London, ON. 1968 to Present
By the time Buckminster Fuller appeared in London he was already a household name throughout Canada. Fuller’s iconic dome was the centrepiece of Montreal’s Expo 67 which would go on to be considered the most successful World’s fair of the twentieth century.
But Fuller wasn’t the only one gaining attention, the art scene in London was also having a moment in the late 1960’s. Writing in Art in America in 1969, critic Barry Lord called London, Ontario, “one of Canada’s four major art scenes,” saying the city was “younger than Montreal, livelier than Toronto, vying with Vancouver in variety and sheer quantity of output… in many ways the most important of the four.”
This episode explores how Regionalism and nationalism continue to hold sway in London, Ontario. Featuring curator and art historian Judith Rodger, artist Jason Mclean, artist Jessica Karuhanga, From Remote Stars curators Kirsty Robertson and Sarah E.K. Smith, artist Amanda Myers, and Museum London curator Cassandra Getty.
Christina Battle
So, the reason we’re doing this podcast and the accompanying exhibition at Museum London is all because of this tape recording.
Recording fades back in
Christina Battle
It’s not a great recording…
Recording fades out
Kirsty Robertson
It’s really hard to hear. And the second thing is that they’re eating dinner at the same time that Fuller was giving the talk. So it’s all you know, people are clinking their glasses and they keep dropping their cutlery all over the place. And on top of that, there’s either a really bad cold is going around or I think maybe it’s because they a lot of them are smokers, just kind of this chorus of constant coughing that interrupts the sound. And then you also hear Greg Curnoe whispering every once in a while.
Christina Battle
The recording was made using an early version of a cassette recorder. You may remember them if you’re from a certain generation, roughly the size of a shoe box, with big buttons along the top edge, a pop up tape cartridge just below the buttons and a tight pattern of holes covering the speaker. Curnoe likely entered the Hunt Club, where the talk was being held that night, carrying this new machine by its handle like a lunch box. Pulled up a chair, set it down, and hit record.
Kirsty Robertson
So the recording has a very particular sonic quality to it. It’s not a great recording of Buckminster Fuller, but it’s kind of a fantastic capturing of this moment in London at this restaurant, eating their dinner, listening to something that I think a lot of them found really exciting.
Christina Battle
And to be honest the recording, as rough as it is, also feels, kind of, exciting to hear. Not necessarily for the content of the talk, most of which is pretty indecipherable, but more for the snapshot of this moment in time. At points it almost feels like you are in the room, like, there is this moment after Fuller has given his talk and answered questions from the audience when he seems to come over to Curnoe’s table and say “well, should we go get a drink”?
Almost immediately after he says that the tape clicks off and when it comes back to life someone is moving a chair at a bar asking if they can sit down and join the group.
Chair moving sounds and tape voice plays under
Sarah Smith
Part of the interesting thing about the tape is listening to it is like this immersive experience of being at this dinner. You hear the clatter of cutlery. You hear kind of the buzz in the room. So I think in terms of a I guess an audio artefact, it’s quite fascinating, but also I think we’re so used to things being easily digestible, probably because of social media, I’m used to short clips that take me to the pithy point.
Intro Music
Christina Battle
Welcome to From Remote Stars, my name is Christina Battle. In this three part miniseries we’ll be thinking about this recently rediscovered recording that Greg Curnoe made that evening at The Hunt Club. What can it tell us about Fuller, his ideas, and how they’ve evolved or been adapted over time.
Episode one London, Ontario. 1968 to Present.
Intro Music fades out
Expo Theme song
Christina Battle
By the time Fuller appeared in London he was already a household name throughout Canada. Fuller’s iconic dome was the centerpiece of Montreal’s Expo 67 which would go on to be considered the most successful World’s fair of the 20th Century. This is the theme song for the Expo you’re hearing… it maybe sounded better at the time. Coming off of the success of Expo Fuller had also been commissioned to put forth a proposal for a huge development along Toronto’s waterfront that would see a 20 story high crystal pyramid at the foot of University ave. You’d be transported to and from the giant pyramid via monorail. He loved monorails. The project was eventually scrapped, but it gives a sense of his visionary reach, at the time he landed in London.
