Homage to Four in Paris (2017)
by Michelle Gewurtz
“We’ve been treated as disappearing, or as a disappearance. It’s almost as if this reappearance is occurring.” – Barry Ace, Homage to Four in Paris.
These words, spoken by artist Barry Ace, a Southern Straight and Woodland style powwow dancer, just after the opening frames of Shelley Niro’s Homage to Four in Paris, 2017, situate the viewer in urban Paris, France and establish the disappearance/reappearance theme of the film. Ace enters the frame walking down a Parisian street dressed in Anishinaabe/Woodland beaded ceremonial regalia, and descends into a metro station. Filmed in 2010 in an expository documentary style, Homage to Four in Paris follows Ace to four locations in the heart of Paris where he performed honouring ceremonial dances.
Collective memory and the collision of two cultures
What happens when different histories confront each other in the public sphere? The jingle of bells heard after the establishing shots of the Paris skyline, a busy metro station, and one of the city’s famed bridges serve as a haunting reminder of Indigenous presence in nineteenth-century Paris. Documenting A Reparative Act, Barry Ace’s site-specific 2010 performances, the film pays tribute to a troupe of Michi Saagii (Mississauga) dancers who travelled from Canada to Europe in 1843 and remained on the continent until 1846-7. Led by Maungwudaus (George Henry), originally of the Mississauga of the Credit First Nation, the dance troupe from the Great Lakes waterways area travelled first to London, Scotland, and Ireland. While in the United Kingdom, they became part of the American painter George Catlin’s Indian Gallery. This showcase was known for presenting exhibits of what were then considered an ancient and disappearing culture, a vanishing race. Maungwudaus and the other Anishinaabe dancers dined with Queen Victoria. They later travelled to Paris to dance for King Louis-Phillipe and an audience of four thousand French citizens.
As the sound of bells continues to be heard in the film’s opening sequence, we see Barry Ace navigating Paris in full regalia while pedestrians stop to stare. Some onlookers openly gawk, point and laugh as he makes his way through a crowded Paris Metro to change trains. The choice to travel by public transportation to the four sites was deliberate. Ace needed to experience the gaze that the 19th century Michi Saagii (Mississauga) dancers would have felt traversing England, France and Belgium in full regalia (Maungwudaus 1848). Ace also wanted to feel the pain the Mississaugas surely would have felt: how their feet must have hurt after dancing on the hard paved surfaces and from walking through the cobbled streets and pebbled parks of Paris in their moccasins.
We see Ace standing as he rides the crowded metro to his first destination. As the camera pans to his feet ensconced in moccasins that are firmly planted on the train’s floor, Ace explains that this is his beadwork. “I did all the beadwork myself and it is based on a very old design from the Great Lakes area. The floral motif, which represents medicines and plants that we would use for protection and healing.”
The film cuts to the first dance performed at the Porte des lions at the Musée du Louvre. “Maungwudaus” Ace shouts, and then he begins to dance, accompanied by an iPod attached to a stereo instead of traditional drummers. Each subsequent dance begins with Ace calling out a single name in acknowledgement, ensuring that the dancers are remembered in their language. A Reparative Act honoured Maungwudaus (Great Hero) at the Louvre, Noodinokay (Furious Storm) in the Tuileries gardens, Mishshemong (King of the Loons) at the Place de la Concorde, and Saysaygon (Hail Storm) at l’Esplanade des Invalides. As footage of Ace continuing to dance in honour of Maungwudaus at the Louvre plays, he explains in a voiceover that these are all “guerilla-style performance, where instead of having a drum, I would actually use a ghettoblaster and come into the spaces where these dancers had been, as interventions.”
