose biography he would go on to write. The event was Hay’s brainchild and was driven by his conviction that gay men’s lives had become spiritually empty and dominated by shallow consumerism. For three days, Roscoe and the other men sought spiritual renewal in meditation, singing and classes in Native American dancing. There were also classes in auto-fellatio, lest anyone doubt this was a gay men’s event.

To say Hay, who died in 2002, was eccentric is to radically understate his weirdness. For one thing, he was a vocal supporter of paedophilia. As such, he once took a sandwich board to a Pride march proclaiming ‘NAMBLA walks with me’, in reference to the paedophilia-advocacy group, the North American Man / Boy Love Association. Hay also believed that gay men were a distinct third gender who had been gifted shamanic powers. According to Hay, these powers were recognised and revered by pre-Christian peoples, from Ancient Greece to, you guessed it, the indigenous tribes of North America.

For years, Hay had been experimenting with sweat lodges and dressing up in Indian garb in ways that would now be criticised as cultural appropriation. Despite this, Roscoe took Hay’s incoherent thesis – that gender-bending and spiritual enlightenment go hand in hand – and turned it into a piece of Native American history.

Unsurprisingly, given its provenance, Roscoe’s work is full of holes and lazy assumptions. To prove that two-spirit people combine the feminine and masculine spirits, Roscoe searched for evidence of gender non-conforming behaviour among the Indian tribes. The problem was that he had to mainly rely on the accounts of white settlers who had little understanding of Native cultures. And even when he didn’t rely on those sources, Roscoe still jumped to the wrong conclusions.

Take, for example, the case of Running Eagle, ‘the virgin woman warrior’ of the Blackfeet tribe, whom Roscoe was the first to label as two-spirit. As a girl, she rebelled against the usual girl chores and insisted on being taught how to hunt and fight. She became a noted warrior and declared she would never marry a man or submit to one.

Of course, none of this really means that Running Eagle was two-spirit, or that the tribe she hailed from was made up of LGBT pioneers. It merely shows that the Blackfeet were smart and adaptable enough to recognise martial talent in a girl and were able to make good use of a remarkable individual. Nevertheless, Roscoe’s description of her has become gospel and Running Eagle is now endlessly cited as an example of a two-spirit.

This is a mind-numbingly reductive approach. It’s based on the presumption that what we think of as feminine and masculine traits are fixed and stable across time and cultures. It dictates that no Native American man or woman who ever breaks a gender taboo or fails to conform to expectations can be anything but two-spirit. This is gender policing on steroids.

The two-spirit term also does Native American cultures a deep disservice. It assumes that 500 different tribes were both homogenous and static. As journalist Mary Annette Pember, herself Ojibwe, argues, it also erases ‘distinct cultural and language differences that Native peoples hold crucial to their identity’.

In some ways, it is entirely unsurprising that the wayward ‘2SLGBTQQIA+’ movement has fastened on to two-spirit, an invented term with a bogus pedigree. Far from paying tribute to Native American cultures in all their richness, it exploits them to make a cheap political point. Harry Hay and his fellow auto-fellators would be proud.

==

"Two spirit" is a great way of fabricating an interesting identity when you don't have one. And you can scream at people as "bigots," but without the guilt of lying about your great-grandparents being descendants of Sacagawea.

The fake mysticism goes along neatly with the notion of disembodied sexed thetans ("gender identity") which become trapped between worlds in the wrong meat bodies.

[jasmancer]

If I were the head of marvel I would make Logan (wolverine) indigenous Canadian, Daken half indigenous Canadian/ half Japanese, and Laura/Gabby half indigenous Canadian/ half Latina.

Thoughts?

I like the concept of First Nations Logan, I've definitely thought about interpreting him as a moc before, but I always have mixed feelings about it. I mean, he's an inherently violent, beastial character, and his whole thing with Jean would read very "forbidden savage brown man pursuing Innocent White Woman" which. obviously isn't great. It's kind of a bummer honestly because on a surface level brown Logan kicks ass but as soon as u dig it's like hm.

