AGENCY
*an act of power
*to make decisions in another's best interest
*when Indian agents & government officials (federal, municipal, provincial) decide
*when Indian Act chief & councils make decisions for you and your family

-----LOSS-----
loss of agency when using the Indian Act to decide
loss of agency will leave you silent and powerless
loss of agency will make you invisible
loss of agency will erase you

NEW AGENCY
*power redefined
*no longer colonial
*no longer patriarchal
*to make decisions for you by you
*to make decisions without the Indian act
*you are no longer invisible
*you are powerful

tīná gúyáńí (deer road) is an artist collective from guts’ists’i / mohkinstsis (Calgary) consisting of parent/child duo Glenna Cardinal (Tsuut’ina/Saddle Lake Cree) and seth cardinal dodginghorse (Tsuut’ina/Amskapi Piikani/Saddle Lake Cree). In 2014, they were forcibly removed from their homes and ancestral land on the Tsuut’ina Nation, for construction of the Southwest Calgary Ring Road. Their multidisciplinary practice honors their connection to land and explores the effects of environmental /psychological damage. tīná gúyáńí’s work is deeply based in culture, language, oral history, family photographs, and museum/archival research. Their art is an act of cultural preservation and a protest against ongoing settler colonialism.

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tīná gúyáńí: guwasidodi (old agency)

By Christina Reynolds

Backstory: How art collective tīná gúyáńí’s guwasidodi (old agency) exhibit came to be – and the one piece that didn’t make it to the gallery.

The interior of the little art house smelled of green tea and fresh wood varnish. On a cold and crisp day in May 2022, Glenna Cardinal, the artist who conceived the house and recently had it built, along with her son and fellow artist seth cardinal dodginghorse, welcomed three visitors inside to talk. Rez House, as Cardinal named it, was a bittersweet endeavour for both mother and son who often collaborate as art collective tīná gúyáńí (deer road), which was a finalist for the 2022 Sobey Art Award.

Cardinal worked with a local builder (and through local arts grants) to build Rez House as a close replica of her isuu (grandmother) Elsie Jacobs’s home — which still stands on Tsuut’ina Nation. The original home is around 100 years old and it faces the Rocky Mountains to its west, and overlooks guts’ists’i/mohkinstsis (the City of Calgary) to its east. The home’s fading red-painted wood shell now also perches above the south west portion of the new 101-kilometre Calgary Ring Road; the old home’s foundation is now just a few feet from the road’s vast corridor and eight lanes of traffic.

 But Cardinal and her immediate family are now physically separated from this ancestral home and land which used to be gently sloping forest and vegetable gardens, where their family lived since before the signing of Treaty 7 in 1877. In September 2014, they were forcibly removed from their homes on Tsuut’ina Nation to make way for the construction of the ring road. Since that day (and really, for their lifetimes — plans for the ring road loomed for 70+ years) Cardinal and her two sons, along with other family members, have been grappling with and mourning the loss of home — and what this means for their deep connection to land, language, ceremony, culture, community, family and identity.

This is the family story Cardinal and cardinal dodginghorse have been telling for years through their multidisciplinary art: a modern war painting, Super-8 movies, a Minecraft version of home, postcards, home furnishings trimmed with reflective tape used for road-construction vests, family photographs printed on library cards and silkscreened on to Pendletons and parfleche, coats and shawls emblazoned with pennies crossed out by sinew-thread Xs, evolving live performances – and now a new art house!

 Anticipation was high as we stepped inside Rez House on that chilly May day. Cardinal opened a brand-new plexiglass window for fresh air, and the five of us arranged our folding chairs into a socially distanced circle, all bundled up with our mugs of steamy tea, ready to talk.

 “I’m so excited!” Cardinal exclaimed, as she fiddled with a temporary space heater — a planned cast-iron stove, like the one her isuu had, was not yet in place. The conversation started full of possibilities: Rez House as a travelling exhibit (it fits on a flatbed trailer, so it’s moveable like a “tiny house”), or as a gallery space, or an art therapy classroom, or maybe, one day, as part of an artists’ retreat, or a movie house for showing family Super-8 films — as another way to keep telling her family’s story through art. And should she still paint the whole exterior red? That was still up for debate.

