Sipikiskisiw (Remembers Far Back)

Archival photo and map on paper, embroidery thread, rick rack, vintage beads, bugle beads, glass seedbeads, caribou tufting, porcupine quills. Photos by Jake Kimble. Installation Photos by Grace Law.

Sipikiskisiw (Remembers Far Back) features images of an Indian Affairs Papaschase reserve survey map from 1899 and a photograph taken before 1907 of Indigenous men and tipis on the grounds of Fort Edmonton documenting Indigenous relation to the Land in Amiskwaciwâskahikan. The image is ripped to show the colonial violence that Indigenous people have experienced, including residential school, intergenerational trauma, loss of language, and displacement from our territories. The images are ripped and stitched together using embroidery thread, caribou tufting, porcupine quills, and beadwork.The rips remain visible as the loss, grief, longing, and memory cannot be fully mended and the resiliency required to survive colonialism is also messy and fragile.  These losses can never be fully healed but wecan process our histories and realities through art, culture and stories.

Papaschase First Nation signed an adhesion to Treaty 6 in 1877. Under treaty they received reserve land in what is now southeast Edmonton. By 1886, they were removed from the land for settler expansion and it was illegally surrendered. Members were forced to take Metis scrip-signing away their treaty rights for a cash payment- or move to nearby reserves.  My great great kokum, Rosalie/LaRose Gladu, was a member of Papaschase who took Métis scrip and she later settled in the Slave Lake area in Treaty 8. Chief Papaschase aka John Gladieu-Quinn, and his family were from the Slave Lake area and moved to the Edmonton area in the late 1850's. The mural is flanked by Kinuso and Strawberry Creek, two works that feature images from the Slave Lake area of northern Alberta, a reminder of the connection and kinship between Treaty 6 and 8. My family’s forced displacement and connection to these lands is not just a scrip number in the archives.

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