Laura with native heritage absolutely vibes with me though. Latinamerica is very diverse and there's tons of indigenous heritage to consider there, I personally tend to imagine her as Oaxaca. Of course this would also extend to our girl Gabby!

Akihiro is kind of in the same boat as Logan for me with imagining him as native. Especially since his early portrayals tend to be. sexually predatory. to put it mildly. There's something to be said about him as an east asian man being portrayed as masculine and desirable though. I'd like if he was more consistently illustrated with his ethnic features in canon stuff, but that's a nitpick you can make with literally any non white character lol

[battle-of-alberta]

Hi and welcome to this thing that's sort of a prequel to the timeline I'm working on. The working title is Alberta Story, but as you can see I kind of changed directions midway through as I thought about it more, I figured if I was getting frustrated then surely Ed was also getting frustrated with it so I turned it over to him to express that, haha. I wrote the first half of this last fall and stewed on it for about a year and decided, screw it, I don't know where I'm going with this but I will slap on a few more panels and figure it out as I go.

This might be the closest thing to a reboot of the BoAB main storyline for a while. I wanted to do something that gave a cursory outline of Canadian / Albertan history for people who are new to it, but of course it runs the risk of repeating every narrative Canada / Alberta have about themselves and that's quite frustrating, to be honest! Particularly when you are trying to write characters who lived through a great chunk of it.

I was trying to think about where to "start" the story of Alberta, particularly after reading Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta. A lot of the tongue in cheek ahistorical assigning of Albertan-ness to even protozoic life rubbed me the wrong way even though I found it an interesting narrative, so I wanted to illustrate the difficulty of "beginning".

Additionally: I really find it frustrating in the Hetalia fandom when people kind of take Himaruya's approach and suggest the colonized personifications almost predate colonization somehow, like they were "always there", or the approach that they are direct descendants of some ambiguous ancestral "Native America" that mysteriously no longer exists. At the same time, I sort of understand how it also happens with the narratives we construct ourselves, in textbooks and museums, that have long illustrated "pre-history" (Indigenous history) as opposed to "history" (the "Real" history of Euro-Canadians). It's a cultural underpinning that needs to be undone.

I don't make any ambitious claims to produce real, decolonizing work, I realize there's this big gap in this universe I'm building that acknowledges municipal personifications and only vaguely gestures at the idea of others and there's a myriad of issues with that, but it's a place that I as a euro-canadian myself am starting with and I hope to continue learning and growing from here.

"Here" is summed up as: isn't it crazy that a company that was just gifted 1/12th of the surface of the Earth not only predates the idea of this country and its cities but also still exists and is just a place you end up in at the mall now?

More detailed explanation of each panel follows.

Diver's Claw: Several stories in different First Nations cosmologies reference the Creator or another figure making a flood that covered the whole earth, where a survivor (Wisakedjek in Cree/Ojibwe stories, Na'pi in Blackfoot, etc) sends down a succession of animals to the bottom of the waters to retrieve a piece of the old earth, which they can then use to create anew.

Mounds of Earth: When the Northwest Mounted Police were sent out west from Canada after purchasing the territories (including Alberta) from the Hudson's Bay Company in 1870, they marked the border along what would become the 49th parallel between Canada and the United States with piles of dirt.

Descent from the Stars: This is supposed to be a depiction of Manitou Asiniy, also known as the Manitou Stone or Creator's Stone, a meteorite that has spiritual significance to many Indigenous peoples. As I write this, he (as a sacred being, he is referred to with these pronouns) is currently in the custody of the Royal Alberta Museum which has recently agreed to return him to the site where he was originally taken from near Hardisty in 1866. Currently, the gallery is open for worship and ceremony until it is time to repatriate him.

Bodies liquified in coral: this is NOT a scientific illustration, haha. The idea is that a lot of Albertan identity comes from about 400 million years ago in the Devonian period. At the time, a big chunk of "Alberta" was covered by ocean. The organisms lived, died, and over time became crushed by sediment layered over them. Coral has a lot of holes perfect for holding this sludge and fossilizes nicely here, and it is this layer of Earth's long history that speculators are looking for when drilling for oil.