Expo Music recedes
Christina Battle
But Fuller wasn’t the only one gaining attention, the art scene in London was also having a moment in the late 60’s. Writing in Art in America magazine in 1969, critique Barry Lord called London, Ontario, “one of Canada’s four major art scenes,” saying the city was quote “younger than Montreal, livelier than Toronto, vying with Vancouver in variety and sheer quantity of output… in many ways the most important of the four.”
This meeting of moments begins to form the background of the tape recording. But before we get too far into the history we should take a second to appreciate the fact that there is a recording at all.
Kirsty Robertson
I moved to London in 2007, and one of the very first things I heard about was that Buckminster Fuller had made a visit to London in the 1960s. And it was this thing that I kind of kept hearing for many years.
Christina Battle
This is Kirsty Robertson an Associate Professor and Director of Museum and Curatorial Studies at The University of Western Ontario. When she first heard about the Fuller visit she did what anyone would do – she googled it
Kirsty Robertson
…and I did find one little mention of it, but not much more than that. And I basically thought it had been lost to time, like there was no way to sort of find any information about this at all.
Christina Battle
Our podcast team can confirm the lack of digital material about Fuller’s visit. It’s not even in Fuller’s official archive, the fantastically titled, Dymaxion Chronofile – it’s a lot to explain up front, but I promise we get into it in episode three. All you need to know for now is that the Dymaxion Chronofile is perfectly named and that it’s incredibly extensive. When searching through the online archive there are records of an interview he gave in Toronto in 1967 and talks in Michigan, Illinois and Rhode Island for most of 1968. But there’s no mention of London, Ontario – anywhere.
And then a few years ago Kirsty found herself in the Art Gallery of Ontario Archives
Kirsty Robertson
I was looking in the Greg Curnoe archives and the Curnoe archive happens to have this really elaborate index system where every single thing in the archive is recorded in there. And there was just this note that said Buckminster Fuller recording London, Ontario, Date Unknown. And I was like, that’s got to be it.
Christina Battle
From there Kirsty and her curatorial collaborator Sarah Smith were off to the races piecing together the history from local records.
Kirsty Robertson
So after I found the recording and Sarah and I listened to the recording, we found the dates that Buckminster Fuller had been in London. And once we had the date, we were able to find a lot more information. So then we were able to find coverage in the London Free Press, which was the local paper, and there was coverage and some like student media. And then there was also a couple of things like the yearbook for that year, had some photos and a little bit of information.
Christina Battle
This is how the two figured out Curnoe’s choice of outfit for that evening, a canary yellow suit and purple shirt.
Kirsty Robertson
I think it was one of the articles in the London Free Press where the reporter reported on Greg Curnoe and what he was wearing because it was, I guess, like very outlandish in terms of where they had met. So the speech Fuller gave a number of talks while he was in London. But the talk that Curnoe recorded was at the London Hunt Club, which was a very kind of posh and I would say like kind of British colonial kind of a restaurant in London.
So the talk was there and the fact that Curnoe showed up in this suit, I don’t know what he wanted to do with that. But he was a bit of a he was a bit of a character. And so having him in the suit might have been a comment on the Hunt Club and on Curnoe’s personality as well.
Christina Battle
You get a sense from watching old footage of Curnoe that he enjoyed being provocative
This is from a CBC interview with Curnoe in his studio in 1975. The reporter is on the edge of frame sitting upright in a rocking chair, legs crossed, with a notepad on their lap. Curnoe, by contrast, is leaned way back in a wooden chair. His look is very 70’s. Handlebar mustache, a wavy mop of sandy brown hair, adidas sneakers and an old cycling t-shirt.
