Water is intrinsically dynamic: its state changes depending on temperature and, in its most common liquid form, it responds to movement. Water’s chemical properties suggest neutrality: it is tasteless, it can act as both an acid and a base, it dissolves many substances and it is almost entirely clear. Globally, it demarcates many liminal places, such as international waters, and time spent on water often has a feeling of suspension. Although the political issues regarding water are often as various and as complicated as its chemical properties, the United Nations nonetheless considers clean water a fundamental human right. Ruth Cuthand’s Don’t Breathe Don’t Drink makes it clear that in Canada clean water is far from politically neutral, and in a disconcertingly beautiful installation she forces her audience to encounter their own subjective position in relationship to the crisis.

The central component of Don’t Breathe, Don’t Drink is the crystal-clear resin that poses as water in 94 glasses, pitchers and baby bottles, which correspond collectively to the number of First Nations communities with water advisories at the time the work was created. A glass-beaded replica of a water-borne pathogen is suspended in the substance within each vessel. As you move through the small room, with its low ceiling and clapboard walls, light refracts through the resin onto the blue tarp tablecloth that covers the table on which the water vessels sit. As the light moves, the beaded pathogens gleam.

Apparently contaminated and eerily still, this installation raises the question of why clean water is treated as a human right in seemingly every jurisdiction in Canada except these First Nations communities. Furthermore, through Cuthand’s scaling down of a national crisis to the setting of a modest domestic room filled with everyday objects and crafted materials, she confronts her audience with their implication in the problem.

The artist’s use of beaded pathogens in this artwork echoes her 2009 series Trading, in which she created beaded versions of illnesses and disease that have been overrepresented among Indigenous populations, historically and in the present, and displayed them in framed petri dishes. Similarly, in both Don’t Breathe, Don’t Drink and Trading, the use of glass beads, which became a form of currency during the time of trading posts, evokes this early colonial history as well as the history of Indigenous cultural production that resulted from access to what was then a new material¹

The act of recreating illness-causing microbes by hand, using a crafting skill with a long and specific trajectory, emphasizes both the labour this entails and the weight of a history of genocide. What if, instead of impotent federal policies, each community lacking access to clean water was consulted, and treated with the level of individualized and informed care, skill and labour that Cuthand employs in her beading? Other elements of Cuthand’s installation also gesture to the myriad ways that the federal government has been ineffectual in supporting the basic needs of First Nations communities. The beaded blue tarp tablecloth on which the glasses sit references the tarps used as stop-gap measures to protect people from the dangers of black mold in homes on some reservations, offering a further reminder of the threats to health and safety present in the everyday lives of residents of remote First Nations communities.

Don’t Breathe, Don’t Drink notably distinguishes itself from Cuthand’s previous series by contextualizing the beaded pathogens in a domestic space, which personalizes the crisis. Every water vessel in the artwork evokes an interpersonal gesture of care. A bottle brings to mind the feeding of an infant, a pitcher brings to mind common acts of offering hospitality to guests. Cuthand’s work reminds us that these basic practices of family and community care embedded in the simple act of providing a glass of clean water are impossible in the kitchens of many First Nations communities in Canada. Although the choice to include the same number of water vessels as there were communities in crisis could have felt like too literal a gesture, the environment in which Cuthand places them creates a nuanced conversation about the nation state’s relationship with Indigenous subjects in Canada.

In the artwork, the person behind the gesture of hospitality suggested by the vessels placed on the domestic table is absent. This reflects the contingent subjectivity that the Canadian nation state has maintained for Indigenous peoples. As scholar Sunera Thobani notes, the Canadian national imaginary is wrapped up in binary ways of understanding our social world that bleed into our very conception of who gets to be the subject raised above others, the subject considered human and thus entitled to full human rights. Colonialism still lives within the way the nation state and the “exalted” national subject (which mutually support each other) remain set up in an oppositional relationship to Indigenous people, meaning they are in part defined by not being Indigenous and by the idea that Indigenous history is long past² The missing host at the artwork’s table is a reminder of the uneven rights each subject is afforded, contingent to one’s relationship with colonial history. The Indigenous host’s labour is present, but they are invisible.

Cuthand hails her viewer by offering up water glasses on a kitchen table. Don’t Breathe, Don’t Drink’s visitor interpellation is contextually significant when thinking about what it means to exhibit this artwork in a gallery setting that, like so many, addresses a largely white clientele. Serving to personalize and concretize systemic national issues, the artwork is a litmus test for checking your own privilege and status when provoked to consider whether or not you would ever be in a position to accept or reject contaminated water.