Lips to a book: Alberta joined Confederation on September 1st, 1905, which our last premier tried to commemorate with a holiday that no one showed up to. Back at the turn of the century however, it was a massive party attended by Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier and the Governor General, a position in Canadian parliament that represents the King or Queen of England. Govenor General Grey (his grandpa was the Earl Grey the tea was named for, I believe) was the one who kissed the bible at this inauguration.

Prince: The prince here is Prince Rupert, who Rupert's Land was named for, and the king in question is Charles II of England (yes, the Restoration and Great Fire of London party guy from the Stuart era). Rupert's Land centred on Hudson's Bay and made up over 40% of what is now considered Canada. The Hudson's Bay Company was granted the charter to all this territory - if they found the Northwest Passage while they were at the business of acquiring beaver or otter pelts, it was certainly a bonus.

The rest is fairly self explanatory, I hope. Like I said, I felt like I was falling into the trap of the same old story of pioneers and exploration that has been absolutely done to death in Canadian history, and I didn't have anything particularly new to say about it that would maintain this storybook level of accessibility so I just. Stopped! Shifted gears! haha. Still, I think the fur trade is a very important piece to the puzzle that often gets either a bit overhyped or glossed over in favour of railroads in Canadian history and almost entirely ignored and forgotten in American history, and it makes sense to start there, particularly for Ed who has a lot of Complicated Feelings about it.

Enjoy! Maybe one day I will figure out part two.

[scotianostra]

Scottish writer, Sheila Burnford was born on May 11th 1918.

Sheila was born and educated in Edinburgh then Harrogate College in Yorkshire, England.

She was one of the first women in Scotland to receive her Aviation Certificate. During the Second World War she worked as an ambulance attendant and driver. Sheila married David Burnford, a surgeon in the Royal Navy, and in 1948 the Burnford family emigrated to Canada, settling at Port Arthur in western Ontario.

Sheila loved the great outdoors, particularly walking and hunting. She became friends with local artist Susan Ross. The two shared an interest in the lives of indigenous people and they inspired each other in creative endeavours.

Both Sheila and Susan were members of the Port Arthur Puppetry Club. It was during her time with the Club that Sheila began writing – scripts at first and then articles describing life in Northwestern Ontario for English magazines and newspapers such as Punch and the Glasgow Herald.

Sheila was a great animal lover, although she always said she had a practical view of them. After the death of her Bullterrier, Bill (who had kept her company during the Blitz in the Second World War), she decided to write a book, in part to memorialize him.

That book became The Incredible Journey.

The animals in the book were based on the personalities of her own animals. In addition to Bill, she had a Siamese cat (Simon) and a Golden Labrador (Raimie). She researched incidents similar to the ones in the book and used the area around her home and cottage (Loon Lake) to describe the terrain.

The book was an international bestseller and was eventually translated into more than 17 languages. It would win a number of awards, including the Canadian Library Association Book of the Year for Children.

In 1963 the Walt Disney adaptation of the film was released. The premiere of the film was held in Port Arthur with over 10,000 people lining the streets for the parade preceding the showing. Actors from the film and the film’s director, Fletcher Markle, attended the premiere. Although the book was based in Northwestern Ontario, it was actually filmed in the Toronto area.

In 1964, Sheila published her second book, The Fields of Noon, a collection of essays on life in Northwestern Ontario. It included a number of essays that had previously been published in English periodicals.

In the late 1960s, Sheila and Susan Ross spent a great deal of time visiting native reserves in Northwestern Ontario. Both women had long held interest in native life and found the opportunity to actually learn about native life to be irresistible. While there, Susan Ross drew sketches of the people and Sheila observed. As a result of these visits, Sheila published Without Reserve, using some of Susan Ross’s drawings as illustrations.

Sheila and Susan next travelled up to Pond Inlet and experienced the life of the Inuit, including travelling by dog sled to see the narwhal. From this experience came One Woman’s Arctic. This book also included illustrations by Susan Ross.

