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She rests in a corner of the new Ottawa Art Gallery, a brown-skinned girl seated on the trunk of a birch tree, her dark hair blowing free in the wind. In front of her, birch bark canoes are pulled up along the shore of the Ottawa River. Behind her, dense forest and the soaring towers of Parliament Hill.
In the picture, the girl is dwarfed by a larger image of herself, her own spirit, who cradles the entire scene in her arms from the west, which glows with the setting sun.
The beauty of the image belies the tragedy it portrays.
“I’ve been trying to tell this story for 30 years,” artist Janet Kaponicin says in a phone call from her Vancouver home. “I’ve been trying to keep it alive. It’s such a hard story to hear.”
The picture — a copy of Kaponicin’s original birchbark painting that was lent to the gallery by the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg Cultural Centre — is titled The Tragic History behind the Parliament Building. It tells the story passed down through generations of Kaponicin women of the horrifying rape and murder of an Algonquin girl by British soldiers on the very site of Canada’s future Parliament.
She is, perhaps, No. 1 on the list of Canada’s missing and murdered Indigenous women.
Kaponicin, 60, grew up in Ottawa and heard the story from her grandmother, Angelique Kaponicin Maheux, who raised Kaponicin from the time she was a year old. Angelique was born in 1884 in the area now flooded by the Baskatong Reservoir north of Maniwaki and was 75 years old when she took the toddler into her home. She died in 1979 at age 95. Angelique was one of a long line of medicine women in the Kaponicin family and had heard the story from her own great grandmother, known as Grandmother Jocko. Jocko’s mother, in turn, had been at the encampment at the time of the murder.
According to the story, a group of Algonquin families were travelling up the Ottawa River from Lake of Two Mountains, returning to their traditional hunting grounds north of Maniwaki. They camped along the river near the site of present day Parliament Hill. At the time, the bluff was known as Barracks Hill, the site of British army barracks built during the construction of the Rideau Canal. Kaponicin says the story goes back seven generations. Though it’s impossible to date accurately, it likely occurred some time between the 1820s and 1850s.
One night a young girl of about 15 from the Algonquin group didn’t return to camp. Her mother went searching and spotted the girl sitting on a stump with her hair blowing loose in the wind.
“How it happened, according to my grandmother, was that a woman never cut her hair,” Kaponicin said. “My grandmother never cut her hair for 95 years. But you never let it loose, either. It had to be tied up, either in a braid or a bun. So when the mother was looking for this young girl, she could see her sitting straight up with her hair blowing in the wind. She knew something was wrong.”
In the picture, the girl’s long hair blows in the wind, a telltale sign that told her mother something was wrong.
A party of warriors went to investigate and found the girl dead. She’d been raped and murdered, then impaled on a stump so that she would sit upright. The warriors saw “government men” — soldiers — climbing back up to the top of Barrack Hill, Kaponicin says.
“The men were so upset when they had to un-impale her from the tree stump, they were going to go up and cause a war,” Kaponicin said. “But the chief was very highly respected. He said to them, ‘No. We’re going to leave here. Because of the way she was killed, she herself will take care of those men. We will leave here and never return.’
“They took her body, but they never reported it. They didn’t want to cause any problems. Nobody knew about it. The white people never knew about it. The soldiers got away.”
Angelique was from a long line of Algonquin medicine women and told her granddaughter many stories of historical and supernatural events. The stories have been the inspiration of Kaponicin’s artwork. She first portrayed the murder story in an early painting called The Spirit behind Parliament, a darker and rawer image than the one now on display at the Ottawa Art Gallery.
George MacDonald, the former director of Canada’s Museum of Civilization, as it was then known, saw Kaponicin’s painting and bought it for the museum’s collection in 1985.
“I think it’s an absolutely authentic story,” said MacDonald, who retired from the museum in 1998 after a 38-year career, the last 15 as director.
“I spent my career authenticating stories and seeing if they ring true or not. As time goes by, stories morph, they lose details. They emphasize certain details over others. It’s like studying linguistic drift. You get changes through time. But nonetheless, you can still detect whether it’s an authentic story or not. I certainly judge that story to be of the kind that people don’t just make up.”
