[MUSIC] My name is Leah Dorion, I'm a Métis artist, I currently live in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. Now, originally my family is from Cumberland House, Saskatchewan, which is a river community and for us Métis, in my family, the river has been such an important part of our identity and who we are. And I believe that that's really impacted my artistic practice. I currently make my home in Prince Albert which is right on the North Saskatchewan River. In our area it is the gateway to the north. So we have a lot of First Nations from the north, Dene people are moving in higher numbers to Prince Albert. We have a lot of First Nation communities around us, and of course, the Métis have been there for many generations. So it's a really good place as an artist to be inspired by the diversity of my people. And so in my artistic career I've been exposed to traditional arts, contemporary arts and it's really made me who I am as an artist. My work is certainly very bright and playful. I'm actually more known as a children's book author and I've done a lot of work in my years to tell stories that I think children need to hear to give them some foundational knowledge about our different cultural teachings. So doing this project with the Faculty of Native Studies here at the University of Alberta has been a complete honour for me because as an artist and a community member, I understand the importance of symbols and images in telling cultural knowledge. It’s essential, vital. Symbols have taught me so much for myself in our families, our communities, and I've seen it and I'm really happy that this project has commissioned six original artworks to tell the stories that are in the course. So I'm very honoured to be that artist. So in this project with six artworks, it was important to also get input from the group, the community and the guide committee, and this is how I work. I would come up with a sketch, we'd have a meeting about what topics would need to be developed, and then I would give a really raw sketch with kind of my ideas and what I wanted to do. And then the group would say, yeah, okay, well let's go for it. So we had to go through a very rigorous pre-sketch process and approval process. And then once the general concept was agreed upon, then I would take the sketch and clean it up and transfer it to the canvas, and then the painting started. I actually believe, as an artist, that the pre-sketching work is more work than the actual painting. That's just the fun part now, you're playing. It's getting your guidelines, your layout, your topics represented, your symbols incorporated. And so, to me, it's the pre-part that is important and fundamental and more work than the, I think this is playing at the end. [LAUGH] The first artwork that I did was this one. It's the first sketch I made and it's the first painting I painted, and it's a tribute to Aboriginal women. There's a lot of content in the material about Aboriginal women so I have fit their story into this artwork. So in my work with this project, I had to really think about focal points. They're important. They are essential for the story. So what I did is when I worked with the team we realized how important Aboriginal women's connection to Mother Earth, the land, those cultural teachings and values of the Earth. So, we took the symbol of the turtle, which is one of our key symbols of Mother Earth, and I used it as the focal point to tell the story of our Aboriginal women in this country, in this nation. Now, important is the stories of Aboriginal women, the creation stories. So we used the story of Sky Woman, which is a Mohawk Creation Story. And in that story, her helpers bring her gently down to the earth, and it's a beautiful story about honouring women and how women birth the new beginning. So the turtle is my focal point, I have this beautiful weave around here. It's almost like lacing a hide or a drum. It's got this beautiful weave, which the earth is everything and it's the grounding force for our teachings of women. And moving along the turtle I have the different story lines that complement the course. So this is the second painting out of the collection. And again, to design the series, it was essential to have a focal point. So this topic is resource use, and we have a bit of contemporary and the traditional resource use. So in the conversations with the faculty, the caribou came up. The caribou, I always think of the caribou as like the buffalo of the north, because I'm from Saskatchewan, right, so the buffalo has been like so keystone species for us, and it was nice to feature the caribou. And so within the caribou, just a way that I like to do some extra storytelling was to put some details within the body of the caribou, and I thought well, dog team has to be represented, the traditional way of going into your hunting territory in the north. And so I have a little representation of the dog mushing, to go out into the territory. So we have our centre caribou, to symbolize that keystone resource in the parts of Canada where it's so essential for our First Nations, Métis and Inuit people, and so we start again. I kind of got this one with a kind of nice division in halves, but like the other paintings I do, I have the stories kind of working from there. This is the third painting and the theme of this painting is governance. And we wanted to tell the story of traditional governance and also move into something more contemporary. And again, focal point is everything in the artworks. What is at that centre? What's going to pull all the story together? So out of a lot of conversations, the clan system came up, the clan system and when you look at the history, the clan system has been so important for governance. So here in the centre of the focal point is a circle to draw the attention to the clan system. Here we have the Anishinaabe original