The Incredible Journey was acclaimed as a children’s book, even though Sheila herself did not think of it as a children’s book. In 1973, she published an actual children’s book, Mr. Noah and the Second Flood. The story focused on the impact of consumerism and waste on the planet.

Sheila’s last book, Bel Ria: Dog of War, was the story of a little dog caught up in the horrors of the Second World War. In writing the book, she drew upon her own experiences in the Blitz and used research to maintain authenticity.

In 1984 Sheila Burnford died of lung cancer. She had moved back to the UK to live with her second husband, Dr. J.D. Loughborough.

In 2017, a documentary of her life, Long Walk Home: The Incredible Journey of Sheila Burnford, was released by Sheba Films.

[capybaraonabicycle]

For the art ask game, 3, 15 and 16?

Thank you for the ask!! I was so hoping someone would send one in :)

3. What artist do you wish people knew more about?

This is difficult because I am mostly aware of the standard artists you meet in art class - almost all of which are western men - and the most 'niche' of the ones I love would be like Georges Braques and Wassily Kandinsky and Umberto Boccioni and Edward Hopper and Canaletto and Ai Weiwei and Franz Marc - and I feel like for any one of those names I will have people at my throat for mentioning them in a sentence that includes the word 'niche'.

There are two that I can name though, that I don't know from art class and I believe they are at least somewhat niche:

There is Kent Monkman, a contemporary queer Cree artist who I was introduced to at uni. He uses a multitude of art forms (and you can check them out on his website) but I am most familiar with his paintings, especially the "Shame and Prejudice" exhibition that we looked at in class.

The exhibition features Monkman's genderqueer alter ego Miss Chief Testickle who tells Canadian history from her perspective and the paintings are, in my opinion, very clever and impactful. I analysed "The Subjugation of Truth" for class and there is a ton of subtle symbolism to drive the political message (painting in traditional settler style, putting the viewer into the position of the indigenous men, having the queen hover menacingly above it all) in the art work.

This is it:

Another really famous of the works is "Resurgence of the people" which references an old settler image with George Washington replaced by Miss Chief:

I'm not sure whether this one is the exact reference but it quotes some picture like this:

I really like Monkman's style and I think his images are very strong and often for the topic of indigenous history with settlers, the violence in them is palpable. Another impressive one would be "The Scream" :

Then I would like to mention the possibly most important artist of my childhood, Estonian-Swedish illustrator Ilon Wikland. She illustrated most of Astrid Lindgren's books and her style is just - so cozy and soft, I want to live in her art.

I feel like many people do know the books and her art, but few will know her name. So she counts :) (she's still alive btw, I had to look that up and was surprised)

15. Share a photo of your favorite contemporary artwork

I'm not sure I have one special favourite art work but this is something I saw at the documenta exhibition semi-recently and it really stuck with me. Unfortunately, I don't seem to be able to find the title, but I remember it was something similar to "deep belly breath".

(It's the blue one in the front)

It's a pretty big plastic, higher than I am tall and it is fluffy and blue and there is water in the middle. I love it mostly for looking like an alien being, but the fluffyness has a nice feel to it too (or rather 'a nice look', I obviously didn't touch it). Together with the title and the water and the dark fur on the inside, there is a sort of desperation and drowning feeling to it, softened by the fact you really want to hug it and climb into the water and be safe in your cocoon.

No idea whether any of this was intentional, but I had to stick with it for a good 10 min before being able to walk on (even though I was already tired) and I had to come back multiple times. I also had my aunt take a picture of me with the art and I am wearing a dw shirt so it's perfect :)

The work was made by someone from the art collective *foundationClass, an organisation based in Berlin who prepare students for art school. They made a bunch of cool, often political, art for the documenta

I have to say I am also particularly fond of the Möbiusship, though, that has been circulating on tumblr

16. What museum or gallery do you want to visit?

I really want to visit the Munch museum! He is one of my favourite artists and when I was in Oslo once, the museum was closed for renovation. But now it should have reopened, so I just need to get myself to Norway and reserve a full day for Munch :)

[ninja-muse]

I completely abandoned any pretense about reaching my yearly reading goal this December, but I did manage to read one TBR book per month and read 50 of the books I wanted to in 2022, so I’m counting the year as a win. And I got close to the goal, anyway, at least if you include the picture books. (I do not like to include the picture books.) This month also included surprise highlights, surprise disappointments, and not one, but two, history books, which I feel like I never do.

