The article published by art historian Laurier Lacroix in The duty of March 5 and 6 entitled “Aboriginal people as portrayed by Krieghoff” unfortunately does not help the reader to understand Krieghoff’s work in the broader historical context of the time and the issues in which it is situated.
In simpler terms, it does not advance our understanding of Krieghoff’s work within the framework of the decolonization of the gaze, which is the one that museums must apply today, in particular with regard to paintings featuring Aboriginal people in the mid-nineteenthand century.
The author limits himself to noting that Krieghoff “spreads stereotypical images of Aboriginal people” which “do not involve meeting with members of the communities” and that he “contributes to the recognition of the craftsmanship of Aboriginal women”.
These assertions are incomplete, inaccurate and distort the understanding of the works to which the author refers by limiting himself to a first-level linear description.
A reminder of the historical context of dispossession in which the indigenous peoples were already struggling at that time will allow us to understand it more accurately. Something Krieghoff himself couldn’t ignore.
The painter Krieghoff was in Montreal in 1845, the year the Parliament of United Canada sat in its new building in the Sainte-Anne market (now Place D’Youville) in the new capital of Canada. That year, the report of the Bagot Commission (1842-1844) was presented to Parliament, which concluded that the best way to assimilate Aboriginal children into Euro-Canadian culture was to separate them from their parents and place them in boarding schools. like that of Brantford in Upper Canada, run by the Anglican Church.
The recent opening (1842) of Saguenay and the North Shore to colonization pushes the Innu outside their traditional hunting territories, and their chiefs write petitions and organize delegations which come to meet, accompanied by the deputy of the region. , de Sales Laterrière, Governor Metcalfe in Montreal to request his intervention in order to regain their territorial rights and obtain compensation. They will come again to Montreal to meet Governor Elgin in 1848.
The painter Théophile Hamel, also established in Montreal, will paint the scene at the request of Governor Elgin, to immortalize the meeting of the “Three Montagnais chiefs and Peter McLeod”, where one of them is holding the petition given to Lord Elgin. Krieghoff knew the works of Hamel, who then resided in the same city as him.
This visit did not go unnoticed. At least three newspapers covered the event, The future, The Minerva and the Quebec newspaper, under the title “The savages of Saguenay”. The petition described the state of poverty and begging to which the Aboriginal peoples were reduced following the spoliation of their ancestral hunting grounds in the Saguenay and the North Shore.
In the summer of 1849, a third mission of Aboriginal chiefs arrived in Montreal: this time, three Chippewa chiefs from Lake Superior came to Montreal to defend themselves against the theft of their natural resources. Krieghoff will also paint the portrait of one of the three, Chief Nabunagoging, known as the Eclipse, and the painter Martin Somerville, his neighbor in the studio, will make a drawing representing the three chiefs, which will moreover be reproduced in The Illustrated London News ; Canadian newspapers made a great deal of the visit of these three Aboriginal “warriors” dressed in their finest chieftaincy.
The poverty in which the Aboriginals then lived was already well known to the people of Montreal. The Iroquois of Caughnawaga, who live near Montreal, have no choice but to come and sell their moccasins, their baskets and their crafts to ensure the subsistence of their families, pushed back to the reserve, which the cholera epidemics have already decimated in 1832, in 1834, and typhus, in 1847.
Camps of idle Aboriginals are planted besides not far from the Lachine Canal, and one can see “savages” and “savages” hanging around the streets of the city, begging and in a state of intoxication, facts of which residents regularly and who alert the clergy.
In 1857 Parliament passed An Act to Encourage the Gradual Civilization of Indian Tribes in this Province to induce them to give up their identity by choosing a government-approved surname, and to renounce their tribal affiliation, in exchange for a lot of land. Then, in 1869, The Act for the Gradual Emancipation of the Indians will be adopted in turn, a prelude to the law which will become the source of the “cultural genocide”, the infamous Indian Act of 1876.
To imply, as Professor Lacroix writes, that Aboriginal people live an idyllic life in dreamy landscapes, embellished with picturesque craftsmanship, is to ignore the dispossession and poverty in which they were already struggling, by trying to alert the Governor General, the Members of Parliament and the entire population of Montreal.
In fact, what Krieghoff depicts are indigenous peoples in the process of acculturation, of dispossession, in the process of being decimated and whose ancestral lifestyle, however dreamy it may be, is doomed to disappear. What he paints is already no longer what Aboriginal people experience, and the society in which Krieghoff lived was not unaware of this either.
We are far from the soothing romanticism that we have always wanted to see in Krieghoff’s “indigenous” works, which reinforced the colonial gaze of the political, religious and military authorities of the time.
Almost all Canadian art museums display Krieghoff paintings with an aboriginal theme on their picture rails; today, they have a particular responsibility to open the eyes of visitors to an increased sensitivity to the Aboriginal reality and to engage in a hoped-for process of decolonization.