Unreserved tour explores Winnipeg's history from Indigenous public art lens

Originally published on October 15, 2021. 

Grab your helmet and water bottle. Unreserved takes you on a bike tour through Winnipeg to explore how Indigenous people are using public art to restore their stories.  

The name "Winnipeg" is from a Cree word meaning muddy water. It's been a gathering place for generations, and many Indigenous people consider this place the heart of Turtle Island. Built on Treaty 1 territory, Winnipeg is the birthplace of the Métis Nation, and it's where Louis Riel established Manitoba. 

Unreserved set out earlier this fall to explore what public art like monuments, statues and murals say about a city.

Here are some visual highlights from that tour.

Wayne Stranger, a bronze sculptor from Peguis First Nation, joined Unreserved host Rosanna Deerchild on the grounds of the Manitoba Legislature, where the statue of Louis Riel stands.

Stranger told Deerchild that the monument for the Métis leader and founder of Manitoba is worth stopping on a tour of public installations that help tell the story of the city. 

The statue of Queen Victoria also once stood at Manitoba's legislative grounds. More and more historical statues are coming down across Canada, either by choice or by force.

Stranger says he viewed the toppling of Queen Victoria's statue with mixed feelings.

As an artist, he said, "You're destroying some work there. And then I thought ... what it represented and the negativity around what that brings for First Nations outweighs what that art was."

Calling the statue a "symbolic object of colonialism," Stranger says the monument "represents nothing good" for Indigenous people.

One of the bike tour stops included the monument that honours the missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.

For Stranger, monuments aren't meant to "glorify" inanimate objects, but he says, "The old people and the elders that I worked with, they said that everything has a spirit. Everything has a vibration and energy."

On the next stop, Deerchild joined multi-disciplinary artist KC Adams, who says her public art Tanisi keke totamak — Ka cis teneme toyak (which means "What can we do, to respect each other) poses a question about Canada's relationship with Indigenous people.

In her art installation, Adams says that above the powwow drum and flames, there are two characters that often appear in Anishinaabe and Cree storytelling — "the wolf and Wisakedjak, or if you're thinking in Ojibway terms, the wolf and Nanabush."

Adams says the characters' story is in the eye of the beholder.

"You could look at it as two brothers looking at each other. Or you could look at it as the wolf being a settler, Wisakedjak as the Indigenous person, and them being in conflict.

"How are we going to come together in a good way? ... And how are you going to move forward in the future in terms of existing on this land with Indigenous people?"

The public art tour continued with Val Vint, who says if you want to know about Indigenous people, read a book. She has a reading list at The Forks — sort of.

Her art installation Education is the New Bison, unveiled in June 2020, stands more than three metres in the shape of a bison. It's constructed out of 200 steel replicas of books and other items by Indigenous authors and allies.

One of the quotes inscribed in the artwork is from former senator and former chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Murray Sinclair, which reads, "Education is what got us here, and education is what will get us out."

Deerchild met up with artist Jessica Canard to explore striking examples of mural work on Winnipeg's Main Street. Canard says if a picture is worth a thousand words, then these murals are worth "hundreds of thousands of words."

Public murals like these are special because they are artist-led and have the power to change the narratives in a community, says Canard.

"A lot of the artists had a lot of creative control and freedom in deciding what they wanted to say with their artwork," said Canard. "If it's their space, their wall, their money that's being put into making this happen, then they get to control the narrative or the story."

The tour headed to the West Broadway neighbourhood, home of Esther Calixte-Bea's brightly coloured mural about the story of the Black/Indigenous experience in Canada.

In Welcome to Canada, Quebec-based Calixte-Bea says she wanted to show a Black and Indigenous person to put a spotlight on "the harm that's been done and the progress that needs to be done as well."

Her mural is full of symbols such as the legless birds above the woman "that represent the spirits floating ... They can't land and can never rest because of the harm and blood that was shed all over Canada."

"I felt that there was so much history that was hidden, especially in Canada."