Shame and Prejudice
A friend on Facebook posted an image that prompted me to look up the painter to learn more.
In Shame and Prejudice, Kent Monkman paints missing Indigenous images into history
As UBC’s Museum of Anthropology gets used to welcoming visitors again, it’s opening a major new show—one that shakes up the very foundations of Canada.
On the final stop of a cross-country tour that kicked off in 2017, Cree artist Kent Monkman’s provocative Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience finally arrives in Vancouver.
The painting in question:
“This was an opportunity to ask Canadians to think about what 150 years have meant to Indigenous people, and reframe it through my own lens,” the artist says, speaking to the Straight from his studio in Prince Edward County, on Ontario’s picturesque Bay of Quinte, where the largely Toronto-based Monkman has been holed up for most of the quarantine. “Colonial history really intended to remove Indigenous people from view, but also strip us of our culture and our languages.”
Hence stealing Indigenous children to put them in residential schools, to strip them of their culture and languages.
His paintings are presented in the style of the old masters, but capture a history never told by 19th-century paintings: one of killing, starvation, and abduction. The Scream is a deeply distressing tableau of nuns, priests, and red-coated Mounties yanking crying children away to residential school, holding back their distraught mothers—in one case, by grabbing her hair.
It is distressing, as well as all too familiar. Nuns and priests locked up children in industrial “schools” in Ireland, too, along with locking up women in Magdalen laundries to do slave labour for years for the crime of getting pregnant without being married. Nothing ever happened to the men who got them pregnant of course.
“Over many years, I’ve been looking at that art history, examining it for those gaps in what has been represented and what has been omitted,” he continues. “So, with this project, what I wanted was to depict events, sometimes traumatic, that were erased from history, erased from the education curriculums of most Canadians, who had no idea that residential schools were this experience that Indigenous people had to survive. So many Canadians graduated from university without having any knowledge of residential schools, so it was an opportunity to insert some of these images into this shared art history, which ended up being quite powerful and troubling to many people. But I felt they were necessary to shock and also engage and educate many Canadians, who still remain largely ignorant of many Indigenous experiences. That’s the beauty and power of art.”
It is.
Canadians, Americans, Australians; we’re all ignorant of the history of residential schools. There have been a few movies on the subject, one being Indian Horse directed by Clint Eastwood. It’s about a child who finds refuge in playing hockey while in a Canadian residential school (and I will NOT spoil the ending on this one. It’s important to watch, trust me.) Another is The Rabbit Proof Fence which tells the story of three girls who escape from an Australian residential school. Kenneth Branagh plays a minor role.
The effects are still being felt today. This book is quite the case study:
https://www.amazon.com/Seven-Fallen-Feathers-Racism-Northern/dp/1487002262
They had a lot of practice for it, after centuries of removing Jewish children to baptize into the Catholic monstrosity. I have some Catholic friends who are truly wonderful people; they do not know any of this history. They refuse to hear it. They assume all of it is just anti-Catholic propaganda. They are so much nicer than their church, or their god, but they write their niceness back into the pope, the bishops, and all the other nasty bits of the church.
I don’t think Eastwood directed this. It was directed by Stephen S. Campanelli, based on the novel by Richard Wagamese. Here’s the movie’s IMDB page, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5672286/?ref_=ttco_co_tt
and the film’s official website: https://www.indianhorse.ca/en/film
Thanks for the correction. Eastwood was an Executive Producer who had mentored Campanelli.
I think Eastwood is a fairly complex individual who doesn’t fit into the conservative stereotypes. He was involved in some other movies as actor/director/producer that tell stories most conservatives would steer clear of, such as Gran Torino and Million Dollar Baby.
I was well aware of the American history of residential schools, because of family histories, identities, etc. I am of the impression it was even more widespread in Canada.
Our family heartily enjoyed the series “Anne With an E,” based on Anne of Green Gables, which treats the matter of religious bastards kidnapping Indian children directly and within a richly developed cultural context.
And while I’m at it, the choice to put modern clothing on the children is excellent. It somehow makes the impact greater. I also like the way the birds seem concerned.
Papito,
The last residential schools in Canada closed in 1996. Granted, those extractions under the compulsory attendance policy stopped after 1948, but it was not just a phenomenon of past lifetimes.
Not just the residential schools, either. There was also “the 60’s Scoop,” in which thousands and thousands of children were removed from their families by provincial “child welfare” systems, and adopted out, mostly to non-native families. This ppolicy lasted from 1951 into the 1980’s.
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/sixties-scoop
Jeeeez.
I need to learn more about this.
Wow, so recent. I wonder if there be any remnant of it, under some other name, still going on today.
