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Alex Janvier's Morning Star: a Metaphor for Canada's Competing Cultures

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Alex Janvier's Morning Star: a Metaphor for Canada's Competing Cultures ALEX JANVIER’S MORNING STAR: A METAPHOR FOR CANADA’S COMPETING CULTURES Alex Janvier's Morning Star: A Metaphor for Canada's competing cultures Elaine Radman ELAINE RADMAN CAPSTONE SEMINAR SERIES Belonging in Canada: Questions and Challenges Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 2012. Managing Editors Ellen Huijgh and Anne Trépanier Desk-top publishing Ryan Kuhne and Anne Trépanier Editorial Board John-Paul Abelshauser, James Benning, Carly Donaldson, Lashia Jones, Elaine Radman, Ellen Huijgh, and Anne Trépanier Special thanks Patrick Lyons, Ryan Kuhne, and Ellen Huijgh Copyright Notice © Elaine Radman, April 2012 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy, or transmission of this publication, or part thereof in excess of one paragraph (other than as a PDF file at the discretion of School of Canadian Studies at Carleton University) may be made without the written permission of the author. To quote this article refer to: ―Elaine Radman, " Alex Janvier’s Morning Star: A Metaphor For Canada’s Competing Cultures" ‖ Capstone Seminar Series, Volume 2, number 1, Spring 2012, Belonging in Canada: Questions and Challenges, page number and date of accession to this website: http://capstoneseminarseries.wordpress.com CAPSTONE SEMINAR SERIES Belonging in Canada: Questions and Challenges 1 Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 2012. ALEX JANVIER’S MORNING STAR: A METAPHOR FOR CANADA’S COMPETING CULTURES Elaine Radman Alex Janvier’s Morning Star: A Metaphor For Canada’s Competing Cultures ABSTRACT Alex Janvier’s Morning Star at the Canadian Museum of Civilization is a reflection of the First People’s shared experience of loss, displacement, renewal and reconciliation. This mural adorns 418 square feet of the dome area above the staircase located at the end of the Canadian Museum of Civilization’s Grand Hall. The artist’s use of colour, imagery and shapes constructs a historical narrative, in the form of a circular timeline, which depicts the experiences shared by Canada’s First Peoples. The circular timeline format of Alex Janvier’s Morning Star is a direct reflection of the role of Canadian historiography, in that, the issues of the past are continually being shaped by the present. This paper will examine the main themes of Alex Janvier’s Morning Star by investigating the context in which the mural was created, the narratives associated with the painting and the anthropological method First Peoples are portrayed in Canadian historiography. In addition, this discourse analyze will compare Janvier’s Morning Star narrative with the Canadian historical narrative to show its differing perspectives on history and identity. KEYWORDS Alex Janvier, Canadian history, First Peoples, Native Art. 2 ELAINE RADMAN The artwork produced by Canada’s First Peoples is a reflection of a shared experience of loss, displacement, renewal and reconciliation. These experiences exist outside the context of the Canadian historical narrative, which is dominated by the French and English European cultures. The Canadian Museum of Civilization (CMC) houses both conflicting aboriginal and non- aboriginal narratives, where these groups each have a separate space to transmit their history to the general public. A key museum piece that merges these two cultures into one historical narrative is Morning Star by Alex Janvier. This mural adorns 418 square feet of the dome area above the staircase located at the end of the CMC’s Grand Hall (see Figure 1). The artist’s use of colour, imagery and shapes constructs a historical narrative, Figure 1: Morning Star by Alex Janvier at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, in the form of a circular timeline, Quebec, 1993. which depicts the experiences shared Photo Copyright: Canadian Museum of Civilization Corporation, 2004. by Canada’s First Peoples. Culture clashes still exist in the heritage sector, despite the 1971 Multiculturalism Policy ensuring equal representation among Canada’s English French and First Peoples. This paper examines these conflicting historical narratives that form the basis for the Canadian, Quebecois and First Peoples identities. The main questions this study seeks to answer is how the Morning Star’s narrative fits into the Canadian historiography, what historical themes does it address and how is First People’s artwork connected to the Canadian historical narrative? First, a literature review and methodology will outline the context of Canadian historical narrative. Secondly, CAPSTONE SEMINAR SERIES Belonging in Canada: Questions and Challenges 3 Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 2012. ALEX JANVIER’S MORNING STAR: A METAPHOR FOR CANADA’S COMPETING CULTURES Janvier’s Morning Star will be