December also, obviously, included a book haul. I got a couple books I asked for for Christmas, a couple books that came from the “give everyone an essay about my tastes” wishlists, and The Atlas Six, which arrived at work too damaged to sell but is still perfectly readable and it had been recommended by a friend…. The highlight is Weirdos of the Universe Unite!, however. I read this at least three times as a kid, via the public library, and I’m pretty sure we can credit my love of urban fantasy to it. That one’s actually part of my birthday haul, but the postal system got in the way. Very excited to (hopefully) reread it in 2023!

The Mummy! - Jane C. Webb Louden A plan to resurrect a mummy somehow upends the monarchy and everyone’s love lives. Melodramatic satire on a grand scale. - Egyptian secondary character

Beneath Another Sky - Norman Davies A world tour of countries subsumed by the colonial West and the ways they’re rebuilding after. - diverse nations and peoples covered - warning: colonial mindsets 1491 - Charles C. Mann An examination of what is known about pre-contact life in the Americas, versus what has often been taught and believed. - Indigenous subject matter - warning: racists, genocide

The Great Believers - Rebecca Makkai Yale is trying for a bequest to his gallery while navigating a relationship and watching his friends die of AIDS. Thirty years later, Fiona is searching for her daughter and reckoning with how Yale’s friend-group has affected her life. - largely 🏳️‍🌈 cast, Jewish protagonist, Jewish secondary character, Black secondary character - warning: deaths from AIDS, period-typical homophobia, including apathy and hate crimes

Books and Libraries - Andrew Scrimgeour, ed. A collection of poetry dedicated to the love of books.

The World We Make - N.K. Jemisin The boroughs of New York thought they’d fought their biggest battle, but then a populist politician comes to town. - ensemble cast containing Black, Indigenous, Indian, Latina, and 🏳️‍🌈 protagonists, Black author, #ownvoices for Blackness

Don't Fear the Reaper - Stephen Graham Jones Jade Jennifer Daniels returns to Proofrock the week a serial killer escapes in a blizzard. Out in February. - Blackfoot protagonist, Indigenous secondary characters, Black secondary character, disabled secondary characters, Blackfoot author, #ownvoices for Blackfoot representation - warning: death, gore, animal death

Grumpy New Year - Katrina Moore with Xindi Yan (illustrator) Daisy’s going to China to visit her Yeh-Yeh for Lunar New Year! Daisy should have slept—but she didn’t. - Chinese cast

The Golden Spoon - Jessa Maxwell Six contestants, two hosts, one world-famous baking show. And a body. Out in March. - ensemble cast containing Black, Latina, neurodivergent, and 🏳️‍🌈 characters

Reread:

The Jolly Christmas Postman - Allan Ahlberg with Janet Ahlberg (illustrator) A postman delivers Christmas mail to the fairy tale and nursery rhyme residents of his village.

Currently reading:

A Killing In Costumes - Zac Bissonnette Jay and Cindy just got an offer that might save their movie memorabilia business. Unfortunately, their competitor has turned up dead and that might sink everything. - 🏳️‍🌈 protagonists

The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle Victorian detective stories - major disabled character
 - warning: colonialism, racism


Stats


Monthly total: 9
 Yearly total: 145 + 2
 Queer books: 1
 Authors of colour: 2
 Books by women: 5
 Canadian authors: 0
 Off the TBR shelves: 2
 DNFs: 0

January February March April May June July August September October November

[arthistoryanimalia]

#MonochromeMonday + #OwlishMonday:

Lukta Qiatsuk (Inuit, 1928-2004)

Owl, 1959

Stonecut on paper

photographed at Brooklyn Museum

“[This work] belongs to the first official catalogued collection released by Kinngait's West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative in 1959, shortly after the introduction of printmaking to the Canadian Arctic two years prior. Many early Kinngait graphic artists adapted their skills as stone carvers to engrave stone matrices used for printmaking. Their work often illustrates the natural world, such as…Lukta Qiatsuk's playful image of an owl taking flight.”

