For the first time, the Hess Art Gallery at the University of Lethbridge is replacing a physical exhibition with a digital one.
It’s also the first time students created pieces based on historic Blackfoot artifacts housed in three British museums.
Members from the museums have been working with the university on this project.
Stories for British Museums, is an art exhibition, which showcases works inspired by the Mootookakio’ssin Indigenous object repatriation project. The artwork can be found at artgallery.uleth.ca.
“Their work is truly at a high professional level — really fantastic work and interesting.
“I’ve just been impressed with the array of approaches the students have taken,” said Dr. Josephine Mills, Hess gallery director and curator.
In July of last year, some elders from the Blackfoot territory, researchers and artists travelled to Britain to visit the original pieces in the museums.
“I know personally for me, it was weird being in a country where my ancestors didn’t have roots at all, but it was very interesting to see the pieces and just feel the power from the pieces,” said Deserae Yellow Horn, research assistant at the University of Lethbridge.
She goes on to say the visits were deeply moving and it was nice to be in the presence of the Blackfoot objects and feel their spirits.
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For the Blackfoot, there is no equivalent to the term “object” because they believe all things are living entities, and as such, the “objects” have some kind of life force.
It was a very sentimental moment for the elders and others on the trip to see the Blackfoot artifacts in-person, according to Yellow Horn, especially after a century or more of separation.
Yellow Horn says some of their ancestral artifacts have been at the museums for over a 100 years, and do not have much information about them listed.
She adds that is because much of the history, significance and context behind the artifacts is not known.
“One of the main things the Blackfoot would do is trade, so when we would have somebody that we considered friendly, we would actually start to trade with them and so some of these pieces were traded, whereas other pieces might have been sold,” Yellow Horn said.
She goes on to explain that the Blackfoot may have sold some of the pieces because they needed money during a time when the concept of using monetary currency was new to them when they were pushed onto reserves and their autonomy was stripped away from them.
They then would have used the money to buy essential things like food.
Some pieces were even stolen by anthropologists and others and sold to colonial museums.
The U of L’s Hess Gallery was initially preparing to open the exhibition as COVID-19 pandemic was declared in March.
Students in Dr. Jackson TwoBears’ Indigenous art studio class were dropping off their work and finishing up their projects when the university was forced to close down, which left the gallery with a patchwork of finished work, some were ready for installation and others had not yet been delivered.
“As we all adjusted to closures of public spaces and working from home, the issue of how to finish this exhibition hung over us,” said Mills.
“The students had done a fabulous job — working hard and engaging with processes, concepts and imagery of objects involved with Mootookakio’ssin,” she added.
The gallery then decided to showcase the art exhibit in its current incomplete state, through an online format.
“And then it was like: Well, this is exactly what visiting the Blackfoot historical objects in the museums was like, where they’re incomplete and you don’t know their stories, you don’t have the people with them and you don’t know the context,” Mills explained.
“It was like: Oh, I think it’s a really good parallel for letting non-Indigenous people understand what that experience is like.”
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