The long connection the Whyte Museum has with Stoney Nakoda First Nation people came to the forefront recently during the opening of what may be the museum’s most poignant exhibition to date.
Drawing heavily from its archives, the Whyte Museum opened Indigenous Ingenuity June 15 with some inadvertent connections to members of the Stoney Nakoda First Nation attending the opening that surprised curator of art and heritage Anne Ewan.
The exhibition features a number of Nakoda cultural artifacts collected by the museum’s founders, Peter and Catharine Whyte, and other Banff families, including a bison-hide dress and an eagle feather headdress once owned by Peggy Bearspaw.
“One of the most incredible ones was meeting David Bearspaw,” Ewan said. “We took him to a photograph taken in the ’50s of his great-great grandmother… and she is wearing this beautiful headdress in the photograph and this headdress is in our collection. So we’ve got this photograph of (David) standing next to the photo underneath the headdress with a big smile on his face.”
The cowrie shell dress, meanwhile, had been carefully packed and stored in the Whyte house. Ewan recognized that the dress was unique, beautiful and expertly made, but beyond that, she knew nothing else about the dress – at least until Melinda Bearspaw walked up to her and said, “See that dress suspended up there? That is the one that my mother made for me.”
Melinda’s mother, Lorna, who is married to David, sold the dress to Catharine Whyte.
“Melinda told me, with her mother beside me, how she wore the dress in one of the last Indian Day parades and Melinda laughed because she had to wear black shoes in the parade because she didn’t have moccasins,” Ewan said.
“That dress has been stored and wrapped properly over at Catharine’s house and it just happened to be a random pick. And then to have this wonderful conversation to happen just randomly is magnificent. Prior to that conversation, we really didn’t know much about that dress.”
Another dress in the exhibition adorned with cowrie shells had been hanging in the Moore House and as part of a project undertaken by archival assistant Dagne Dubois to identify Nakoda people in photographs in the Whyte’s collection, a photograph was found that identifies the dress and its former owner, Lorna Bearspaw.
“The other thing about this exhibit that has been really wonderful – for the whole staff – is Dagne found these photographs and there’s this beautiful photograph of a woman in a cowrie shell dress and it turns out, in the identification of it, that it is Mrs. Bearspaw and this cowrie shell dress has been hanging in the Moore House for however long. So they are exhibited together,” said Ewan.
It was Dubois’ project, along with a conversation Ewan had with Gail Lint of the Alberta Foundation of the Arts about Joane Cardinal-Schubert, that led to the exhibition.
Cardinal-Schubert was an influential native artist, writer, curator and poet who died in 2009. She championed aboriginal arts and artists, helping to propel both into the mainstream at a time when native artists were not on an equal footing with their non-native counterparts.
“This summer marks the fifth summer of her passing and we thought it would be cool to do something to honour Joane. The thought was to honour her because of her artistic practice, which really addressed political and social injustice, and yet she did it in a really lyrical way. Her lyrical indications of native culture have somewhat of a wry humour, if you will,” Ewan said.
“She was recognized nationally and internationally for her artistic achievements, particularly in the advancement of indigenous art and culture in Canada. She had this incredible conversation with the national gallery, saying, ‘you should be exhibiting and collecting native art, not because we’re native, but because we’re good artists.’”
Honouring Cardinal-Schubert was one component of the exhibition. The second component acknowledges artists who inspired Cardinal-Schubert and those artists she influenced, such as Terry McCue and Jane Ash Poitras.
“The third piece brings both the historic and contemporary works together to highlight the depth and diversity of the native artistic practice,” Ewan said. “We have combined artifacts from the collection and mounted them and interspersed them with contemporary native paintings. It is really interesting to see the thematic designs and (colours) that go through generations.”
The exhibition is also serving to deepen the relationship between the Whyte Museum and the Nakoda, which reaches back generations to Banff merchant and Peter’s father Dave White, who opened his store on Banff Avenue in 1894.
Both the Bearspaw and Poucette families adopted Peter, born in 1905 (Peter later changed the spelling of his name), and his brother, Jack after smallpox had killed all of the Bearspaw’s sons, Ewan said.
After Peter’s death in 1966, Catharine continued to support the Nakoda.
“(And) whether we like how she did it or not, or whether we approve or not, is totally irrelevant. The fact is she did, and the fact is we have to establish a relationship that works for them and for us,” said Ewan.
“We’re hoping at some point we’ll have some Stoney graduate students come out and spend some of the summer here working with these artifacts, identifying, handling, hopefully talking with elders about specific pieces. I think one of the things this exhibition has done is awaken the knowledge that we hold a lot of their culture here and it was really lovely to hear some of them say ‘thank you for looking after all of this for us,’”
Indigenous Ingenuity is proving to be, as Ewan described, “an interesting, multi-leveled story,” that she hopes stimulates conversation about the state of aboriginal people in Canada: from John A. Macdonald and his policies of assimilation to the effect residential schools had on aboriginal children and culture to the exclusion of the Stoney Nakoda from their ancestral land in Banff National Park to serving as a reminder that here in the Bow Valley, non-native people were not the first people to live here.
“(It’s the) power of the Sleeping Buffalo,” Ewan said of the aboriginal name for Tunnel Mountain, as from the east the small, rounded mountain looks like a sleeping bison.
“Whenever a friend comes to Banff, I point that out. It is such a great conversation starter because people forget this was a huge native crossroads, including between white and native cultures. When the Bearspaw and the Whyte family first knew each other there was great camaraderie.”
