A Study of Indian-ness
May 6 – Jun 5, 2004
Jeff Thomas
Exhibition:
Frustrated in his search for archival testimonies of aboriginal experience,
Thomas turned to historic studies produced by white photographer Curtis
and ethnographer Knowles as sources for discoursing with history. A Study
of Indian-ness is based upon fictive conversations between the artist and
these historic persons.
Jeff Thomas: Working Histories
Essay: Richard William Hill

In a recent review in the Globe and Mail, arts writer Gary Michael Dault
summarily dismissed an exhibition by Haisla artist Arthur Renwick. His
central complaint was that the subject matter, a nineteenth-century treaty
between several Aboriginal nations of the plains region and the U.S.
government, was of no current interest to "us." I am always wary when I
see an "us" used like this in the mainstream press, suspecting that, in the
writer’s eyes, I am more likely to fall into the "them" category.
The antidote to Dault’s presumption that Aboriginal history lacks
contemporary relevance might be to spend a few hours in conversation
with Jeffrey Thomas. Thomas has found more productive ways into history
than anyone I have ever encountered. He digs into historical
representations of Aboriginal people until "us" and "them" is no longer the
only way to see the issue. The results of this process end up in the gallery,
where Thomas thoughtfully and meticulously shows us why history matters
and how it can be put to creative use. In fact, it was Thomas’s work that
taught me how to engage with mainstream representations of Aboriginal
people at a time when I simply wanted to look the other way.
Thinking back, I can’t remember the first time I saw a representation of an
Aboriginal person. It was almost certainly on our little black-and-white
television, that amazing conduit that poured images into my brain every
day throughout childhood. It might have been on one of the TV westerns
that were still kicking around in the late sixties, or an old John Wayne
movie. No particular image comes to mind, just a general impression of
cowboys and Indians. I also recall a book of boys’ adventure stories that I
had with a cowboy and Indian fighting on the cover. Somebody gave me

this book before I could read more than just a few words and I remember
how much it bothered me, staring at that provocative cover and not being
able to access the stories. Yet, I suspect that they became infinitely more
fascinating in potential than they would have been in actuality.
Sometime, fairly early on, I remember my mother’s critical voice speaking
over those cowboy and Indian movies. She wanted to remind me that
these images were nonsense and had nothing to do with us. That much
was obvious, even to me. But it was hard not to be seduced by the
pleasures of those stories, the exotic landscapes, colourful costumes and
thrilling goings on. "Do you notice that the Indians are always the bad
guys?" my mother would ask. Well, maybe. And maybe now that she
mentioned it I couldn’t stop noticing. "Do you notice how they try to make
the Indians look scary?" Yeah, I’d noticed that too. "And do you notice that
these actors don’t look much like Indians? Or talk like Indians? Or that this
is not just an isolated phenomenon but something that happens over and
over again systematically, to make us look bad, to justify taking the land
and the resources?" Yes, yes, and yes. Now I noticed.
So my mother ruined westerns for me, thank goodness. And that childish
pleasure was easily supplanted by anger. The more I saw of the world, the
clearer it became that the whole thing was a set up. Fuck John Wayne.
Fuck the Lone Ranger and his condescending attitude to Tonto.
Fuck…well, you get the picture. I suspect that if all of the Aboriginal
peoples of North America have nothing else in common, they share this
anger about how we’ve been represented. But I also have another
emotional response that I’m not sure is as universal. When I watch these
westerns now I get embarrassed. Not on behalf of Aboriginal people, but
for the people who made them. Once you realize that they are pure fiction
you see just how naked these fantasies are. What could leave one more
exposed than the parade of unexamined urges and assumptions that make
up what Robert Berkhoffer called the White Man’s Indian? All those
captivity narratives that fear and loathe sexuality and at the same time
seem delighted to have found this excuse to talk about forbidden sex over
and over again. You are looking right into the fears, power fantasies and
repressed desires of white America. Blame it on my ancestors being
colonized by the uptight British if you want, but I find that sort of thing a bit
embarrassing to look at, once you understand what you’re seeing.
Of course Hollywood isn’t the only place that the notion of the Indian was
produced. There were the travel writers, the military accounts, the
photographers, the historians, the archaeologists and the anthropologists.
So to hell with them too, right? All they are doing is adding new layers of

