Ancestral Portraits: The Colour of My People (review)

This vivid book is the first in a new University of Calgary Press series, Art in Profile, intended to make the work of living Canadian artists broadly available. It's a fine debut. More than sixty full-colour reproductions of Frederick McDonald's primarily acrylic paintings are accompanied by his personal commentary on his art and its relationship to contemporary society.

McDonald begins with his childhood in a land-based Cree community along the Athabasca River in northern Alberta. Hunting and trapping taught him the kind of survival that balances death and creativity and that still informs his art. He argues that Hollywood stereotypes have made it difficult for Canadian mainstream consciousness to interpret art in Native contexts. He combines his university education and his earlier learning on the land and in his blue-collar years as a pipefitter for SynCrude in Fort MacMurray to translate First Nations art to non-First Nations audiences, to create and sustain a meaningful dialogue between European and First Nations ideas, and to report, through his art, back to First Nations communities. He takes the pragmatic stance that non-First Nations peoples are in Canada to stay and that it is important both for Indigenous peoples to learn about the rest of the world and for non-Indigenous peoples to learn about First Nations concepts and especially about their land ethic. He credits his 'walkabout' in Australia between his pipefitting career and his university arts career with helping him achieve a global perspective on difference and commonality.

McDonald uses stylized versions of the ancient symbols of human-spirit connections in North America as incised or painted on rock surfaces across Canada. He also uses historical photos of well-known figures and of his own family. Most of these are triumphant, rich in colour and in power, except for the tragic Bigfoot ... (1993), frozen in death against the snow at Wounded Knee, and the deeply moving After, Before the Pain (1995-96), showing Crowfoot and his nine children, all of whom predeceased him, in a world of northern lights, where buffalo feed them and crows protect them.

The history is inescapable and shadows present and future, but McDonald is most interested in how we can all get along now and in the future. Sometimes he addresses this symbolically, as in Turtles Doing the Spiritual Square Dance (1999), in which he juxtaposes rounded turtles, among his favourite spirit beings, with the square corners of city landscapes. Some of his images playfully undercut stereotypes, such as a golfing painting titled Gathering (1997) that suggests golf tournaments are providing a contemporary way for 'Aboriginal people ... [to gather] for some friendly competition,' just as they might have hunted and collected berries and told stories when he was a child. An Aboriginal doctor whose thunderbird headband and buffalo tie complement his white coat and stethoscope (Time-Honoured Traditions, 1999) is balanced by an elder Medicine Woman (1996) among birches. McDonald's own self-portrait, Dancing on a Table (1994), juxtaposes a dark Calgary skyline with women who fall from the sky and metamorphose into butterflies while the dancer, his buckskin fringe alive with motion, advances towards a crow. And by far the most optimistic painting, 'created with input from the corporate world' and now in the collection of Albian Sands, Ltd, Fort MacMurray - Athabasca Dreams 2 & 3, the Present and the Future (2001) - shows a non-Native man talking to a First Nations man at a desk in front of two very realistic images: the 'present' of earth-moving machinery and a restored 'future' of a river flowing through a forest. McDonald emphasizes that, although everything he paints and writes is influenced by his own community and family, he does not speak for them, nor does he represent some mythical 'pan-Indian' consciousness. His voice and brush are worth heeding.