asian diasporic visual cultures and the americas 2 (2016) 255-263 brill.com/adva Home Ground: A First Nations Perspective Robert Houle First Nations artist, member of Sandy Bay First Nation, Manitoba, Canada [email protected] The following is the transcript of Robert Houle’s keynote lecture for the one-day symposium Home Ground: Canadian Perspectives, which took place 6 December 2015 at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Greetings everyone. Welcome to the traditional territory of the Mississauga, to Paradise (as the Western Hemisphere was initially referred to during the Quattrocento, when Europeans began to arrive). Ozhahwushquah Penaise dezhenekanego, “I am known as Blue Thunder,” in my maternal language, Saul- teaux. This is the spirit name given to me by a shaman from my community of Sandy Bay First Nation in southern Manitoba. Today I would like to talk with you about the politics of identity from a First Nations perspective and what inspires my work. An artist begins by painting what he knows. It would be fair to say that the two are interconnected, and I will use six works of mine to establish that point, as well as an historical image of an identity more personal. Morningstar, a 1999 site-specific multimedia installation at the Pool of the Black Star in the rotunda of the Manitoba Legislature in Winnipeg, is an affir- mation of a journey home mediated by memory that lies somewhere between material and process (fig. 1). The naming and mapping of Manitoba’s sixty-one First Nations around the circumference of the steps, the mantra-like sound of recorded water hitting rocks, intertwined with drumming and the singing of a Grand Entry Song and brightly-lit coloured lights of yellow, blue, purple, and red symbolizing the hem of Rainbow Woman’s skirt, emerge as a multisensory- induced reclamation of a spiritual and political place. Rainbow Woman is a mythological figure that appears after a storm and the rainbow is the hem of her dress. Our identity is largely a construct of historical misrepresentation. Indig- enous people of the Western Hemisphere have a history dating back to the Ice Age. It is the story of our creation on Turtle Island, North America, our Home Ground! The Place Where God Lives, a 1989 suite of four large oil paint- ings based on four works on paper from the 1983 series Parfleches for the Last © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi 10.1163/23523085-00203005 <UN> 256 Houle Figure 1 Robert Houle, Morningstar, 1999. Multimedia installation, vinyl lettering, lighting, sound. Manitoba Legislature, Pool of the Black Star, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. © Robert Houle. Photograph by Ernest Mayer. Supper is also about place, the origin of the name “Manitoba,” the celebra- tion of Indigenous place names appropriately incorporated into the language of the state (fig. 2). Created during a residency at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, these paintings are responses to prairie light and landscape, providing insight into the Saulteaux cultural universe—an abstraction of landscape before and outside the Renaissance perspective. Mythology identifies an island in the Nar- rows of Lake Manitoba, Manitou Island, known to us as manitowahpah uhya- huk, a sacred space and “the place where the gods are present.” I wanted to abstract the traditional European landscape, a ground of intuitive reordering of perception, where gestural marks are topographical and colour creates sen- sations and atmosphere. The question of where we came from is answered when the Anishnabec ad- dress the Laurentian Shield as their grandfather. For us this is to witness the time of our creation, a narrative repeated in rituals and ceremonies. It is based on the stories left by the ancient ones, an identity shaped and etched on it, a long presence that is still a work in progress. Kanata, a 1992 four-panel mixed-media painting, challenges the national norm of how we see the late eighteenth-century English and French conflict asian diasporic visual cultures and the americas 2 (2016) 255-263 <UN>.