The interview reveals his brash confidence.
Greg Curnoe’s voice fades back up
Generally speaking we felt we were not being taken seriously and our work was not being purchased. And it came out of that and consequently all the artists got together on that issue. We all did. We were used to getting together on issues.
Christina Battle
In this case he’s retelling the story of the founding of CAR Canadian Artist Representation, which later became CARFAC. The year of this interview, in 1975, Canada became the first country to pay exhibition fees to artists, after successful lobbying by the organisation. And the idea all started in London, Ontario the year Fuller visited in 1968. The leader of this artists union was Curnoe’s friend and fellow artist who was with him that evening, Jack Chambers.
Judith Rodger
So I’m just looking I wanted to say about I thought about Jack Chambers, who was also at that dinner at the hunt club,
Christina Battle
This is Judith Rodger.
Judith Rodger
So, my name is Judith Rodger. I’ve lived in London, Ontario since nineteen sixty-seven. I have an interest that I have developed over the years in art, and I’m now an art historian and I have written a book published through the Art Canada Institute on Greg Curnoe.
Christina Battle
Judith also was responsible for cataloguing the archives of both Curnoe and Chambers at the AGO.
The formation of CARFAC was the result of a letter from the National Gallery of Canada to Chambers, asking him to give permission to use slides from his work in a series of kits that they were producing in the Education Department to distribute around the country.
Judith Rodger
And Chambers said he wanted to be paid. And that was that created a bit of a sensation and the upshot of that was that this national organization, which is still going in Canada, was started in London, Ontario, with Jack Chambers, Tony Urquhart and Kim Ondaatje the wife at the time of Michael Ondaatje the author, who was also in London at the time.
So it was very rich period of time with lots going on. So the first artist run gallery was here in London, started by Greg in the 60s, called Region Gallery. And then there have been a number of them. And the one that’s still going that he was involved in is called Forest City Gallery. And the Canada Council used the example of those galleries to establish the criteria for funding alternate galleries across the country. So, you know, there’s, there was a lot going on here.
Christina Battle
Although the collectivist mentality that was fostered in London went on to benefit all artists working in Canada, key members of the London scene were devout loyalists to their hometown. The term Regionalism, in a Canadian art context, is widely associated with London, Ontario and a specific group of artists – Greg Curnoe, Tony Urquhart, Murray Favro, Ron Martin and Jack Chambers most notable among them – they all lived in London and to varying degrees, all made regionalist work that was informed by their life in London. According to Judith Rodger, the term Regionalism itself, began with Curnoe.
Judith Rodger
It began with this little magazine that he produced a hand, I think the edition of five and it was called region and it was circular and they cut it out. So he says this is off the top of my head, but something like region came first and then they wanted a place to exhibit their works because they’re their works were not conservative enough for the London Art Gallery. So they opened a gallery called Region on Richmond Street, sort of in the heart of downtown, and it was in the front of a framer’s shop. So they would have the exhibits and then the framers would help, you know, be there when it was open because the artists couldn’t commit to being there all the time. They did take turns and the same thing with the other alternate spaces that they found. They had to take turns being in those galleries when people came in
Christina Battle
Beginning in the early 60’s the movement grew quickly to include more artists, filmmakers, novelists, poets, activists, and musicians, who collectively became known as the Regionalists. In 1968 a touring exhibition titled the Heart of London, brought London Culture to the rest of Canada.
Judith Roger
So this exhibition in the heart of London in sixty eight went from Charlottetown to Victoria, I think, and many places in between, and put the London artists on the map as regionalists. And it wasn’t slated to be shown at the National Gallery, but they had such a response from across the country that they actually had a display at the National Gallery and extended the tour.
Christina Battle
For artist like Jason Mclean, who grew up in London, immersed in the history of the 1960’s and 70’s the stories of the city occupy a large space in his imagination. His work in From Remote Stars at Museum London is an illustration titled, The Maple Moose Forever. The illustration maps out this iconic moment in London’s art history and its looming presence in the city even today.