fiction, so why bother paying attention? That was my attitude until I
encountered Jeff Thomas’s work about ten years ago. Somehow Thomas
had found a way into all this stuff. More than that he had taken these
representations and had somehow made them creatively productive.
Where other Aboriginal artists were drawing on this material in order to
turn it on its head or expose it as caricature in relation to ‘reality’ (or at
least their notion of reality), Thomas just kept digging deeper and deeper.
The works in this exhibition are artifacts of that journey.
What makes Thomas’s work so disarming is that one senses almost
immediately that he is motivated by genuine curiosity. The sincerity of that
curiosity opens his work up as a process and allows it to pursue
unexpected directions. Too much contemporary art is loaded with pretend
moments of discovery in which the artist reveals a social or political
phenomenon that it is all too clear they set out to find. We are trained to
expect artists to produce novelty, but how familiar and desperate that
novelty can sometimes feel. Thomas never seems desperate for our
attention or for something to say. When he tunnels into archives and
museum collections he isn’t harvesting historical representations of
"Indians" in the service of an art practice, but putting his art practice into
the service of his own curiosity and his own desire to share his process of
discovery.
Pedagogy as Art and Story
Thomas talks frequently of wanting his work to be a bridge spanning the
gap between the images of Aboriginal peoples in museum and archive
collections and the Aboriginal community. His ambition, based on his own
experience, is to model how the "historical image is [a] catalyst for telling
new stories, stories that really deal with the contemporary world that we
are a part of." He connects the notion of history as story to the way he
learned as a child in his community. His childhood was lived between
urban Buffalo and the Six Nations Reserve. On Six Nations, he was taught,
often by powerful women in the community, to take pride in Haudenosaune
(Iroquois) culture. He remembers the stories that framed his first views of
the past, "[I]t is interesting to think about those stories that we heard as
children. When I was staying on the reserve there was no television,
electricity, running water or central heating. In the evenings or during the
day, we would sit around the kitchen table and listen to the elders talk
about the old days and in my mind, they created vivid images."
On the streets of Buffalo, however, he could find no signs of this history.
He recalls asking one of his elementary school teachers, Miss Eckles,

"Why don’t we learn about Iroquoian history?" His teacher replied, "Jeff, I
don’t know. You are going to have to find that out for yourself." He
remembers feeling crushed at the realization that nobody was going to be
able to answer his questions about his own history. Later, as an adult
pursuing his interest in history he says that he at last understood what she
meant: "Miss Eckles was African-American and her situation was very
similar to mine. [She was telling me that] if they are not teaching your
history, then you have to go out and find it for yourself. Certainly the work
with historical images is about that."
Thomas’s work is not nostalgic. Like Aboriginal stories that change
gradually from teller to teller and generation to generation, Thomas is
conscious that the narratives he weaves around historical images be
situated in the concerns of the present. He notes that historical portraits of
Aboriginal people often excluded their immediate environment, leaving
their subjects in stasis, floating in a placeless place. It is precisely the
sense of immersion in an immediate, living world that he tries to capture in
his own portraits. For him, contrary to the romantic notion, that world is an
urban one. At the most basic level this is simply looking at models for
survival. He reflects on the challenges his parents and grandparents faced
trying to find a place for themselves in the city. For those generations, he
reminds us, "there was no manual or pamphlet that said, ‘Okay, this is how
you survive as a First Nations person in the city.’"
For Thomas himself, the struggle, which he has turned into a life’s work, is
to engage the place of Aboriginal history and identity in the city. He says:
My photography is based on street life. [I am] an Iroquoian person, raised
in the city and going around always looking [for] or hoping to find evidence
of my own history. I wander the streets with this idea in mind and what I do
actually find, whether it is a monument, a frieze, or a little plaque that says
something about First Nation’s history [is the] evidence that we actually
were here.
We can imagine this as an almost archaeological form of engagement with
the city. Through a kind of immersion, Thomas has developed an insider’s
understanding of the systems by which Aboriginal peoples have been
represented. This understanding is critically engaged because it remains
linked to a knowledge of both where he has come from and the many
boundaries he has crossed getting to where he is. He doesn’t reject
outright the representations of Aboriginal peoples that he encounters.
Because he is so deeply immersed in these forms of representation, he is
able to turn Aboriginal ideas loose within the very heart of them. The

process is so thoughtful and reasonable, so clearly guided by good
intentions that you can’t really describe it as entirely destructive. Nothing is
the same when it’s over, but we nevertheless feel a net gain has been
made.
The Monument
Monuments are one way in which the state appropriates history to serve its
own agenda. Monuments function in a peculiar way in public spaces, their
presence being both highly visible and so entrenched, so much a part of
the urban landscape, that they often recede from visibility right under our
noses. From this oddly covert position, monuments instruct us on the
ideology of the state. Thomas is interested in the absence of Aboriginal
people from so many of these monuments, but he has also worked on
ones that make statements about Aboriginal people and our place in
history. He meets the narrow didacticism of the monument with a
pedagogy of his own, turning the monument into a vehicle for a process of
critically engaged thinking about power and representation.
Thomas has a long history of engagement with the Champlain Monument
at Nepean Point in Ottawa. The monument once featured Champlain
perched on the top and a kneeling "Indian scout" positioned well below him
and clearly in his service. Thomas took on the challenge of decentring
Champlain by persistently photographing the Indian scout. Often his son
Bear appears in the photographs as a jarringly urban and contemporary
challenge to the image of the breechclothed scout. In 1996 the monument
was the focus of a protest by the Assembly of First Nations, in which they
covered the Indian scout with a blanket as a symbolic rejection of his
subservience and inaccurate, stereotypical costume. Their ultimate goal
was to see him removed altogether. While Thomas understood and
sympathized with their critique, he was also aware that, although the
protest created a productive controversy in which the monument came
alive as a site of historical discourse, if it was taken away future
opportunities to expose that history would be lost. That seemed to be
allowing the rest of Canada to forget this sign of how Aboriginals have
been viewed a little too easily. Thomas suggested instead that a plaque be
placed at the monument detailing Aboriginal concerns about it.
Eventually the Indian scout was moved across the street to Major’s Hill
Park where he crouches on his own, presumably scouting for his own
sake. Thomas has not let him get away. He continues to photograph the
scout in his new location and keeps up to date with the goings on related
to him.

