“I HAVE A THEORY THAT IT’S EASIER FOR INDIGENOUS PEOPLE to the north of the Canada–US border to imagine a world organized beyond the settler state,” writes the professor Kim TallBear (Dakota) in a recent post on her Substack, Unsettle, because the vast territory and small population to the border’s north make anti-Indigenous racism hyper-visible. In History is Painted by the Victors, a sumptuous new exhibition catalogue, Toronto-based art star Kent Monkman (Fisher River Cree) offers ample evidence in support of TallBear’s theory. The hyper-visible racism is on grotesque display in The Scream (2017), Monkman’s depiction of Royal Canadian Mounted Police abducting Indigenous children to place them in residential schools designed to strip them of their identities. “This is the one I cannot talk about,” Monkman has written. “The pain is too deep.” Speechless, he paints the soundless scream of forced separations. {read}