Shelley Niro and Barry Ace were in Paris for the opening of Robert Houle’s monumental multimedia installation Paris/Ojibwa (2010) at the Centre culturel canadien. While doing preparatory research in the Musée du Louvre to create his 2010 work, Houle stumbled upon a series of pen and ink sketches from 1845 by the Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix that depicted an Anishinaabe dance troupe in France. The presence of Anishinaabe performers in Belgium, France, England, Scotland, and Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century had all but been forgotten until then. Houle’s encounter with these historical sketches of Michi Saagii (Mississauga / Ojibwe) dancers inspired Barry Ace to honour the memory and spirit of these individuals with his own intervention into the landscape of contemporary Paris.
The observation at the outset of Niro’s film that Indigenous peoples have historically been treated as disappearing, links Homage to Four in Paris to other forms of contemporary artistic resurgence that directly oppose the “Myth of the Vanishing Indian.” At the core of eighteenth and nineteenth-century nationalist settlement and expansion in North America is the image of the “vanishing Indian.” Perceived as noble, brave, and yet destined to sacrifice both freedom and land to make way for the formation of Canada and the United States, this image captured the settler-colonial cultural imagination in both countries. It inspired artists ranging from George Catlin to Emily Carr to devote themselves to documenting what were perceived to be dying cultures. Today, Indigenous peoples link themselves to a long, rich heritage connected to the land through ceremony and stories, the reclamation of cultural practices, and a revival of Indigenous languages. In Canada, Indigenous artists, musicians, and filmmakers are at the forefront of calls for social justice, and movements such as Idle No More are working to dispel such colonial myths. Shelley Niro’s film Homage to Four in Paris also raises important questions about shared histories, collective memory, and the use of public space.
Multidirectional Memory & Cultural Exchange
Memory is a set of practices; it is an intervention. In Ace’s honouring dances, we have an example of memory that is the past made present. As Richard Terdiman explains, memory is a contemporary phenomenon. It is concerned with the past but plays out in the present (Terdiman 1993, 7). In Homage to Four in Paris, we see memory as labour and action. It is a way of working through the past. Throughout the film, viewers bear witness to these agents and sites of memory. The film is concerned with individual and collective memory within specific historical and political contexts of struggle and contestation.
Homage to Four in Paris illustrates Michael Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory, which suggests that memory is subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing and borrowing. Multidirectional memory, like cultural exchange, is productive, not privative (Rothberg 2009, 3). While colonial contact is often thought of as a unidirectional transmission of language and culture from Europe to the Americas, exchanges and cultural influence worked both ways. Indigenous culture and materials also travelled to Europe. Without Indigenous knowledge, settlement of the Americas by Europeans would have proved difficult, if not impossible. Homage to Four in Paris recovers an all but forgotten history of such cultural exchange.
New Forms of Solidarity
Through an eloquent recounting of his emotions as he journeyed to the locations to pay homage to the Mississauga dancers, Ace notes that he felt “…that this is exactly what the spirit of those dancers wanted me to feel and experience. …I clearly felt their presence, each peering with me through my eyes…” (Ace 2010, 37) The borders of memory and identity are jagged. Memory’s anachronistic quality—the fusion of now and then, here and there—is the source of powerful creativity. For artists like Ace and Niro, memory allows for building new worlds out of the material of history. Homage to Four in Paris encourages viewers to think about public space as malleable. Individual and collective identities come into being through their interactions with others. People and the public spaces they navigate are open to continual reconstruction. When productive cross-cultural and multidirectional dynamics are explicitly claimed in the public sphere, as seen in Niro’s documentation of A Reparative Act, there is the potential to create new forms of solidarity and new visions of justice and empathy.
FURTHER READING
Ace, Barry. 2010 “A Reparative Act.” In Paris/Ojibwa, exhibition catalogue, 34–40. Peterborough: Art Gallery of Peterborough.
Basciano, Rebecca, Gewurtz Michelle and Sinclair, Catherine, eds. 2017. Àdisòkàmagan| Nous connaître un peu nous-mêmes| We’ll All Become Stories. Exhibition Catalogue. Ottawa: Ottawa Art Gallery.