Jason Mclean
If you go to the National Gallery in Canada there’s quite a strong presence. If you go to the 60s, 70s area, you know, and then there’s other sideline stuff of people who had left London or residencies they would do in London and people like Claude Breeze would come here or like Tony Urquhart lived here, Michael Snow used to come down here all the time with Joyce Wieland. And there was an incredibly strong literary scene between, you know, Margaret Atwood, I believe her husband I heard recently, taught, or boyfriend, taught at Western. Like Michael Ondaatje, he lived here, Kim Ondaatje when they were together Bill Bissett living here and coming here. And there was also George Bowering used to be a regular here and bp nichol. And then that scene with Coach House and Brick Books. And like there was just there was seemed like there was a lot going on. I mean, not like there’s not a lot now, but it’s usually when you’re in the moment of something, you don’t realize what’s going on.
Christina Battle
Having done grad school In London I can tell you that this legacy still very much shapes the identity of the city. Kind of like this Fuller tape being rediscovered, history is made up of the stories that we choose to reexamine and if we don’t dig more stories back up and keep expanding our idea of history we can get trapped in this loop.
Jason Mclean
I mean, in the history of the city. Maybe it’s interesting once this style gets. Like a city, it’s known for certain thing, and then people always relate it to that, you know. Like when I lived in Vancouver later, it got to be the photo conceptual movement that got really known in Vancouver and then a lot of the kind of nonsensical kind of Canadian Fluxus, kind of Western Front stuff, kind of got dropped a little bit. And in certain instances to say something like with Robert Smithson would always get mentioned in Vancouver, but then they would never talk about Chris Burden doing his digging performance on Granville Island. And because it never really fit into the canon, you know, which was a significant piece he did. And maybe not as many people knew about that or but it never things. You know, the writers that write about the time period have a lot of responsibility of of what gets carried on with time. You know, I mean, if someone wrote a book about the history of London Art, they can craft it the way they want and then certain things will fit in and some things won’t unless you dig back, you won’t find out about those things. I don’t know, it’s just it’s interesting the way history gets remembered that way, you know?
Christina Battle
In some ways this idea of regionalism is the perfect recipe for this sort of sticky history. It’s a movement that doesn’t define itself by a style or a theoretical underpinning, it’s literally just about a place, and almost by default art that happens in that place gets tied back to it.
Jason Mclean
I mean, the interesting thing is I find for myself is coming back and keep rehashing. This regional scene, you know, it’s because I literally left. London the first time back in 1990, and it’s still the same stuff that’s generally being talked about, you know, like I wonder, you know, I’m almost 50, like I’m forty nine. Like, in another 20 years or 30 years is still going to be the regional scene, you know, or will there be something new they talk about? You know, like, I don’t know. It’s interesting that way. It’s a certain window of time.
Short Music break
Christina Battle
The thing that probably stands out the most in the Fuller recording is this tension between the regional identity, which really was and in some ways still is London’s identity, and the globally integrated future that was at the core of Fuller’s thinking. By 1968 Fuller was famously a global citizen. He was on the road nearly 11 months of the year.
Jamie Snyder
Well, to paint just a little picture with a couple of years of experience, I remember the first place just to give you a picture of the first stop. Got on the plane, we flew, I think it was to the University of Minnesota.
Christina Battle
This is Fuller’s grandson Jamie Snyder. Jamie had a chance to travel with Bucky for a several months in 1973 and this abbreviated version of their trip gives you a sense of what his life was like
Jamie Snyder
And so we started there, I think pretty soon. We went to the U.K.
And we’re there for a couple of days, and then we, and then I remember. We flew. To Greece, we were in Greece for a couple of days. Don’t really remember that that was a pretty short stop.
I think from Greece we flew to Tehran.
