Artist’s Statement

Four Seasons On Poorman‘s Pond

The pond behind my house in Kawacatoose has no name that I can find. It was once a lake, and likely this entire area was under water thirty thousands years ago. We have lived here since then. Long before the Egyptian pyramids were built.

We are called posâkanacîwiyiniwak, the Touchwood Hills People. The entire area for hundreds of square miles is where we used to live. We are now left with a scrap of our former demesne. The word, “posâkanacîwiyininiwak” refers to our knowledge of the uses of “posâkana,” known as “chaga,” a mushroom that grows on birch tress, and has well-known medicinal qualities. We would trade with it.

Thoreau’s “Walden Pond” was inspirational in my youth. Arriving in Kawacatoose last September to find the pond here behind my house initiated a series of small oil studies using large brushes. I continued making paintings of the pond since then, and have completed one circuit of the seasons, twelve months of studies of the pond, which I named “Poorman’s Pond” for the purpose of titles for this body of work.

First the Colonizers waged war on the buffalo, then the Settlers waged war on the trees and anything else that moved or grew that was not wheat. And Saskatchewan came to be a monoculture, a desert. But not Kawacatoose, not Poorman’s Indian Reserve Number Eighty Eight.

Land Stewardship is never an accident. Imagine the horror of watching the wanton destruction of the buffalo by creatures like the Colonizers were. No respect for Mother Earth. Exploitative and greedy beyond imagination. Willing to murder for money. They dispossess us of our home, mock any revanchism as the rude impulse of dull and ignorant beasts, and imprison us on tiny Indian Reserves when we fight.

There is little or nothing to buy on Kawacatoose, gas or potato chips. I have to shop in Raymore for my cat food and my staples. I am always, always met with open contempt and hatred, just like Edmonton or Vancouver, yet no one in Raymore knows any other section except Section 87 of the Indian Act. It is impossible to hold an intelligent conversation with any of them. They have already decided I have the I.Q. of a German Shepherd. I never leave Raymore with any money, every penny I take there with me gets spent there.

If the populations of Kawacatoose and George Gordon and Day Star and Muskowekwan didn't spend every penny in Raymore, well, Raymore would cease to exist.