“Indians Exist": Indigenous Female Artists, Activist Voices, and Political Potential at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights

Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Carly Ciufo  

In the 1970s, musician, activist, and educator Buffy Sainte-Marie claimed that, “Indians exist. We are not all dead and stuffed in museums like the dinosaurs.” Challenging public perceptions of Indigenous experience in North America, this stance still disrupts the colonized realities foundational to many public understandings of Canadian history. But what happens when the works of female Indigenous artists like Sainte-Marie are put on display at a national museum? As seen in the exhibition of pieces from multidisciplinary Indigenous female artists Sainte-Marie, Jamie Black, and Rebecca Belmore at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) in Winnipeg, Canada, museums displaying Indigenous histories through an “Indians exist” museological ethic can make activist gains on local, national, and global stages. Working with, amongst, and separate from the CMHR, the artwork and activism of these three artists reveal how contemporary art created in and displayed for museum audiences can have notable political impacts beyond gallery walls. Such work is increasingly important in a Canada that is still navigating the conflicting observances of its sesquicentennial, intergenerational residential school survival related to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s findings, and the grim realities of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls countrywide.