I think we flew from Tehran. To India.
in India, we first, I think, stopped in Bombay for a couple of days and again meeting with architects
then we went to then called New Delhi, now just called Delhi. And that was quite extraordinary because Buckie had a meeting, which I sat in on, with the prime minister, then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi,
Bucky had met Indira Gandhi and Nehru on a few occasions before that. So it was kind of like, well, any time you’re in India, why don’t you stop in and sort of check in.
Christina Battle
In the final leg of the tour they made stops in Thailand and Hong Kong before returning to the US and carrying on.
Jamie Snyder
Again, these were all like. Thirty-six hours, forty-eight hours, so I wasn’t quite like, oh, wow, we’re going traveling. It was more like fly in meetings, run around, do whatever and then be off on the next plane.
Christina Battle
And it should be said Fuller was 78 years old when Jamie was on tour with him and he kept up this frenetic touring schedule for nearly 20 years, all through 70’s and into his 80’s! And you can tell from the Curnoe recording, as well as many other archival recordings of Fuller meeting with people all over the world, that he LOVED this lifestyle.
Jamie Snyder
You know, we’d fly in somewhere, you know, we’d arrive and the hosts would greet us and they would be. You know, very nice and warm, we get to know them and then they’d sort of we’d go and we’d have dinner and they’d ask him, well, what are you going to talk about? And he’d say, Well, you know, I, I, I don’t know what I’m going to talk about. And they were kind of like ha ha Oh, OK. And. You know, then he give his talk and there’d be usually maybe some interviews, and then and then all of a sudden it’d be like bye! And and I do remember this this experience of you kind of got a sense of the sphere of the Earth, because every couple of days you’d get on a plane and you just sort of like, you know, you’d roll around to some other place and and then you’d meet a whole new group of people and the new setting.
Christina Battle
Nearly all of Fuller’s designs were motivated by a concept that he called “World Man” where the idea of a home or region where you lived would be irrelevant. World Man is a man of the future, one that would be like Fuller, constantly on the move. In many of his talks he points out that man was born with legs, not roots, and that his primary natural advantage as a species is mobility. He considered it preposterous to be asked where he lived.
Now, contrast this with Curnoe, who famously spent nearly his entire life five minutes away from the house where he was born. He never expressed any desire to ever leave London.
This contrast may seem familiar to anyone who has moved away from their hometown as well as those part of the diaspora. When you go back and try to talk to your friends who never left your conversation may feel a bit stilted. When you move to a different place your perspective and your environment expand. You need to learn the new roads, but there’s also maybe new politics, new people, new ways of doing mundane things. Almost by necessity, your priorities shift and the issues of your original hometown occupy a different portion of your consciousness.
Now, imagine that with Fuller. A person whose predominant view of the earth was 42000 feet in the air where, as his grandson observed, you could sense the earth’s curvature. In some ways it’s like he and Curnoe were living on different planets.
Sarah Smith
Yeah, I think what comes through in the audiotape is a certain frustration based on. A certain frustration with Fuller and his inability to engage with the nitty gritty or the pragmatic details of the city and what was going on, so it’s noted that artists were interested in connecting with Fuller about those changes that were going on. There was a proposed freeway. They were going to there was going to be destruction of a lot of artists, studios and artist spaces. And in fact, there was the freeway was not built downtown.
Sarah Smith
And Fuller kind of quip in the audio about how. Don’t worry about it. By the time it’s built, it’s going to be out of date and you can use the freeway as a roller rink. So very kind of patronizing, dismissive, not really taking these concerns seriously or kind of thinking about the day to day of the inhabitants.
Christina Battle
In a certain way, it’s hard to fully blame Fuller for this dismissive quip. It’s a lot to ask someone to just drop into your town for a few days and have fully formed opinions about local politics. And although this dismissal of the freeway probably didn’t land well with some in the audience, Fuller at his core was a salesman and was never short of flattery for any city he was invited to visit. In this clip he’s saying that he’s fascinated with the location and history of London, Ontario and that the city has (quote) “some kind of embryo” here that he could feel. And that nature was planning something very important for the location.