 Tomas Jonsson, a curator at Dunlop Art Gallery, was one of the three visitors that day. He came to Tsuut’ina Nation to see these Rez House possibilities first-hand, and to talk about possibly exhibiting it in Regina. The other guests were a fellow artist, and me, a journalist who lives nearby in Calgary, who has been closely following the family’s story for years. Over the next few hours, Cardinal and cardinal dodginghorse often finished each other’s sentences as they recounted their family’s story through the story of their art.

 It later turned out that logistics prevented Rez House from traveling to Regina. And while all of this might seem like a lot of backstory for an art piece that did not make it to the Dunlop’s new exhibit, guwasidodi (old agency), January 20 to April 9, 2024, Rez House was a key catalyst for the show – and is just a tiny bit of context for the eight carefully selected pieces that did travel to Regina. These artworks tell the stories shared in and held by Rez House.

 One of the first pieces you’ll see when you enter the show is i am here (2019), a postcard stand filled with a series of 40 numbered cards. Pick one up (visitors are encouraged to do so). On the front of card 14/40 is a sepia-toned image of barren trees flanked by survey markers and tangles of barbed-wire fencing. Flip to the back, where cardinal dodginghorse writes: “I am here, at the South West Calgary Ring Road, walking through a small bit of my family’s forest that barely exists...” Pick up another. The story unravels in stark images and vivid prose poetry.

 Throughout the exhibit, three semi-transparent elk parfleche are suspended in mid-air: ina (mother) (2019); nadisha-hi at’a (i am going home) (2023); and kuniya (come in) (2023). These modern-day war paintings and portraits feature silkscreened images of Elsie Jacobs and her mother Winnie Bull. For ina, cardinal dodginghorse used traditional paint pigments to depict the day his mother, Glenna Cardinal, first saw their trees chopped down and consumed by yellow construction vehicles for the ring road. The pictographs also recount Cardinal’s empathic encounter with a buck stranded in the tree shards who stared back at her with eyes as lost and scared as her own. On the floor below this parfleche – literally cut out from it – are a silkscreen image of Winnie Bull and her baby Elsie, showing how, through the continuing impact of the Indian Act and modern-day colonialism, women and their descendants are still being disenfranchised.

 The title of this exhibit guwasidodi (old agency) connects with this continuing fight, along with another piece in the show titled new agency (2023). In this text piece printed on a wall, the artists reclaim and redefine “agency”, “loss” – and most importantly, “new agency”: 

 “*power redefined


*no longer colonial


*no longer patriarchal


*to make decisions for you by you


*to make decisions without the Indian act


*you are no longer invisible


*you are powerful”

 The story continues along the elk parfleche spine of kuniya, which is silkscreened with 10 images of their primary family home, this one constructed in 1951, which was moved from their land for the ring road almost a decade ago now.

 tīná gúyáńí’s most recent piece, her name (2023), is a 33-minute Super-8 film of family memory vignettes paired with a powerful and ethereal musical score by cardinal dodginghorse. It’s the first time the collective has created work that connects their family life growing up on Tsuut’ina also with family connections to Saddle Lake Cree Nation, north-east of Amiskwaciy-wâskahikan (Edmonton), where Cardinal’s father grew up and attended Blue Quills residential school. Cardinal’s dad had an older sister who also attended, but did not come home.

 What tīná gúyáńí said recently about this film also sums up much of their approach to all the art they create: “This is not an educational film. It’s not a history of the school,” cardinal dodginghorse explains. “It’s a personal story – it’s not just big trauma dumping. As we get to the end of it, there are heavier things, but we are respectful to people in the family that are living through this. And we made this movie in a way that people in our family can watch it.” Says Cardinal: “Making this film is a way of giving to our family – we’re documenting it because no one else is. It’s art that facilitates healing.” Both cardinal dodginghorse and Cardinal credit making art with helping them to recognize and develop their own voices, and their ability to speak up and speak out. “Art gave me a voice,” Cardinal says, “especially at times when I couldn’t say the words out loud.”

