Imagining Resistance: Visual Culture and Activism in Canada

Monumental Interventions: Jeff Thomas Seizes Commemorative Space

Monumental Interventions: Jeff Thomas Seizes Commemorative Space CLAUDETTE LAUZON In my culture/there are no monuments Shelley Niro, For Fearless and Other Indians The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved I ’m cycling through downtown Ottawa on an unseasonably warm day in autumn 2001.My destination is Nepean Point,a cliff top that rises up behind the National Gallery of Canada and overlooks the Ottawa River,and the site of a towering monument to explorer, geographer, and mapmaker Samuel de Champlain (1567–1635).Here,Ottawa-based Iroquois-Onondaga photographer Jeff Thomas is performing a public intervention,“Seize the Space,”billed as a casting call of sorts.1 Thomas will invite visitors and passersby to pose for a portrait on the ledge under Champlain’s pedestal—an empty ledge that for over seventy-five years was occupied by the statue of an unidentifiedAboriginal man known colloquially as the “Indian Scout.” As part of the performance, Thomas will share his reflections on the absent scout and invite participants to reflect upon the experience of collaborating in the intervention. When I arrive at the Point, Thomas tells me his intention is to encourage citizens to engage critically with the Champlain monument, and the many others that dot the Ottawa cityscape, by enabling participation in the space where the highly controversial statue removed from the site in 1999 once knelt. Thomas hopes to prolong the dialogue initiated by the controversy in order to disrupt the monological narrative imposed by the commemorative space, and ultimately to reshape that space into a locus for rethinking both the representation and lived experience of Aboriginality in urban settings. In this same spirit of prolonging the conversation, the present study engages with Thomas’s interlocutory practice as I consider how national ideologies are constructed and reified in the public spaces of monumental art andhowinterventionsintothesespaces,whichrevealthecracksintheseemingly 79 impenetrable narratives that they convey, seek to mine these cracks for hidden , stolen, silenced narratives. I suggest that Jeff Thomas’s photographic and performance-based works transform monumental spaces into spaces of contestation between hegemonic colonial narratives and oppositional postcolonial narratives, or what Homi Bhabha terms the“Third Space.”2 Assuming the role of storyteller in venues that tend to both ossify and obscure their own narratives , Thomas occupies this Third Space by envisioning resistance as a tactical interruption of normative discourse in the very sites of its enunciation. Monuments and Memory The monument to Samuel de Champlain, commissioned by a citizens’committee , funded by various levels of government, and crafted by sculptor Hamilton MacCarthy, was unveiled in 1915 by the Duke of Connaught to commemorate the tercentenary of Champlain’s second voyage up the Ottawa River. The unveiling of the larger-than-life bronze statue, mounted on a twometre concrete plinth and accompanied by a plaque heralding Champlain as “the First Great Canadian,” transpired at the end of a fifty-year period of Imagining Resistance 80 Fig. 7.1. Jeff Thomas, Indian Man from Nepean Point, Samuel de Champlain monument, Ottawa, 1992 (gelatin silver print) what historian Brian Osborne describes as “statuemania,” during which Western nations sought to provide “visual prompts for the collective memorizing of an official state narrative”with the use of commemorative statues intended to personify the nation-state via depictions of national personages rendered in heroic colossal form (fig. 7.1).3 Ottawa’s monument to Samuel de Champlain epitomizes“statuemania” in Canada, depicting a fearless European explorer who discovers, maps, and conquers the uninhabited wilds of the“new world,”ostensibly opening that world to commerce, settlement, civilization, and the building of a new nation. In the same moment of veneration, the monument contributes to the production of what Benedict Anderson terms “collective amnesia”4 through its designation of Champlain as the first “great” Canadian. This designation both conveniently forgets a fundamental characteristic of the land before Champlain’s arrival on the shores of what would become Quebec City—its prior occupation by First Peoples—and reflexively reveals Canada itself as a European invention. Indeed, the Champlain monument embodies what has been identified as one of the key characteristics of public monuments: their capacity to establish national history while burying national memories.5 Monuments of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries sought to legitimize nation states by subsuming social conflict within a myth of stable national identity.6 Impenetrable and seemingly unalterable reifications of...