Handing Down of Culture | Chapter 16 | Joy Cohnstaedt

Chapter 16 | Joy Cohnstaedt

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My career in cultural policy-making and practice began in 1972. The newly created Saskatchewan Department of Culture and Youth employed me as a consultant. One of the programs the department began was “Towards a New Past,” a first effort to be inclusive. It was controversial, as was our effort to place the arts in a larger community setting and to resist the ascendancy of professional practitioners demanding preferred treatment. Our goal was to encourage participation in arts, heritage and cultural activities and to provide leadership, thereby improving standards. But industrial and economic objectives, and the arts and heritage community’s goal of professionalization, weighed down our efforts. Our dependence on national resources steered our activities to meet the objectives of federal programmes. This was also the decade that introduced lottery financing to western Canada. In response to the demands of the few, the model chosen by the province was based on amateur sport — it was organized into provincial associations and was highly participatory. The effect was immediate: the promise of lottery dollars led to the building of an extensive network of community organizations and a hierarchy and bureaucracy parallel to that of government. Rural communities, with a strong infrastructure of sport and recreation activities, benefited particularly from this model but not the First Nations organizations that also participated in these activities. Thereafter the rift between the haves and have-nots was cemented.

One of the cultural initiatives of federal and provincial governments at this time was to support the policy of multiculturalism, first announced by the government of Canada in 1971. The focus of government was to accommodate immigrant populations through, among other programmes, the sponsorship of “heritage languages,” and multicultural and community-based arts and crafts. Both the Francophone and Aboriginal populations excluded themselves from this policy and its implementation. They demanded parallel but superior structures to meet their objectives. A decade later community tensions increased as the racial and cultural pluralism of Canada, especially in larger urban centers, grew. The government sponsored heritage language programme was displaced by anti-racism initiatives in an effort to deal with predominantly urban-based conflicts, but not with the institutional and systemic racism that have for so long confronted Aboriginal peoples.

Those promoting First Nations and Inuit artists and craftspeople at this time were well aware of the potential of external tourist markets and the economic benefits of arts patronage, especially for collectors and those who planned to resell or donate their collections to the state. Promoters, including the government, and in particular the federal department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, were able to support the creation of material culture of their own liking, constructing the context in which it would be viewed, and suppressing that which did not reflect and support its conception of the marketplace. Eskimo soapstone sculptures and the argillite model poles of the Haida on the west coast had become novel. Inuit prints became a national genre of assimilated fine art. Even stone models of Inukshuks (“like men” cairns) became part of the tourist trade and are now marketed in the south, and like gnomes, are garden monuments.

In the Qu’Appelle Valley, under the guidance of Lorna Ferguson, women on the Standing Buffalo reservation hooked rugs that told traditional myths. This effort to follow the success of the Inuit arts and crafts by promoting the rugs in eastern galleries and in New York City was unsuccessful. The history of arts and cultural policy and practice as it relates to Aboriginal Peoples is to a great extent a history of the commodification of their art and material culture. Modern Aboriginal artists were denied access as long as predetermined and largely ethnographic criteria were applied to their work by museums, galleries and granting agencies, such as the Canada Council.

Today few contemporary Canadian galleries focus on the arts of First Peoples, though the Winnipeg Art Gallery, McMichael Canadian Art Collection and the McCord Museum are notable exceptions. Even fewer have aggressively sought to include their arts and material culture in their collections, though both the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Ontario have recently accepted donations from collectors. In the case of the NGC the collection of DIAND has been transferred to its facilities in Ottawa. The National Museum of Man, now the Canadian Museum of Civilization and located in Hull, led the way by creating a position as Curator of Contemporary Art, once held by the Plains Cree artist, Gerald McMaster. But here and elsewhere, the historic curatorial practice of collecting and exhibiting the art and material culture of Aboriginal peoples in an ethnographic (or anthropological) context has endured. (Recently Robert McMichael, founder of the McMichael Gallery, has indicated his intent to deaccession a significant portion of its collection, including the more contemporary work of artists of Aboriginal heritage such as Métis painters Bob Boyer and Gerald McMaster.)

Chapter 16, continued >