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Plural

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Mackenzie

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Workman 1

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Feature

Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is a PhD student in the Dept. of English & Film Studies at the University of Alberta. He is the author of This Wound is a World: Poems.

in front of me, 1947; a fractured door; rotted wooden beams. behind me, an old forest of gone peoples. these are what’s left of an indian residential school in joussard, alberta. what remains exceeds the infrastructural remains. we are caught up in the afterlife of captivity. cages were made out of bodies, and then bodies out of anything that was left behind. this is the world we have inherited. it is infused with the violence of being left to float in the air like an unanswered question.

it is an afternoon in june when i return to this primal scene, this open wound. the air clots, as if to make a fool out of my lungs, as if to remind me that having a body were a sick joke i was never in on. air enters, and out comes smoke.

there is something unsayable about this type of return. it makes words crumble in my mouth. they taste like dust this time. it feels ndn to be pulled anew into a scene of injury like this one.

it is summer, so rich white people are camped on the shores of lesser slave lake, just a few feet away from this prison house. they think nothing of it. not thinking is a way to think the world. they bathe in the aroma of violence, but unlike me their sense of self stays intact. a self that’s been dragged through the dirt of bad social structures cannot bear this kind of looking.

one day, the government of alberta might make this place into an historic site. i can see it now: a spectacle during which white politicians crawl out of the bloody maw of the past, smiling with the carcasses of words like history and forgiveness hanging from their lips. they mistake the red on their skin for sunlight.

to be ndn is to know that a spectacle isn’t always an event.

online dating bio: i want to refuse the non- event of the present with you. my hobbies include: not dying, apologizing to the future, and slow dancing to the tune of bryan adams’ “heaven” with white men who won’t find it in themselves to love me.

i am fixed by the darkness that emanates from the doorway. it is a thick nothingness at which i feel compelled to stare. nothingness is a thing. a lot of indians live there. i don’t blame them; who needs a map when the world is labyrinthine? who needs geography when there are doorways everywhere?

does the sky look like it could fall apart at any given moment, or is that just me?

here, i have no words for things like _priest_ or _prayer_. the dead come back from the dead for at least the possibility of revenge. revenge is something more satisfying than justice.

did you know: a group of indians is called a murder?

a white boyfriend of mine wanted me to be less beholden to the clouds. i told him that we are all at the mercy of the sky, for better or for worse. part of me still thinks that he didn’t deserve to know about this mode of attention, about this art of description. but i can’t keep secrets: i am addicted to the high of letting my own words betray me.

there is no shelter under skies like these. when i was a little boy, my mooshum told me a story about the day the sky fell down. the sky is still falling, but only indians can tell the difference. i look up, and down comes an endless parade of half-smiling children.

Writer

Site/ation

issue-136-p13-16.pdf

Indigenous

Poetry

Identity

Landscape

Time

Critique

A poetic response to the residential school ruins in Joussard Alberta.

TO BE AT THE MERCY OF THE SKY

Editorial

BUSH gallery is a space for dialogue, experimental practice and community engaged work that contributes to an understanding of how gallery systems and art mediums might be transfigured, translated and transformed by Indigenous knowledges, traditions, aesthetics, performance and land use systems. This model of decolonial, non-institutional ways to engage with and value Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous creative production is at the heart of BUSH gallery. BUSH gallery is a trans-conceptual gallery space. To be trans-conceptual is to reposition ideas born within Indigenous and western epistemological conditions. A trans-conceptual space requires your body to be in a constant state of flux – never settling, like the flow of water in a river. One of the goals of BUSH gallery is to articulate Indigenous creative land practices which are born out of a lived connection to the land.  
  
  
This gallery is out on the land, it is outside of or at the margins of monetary systems and away from the colonized space of art institutions. This gallery is a gallery of the land, of Indigenous culture(s) and language(s); this gallery can show new media with basketry, beading with installation art, performance art and storytelling.  
  
  
BUSH gallery is alive and breathing.  
BUSH gallery is on Indigenous Lands.  
BUSH gallery is animate and inanimate at the same time.  
BUSH gallery is radically inclusive – all bodies and  
lands and kids and dogs and bears are welcome.  
BUSH gallery requires new words.  
BUSH gallery includes working the land.  
BUSH gallery includes walking the land.  
BUSH gallery includes conversations with kids.  
BUSH gallery includes moms and dads and caregivers.  
BUSH gallery includes all Indigenous languages  
(within BUSH gallery, we understand that Indigenous languages are spoken with hands, with the movements of bodies, with the tongue, with the movements of mouths, with laughter, with tears, and with righteous anger).  
BUSH gallery includes dogs.  
BUSH gallery is in constant transition as the land is in constant transition.  
BUSH gallery knows that disruption inspires growth.  
BUSH gallery is a place of hope and no hope.  
  
