Who Discovered the Americas

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright and librettist and author of the
children’s books Magic and What’s in a Name?

“Rather than celebrating the arrival of Columbus, maybe all people
should be celebrating 500 years of survival of indigenous people.”
These are the words of Jane Ash Poitras, born a Cree in Alberta, who
sees artists as shamans, and art as a tool of teaching and of healing.
In her 1992 show in the Thunder Bay Art Gallery, which later traveled
across the country, she placed an oak desk in the middle of her
mixed-media pieces.

This catalogue includes illustrations of the work, a short essay by the
artist in which she discusses the importance of ritual in her life and
art, and an explanatory essay by Janet Clark, the curator of the show. A
catalogue most usefully serves as a reminder of an exhibition that one
has visited, but the illustrations in this book may help the reader who
has not seen the work to grasp something of the experience of the actual
show.

The works themselves are presented in multiple panels or installations
in a series. “Living in the Storm Too Long, 1992,” for example,
consists of four floor-to-ceiling wall pieces side by side. These wall
pieces are complex, presented in collage and painting techniques with
resonant images such as buffalo or Spanish galleons, photographs of
Native people in groups or alone, symbols from Native American life and
religion, written words that state a political point in lists or quotes
or observations or sometimes the juxtaposition of loaded terms such as
“exploration” and “exploitation.” Poitras is always political
and the catalogue suggests that her work is powerful. But she is
playful, too, and ingenious in her use of her art.