Art: Reclaiming the Narrative

I was recently reminded that while November is a month in which many of us look forward to good food, friends, and family, it’s also Native American Heritage Month. I’m sure we all know by now how much I love art, so I would again like to take this opportunity to highlight an artist who uses his talents as a means of resistance against Western colonization. I again did a quick internet search and came across Indigenous artist, Kent Monkman.

According to the artist’s biography on the Art Canada Institute website, Monkman was born in 1965 and brought up as a member of the Fisher River Cree First Nation. Monkman took up art at an early age using colored pencils to create stories. Due to his Anglo-Canadian mother and Cree father, Monkman grew up with a profound knowledge of how colonialism affected his community. This is especially true when it came to his paternal great-grandmother, Caroline Everette, who experienced forced relocation three times, along with a number of her children who were made to attend residential schools. He found his lifelong passion for art while seeing dioramas depicting Indigenous peoples prior to the arrival of settlers at the Manitoba Museum. Graduating from Kelvin High School in 1983 at the age of seventeen, he enrolled in the Illustration program at Sheridan College of Applied Arts & Technology in Brampton, Ontario. Three years later he completed his degree and began to work for Native Earth Performing Arts, a theater organization based in Toronto. Gaining public recognition in 1992 for his illustrations in children’s book, “A Coyote Columbus Story,” he began to establish his own artistic style through his use of vibrant colors in his depiction of Coyote. Paired with Cree author Thomas King’s rich text, this book sparked political outrage due to its counteracting the dominant colonialist doctrine of the Columbus story. This motif stuck with Monkman and is seen in many of his paintings, including “Resurgence of the People,” a piece that is redrawn from Emmanuel Leutze’s “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” Some of Monkman’s art has been controversial, and while I may not agree with other decisions this artist has made, I am bringing him into this current discussion of the decolonization of art because of his use of pertinent themes in the particular piece I analyzed. 

I’ve begun to notice that my favorite art style is the kind where Western narratives get flipped inside out by artists of different ethnicities who reclaim their stories through their work. Monkman’s “Resurgence of The People” is a perfect example of this concept. In contrast with the familiar painting “Washington Crossing The Delaware,” the boat is manned by Indigenous peoples representing multiple genders clothed in modern outfits. Here, Monkman exhibits a feeling of timelessness, almost as a reminder to the audience that his people refuse to be dismissed and lost in history. The bright coloring of the outfits are in direct contrast to the gray river surrounding them, which makes the people in the boat the focal point of the piece, supporting Monkman’s emphasis on the importance of people telling their own stories.

What I love about this piece are the layers upon layers of concepts to analyze and unpack, especially because the piece is done by an individual who is changing the normalized Western art canon of portraying minority groups to be inferior and making the work a reflection of his background and history. It may be worth mentioning that Monkman is not the only one to emphasize this motif: New York City based artist Kehinde Wiley is also a big figure in decolonizing art. My favorite piece by him is “Dacia Carter” which centers on a Black woman and thus gives her agency as opposed to the subject of the painting “Portrait of Madeleine” (also known as “Portrait of a Negress”) by Marie Guillemine Benoist. 

Ultimately, art isn’t only a means of catharsis. It can also be used as a statement of resistance against oppression and preconceived notions about a particular group of people, in this case, Indigenous groups. Happy Native American History Month!