![]() Her performance expressed the collective anger of the many Indigenous people throughout Canada who condemned the organisers and sponsor of ‘The Spirit Sings’. In minus 18 degrees Celsius weather, she sat immobile on the frozen ground in a museum case outside the Thunder Bay Art Gallery in Ontario. On 12 January 1988, three days before ‘The Spirit Sings’ opened to the public, Rebecca Belmore burst into the national arts consciousness with her performance piece Artifact #671B. Indigenous artists, communities and political organisations across the nation strongly supported Lubicon’s perspective and boycott. ![]() In their case, that reality was the destruction wrought on their culture and livelihood by Shell Canada, the corporate sponsor of the exhibition, as well as the complicity of major cultural institutions in Shell’s corporate agenda, through organising or lending work to the show. From the perspective of the Lubicon Cree, the exhibition glorified numerous romantic stereotypes associated with historical Aboriginal cultural objects while denying complex contemporary realities. The fact that ‘The Spirit Springs’ came to my attention as early as 1986 can be attributed to a widely publicised campaign by the Lubicon Cree Nation – a small Aboriginal community living sovereignly in northern Alberta – to boycott the exhibition, which brought issues of museum representation and First Nations cultural heritage to the forefront of the national debate. Artistic and community activism, exhibitions, conferences and a task force forever transformed relationships between museums and Indigenous peoples in Canada this essay is an attempt to weave together a history of the turbulent dynamic of this time. ‘The Spirit Sings’ was part of a sequence of exhibitions and events during the late 1980s and early 90s that profoundly impacted the content of, and contexts for, exhibitions of Indigenous art. My anger was exacerbated by the fact that the exhibition would include only historical objects, without regard to contemporary realities – typical of the exclusionary practices of museums that had amassed significant collections of Indigenous historical objects while denying intellectual and physical access to the objects by the very communities from which they were taken. 2 I was angry and frustrated to learn that the curatorial committee included no Indigenous curators. ![]() 1 Organised by the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Alberta to coincide with the 1988 Olympics held in that location, ‘The Spirit Sings’ was to include over 650 historical objects borrowed from national and international ethnographic collections. In 1986, while working in a university museum in the US state of Maine, I began to hear media reports regarding the planning of an exhibition titled ‘The Spirit Sings: Artistic Traditions of Canada’s First Peoples’. ![]() Rebecca Belmore, Artifact #671B, 1988, performance, Thunder Bay, Ontario. ![]()
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