[newhistorybooks]

"For too long, Canadian history erased the story of Canada's Indian residential schools. Thanks to the efforts of Indigenous peoples and their allies, that shameful silence is being ended. . . . Sam George was a student who survived, although, as his powerful memoir The Fire Still Burns painfully illustrates, not without scars. . . . But he is also able to tell the story of how reconnecting with his Indigenous roots and culture helped him heal and become a loving, contributing elder in his community. He counsels on addiction and hears his grandchildren speaking the language he was beaten for. Cultural genocide has not triumphed."

[rlyehcityplanner]

Okay, so this one was pretty good

The themes I seemed to pick up on were exploitation of indigenous lands/culture/peoples actions without consequence leads to moral decay, and surprisingly it touched on addiction too

That second one is particularly appropriate for a Canadian director to put in, I get the feeling Mr. Cronenberg has some thoughts there

I’ve heard the 5 theory (that there were in fact 5 James clones) but I’m not certain it really matters, given that regardless of his identity struggle, he’s a broken husk either way

I think the overwhelming emotion I had leaving this one was weirdly enough, anger. Mostly at these wealthy assholes and their truly horrendous acts, but partly at James for falling for this bullshit hook line and sinker

Dude went along with it too far, and crossed the moral event horizon, no character leaves this film without blood (literal or metaphorical) on their hands

Cloning is yet another effective metaphor for loss of humanity

Mia Goth continues her reign of terror here and solidifies her Scream Queen status

though Pearl is still her best role imo

Would’ve liked more of the trippy visuals like we see when James is first doubled

Loved the colour switch when James returns to the apartment after mercilessly beating his double and running from Gabi and co. 

his apartment is bathed in a blue hue, to illustrate him taking back calm/sanity however briefly and contrasting with the deep reds the rest of the film skews towards (madness)

Still gotta catch Antivrial but Brandon Cronenberg is 2/2 for me

[bookclub4m]

Episode 166 - Sports (Non-Fiction)

This episode we’re talking about Non-Fiction Sports books! We discuss how to define sports, live sports, weird rules, and more!

You can download the podcast directly, find it on Libsyn, or get it through Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, or your favourite podcast delivery system.

In this episode

Anna Ferri | Meghan Whyte | Matthew Murray | RJ Edwards

Things We Read (or tried to…)

The Comic Book Story of Basketball: A Fast-Break History of Hops, Hoops, and Alley-OOPS

Canadian Heritage Minutes: Basketball (YouTube)

(lots more below in “Links, Articles, and Things”)

Walking: One Step at a Time by Erling Kagge, translated by Becky L. Crook, narrated by Atli Gunnarsson

Revolutions: How Women Changed the World on Two Wheels by Hannah Ross

One Game at a Time: Why Sports Matter by Matt Hern

Strong Like a Woman: 100 Game-Changing Female Athletes by Laken Litman

A Most Beautiful Thing: The True Story of America's First All-Black High School Rowing Team by Arshay Cooper, narrated by Adam Lazarre-White

Other Media We Mentioned

Football in Sun and Shadow by Eduardo Galeano, translated by Mark Fried

Soccer vs. the State: Tackling Football and Radical Politics by Gabriel Kuhn

Links, Articles, and Things

Which Pokémon are the most goth? (featuring Matthew and Jam)

Lumberjack World Championship (Wikipedia)

Sports Book Awards

Mascot Mischief (Jam’s mascot RPG)

Pawtucket Red Sox (Wikipedia)

It’s possible the burlesque wrestling event that Anna and Matthew went to was Glam Slam, which still exists!