The 1985 work is sparse and less “painterly.” The girl is more obviously naked.
“I saw that immediately of a very poignant example of memory within a family that had to be expressed. It had to be communicated to other people and being an artist she could do that,” MacDonald said. “She was thinking about it then. She just wanted to get it out as direct a way as possible. The first one was a much more emotive and immediate expression, not at all motivated by the art market.”.
The Spirit Behind Parliament, an early version of Kaponicin’s painting, is owned by the Canadian Museum of History.
Indigenous stories can be uncannily accurate, MacDonald said. For example, stories from West Coast First Nations people talk of a Great Flood, which anthropologists first thought were versions of the Biblical flood that had been relayed by Christian missionaries. They soon realized that the Indigenous flood stories went back thousands of years before European contact and were backed up by archeological evidence.
“I’ve been really interested in the persistence of memory in different cultural groups, particularly where it comes to very traumatic incidents in their histories,” MacDonald said. “All Aboriginal people in Canada have tragedies that they remember for a long time and it comes up in their art a lot. The residential school is just one example that cuts across many, many artists.”
When MacDonald saw Kaponicin’s original painting and heard her tell the story behind it, he found it “absolutely intriguing and fascinating.”
“How horrendous. To have had that happen on our own Parliament Hill. It’s a statement about the relationships between the different cultures, and different genders. It has everything in it, and the worst possible outcome. This comes up in the context of the murdered Indigenous women. It is a narrative of that as well.”
Kaponicin’s painting has been in storage at the museum ever since, though MacDonald said it’s not because the story is too controversial or too politically sensitive.
“I did feel it had a lot of scholarly interest because of the themes it expressed. I didn’t anticipate that it would be publicly shown much. I hoped that it would be, but I didn’t make any commitments that I can recall,” MacDonald said.
Kaponicin, on the other hand, thought the work was to be displayed prominently as a reminder of the crime committed on that young, nameless Algonquin girl.
“When it didn’t go anywhere and it went into storage I thought, ‘Gee, I did that so it would get out.’ But I’m an artist so I thought, ‘I’ll do another.’ It’s the same story, but it’s a completely different painting.”
The new work, done in 2004, will remain at the Ottawa Art Gallery until September as part of the “Mapping” themed section of its inaugural exhibit. Space constraints prevent the gallery from telling its full story, says assistant curator Rebecca Basciano. The text for The Tragic History behind Parliament Hill and two adjacent works by artists Dean Ottawa and Henry Pooley says Kaponicin’s work depicts “the brutal rape and murder of an Indigenous woman on this site by British officers. It is said that the woman’s spirit continues to haunt Parliament Hill and if you listen closely, you can her cries in the wind.”
The site is haunted to this day, Kaponicin believes, pointing to a number of high profile deaths and suicides near the Hill and nearby Majors Hill Park. (Just steps away from the Kaponicin work at the Ottawa Art Gallery is an installation by artist Carl Stewart that marks the homophobic murder of Alain Brosseau, who was thrown to his death from the Alexandra Bridge in 1989).
“My grandmother was able to see spirits. All those spirit stories, I have them in paintings. Natives have a lot of power that non-natives can’t understand,” Kaponicin said.
The story “was important to my grandmother. She remembered that. She said if you go to the back of Parliament you can hear her cry. If you’re unbalanced at all, you’ll feel the emotions. You’ll feel the hurt and the pain and you’ll become suicidal. Or you’ll feel the anger and you’ll want to hurt somebody.”
The story of the terrible rape and murder has weighed heavily on her family over the generations, Kaponicin said. Yet as terrible as the story is, there are positive elements, too.
“It also shows how peaceful the natives were,” she said. The Algonquins left the tragic scene quietly, avoiding a conflict with the soldiers encamped on the high ground. The chief, whose name Kaponicin can no longer remember, convinced the warriors that more violence was not the answer.