  
Our ancestors are buried there, in BUSH gallery.  
  
  
BUSH gallery is not afraid of opinions.  
BUSH gallery is not afraid of sharing our opinions.  
BUSH gallery is not not-for-profit.  
BUSH gallery is for Indigenous and non-Indigenous art and artists and curators and thinkings and grandmothers and grandfathers and fathers and mothers and cousins and aunties and uncles.  
BUSH gallery is eating whipped berries under the stars, punctuating conversations and visits about art.  
BUSH gallery is a space to make art, but the openings are attended by bears harvesting the last of the berries before hibernation and maybe the neighbours’ horses or cows are grazing, and there are crows, reservation dogs and the spirit of the land, lots of spirits.  
BUSH gallery is an autonomous space… for birds.  
BUSH gallery is human-led, Indigenous knowledge-based, we trace our impacts on the land in search of balance amidst our inherent selfish humanity.  
BUSH gallery talks big, dreams bigger and doesn’t bother to walk its talk, we send our talk straight up to the stars and the sky, on the wings of eagles and hawks…  
BUSH gallery can disappear.  
BUSH gallery fits into our pockets.  
BUSH gallery can be called into being and called out.  
BUSH gallery is not one place, not one territory, not  
one Nation, we trace out our family, our blood, our  
belonging in cities, on reserves, in the BUSH, in the  
suburbs, overseas and under mountains.  
BUSH gallery believes in dreaming, and sleeping, and walking, and being.  
BUSH gallery is sometimes nothing but opening your eyes and breathing in the land around you.  
BUSH gallery hopes that art matters.  
BUSH gallery is sometimes a blockade, sometimes a bridge, always a balancing beam.  
BUSH gallery says sometimes you gotta stop dreaming and get to work, dig a well, hunt and grow food, chop wood, bury sunshine for later and give food to ghosts.  
BUSH gallery is stick gambling for all the bragging rights.  
BUSH gallery respects the land and is in love with it.  
BUSH gallery means nothing if you are in the way of a bear and his berry patch, you better move it on.  
BUSH gallery is performance, installation, craft, conceptual, painting, photography, stand up comedy, cooking, movie watching with trees and many other things you might call bullshit on ’cause they are not really art. But bullshit is part of BUSH gallery too.  
BUSH gallery seeks to speak with many tongues, honouring Indigenous languages as a way to speak with, to and from the land. BUSH Gallery asks what does pop culture mean in the BUSH? If you hashtag the land, and no one is there with a cell phone, does the land even know it is on social media.  
BUSH gallery; ants might crawl on your art, surprise rain might ruin or make your next work and you should think about carrying bear spray.  
BUSH gallery starts now.  
BUSH gallery ends here.  
BUSH gallery will pitstop intermittently.  
It is recommended you have your web browser settings  
filter out any obscene images you may find when you  
google search BUSH gallery – that means images of war leaders as well.  
BUSH gallery is idea(s), place(s), story(ies), mood(s), artist(s), farmer(s), fighter(s), kid(s), the four-legged, the fish, the birds and the bugs, the stars and the water that makes us all.  
BUSH gallery is yours and mine and no one’s.  
BUSH gallery is going to blow up.  
BUSH gallery sees the bush in the city.  
BUSH gallery imagines what art for ourselves – not for the institutions of galleries, museums, history or academies – looks like.  
BUSH gallery wonders what art can do.  
  
  
BUSH gallery works towards Indigenous resurgence.  
  
  
BUSH gallery is expanded, not limited, by tradition.  
BUSH gallery is feminist.  
BUSH gallery remembers the things we never knew.  
BUSH gallery is inauthentic.  
BUSH gallery is unsettled.  
BUSH gallery is representative and abstract.  
BUSH gallery is on the land, researches land, goes to the land, because land is the foundation of Indigenous life and Indigenous struggle.  
BUSH gallery is a place where knowledge is open-ended.  
BUSH gallery thanks the land.

issue-136-p6-8.pdf

Collective

Manifesto

The BUSH Manifesto outlines BUSH Gallery’s decolonial and non-institutional praxis by stating both what the gallery is and what it is not.

THE BUSH MANIFESTO

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