Ogimaa Mikana: Reclaiming/Renaming

Untitled (All Walls Crumble)

The Anishinaabeg endure. We do so through settler colonial time, and across space.  We do so in contention. Untitled (All Walls Crumble) considers this movement. To be Indigenous in the city is so often a struggle for recognition, to be seen, and to resist the erasure that is common in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, etc. Yet with recognition also comes appropriation and co-optation. In this unease, we consider the benefits of erasure, or at least, covert movement.

Inspired by stories of our relatives and ancestors counting coup, and Basil Johnson’s description of warfare more generally, the Ogimaa Mikana Project considers the tension between visibility and invisibility to challenge settler colonial logic. Against a crumbling wall holding up Ottawa’s major highway - scheduled for demolition and replacement - we draw attention to the ways the settler state recycles itself, and by extension, affirms its legitimacy. We see it and resist in provocative ways that mirror a there/not there presence.

Against this crumbling wall, we reclaim space for an anti-recognition: to speak to each other, as Anishinaabeg, as communities pushed out by gentrification, as the colonized, and offer a refrain and a sign of defiance: “Wakayakoniganag da pangishin. Nin d'akiminan kagige oga ahindanize.”

Untitled (All Walls Crumble) is exhibited as part of Language of Puncture, an exhibition curated by visual artist Joi T. Arcand at Gallery 101. Photo courtesy of Gallery 101 and Joi T. Arcand

For the past 3-4 years the Ogimaa Mikana Project has been replacing official street signs and historical plaques in the city of Toronto with Anishinaabe versions. We are slowly reclaiming our territories from an alien landscape committed to erasing us while contributing to the growing Indigenous cultural, political and linguistic revitalization efforts across Turtle Island. In the space between raising up our nations and languages and reminding non-Indigenous people that they are on Indian land, we hope to create dialogue.

Over the course of 2016 the Ogimaa Mikana Project will be installing billboards across Anishinaabeg territory. This campaign will draw on our language, philosophy and diplomacy to challenge, reflect on, and operationalize the concepts of reconciliation and decolonization.

Our first installation is in the rapidly gentrifying Parkdale neighbourhood of Toronto. Parkdale was home to a relatively large Indigenous community in the 1970s and 80s (and a much larger one pre-1830) but increasingly less so.

The billboard here reflects our original obligations to each other, which we feel are captured in the Dish with One Spoon wampum belt. The Dish with One Spoon is a common diplomatic metaphor for Great Lakes Indigenous nations. It is considered among the early treaties between the Anishinaabeg and Haudenosaunee and also among the first that French and English settlers were welcomed into.

All Canadians today should see themselves as living in the Dish.

The treaty imagines that we, as diverse peoples and nations, can live together peacefully in the same territory if we respect rights to mutual autonomy. But more, that we have obligations of mutual care, to each other and to the land we share. If we are serious about moving forward together in a good way, we must collectively re-learn these obligations. We must start at the beginning.

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Anishinaabemowin translation for this installation is in Gchi'mnissing dialect, with help from Myrtle Jamieson.

This project has been made possible through the generous support of the Ontario Arts Council Aboriginal Arts Projects grants.