Fuller tape
I read the history of the Europeans coming into this part of the country and I am certainly fascinated with the location, the fact that you are between two very large metropolis of Detroit and Toronto yet you still have an integrity. You’re Protected by lakes north and south and there’s something going on here that’s very, very unique and nature has some kind of embryo here that I can’t help but feel it. You’d better be careful before you tamper with it. Nature might be planning something very, very important.
Christina Battle
These sort of prophetic sayings are speckled throughout nearly all of Fuller’s lectures. They usually have a mystical quality to them and like a horoscope they always seem to be fairly nebulous, But he also knew what to look for.
Fuller tape
I feel it is fascinating to see that river running along that peninsula between two lakes and not running into those lakes. The history of man who came in here as a settler I find very exciting. I don’t know how many of you have actually read your own history of the settlement, but it’s very exciting history. Everybody has clearly founded … it’s a rich country, full of some opportunity. The river, your Thames River is a very important affair and I Think it would be a great pity if we lost track of that river. Because… it’s out of sight so the community is no longer aware of how very important it is/has been historically.
Kirsty Robertson
The fact that he notices the river and sees something of interest in the river. To me is the most interesting thing in his talk, so the river in London is known as the Thames. It has like a colonial name, but it’s also its real name is Deshkan Ziibi, which means antler river. And the role of the river through time is the thing that kind of holds the place of London. So, I love that he recognised that because having lived here for 10 years, the river itself is quite a small river. But it’s this watery connector to the Great Lakes and to all of the things that have made this place. I think he’s right that it’s very unique, And I’m not sure it’s what the people attending his talks might have thought was most unique about London at this moment in 1968.
Sarah Smith
A unifying theme around some of the works in the show has to do with the river in London, the Thames River or Deshkan Ziibi. And so there is a lot of work because Fuller in his talk, he talks about the river. He thought River was fascinating and he’s very focused on some parts of the river, not others. And so some of the artists in the sho w also connect with the river in terms of kind of just thinking through London as as a space.
Sound from Jessica’s video
Jessica Karuhanga
So sometimes a sound or a scent is material. And to me there was a sort of rhythm to the water. And I was interested in how that rhythm or cadence can be kind of material. So like how that even though you’re maybe visually experiencing and your environmentally hearing kind of sounds or that kind of create the sort of space like how that kind of cadence can fetch tempo for a movie to sort of like respond to.
Christina Battle
This is Jessica Karuhanga. Her work in the exhibition titled “being who you are there is no other” depicts two Black subjects in long colourful gowns, and later in a black and white outfits, moving in a trance-like dance to the music you’re hearing now. They glide through tall grass along the banks of a slow moving river as the camera seems to hover around their bodies.
Jessica Karuhanga
Such a way where the camera and the lens, the gaze is also in movement. So I wanted to kind of create this sense. When you’re a viewer witnessing the work, that there’s a relationship that you have to be image. And if you penetrate that image, the subject’s in there. But also what your relationship might be physically or phenomenologically to the installation kind of in space.
Christina Battle
In the exhibition the two channel video work will be projected against a set of windows looking out onto the river allowing it to be viewed both inside and outside of the gallery space and developing a relationship to the environment surrounding the museum.
Jessica Karuhanga
So oddly, that video gets read a lot for people that want to tread carefully around talking about indigeneity or Blackness, a look at a piece like that and be like it’s about land in a Canadian landscape. And sure, you could insert that conversation there, but I feel like it’s almost out of this, like not wanting to have more complicated conversations. So yeah, I feel like for me I was thinking more like, why is it that, like, you don’t really see blackness represented this way in many contexts. Specifically I guess within a Canadian sort of like context of that diaspora? So that was kind of the impulse.