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tīná gúyáńí

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Photos by Don Hall

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her name is a film commissioned by Gallery TPW by tīná gúyáńí (deer road), the parent/child artist-duo consisting of Glenna Cardinal and seth cardinal dodginghorse. The film explores a family story as it unfolds during Glenna’s studies at Blue Quills University near Edmonton, Alberta. In 1970, the Blue Quills Native Education Council took over operations of a former residential school and initiated the first Indigenous-owned and governed educational centre in Canada. Encountering a father and daughter’s experiences of Blue Quills at different periods of its history, her name presents “life as it is lived'' for a family navigating intergenerational colonial trauma through an Indigenous framework of healing

Content warning: This film contains content on Indian Residential Schools

The Indian Residential School Survivors Society has a 24 hour Crisis Line available for individuals in need of support: 1-866-925-4419

Artist Talk with Annie Wong, seth cardinal dodginghorse, and Glenna Cardinal

The Indigenous curatorial mentorship program is a partnership between Sâkêwêwak First Nations Artists' Collective Inc and Dunlop Art Gallery. Recognizing the need for more Indigenous curators living and working on Treaty 4, the program aims to create a unique mentorship opportunity for an emerging Indigenous curator and provide a generative space for study, discussion, and critique.

Brianna LaPlante is this year’s mentee curator, was mentored and guided by Alyssa Fearon and Holly Aubichon. The mentee selected artwork from Dunlop’s permanent collection for an exhibition this Fall at Dunlop Art Gallery.

Brianna LaPlante is a Fine Artist from Fishing Lake First Nation. LaPlante’s larger scale commissions have been sought out to elevate Treaty 4 spaces as an artist from the land. Artwork is an act of lifelong learning and resilience for her as an Anishinaabe/nehiyaw/ Michif creator. Her work is rooted within the elevation of Indigenous knowledge systems informed by the intersections of her life experiences. Underlying tones of her road to reclamation of both language and culture are present within all that she puts out into the world. This narrative is further explored through the multifaceted artworks dialing in on the evolution of culture and the dualities of existing in the two worlds of ceremony and urban life. Her artworks engage mind, body, and spirit.

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David Garneau Jane Ash Poitras Keith Bird Bob Boyer Darren Desnomie Leah Dorion Sherry Farrell Racette Simone McLeod Edward Poitras Florence Ryder Allen Sapp

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Photos by Don Hall

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the excess is ritual returns to histories of excess from a pluralistic range of positions and experiences, to generate new readings and relations within queer contemporary art. It features artists and thinkers who draw on the repertoire of rituals, which have become marginalized and silenced through colonial and homocolonial history. Using the metaphor of excess, this exhibition hopes to visualize all that has been lost and all that can be recovered.

Artist projects centre aesthetics of queer life, queer history, and cross-cultural relation, as they are brought together to confront Western fantasies of progress and order. Under the curatorial umbrella of queer and relational, works will comment on the afterlife of racism in diaspora, the imagined intimacies of ancestors, and the survivance of non-binary identities through the histories of settler colonialism. Moving across specific contexts and questions, we consider what it means to centre queer and relational practices, pleasures, and desires in art.

Noor Bhangu is a curator and scholar, whose practice is rooted in relational curatorial aesthetics and practices. Through curatorial intervention, she hopes to involve politics of history, memory and materiality to problematize dominant histories of representation. She completed her BA in the History of Art and her MA in Cultural Studies: Curatorial Practices at the University of Winnipeg. In 2018, she began her PhD in Communication and Culture at Toronto Metropolitan University and York University in Tkaronto, Toronto.

She is a co-curator for Window Winnipeg (CA), a 24-hour art space for site-responsive presentations of contemporary art, with Mariana Muñoz Gomez and Jennifer Smith. Her independent curatorial projects have shown in Canada, Czech Republic, Germany, and Norway.