discussed within the context of the museum space. Then, the principle meaning of Morning Star is defined and analyzed by illustrating the connection between the artwork’s message and how First Peoples are portrayed in Canadian historiography. Literature review and methodology Artwork and identity are intricately linked in Alex Janvier’s work. Chris Dueker’s (2011) analysis on Alex Janvier’s Entangled Cartographies: Hunters’ Dreams, Bauhaus Aesthetics, and the Cold Lake Air Weapons Range shows that Janvier’s abstract style is fraught with multiple meanings ranging from the artist’s struggle for his own identity and the politics surrounding his family’s eviction from their ancestral land: For Janvier’s aesthetics intersect with a myriad of cultural, political, and artistic currents in which mapping is implicit, including the artist’s own exile from and hard fought return to his traditional homeland, his mentor’s Bauhaus grammar of lines as records of movement and expressions of environmental pressures, the geomantic reconnaissance of Dene hunters’ dreams, the power of military and oil concerns to qualify, control and redefine landscape, and the use of Traditional Land Use Studies to chart, and sometimes salvage, Indigenous ways of knowing land.1 Lee-Anne Martin and Robert Houle’s (1993) The Art of Alex Janvier: His First Thirty Years, 1960-1990 tracks Janvier’s political and artistic development that earned him the title of the ‘father of aboriginal art.’ Lee-Anne Martin (1993) notes that “Alex Janvier’s history as an artist parallels the politics and history of Native art in Canada since the 1960s.”2 Native art grew from this period as being considered a craft to being an accepted artistic style by the Western art world. Houle (1993) summed up this reality of discrimination by indicating that 1 Chris Dueker, “Alex Janvier's Entangled Cartographies: Hunters' Dreams, Bauhaus Aesthetics, and the Cold Lake Air Weapons Range,” Art History 34.3 (2011): 537. 2 Lee-Ann Martin, Robert Houle and Alex Janvier, The Art of Alex Janvier: His First Thirty Years, 1960-1990 (Thunder Bay: Thunder Bay Art Gallery, 1993): 7. 4 ELAINE RADMAN Native art prior to the 1970s did not qualify as part of the contemporary artwork of Canada.3 It was restricted to the Museum of Man (now the Canadian Museum of Civilization) and not displayed in the National Art Gallery.4 First People’s representation in Canadian historiography follows similar lines of exclusion and discrimination in Ottawa’s national narrative. Studies on Canadian historiography by Jan Grabowski (2000) and J.R. Miller (2008) illustrate that Canadian history ignores the aboriginal presence in the narrative until the 1960s, where any prior analysis on this cultural group was completed in the anthropology discipline. This paper’s main goal is to show that the circular timeline format of Alex Janvier’s Morning Star is a direct reflection of the role of Canadian historiography, in that, the issues of the past are continually being shaped by the present. It will examine the main themes of Alex Janvier’s Morning Star by investigating the context in which the mural was created, the narratives associated with the painting and the anthropological method First Peoples are portrayed in Canadian historiography. In addition, this discourse analyze will compare Janvier’s Morning Star narrative with the Canadian historical narrative to show its differing perspectives on history and identity. The Canadian historical narrative encapsulates both the collective identities of Canada’s diverse population and the pan- Canadian identity that is designed on a national scale to connect these different cultures. This study uses the Canadian historical narrative term in the context of identity and history represented by Jocelyn Létourneau’s (2004) A history for the future: rewriting memory and identity in Quebec and J.L. Granatstein’s (2007) Who killed Canadian history? Létourneau (2004) defines the Canadian historical narrative as a collective memory of identity, historical facts, self-reflections and 3 Janet C. Berlo and Ruth B. Phillips, Native North American Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998): 213. 4 Lee-Ann Martin, Robert Houle and Alex Janvier, The Art of Alex Janvier: His First Thirty Years, 1960-1990 (Thunder Bay: Thunder Bay Art Gallery, 1993): 49. CAPSTONE SEMINAR SERIES Belonging in Canada: Questions and Challenges 5 Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 2012. ALEX JANVIER’S MORNING STAR: A METAPHOR FOR CANADA’S COMPETING CULTURES scholarly debates that provides the necessary perceptions of historical events.5 These stories are from Canada’s pluralistic history, where anthropologists, historians and museum staff interpret the diversity of the inhabitants (i.e. their social, gender, spatial, ethnical and cultural factors) within the country’s framework.6 Granatstein’s (2007) interpretation of the Canadian historical narrative
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