Christina Battle
There’s a feedback loop that happens, between culture, commerce, and identity. As well as being objects that we venerate, art is also used as a tool for soft diplomacy. It reinforces a form of nationalism that projects a comfortable and often conservative self-identity that neglects a large swath of society and paints an incomplete picture of Canadian culture. We learn about the Regionalists or the group of seven in textbooks and in many ways this history feels indelible. But it’s also important to remember that these were nearly all white men, who held a privileged place in Canadian society. As exhibitions are rehashed, the story gets repeated, and this incorrect identity gets amplified. Jessica’s video of two black figures moving with graceful fluidity along the edge of a river unsettles an easy acceptance of those singular narratives, challenging any idea that region, or nation, or even the river, are just one thing.
Jessica Karuhanga
You can kind of see how even within almost like a school of thought, like whether it’s within the institution of Western or in proximity to it, How it informs people sort of making because so-and-so was taught by so-and-so, was taught by so-and-so, was part of x collective group of thinking and which was interesting to me when I was in school there. But I also felt kind of outside of it because I’m like a first gen African kid that happened to end up in this place.
But I was always curious about what was on the fringes or the edges or outside of that of the space that felt very like hip and just like touching this surface to me. And that, who are the people that I don’t know, and that is like a mission of mine, like a personal vendetta, because I think about the disappearance of so many people that have contributed to a type of cannon that maybe isn’t like in the foreground, you know, that might be like outside of the sort of like frame, you know. And I think that even informs how I make video and film, like, I’m offering little glimpses or like a different kind of vantage point.
Jessica’s Music fades out
Christina Battle
Although Fuller’s human perspective was global, his historical perspective, in the case of the river, was limited. You may have heard him in the tape referring to the colonial history of the river, and completely jumping past the nearly 11000 years of human history that predated the arrival of Europeans.
Kirsty Robertson
He was very interested in the river, but he would probably not have thought about indigenous ways of being on the lands here, which were ongoing at the time and are still vibrant today. So it’s in some ways fair to say that many settler thinkers were not thinking about that at the time.
It is definitely something that is not present in his work because he wasn’t here, it does still seem to be something that’s so lacking when you take in his project as a whole and then try to apply it or think about it in this region.
Music Break
Amanda Myers
My English name is Amanda Myers. My Anishinaabe name is Kitaay Bizhikikwe. Which means, simply put, I guess, really, really old buffalo. Some people like to romanticize it to “ancient” in English, but my clan is the Marten clan. my family comes from Mooningwanakaaning because my family does not have a home community. And that is the oldest home community that my family lines, both the Myers and the Cadart are connected to. So that actually informs a lot of what I do as an artist and what I do in my work at Western University.
Christina Battle
Amanda Myers works as an artist and as the director of the Indigenous Student Centre at Western University. Her piece in the exhibition titled They Know Better traces the history of the river by overlaying images of the Thames in England over images of the Thames or Deshkan Ziibi in London Ontario.
The work physically depicts the erasure of culture that has occurred along this significant portion of the river. Representations of landmarks from western culture are scattered across the canvas, piled up over top of each other, opaque and vying for your attention, as elements of beadwork and ceremonial dress seem to float over the space like spectral traces of the past.
Amanda Myers
You need to acknowledge that we were here before all of this happened and that this was a central hub. You know, that you think of how the 401 functions today. And that’s what Deshkan Ziibi was before That was the the Highway for our Commerce, because we were very busy people.
Christina Battle
Before settler colonization of the area, before London was London the forks of the Deshkan Ziibi was already a hub of activity. It was a place where trade routes converged and goods from the north, east and west could be exchanged. It wouldn’t be hard to argue that one of the main reasons London exists where it does is because of the river and the thousands of years of history at the Forks before colonization.