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the excess is ritual

by Noor Bhangu

The language used to name the workings of this exhibition was first introduced by Joseph Massad in his 2007 text, Desiring Arabs, to analyze the emergent homophobia of post-Independence Egyptian literature. While our exhibitionary endeavour is more global and transcultural in its reach, the exhibition title retains from its conceptual ancestor an ethic of queer historiography, which can only be understood as the deep desire of queers to place themselves in the wound of history. Anchored around diverse representations of queer life, the excess is ritual cradles the excesses and rituals of history to initiate a present and future coming of all that is lost and all that remains to be recovered.

Consistent with exhibition’s troubling history and historiography, the excess is ritual beats an archival impulse, which is defined by Hal Foster, as the desire “to connect what cannot be connected.” In the work of Anna Binta Diallo and Dan Taulapapa McMullin, the highly subjective technology of collage is used to form new bodies of knowledge from colonial and, often, disparate sources. Anna Binta Diallo’s Ritual series includes three figures performing the rituals of celebration, menstruation, and hunting, their bodies filled in by scraps from old magazines, almanacs, and other printed matter. Dan Taulapapa McMullin’s two books, Coconut Milk and The Healer’s Wound, are compilations of the artist’s research into Samoan queer their stories, with specific attention paid to the recovery of Fa'afafine identities. The Wound, a new video work, expands on this research by collapsing visual and textual references to queer practices and identities recorded in colonial archives. The figures produced by Diallo present critical appropriation as part of a larger dialogue about decolonization of archives, while McMullin’s work travels across familiar colonial tropes to forge an eventual return to its source. 

Grounding the past and future archives is an installation by artist Sahar Jamili. Disturbed by the monstrous turn in the depiction of brown bodies in Scandinavia and the Euro-American world, Jamili appropriates the monster to build an alternative rhetoric of anti-racism. In their installation, Monster, me, more, strange creatures take up residence above a wrinkled bed in a child’s bedroom. Instead of disturbing the scene, the monsters borne of Jamili’s hands are casually domesticated to subvert their internal ideologies. The monstrous excess in the case of Jamili’s installation is ritualized to think through the social politics of contemporary time and the location of brown queers within.

By contrast, the work of Damien Ajavon, Darcie Bernhardt, and Carmel Farahbakhsh moves away from the density of archives and onto the imaginary plane of critical fabulation. In the work of Saidiya Hartman, critical fabulation can become a way of working with scatted references to produce historical facts. Ajavon’s Dyptique de l'imaginaire visualizes a conversation between the artist and their ancestor, separated across borders as well as colonial and post-colonial time. The artwork memorializes in thread a feminist and queer genealogy, whose transference was broken in time, but one which can easily be recovered. Bernhardt and Farahbakhsh’s work similarly explores the fruitful conceit of relation. Nanuk and Bibi is a short video, which includes hand-drawn representations of the artists’ grandmothers, as they sip tea, gossip, and sit in the pleasure of birthing future queer generations. While Ajavon’s work stretched an intimate line between blood relations, Nanuk and Bibi fabulates relation across cultures. The imagined relation becomes a new memory for the artists, even though the ancestors did not encounter each other in their mortal lives or even understand the queerness of their future kin. The works of Ajavon, Bernhardt, and Farahbakhsh exists in excess of historical knowledge and has the potential to shift what we know as historical truth. 

But of course, the present representation and future inheritence of queer history too has its limits. As Walter Benjamin writes, “The true picture of the past flits by [and] the past can be seized only an as image which flashes up at an instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.” In bringing together aesthetics of queer life, queer history, and cross-cultural relation, this exhibition lingers at the ritual passage of time, captured in asymmetrical visuality, to seize on encounters with an earlier, current, and future queer life.

While these moments of recognition are bound to disappear, as prophesized by Benjamin, it is my hope that our ritual desire to recover persists.

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Damien Ajavon, Darcie Bernhardt & Carmel Farahbakhsh, Anna Binta Diallo, Sahar Jamili, Dan Taulapapa McMullin.

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Photos by Don Hall

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