Catlin, George. 1848. Notes of Eight Years’ Travels and Residence in Europe: With His North American Indian Collection. With Anecdotes and Incidents of the Travels and Adventures of Three Different Parties of American Indians who He Introduced to the Courts of England, France and Belgium. London and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Feest, Christian F., ed. 1999. Indians and Europe: An Interdisciplinary collection of essays. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Horton, Jessica L., 2017. Art for an Undivided Earth: The American Indian Movement Generation. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
Kramer, Karen. 2018. “Making Visible That Which is Known.” In Encountering the Spiritual in Contemporary Art, ed. Leesa Fanning. Exhibition catalogue. Kansas City, MO.: Nelson Atkins Museum of Art.
Madill, Shirley. 2018. Robert Houle: Life & Work. Toronto: Art Canada Institute.
Maungwudaus. 1848. Account of the Chippewa Indians, Who Have Been Travelling Among the Whites, in the United States, England, Ireland, Scotland, France and Belgium; with Very Interesting Incidents in Relation to the General Characteristics of the English, Irish, Scotch, French, and Americans, with Regard to Their Hospitality, Peculiarities, etc. Boston: Published by the Author.
Niro, Shelley. 2011. Robert’s Paintings. Colour video 52:00 min. Toronto: Turtle Night Productions.
Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Terdiman, Richard. Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
About the author
Michelle Gewurtz is the Supervisor of Arts & Culture at Peel Art Gallery, Museum and Archives (PAMA) and was most recently the Senior Curator at the Ottawa Art Gallery (OAG). She holds a Ph.D. in the History of Art from the University of Leeds with a specialization in Feminism and Visual Arts. Her curatorial projects explore the convergence of gender politics and creative identity, and her research interests extend to both historical and contemporary art practices. She is the author of Molly Lamb Bobak: Life and Work (ACI, 2018). Exhibitions she has curated for the OAG include Facing Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore (2019), Howie Tsui: Retainers of Anarchy (2019), and the gallery’s inaugural exhibition, Àdisòkàmagan/Nous connaître un peu nous-mêmes/We’ll All Become Stories (2018) among others. She has also served in curatorial, educational outreach, and advisory capacities at SAW Gallery (Ottawa); A Space Gallery (Toronto); Gallery 44 (Toronto); Richmond Art Gallery (British Columbia); Kniznick Gallery (Waltham, MA, USA); and The Freud Museum (London, UK).
Expository documentaries set up a specific point of view or argument about a subject and often feature voice-overs. For expository documentaries, the cinematographer is responsible for collecting footage that supports and strengthens the spoken argument of the film, including archival footage, b-roll, or historical re-enactments.
Before the arrival of Europeans in the fifteenth century, Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island did not use one word to indicate all the peoples who lived in the Americas. Europeans called the native peoples they encountered “Indians,” because they mistakenly thought they had discovered a new way to reach the Asian subcontinent. In the nineteenth century, it was often said that the Indians were vanishing, that soon they would be extinct. This idea resulted from the widely held belief that Indigenous cultures were not strong enough to coexist with the European-based cultures of Canada and the United States. There are many references to this conviction by Canadian politicians and writers ranging from John A. McDonald to Duncan Campbell Scott. Much like photographer and ethnologist Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952) in the United States, Canadian painter and photographer Edmund Montague Morris (1871-1913) documented Indigenous peoples in northern Ontario and Western Canada. Between 1906 -1910, Morris was commissioned by federal and provincial governments to record the likenesses of individuals he met, and he worked by painting in his studio from photographs which he took on his travels. He also incorporated artifacts he collected into his paintings and pastel drawings. In 1906, Morris travelled with a delegation headed by Duncan Campbell Scott to negotiate Treaty 9, and was evidently appalled by the living conditions of the Indigenous people. In a 1910 letter on “The Indian problem” written to the Manitoba Morning Free Press, he mused “[what are] we reducing them to by thrusting upon them our so-called civilization.”
