Indigenous Visual Culture

What happens when a Native or indigenous person turns a video camera on his or her own culture? Are the resulting images different from what a Westernized filmmaker would create, and, if so, in what ways? How does the use of a non-Native art-making medium, specifically video or film, affect the aesthetics of the Native culture? These are some of the questions that underlie this rich study of Native American aesthetics, art, media, and identity. Steven Leuthold opens with a theoretically informed discussion of the core concepts of aesthetics and indigenous culture and then turns to detailed examination of the work of American Indian documentary filmmakers, including George Burdeau and Victor Masayesva, Jr. He shows how Native filmmaking incorporates traditional concepts such as the connection to place, to the sacred, and to the cycles of nature. While these concepts now find expression through Westernized media, they also maintain continuity with earlier aesthetic productions. In this way, Native filmmaking serves to create and preserve a sense of identity for indigenous people.

Carmen L. Robertson charts both the colonial attitudes and the stereotypes directed at Morrisseau and otherIndigenous artists in Canada's national press. Robertson also examines Morrisseau's own shaping of his image.

Fountain, a performance work and video installation dealing with elemental essences-fire + water = blood-will be presented by Rebecca Belmore as Canada's official representative at the 2005 Venice Biennale. Belmore, a Vancouver-based Anishinabekwe artist, creates works which explore the Aboriginal attachment to the land, both now, in the industrialized landscape of North America, and in the past, a time of myth. "Location and memory are key elements in my approach to making art," she says. "I am aware of the elusive nature of memory. Creating in the presence of the absent makes me a witness." In both color and black-and-white.

"The Rebel Yells: Dress and Political Re-dress in Contemporary Indigenous Art traces the influence of Shelley Niro's The Rebel (1987) through successive generations of artists. In homage, works by eleven artists from across Canada are assembled, opening discussion around dress, representation, self-definition, and their accompanying politics in new and revitalized ways."--Publisher's website.

Contemporary Indigenous artists explore ancient treaties to reveal what they say about relationships to lands, region and territory, while considering distinct Indigenous perspectives on the history of treaties in this land now called Canada. Includes an essay by Lisa (Rose) Myers.

The Inuit Art Quarterly is the sole magazine devoted to Inuit and circumpolar arts, connecting Inuit Nunangat and readers around the world.