The Miniature
If the monument is the grand state-sponsored statement, the museum
diorama represents a very different mode of didactic representation. I
confess to being both fascinated and repelled by the diorama. As a child I
found them absolutely immersive. I could enter these worlds with no effort.
I could also imagine the satisfaction of creating them, the oddly godlike
pleasure of creating one’s own world exactly as one wants it, shrunk down
to a manageable size. These are the aspects that make me uncomfortable
now. And I can see how this desire for mastery relates to the colonial
history of the museum. Here is the desire to conquer the world not just in
fact, but in idea; here is the attempt to hoard and catalogue the cultures of
the world, mastering them through exhaustive representation.
I remember a childhood encounter with a series of three dioramas. I can’t
place where they were, but I remember the message clearly. As I recall,
the tour guide presented our class with dioramas of three different
landscapes, or rather three different moments in the history of one
landscape. In the first one there was a tipi pitched beside a river in a
pristine landscape. In the second there was a nineteenth-century
European settlement in the same landscape, now, however, there were
some signs of pollution, logging, and so forth. In the third diorama we were
up to date. The river was surrounded by industry, pollution, and the detritus
of modern life (circa late 1970s). Our guide asked us which diorama we
would prefer to live in. As soon as I saw the tipi my back had gone up, as it
did when anything to do with Indians arose at school. I waited to be
offended. I was going to point to the tipi, no matter what. And, to my relief,
everyone else pointed to the tipi too. So far, so good. But we weren’t done
yet. The tour guide then went on to describe all of the diseases that might
plague us if we lived in the world of the first diorama. The hardships. The
short life expectancy. Lack of education and opportunity. Wouldn’t it be
better to live in the world of our own time, but without the litter and
pollution? Aha! Suddenly the exercise was clear. It was about how we
shouldn’t litter and should fight pollution. She paused after her speech and
asked us again to point to which world we would prefer to live in now that
she had enlightened us. Everyone understood what was expected. We
were supposed to enact the process of having our minds changed through
her lesson. Everyone else pointed to the contemporary diorama. I stuck
with the tipi. So the interrogation began. Why, after her careful explanation
would I want to live back then? I knew better than to argue with grownup
white folks who were determined to teach you something. I wasn’t going to
say "because this one has Indians in it and the others don’t." But I wasn’t

going to back down either. I used the classic kid strategy, "I dunno. I just
would." No use arguing with a kid that stupid. So she moved along. Still,
how I wish someone like Thomas could have appeared out of the
woodwork just then to help me read the ridiculous dioramas against the
grain.
Jeff had his own childhood experience with a diorama in the forth or fifth
grade. He recalls:
We went to the museum or [perhaps it was] the Buffalo Historical Society
and they had a re-creation of an Iroquois village in a Plexiglas case. It was
dissected so it was cut in half and you could look inside and see the
families in there. And in another part of the tour, we came to another area
and it said, "no admittance except for museum personnel." And I thought,
"What would it be like to go through that door and find out what is on the
other side?"
I’m not surprised that those two experiences are linked in Jeff’s mind and
not just because they occurred on the same day. The curiosity raised by
the diorama is not an end point but a provocation to learn more, to get
behind the scenes to see how it all works and figure out what they haven’t
been showing you.
Thomas’s diorama, entitled The Iron Horse, 2004, engages the spectacle
of the wild west show. He has created an amusing play in which the
spectacle of the show is deflated to the scale of the miniaturized model
railroad around which the project is based. The wild west show was a
spectacle of the triumph of civilization and modernity over the primitive.
The trains, which transported the shows, were linked to modernity in the
public imagination and were seen as a significant force in civilizing the
mythic West. Thomas pries into this tension, literally opening up spaces for
contemporary life within his diorama and rupturing the dichotomy between
the modern and the primitive.
Thomas’s trick is to turn an absence into a presence, to find himself and
his history in the world. He is able to do this because he has found the
places where he can engage with history on his own terms. They seem to
be the most unlikely places, the most impenetrable. But he finds his way in
because he understands image and story and he uses them as Aboriginal
forms of knowledge, or more precisely, as processes of knowledge
making. This is based on an understanding of how history actually
functions, that it is not just the ideal of objective facts strung out in a
convenient chronology, but rather, it is a web of stories and images that
are spun everywhere from the family to the state. And this is how we

experience history, from the most obscure personal history to the grandest
narrative of global conflict, from rumour to statistic. Starting from our own
position in the world as we find it, history comes to us in fragments. And
sometimes we get it out of sequence. Sometimes we get it plain wrong.
Thomas’s working process is alive to the fact that this messy business is
ultimately a series of creative acts. Thomas models an Indigenous form of
agency that not only insists on self representation, but insists on self
representation from within the very discourses that have overwritten our
identities.