Pictures Woke The People Up (with Wendy Ewald) (2007-2012)
In 1969, the Innu people became the last Indigenous group in Canada to gain suffrage. The historically nomadic group that had pursued the caribou herds through the Quebec-Labrador peninsula for thousands of years had recently been sedentarised, forced to abandon their nomadic ways and settle on reserves, crown lands set aside for Indigenous people primarily in remote rural areas of Canada.
In the decades that followed sedentarisation, the change from nomadic life to life in the community took a toll on the Innu. Removed from traditional activities of hunting and fishing, they began to eat cheap processed foods, which took the place of caribou, porcupine, and salmon. Diabetes and blood pressure skyrocketed throughout Innu communities, as did alcoholism and depression especially among young people.
In 2007, at the request of people involved with the Innu community, Wendy and I returned to Labrador. We displayed the photographs made by the young Innu in 1969 (Wendy's students then) in the Innu Nation hall. These images sparked conversations with people about the changes since 1969. The suggestion was raised that, in a time of wrenching change, pictures might point a way forward and raise questions of importance: Where are we from? What happened? How do we adapt our ways of seeing and learn to see farther? Where do we go from here?
We embarked on a series of projects in the following five years that investigated these questions through repatriation of images, local exhibitions and screenings, youth photography workshops, the creation of a digital archive of Innu pictures and community-curated installations on public buildings on the native reserve Sheshatshiu and in the nearby White town Goose Bay.
As we circulated the 1969 pictures in people’s homes throughout the community, while the exhibition was hanging in the Innu nation hall, people asked us, “Do you have other old pictures?” While non-Indigenous explorers and anthropologists such as William Brooks Cabot, Rupert H. Baxter, Robert Flaherty, and Donald Baxter McMillan had photographed the Innu for over a century from the point of view of outsiders, their photographs are typically housed far away, in universities and museums that Innu people have no chance to see. We began discussing the idea of building an archive of Innu photographs with community members. We located as many photographs and films as possible. Noticing that many of the people we met there connected across geography through social media, we began loading the images onto the Innu Online Picture Archive, a Facebook group we created for people to share and communicate about photographs of Innu people.
The resulting conversations provided a more intimate context for viewing these pictures than do the anthropological captions provided by the photographers. What could otherwise be archeological artifacts are instead excerpted from a family album.
This project includes:
We Are Talking About Life And Culture (2009)
Innu Online Picture Archive (2010)
Unfinished (2012)
Addison Gallery of American Art (2012)