My name is Nancy King and I’m a Potawatomi and Chippewa artist from Rama First Nation and Moose Deer Point First Nation. My spirit name is Ogimaakwebnes, which means Chief Lady Bird.
I work with a collective of four other young indigenous artists. We painted a big mural about Truth and Reconciliation at the Pan Am Games Aboriginal Pavilion, as part of a large art show, and we brought in elders and teachers to do talking circles. We take traditional native stories, motifs and teachings – things we know about our own identities – and apply them to art using contemporary materials like spray paint. Our work is a lot about reconciling our traditional world with our urban world.
I started drawing and painting when I was two years old. The approach I took as a teenager was working through emotional things and painting things that meant a lot to me, that I was sad about or that made me happy like my favourite bands.
My dad’s a medicine man, so I grew up with teachings, ceremony and being in tune with the spiritual side of my life. I was used to seeing traditional native art, but I had never thought about it as something I could do. It was just part of my life. I was working in communications as a summer student, and we had to research various topics and do presentations to chief and council. One of my presentations was about native art, and they directed me to the Indian Group of Seven, as they were called.
I went to OCAD University, where I majored in drawing and painting and minored in indigenous visual culture. There, we touched on historical issues and a lot of issues that people assume are history but are still going on today: the impacts of colonialism, the residential school system, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. A lot of the classes bridged the gap between things that have happened to our people, how they affected us and how they subsequently became part of our art.
My art practice was about bringing experience from my major into my minor and vice versa. The indigenous visual culture program helped me delve deeper into the issues I had been learning about on my own and gave me the tools to deal with them and further educate my peers and the youth I work with as well.
The program is getting bigger and the office just expanded, so they have a bigger space for resources and for students to hang out. It was a safe space for me and it became like a family. We had weekly buffalo stews, and if I had a break I’d talk to the people who work there and the other students hanging out. We had a sense of community that I feel is sometimes lost moving from the reserve to the city.
The misconceptions around native art are the worst part of what I do. One professor told me the colours I use in my work aren’t native enough. What is a native colour? I’m supposed to paint only with the colours of the medicine wheel to appease you and show you that it’s native art? I’m trying to break out of what people think native art should be and expand that.
The critique process in school teaches you how to talk about your work in an appropriate, articulate way, and the opportunity to have a critique doesn’t come anywhere else but in school. That time is crucial to the development of our work.
The work that I really enjoy doing is a mix of everything: it’s digitally manipulated, painted and then traditional beadwork is added overtop. That opens up a place for me to talk about things like truth and reconciliation, this country’s colonial history and my own experiences.
I’ll take pictures, especially when I go home because that’s where I feel most connected to the land, and then manipulate the images and bring them into a contemporary context.
The individual story is really important to the collective story of who we are as a people. A lot of people stereotype us. By telling our individual stories, we’re adding to the diversity of who we are. There are so many different stories, so many different nations, beliefs, world views and creation stories that the individual is really important.
I’m able to teach through just telling my story.