GW,
No, not now. It is now very well known, and a very raw theme in Canadian political/social discourse. Reconciliation is a priority. Kids in many (all?) provinces have an Orange Shirt day at school to raise awareness, with the orange shirt a symbol because of a girl who was sent to one of these schools in 1973 wearing a new orange shirt she was so happy to have received, only to have it stripped from her, never to be seen again.
https://www.orangeshirtday.org/phyllis-story.html
There are echoes of Canada’s terrible residential school history in our new school transgender policies. They’re going to the children behind the parents’ backs and indoctrinating them into extreme gender ideology right from Kindergarten; they’re encouraging kids to identify as “transgender” and keeping it all strictly secret from the parents. All of this with the idea that the government knows what’s best for the kids, and the government must forcibly prevent parents teaching their kids their own social and cultural ideas about sex and “gender identity” if they differ from government sanctioned views. They’re going so far as to aggressively prosecute and imprison parents who don’t comply (like Rob Hoogland, who I’ve met and who is a decent man, and who at this moment is temporarily out of high-security prison pending an appeal to his conviction for opposing his troubled teen daughter’s medical transition, after the girl went to her middle school guidance counsellor for help processing a crush on her phys ed teacher, and the counsellor instead declared her transgender and assigned her a new male name), and they want to see children forcibly removed from homes they deem noncompliant. (A social worker in British Columbia was caught bragging on camera that one in five kids in the Province’s foster care system have come to believe they are transgender and are receiving transgender medical care.)
It’s the same thing all over again. Canada’s greatest shame is repeating itself right now, right in front of us all.
There were Industrial Schools in Britain, as well as Ireland. Probably where everyone else got the idea. We’ve always been great at innovation when it comes to cruelty.
Morty – wo! Do you have a link to that social worker item?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_school
I don’t think I knew that. I knew about the poor house, but not “schools.” They do indeed predate the Irish ones. Rule Britannia wot wot.
His name is Dr. Wallace Wong, and he bragged of having over 500 orphans and fosters in gender care. Which we could estimate to be 20% if not more of the foster population. (Though this article suggests it could be as little as ten percent, but I’m not buying that. I’ve seen estimates of only 1000 fosters in all BC, which would put 500 at half.) These people are maniacs!
https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/01/doctor-advises-threatening-suicide-get-transgender-treatments-kids/
Artymorty:
“after the girl went to her middle school guidance counsellor for help processing a crush on her phys ed teacher, and the counsellor instead declared her transgender and assigned her a new male name)”
I would guess that the phys ed teacher is female. Correct?
That would imply that rather than just acknowledging that the girl is lesbian or bisexual, the counsellor decided that she must instead actually be male.
This reminds me of something I have heard about the treatment of gays in Iran.
Reading. Ohhh jeeeeez
@jim
No. The gym teacher was male. The daughter was just an awkward and by all means seemingly straight and “gender typical” (for lack of a better term) young teen. Having some emotional troubles, not fitting in well with peers. It’s believed she didn’t even pick her own male name; it was assigned to her by the school after the school decided she was trans. The whole story is deeply tragic. I spoke at length with the father Rob for a piece I ultimately never wrote. (There was a media ban in Canada and the Mounties were enforcing it with personal visits to people’s houses and heavy-handed threats.)
His love for his daughter and her love for him in return was very evident. He knows it’s complicated to speak out publicly about it but what else can he do? The whole thing is so sad. Another interesting fact in that case is that the government took up advocacy for the girl against BOTH of her parents. Initially both parents didn’t want the girl to get permanent drug treatment, and the government assigned her a lawyer and sued them BOTH on her behalf.
Another thing, about the school declaring the girl trans and taking it upon themselves to assign her a new name. Firstly, I tried to run that down and couldn’t get it confirmed, but it’s what the father believes happened and it’s at least well within plausibility. But it’s such an eerie echo of the treatment of Canada’s indigenous people. Indigenous names getting replaced with traditionally Christian names was not uncommon. But also, my Inuk friend is a musician and she sang a song about how the government registered her mother’s name as a simple serial number — “E5-770” — rather than record her own Inuktitut name.
Names! Identities! Don’t fuck with them, governments.
Is he the one who was sentenced to jail time?
Rob Hoogland, yes. In a civil court proceeding they put him in a cage like Hannibal Lecter. And after he was criminally convicted (which itself is completely unprecedented), he was placed in high-security prison. The whole thing is just complete madness.
He’s a gentle, sweet suburban postman! He loves his daughter, doesn’t care that she identifies as “trans”, just wants girls like her to not get this irreversible medical stuff done to them unnecessarily. Not a drop of homophobia or transphobia or hate in him.
Let’s place bets on who’s eventually gonna make the movie. Oliver Stone maybe? Errol Morris?
Oh god. It’s just horrific.