“But he pointed back in that direction and said, ‘No good will ever come of this land,'” she said. “That’s where Parliament is. In a way, he almost put a curse on that land.”
bcrawford@postmedia.com
Twitter.com/getBAC
查看原文...
In the picture, the girl is dwarfed by a larger image of herself, her own spirit, who cradles the entire scene in her arms from the west, which glows with the setting sun.
The beauty of the image belies the tragedy it portrays.
“I’ve been trying to tell this story for 30 years,” artist Janet Kaponicin says in a phone call from her Vancouver home. “I’ve been trying to keep it alive. It’s such a hard story to hear.”
The picture — a copy of Kaponicin’s original birchbark painting that was lent to the gallery by the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg Cultural Centre — is titled The Tragic History behind the Parliament Building. It tells the story passed down through generations of Kaponicin women of the horrifying rape and murder of an Algonquin girl by British soldiers on the very site of Canada’s future Parliament.
She is, perhaps, No. 1 on the list of Canada’s missing and murdered Indigenous women.
Kaponicin, 60, grew up in Ottawa and heard the story from her grandmother, Angelique Kaponicin Maheux, who raised Kaponicin from the time she was a year old. Angelique was born in 1884 in the area now flooded by the Baskatong Reservoir north of Maniwaki and was 75 years old when she took the toddler into her home. She died in 1979 at age 95. Angelique was one of a long line of medicine women in the Kaponicin family and had heard the story from her own great grandmother, known as Grandmother Jocko. Jocko’s mother, in turn, had been at the encampment at the time of the murder.
According to the story, a group of Algonquin families were travelling up the Ottawa River from Lake of Two Mountains, returning to their traditional hunting grounds north of Maniwaki. They camped along the river near the site of present day Parliament Hill. At the time, the bluff was known as Barracks Hill, the site of British army barracks built during the construction of the Rideau Canal. Kaponicin says the story goes back seven generations. Though it’s impossible to date accurately, it likely occurred some time between the 1820s and 1850s.
One night a young girl of about 15 from the Algonquin group didn’t return to camp. Her mother went searching and spotted the girl sitting on a stump with her hair blowing loose in the wind.
“How it happened, according to my grandmother, was that a woman never cut her hair,” Kaponicin said. “My grandmother never cut her hair for 95 years. But you never let it loose, either. It had to be tied up, either in a braid or a bun. So when the mother was looking for this young girl, she could see her sitting straight up with her hair blowing in the wind. She knew something was wrong.”
In the picture, the girl’s long hair blows in the wind, a telltale sign that told her mother something was wrong.
A party of warriors went to investigate and found the girl dead. She’d been raped and murdered, then impaled on a stump so that she would sit upright. The warriors saw “government men” — soldiers — climbing back up to the top of Barrack Hill, Kaponicin says.
“The men were so upset when they had to un-impale her from the tree stump, they were going to go up and cause a war,” Kaponicin said. “But the chief was very highly respected. He said to them, ‘No. We’re going to leave here. Because of the way she was killed, she herself will take care of those men. We will leave here and never return.’
“They took her body, but they never reported it. They didn’t want to cause any problems. Nobody knew about it. The white people never knew about it. The soldiers got away.”
Angelique was from a long line of Algonquin medicine women and told her granddaughter many stories of historical and supernatural events. The stories have been the inspiration of Kaponicin’s artwork. She first portrayed the murder story in an early painting called The Spirit behind Parliament, a darker and rawer image than the one now on display at the Ottawa Art Gallery.
George MacDonald, the former director of Canada’s Museum of Civilization, as it was then known, saw Kaponicin’s painting and bought it for the museum’s collection in 1985.
“I think it’s an absolutely authentic story,” said MacDonald, who retired from the museum in 1998 after a 38-year career, the last 15 as director.
“I spent my career authenticating stories and seeing if they ring true or not. As time goes by, stories morph, they lose details. They emphasize certain details over others. It’s like studying linguistic drift. You get changes through time. But nonetheless, you can still detect whether it’s an authentic story or not. I certainly judge that story to be of the kind that people don’t just make up.”
The 1985 work is sparse and less “painterly.” The girl is more obviously naked.