Heritage Minutes (Wikipedia)

Wilder Penfield (YouTube)

Sam Steele (YouTube)

Halifax Explosion (YouTube)

Jackie Shane (YouTube) (most recent one!)

The 10 Best Canadian Heritage Minutes of All Time

A Part of Our Heritage (YouTube)

AK Press (Wikipedia)

Green Bay Packers (Wikipedia)

List of fan-owned sports teams (Wikipedia)

Sex verification in sports (Wikipedia)

Testosterone regulations in women's athletics (Wikipedia)

Zhang Shan: The only female shooter to win gold in a mixed competition

“After the Barcelona Games, the International Shooting Union barred women from shooting against men. For the next years, the skeet event remained on the Olympic Games programme, but only for male athletes.”

The Bob Emergency: a study of athletes named Bob, Part I by Jon Bois

Barbados intentionally scored an own goal to help them win by two thanks to a weird golden goal rule Weird Rules on Secret Base (YouTube)

Twenty20 (Wikipedia)

“Twenty20 (T20) is a shortened game format of cricket.”

Episode 159 - Hurts So Good: The Science and Culture of Pain on Purpose by Leigh Cowart

16 Sports (Non-Fiction)books by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, & People of Colour) Authors

Every month Book Club for Masochists: A Readers’ Advisory Podcasts chooses a genre at random and we read and discuss books from that genre. We also put together book lists for each episode/genre that feature works by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, & People of Colour) authors. All of the lists can be found here.

Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina  by Misty Copeland

Indigenous Feminist Gikendaasowin (Knowledge): Decolonization through Physical Activity by Tricia McGuire-Adams

Rebound: Sports, Community, and the Inclusive City by Perry King

A Beautiful Work in Progress by Mirna Valerio

Basketball (and Other Things): a Collection of Questions Asked, Answered, Illustrated by Shea Serrano

Black Gods of the Asphalt: Religion, Hip-hop, and Street Basketball by Onaje X. O. Woodbine

Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete by William C. Rhoden

In My Skin: My Life on and Off the Basketball Court by Brittney Griner

Blood in the Garden: The Flagrant History of the 1990s New York Knicks by Chris Herring

A Team of Their Own: How an International Sisterhood Made Olympic History by Seth Berkman 

Tigerbelle: The Wyomia Tyus Story by Wyomia Tyus, Elizabeth Terzakis

Rise of the Black Quarterback: What It Means for America by Jason Reid

Courage to Soar: A Body in Motion, a Life in Balance by Simone Biles with Michelle Burford

My Olympic Life by Anita L. DeFrantz and Josh Young

Back in the Frame: How to get back on your bike, whatever life throws at you by Jools Walker 

Relentless: From Good to Great to Unstoppable by Tim S. Grover

Give us feedback!

Fill out the form to ask for a recommendation or suggest a genre or title for us to read!

Check out our Tumblr, follow us on Twitter or Instagram, join our Facebook Group, or send us an email!

Join us again on Tuesday, January 17th we’ll be discussing reading resolutions!!

Then on Tuesday, February 7th it’ll be our annual Valentine’s Day episode and we’ll be talking about the genre of Holiday Romance!

[theivorybilledwoodpecker]