Amanda Myers
Yeah, I found this this shared history so interesting, because when you go to the Forks now, you don’t there’s no evidence of indigenous people being there or recognizing that as an indigenous space of importance. And when I have traveled through other territories in Canada and the US, there’s these monuments, these acknowledgments of Indigenous impact and history in that space usually connected to the water, whether it’s river or lake. And I found London wanting to say that they wanted to do all these things. And I’m like, well, here’s the place to start. Because when you go there, now, the only thing acknowledged is the colonial history.
Christina Battle
Not only is there no acknowledgement around the river but there’s barely anything online. If you google Forks of the Thames the Wiki page only goes back to the battle of 1812, on historicplaces.ca the Forks of the Thames Interpretive Centre only cites history to the 1800’s. You need to go about halfway down the google search results before you get the first mention of any pre-colonial history on the London public library page and even then it only says: “Around 7,500 B.C., aboriginal peoples migrated to this area, attracted by abundant fish and game. Centuries later, Neutral tribes lived along this river they called Askunessippi.”
When Fuller visited London that evening in 1968, maybe instinctively, he knew to highlight the river. He’d been to thousands of cities around the world by then and likely observed that the bulk of historic cities were situated along waterways. It probably seemed a safe choice to spotlight the river as, (quote) “a very important affair and something that would be a great pity if we lost track of.” But in his prophetic retelling of its colonial past he didn’t seem to be aware that the track of the river was already lost, and in some ways we still haven’t found it again.
Amanda Myers
There’s lots of beautiful colonial history there, but they’re missing a whole bunch of history that’s taken place as far as trade, commerce and all the things that detail the brilliance of indigenous cultures.
Christina Battle
In London today, there are Indigenous historians from the Chippewa of the Thames First Nation who Amanda suggests could lead this expansion, of how we understand the history of the land that we call London.
Amanda Myers
You have these people here who have this knowledge. To educate people, to create visual representations of what they’re saying and what they’re talking about and to help people connect to that land, to that space? Because I think that’s how indigenous and non-indigenous people begin to reconcile, to acknowledge that we’re both human, that we both need the earth, and how do we connect to the Earth until people think critically about this it’s really hard for them to connect to each other.
Music
Christina Battle
A lot has changed in the world since Fuller’s visit to London, Ontario in 1968, but in some ways the public archive seems to remain stuck in the past. Whether it’s Curnoe and the Regionalist’s ever looming presence in London, landscape art as de facto Canadian identity, or the history of the Thames being locked within a colonial framework – the past can seem unchangeable. But history and identity is an ongoing project. Like a river that meanders over time and finds more tributaries, history should always be expanding to include more voices and perspectives.
Near the end of the recording at the Hunt Club, Curnoe is trying to argue with Fuller about the value of nationhood. Although Fuller traveled the globe constantly, visiting many different countries, he also famously didn’t believe in nationhood. He was living the vision that he espoused: of “world-man”. You can tell from the tape that the idea of defining your identity by arbitrary lines on a map and the stories that you’ve been told about who we are as a nationseemed foolish him.
As the argument over the importance of place and nationhood seems to be hitting a crescendo, the second half of the tape clicks off.
Maybe it’s a fitting metaphor.
On the next episode of From Remote Stars. The beginning of the proto-environmentalist movement of the 1960’s, the dawn of the atomic age, and where we are today.
This episode of From Remote Stars was written and produced Accounts and Records with research and scripting assistance from me, Christina Battle. Kirsty Robertson and Sarah Smith are our supervising producers. Additional research and fact checking assistance by Alyssa Tremblay and Mirella Ntahonsigaye.
Music in this podcast by Habalayon and our theme music is by Adam Sturgeon. The episode was mixed, edited and sound designed by Angela Shackel with additional audio engineering from Teresa Morrow. Archival footage from the CBC and expo music from the Prelinger archives.
Big thanks to everyone we talked to for this episode, Judith Rodger, Jason Mclean, Jessica Karuhanga, Kirsty Robertson, Sarah Smith, Amanda Myers and Cassandra Getty at Museum London.
From Remote Stars is a production of Carleton University in partnership with Western University, with the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.