“I saw that immediately of a very poignant example of memory within a family that had to be expressed. It had to be communicated to other people and being an artist she could do that,” MacDonald said. “She was thinking about it then. She just wanted to get it out as direct a way as possible. The first one was a much more emotive and immediate expression, not at all motivated by the art market.”.
The Spirit Behind Parliament, an early version of Kaponicin’s painting, is owned by the Canadian Museum of History.
Indigenous stories can be uncannily accurate, MacDonald said. For example, stories from West Coast First Nations people talk of a Great Flood, which anthropologists first thought were versions of the Biblical flood that had been relayed by Christian missionaries. They soon realized that the Indigenous flood stories went back thousands of years before European contact and were backed up by archeological evidence.
“I’ve been really interested in the persistence of memory in different cultural groups, particularly where it comes to very traumatic incidents in their histories,” MacDonald said. “All Aboriginal people in Canada have tragedies that they remember for a long time and it comes up in their art a lot. The residential school is just one example that cuts across many, many artists.”
When MacDonald saw Kaponicin’s original painting and heard her tell the story behind it, he found it “absolutely intriguing and fascinating.”
“How horrendous. To have had that happen on our own Parliament Hill. It’s a statement about the relationships between the different cultures, and different genders. It has everything in it, and the worst possible outcome. This comes up in the context of the murdered Indigenous women. It is a narrative of that as well.”
Kaponicin’s painting has been in storage at the museum ever since, though MacDonald said it’s not because the story is too controversial or too politically sensitive.
“I did feel it had a lot of scholarly interest because of the themes it expressed. I didn’t anticipate that it would be publicly shown much. I hoped that it would be, but I didn’t make any commitments that I can recall,” MacDonald said.
Kaponicin, on the other hand, thought the work was to be displayed prominently as a reminder of the crime committed on that young, nameless Algonquin girl.
“When it didn’t go anywhere and it went into storage I thought, ‘Gee, I did that so it would get out.’ But I’m an artist so I thought, ‘I’ll do another.’ It’s the same story, but it’s a completely different painting.”
The new work, done in 2004, will remain at the Ottawa Art Gallery until September as part of the “Mapping” themed section of its inaugural exhibit. Space constraints prevent the gallery from telling its full story, says assistant curator Rebecca Basciano. The text for The Tragic History behind Parliament Hill and two adjacent works by artists Dean Ottawa and Henry Pooley says Kaponicin’s work depicts “the brutal rape and murder of an Indigenous woman on this site by British officers. It is said that the woman’s spirit continues to haunt Parliament Hill and if you listen closely, you can her cries in the wind.”
The site is haunted to this day, Kaponicin believes, pointing to a number of high profile deaths and suicides near the Hill and nearby Majors Hill Park. (Just steps away from the Kaponicin work at the Ottawa Art Gallery is an installation by artist Carl Stewart that marks the homophobic murder of Alain Brosseau, who was thrown to his death from the Alexandra Bridge in 1989).
“My grandmother was able to see spirits. All those spirit stories, I have them in paintings. Natives have a lot of power that non-natives can’t understand,” Kaponicin said.
The story “was important to my grandmother. She remembered that. She said if you go to the back of Parliament you can hear her cry. If you’re unbalanced at all, you’ll feel the emotions. You’ll feel the hurt and the pain and you’ll become suicidal. Or you’ll feel the anger and you’ll want to hurt somebody.”
The story of the terrible rape and murder has weighed heavily on her family over the generations, Kaponicin said. Yet as terrible as the story is, there are positive elements, too.
“It also shows how peaceful the natives were,” she said. The Algonquins left the tragic scene quietly, avoiding a conflict with the soldiers encamped on the high ground. The chief, whose name Kaponicin can no longer remember, convinced the warriors that more violence was not the answer.
“But he pointed back in that direction and said, ‘No good will ever come of this land,'” she said. “That’s where Parliament is. In a way, he almost put a curse on that land.”
bcrawford@postmedia.com
Twitter.com/getBAC
查看原文...
