“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past,” George Orwell wrote in 1984. A powerful example of that is happening right now as Cultural Marxists are decolonializing the art collection at the University of Manitoba.
Karen Pauls explored the white purge in a recent CBC article. Here, C.W. Brooks-Ip, registrar and preparator of the University of Manitoba Art Collection, said it wasn’t only problematic art that was the problem, it was the school itself.
“The university is ultimately a colonial institution that is designed to serve white people … and that needs to change,” said Brooks-Ip.
“We have had artwork that is by a white settler that depicts Indigenous folks in not really an accurate way, in sort of the mythologized way, that in some ways glorifies the white settlers — or at least reinforces their white supremacy.”
By all appearances, Brooks-Ip is white–and wrong about his university. Between the special access many Indigenous people have to post-secondary tuition funding and the numerous international students worldwide who attend, it’s hard to see how any Canadian university is colonial.
Brooks-Ip commented on one painting removed from the university president’s office made by Lionel Stephenson, who lived in Winnipeg between 1885 and 1892. Here, an indigenous person sits outside their teepee in the foreground, looking at a canoeist in the river and Upper Fort Garry on the opposite shore.
To Brooks-Ip, this clearly showed “the threat of direct colonization.”
“It’s kind of depicting a ”We’re over here and they’re over there’ type situation,” Thomas said. “It’s not showing community and togetherness. It’s showing the separation between the river and the settlement.”
One wonders what depiction would be acceptable to 21st Century leftist eyes. If the people were depicted as living harmoniously together, would it be criticized for depicting assimilation or for whitewashing history? Critical theory can only do one thing: criticize, and it does that no matter what.
To decolonialize the university’s art, Brooks-Ip created a two-year pilot project with $30,000 support from the Office of the Vice-President (Indigenous). The Indigenous Student Led Indigenous Art Purchase Program allows UManitoba students to pick out art pieces to be bought, put on display in a school gallery, and later spread across the campus.
Third-year architecture student Jory Thomas, a Red River Metis and co-coordinator of the project committee, seems not only ready to disown the white side of her heritage but, nevertheless, she wants to accurately depict Indigenous history.
One piece of university art now hidden in a vault was a sculpture of a buffalo hunt by Thomas Holland. The American depicted an Indigenous hunter on horseback spearing a buffalo.
“While the depiction may be historically accurate, it wasn’t created from an Indigenous perspective of cultural understanding, respect and gratitude for the animal’s sacrifice, said Thomas, whose clan animal is the buffalo,” the article reads.
“Images like this perpetuate harmful stereotypes of angry, violent Indigenous people, fostering a hostile environment on campus, she said.”
So what would Thomas suggest?
“Instead of this violent attacking of the bison, there might be a better option of a sculpture, where they’re preparing the bison that they’ve hunted, because we historically used all the parts of the bison,” she said.
If depictions of preparing a dead buffalo are okay, but the process of hunting them is not, this only means that art and history are both being white-washed.
Manitoba’s 1800s history will be replaced by newer works, such as a 2024 soapstone carving by Frederick Lyle Spence, also known as Thunder Bear, an Ojibway from Peguis First Nation in Manitoba.
“Let your dreams fly, for they will bring you home,” Spence called his work. Yet, as another piece of irony in this charade, he wants to hold onto the art and not let it fly.
“If I’m not ready to let it go, one of the things I’ve been told is that it’s meant to stay and absorb your love and your positive energy,” Spence said.
“And when it’s ready, it’ll go to its new home and then it’ll sit and give off that energy to whoever is around it.”
Riva Symko, head of collections and exhibitions at Winnipeg Art Gallery-Qaumajuq supports the efforts. The person in charge of the world’s largest public collection of contemporary Inuit art said some colonial art should be hidden to keep the Indigenous people from trauma.
“We do need to put things away to make space for other voices to be heard and seen. Sometimes we need to put things away because they’re traumatic, because they are harmful … especially to our Indigenous visitors and audiences,” she said.
“The future will tell whether we burn them down, or whether we store them away and lock them in the vault, or whether we bring them out and use them for discussion.”
So here we are. Taxpayer-funded institutions are destroying one group’s culture and history to assert a contemporary version of their own. Art collectors are speculating about destroying all art they disagree with. People at institutions of higher learning can’t perceive their shortcomings and believe they are doing the right thing.
One question remains: what will Canada become if its culture and history are destroyed?
Lee Harding is Research Fellow for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