It was February 1982 and Danielle, 22, and her parents were inside a family member’s home in Regina, a city in Saskatchewan, Canada, when the local officer, who she said had been briefed by Calgary police, explained that her sister Eleanor “Laney” Ewenin was last seen leaving a downtown bar in Calgary. Two days later, police reportedly found her in a field that Danielle estimates would have been about 20 miles from the town center at that time. “They had told us that it had snowed, so they could see the tire tracks pulling in and the tracks pulling out and that they could see that she was trying to make her way across the field,” said Danielle, who described the meeting with police as lasting about an hour. “There was a building there that had lights on, so they felt that that's where she was going.” But she would never make it. Tracks in the snow, according to Danielle, indicated that she fell three times and on the third fall she never got back up. The mother of two boys, ages 5 and 3, was found face down, dead in the snow after preceding nights dropped as low as -15F. According to the autopsy provided by her family, Laney’s cause of death was hypothermia, with alcoholic intoxication listed as the “antecedent cause.” That same year her death was ruled non-suspicious, according to Alberta Royal Canadian Mounted Police. .... About a week before Laney’s body was discovered, family members said city police showed up at her mother’s home in Calgary with Laney. This was a fairly common occurrence, according to Debbie Green, another of Laney’s sisters, who was around 12 at the time. Laney, who is Plains Cree, was taken from her family as a young child as part of the “sixties scoop,” a series of policies that began in the early 1950s and resulted in the removal of thousands of Indigenous children from their homes. She suffered horrific abuse in foster homes, which included losing her left ring finger, and she later developed an alcohol addiction. Just before she died she was looking into alcohol treatment and getting custody of her sons. The last time police had brought her home, it was different, Debbie said: “The police came one time with her and said, ‘Look, we’re tired of doing this. You better do something, right? Or she's just not gonna make it home one day.’” Days later, Laney Ewenin was dead. .... The Alberta Royal Canadian Mounted Police said it no longer had an investigation file related to Laney’s death. Since her death was ruled not suspicious, an Alberta Royal Canadian Mounted Police spokesperson said in an email the file “was subject to purging after eight years, in accordance with Canadian Federal Government information retention policies. Because of that policy, I don’t have any records to be able to confirm that the file existed in 1982.” .. . During one part of the national hearings that was not broadcast publicly, Debbie said her family had the opportunity to speak directly to Royal Canadian Mounted Police officials and local police officers. Family members, according to her, told them they knew law enforcement was responsible for Laney’s death. Debbie said she remembers an official responding: “Well, unfortunately, you know, we will never know.”

[vanessa-df]

Language of the street

I’ve decided to explore and create my design poster on the chosen area Ahuntsic-Cartiervill. This location is well known for its exciting culture rich history and lively scenery. Cartiervill is located towards the end of the northern part of the city of Montreal. It is situated near the Rivière des Prairies to the north and the city of Montreal to the south. Its origin traces back to when it was occupied by the indigenous before it became a French settlement in the 17th century. Today, it’s known as one of the oldest villages of Montreal, known for its historical background, I captured most of my images on the street La Promenade Fleury the street is popular for it’s tourist attraction natural scenery, local shops and restaurants such as Chez Clementine, La Petite Flore, Style Petales, and places for residents. And significant historical buildings built from the late 19th century; Moreover the area is surrounded by public art, such as the sculpture The Little Purple Boxes" by artist Pierre Piché. Which was created for the community and local residence.

 I have decided to focus the content of my poster based on the history and specific art elements of public art I have photographed. Color is a key design element that shapes the overall concept of my poster I used an off-white color to create an old-time aesthetic and vintage timeless look given its historical context and color scheme of the public art.  I used turquoise, blue, and red within the typography and shapes to create contrast within the creation that creates a more dynamic look, and lastly, I used yellow in the window to really emphasize and draw the viewers’ attention to make the window stand out and create a warm inviting feeling to describe the community. My poster also consists of an image of the residence building where I cropped out windows to create repetition, giving the sense of a visual rhythm and unity with its repeated patterns. Additionally Shape is also used to frame certain parts of my poster, such as the typography and visual elements in relation to the structure of the windows. for example I tried to illustrate on my poster the structure The little purple box by Piché. I wanted to add shapes in my poster in a similar way to the structure, stacked and overlapped to create this real-life structure. Finally, movement of the road creates a crucial role in guiding the viewer’s eyes through the composition the movement of the road creates a visual flow and path towards the center of the poster the curved road allows the viewers eyes to explore the different elements used along the path and draw them to the main part of the poster. For the typography I used I used old-style text to create the timeless depth. I emphasize in big at the top of my poster the Molson dry text to create the connection between Canadians oldest bear and the Cartiervilles oldest village. In conclusion Ahuntsic-Cartierville is full of a lot's of history and art, so I aimed to incorporated all those elements I captured in my photographs and design elements, making it both visually appealing and representing its rich history