zhigwe/aim week 7
Week 7 –Nadia Myre, Indian Act (2000-2002) (detail)
Week 7 –Nadia Myre, Indian Act (2000-2002) (detail)
Nadia Myre is a Montreal-based artist of mixed Algonquin and French Canadian heritage. Her art practice is multi-disciplinary and incorporates recurring themes of identity, language, longing and loss. Myre’s practice has also extended to participant involvement.
Myre has stated that Indian Act (2000-2002) was inspired by her own family story of reclaiming Native Status. The Indian Act is a federal Canadian government document that dates from 1876, it has been revised a number of times (1904, 1921, 195??, 1985) and it is still in effect today.
Myre’s art piece uses beads to cover or bead over all fifty-six pages of the 1985 version. Red beads were used to signify the negative space of the page, and white beads were used to indicate the text or words. This beaded work, with each page in varying states of completion, seeks to create a visual representation of the Indian Act that at the same time both “takes back” the text (through the art of beadwork) and criticizes it as an artifact of a patriarchal colonialism. We must understand that the Indian Act is a piece of legislation that is still in effect in 2017, it is a government document that defines who is and who is not an Aboriginal person in Canada, and it continues to regulate and have an impact on people’s lives.
To complete the multi-page work, Nadia Myre with the help of curator Rhonda Meier, over 250 friends, colleagues and helpers were enlisted to aid in the project to bead over the Indian Act. They organized workshops and presentations at Concordia University, and hosted weekly beading bees at Oboro Gallery, where it was presented as part of the exhibition, Cont[r]act, in 2002.
Myre’s beautiful and laborious rendition of the infamous legal document known as the Indian Act – the federal legislation dealing with Indian status and establishing the reserve system – uses beads to represent the patterns of words and paragraphs. The work becomes symbolic of the overlay of meaning between different systems and directs us to notice both the associative beauty and the obvious gaps in the translation. The direct transference of words into beads is at once a close reading, a complication, and a poetic exploration bridging image and text.
For more information about Nadia Myre and her art practice, see also:
For more information about the Indian Act of 1876 see:
- https://www.aadnc-aandc.gc.ca/DAM/DAM-INTER-HQ/STAGING/texte-text/1876c18_1100100010253_eng.pdf
- https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/indian-act/