clans and the clan symbol for that, and there's the clan animals associated with the original clans. And of course, I have the people. These are little, if you look closely, you can see they’re little people with their arms up, right? And they're all circular around the original clans, so there's the community, there's the governance, there's the focal point in its essence. Now, traditional leadership and making decisions has always had fire, the council fire. When I lived up in the Northwest Territories, our Dene relatives up there, they'd start their fire right before the political gatherings, and keep those fires going. I've seen it in my own communities, they put the council fire on to ground those decisions of the political leaders, to guide everything. So, when a sacred fire is lit, it just opens doors. So at the base, I wanted to put the council fire. And I have stones, which represent the stones of truth and that nice earth. And here the fire leads in through this line into that clan system, and it goes up to Creator, because of its spiritual foundation for everything in governance. So there's the kind of the centre line and the focal point, then there is kind of another extension of the focal point. The Two Row Wampum. The Two Row Wampum and just such an important teaching about living together in harmony. So I have it here with the two centre purple representing that coexistence and that equality that is taught with the Two Row Wampum. So it's almost like a second focal point in this particular artwork. Well here we move along to the next painting which is got a really different feel to it. Focal point was a little more challenging to create, little different direction. And there is a focal point believe it or not, but it's laid out in a different way. This painting has three particular zones, so what happens is the centre zone becomes the new focal point. Very different from the others that have circularity, almost directional. This has got a real linear feel to it and I'm glad. It's urbanization and the effects on Indigenous people of this country. So, hard story to tell. I've had people who follow my career, how are you going to represent the dark, the trauma, the sadness, the pain in this story of urbanization and I had a solution to that. I wanted the tones of grey, a lot of dark colours, heavy colours and I wanted to work with greyscale, from black to grey and all levels of grey to really portray that trauma because they really stressed in the course and the faculty was really coming to the city, and has had a tremendous effect. So in the focal point of the centre band is people arriving to the city environment. They're all with grey faces, they have grey bodies, different levels of grey, and coming to the city for that hope of that new beginning. And here we have a cityscape, so we have the incoming migration, we have kind of like stones, and lots of harsher angles. I have like a triangle versus circles, so it's harsher, pointed, edgy [LAUGH]. There's a lot of edge and I don't know if people noticed it, but I even have jagged edge rows and strong triangle point symbolism in the work. And, of course, when the city experience and coming to the city, the results weren't what people wanted. And the loss of life, the effect of the street and the things that have happened, so we have a lot of loss, we talk about the prostitution, the drugs, the alcohol, homelessness. So here is a candle light vigil with blue, which is also a very heavy colour, sad colour, and a mourning colour here. And then, there's the prayer for all those people who came to the city and have had their lives taken. The next painting is about education, and I have always heard that education is our new buffalo. And so we talked about how can we show education and moving forward, and making change through education. So the main centre point was to really get the strong buffalo figures here, and these buffalos, I actually strategically, because they are the core centre focal point here, is I actually have them moving and travelling. They're actually a herd on the move and I think that's what the whole vision of education is to move ourselves in a new direction and keep moving forward and growing, having that path and directions. So they are traveling buffalos, their little herd is on the move but so fun to do is to have that transfer into a person. This metamorphosis, moving from traditional buffalo hunt culture to here's, somebody today getting their education. They could be a business person, a lawyer, I have a tie and a briefcase to show, we are playing roles and we are getting education, and doing things that maybe aren't rooted in traditional ways. Maybe our values are still with us but we’re taking on these other skill sets. This is the final painting in this collection that has been commissioned. It is a story that's very relevant to right now. Now, quite a story to put in it. With Idle No More, the round dancing and the mass flash mobs to raise issues on certain issues that needed to be spoken to immediately that were a pressing concern particularly around the environment. This whole story on this painting is the arts and the environment. And kind of protesting and speaking up for them and using art to communicate and heal and but be politically active. And again, the Idle No More using the drum, and song, and dance, and coming together in mass groups to vocalize concern. So I have this kind of neat group of dancers, hand in hand, all around, so like little - big group of round dancers. Now in the centre is the activists and the whole issue here is, No Pipelines Without Consultation. See I don't use a lot of words in art. I don't often, but sometimes there just needs to be words present to really clarify the issue. And here's a protest against not being consulted properly. So we have drummers, we have male, older male and a young male. So we have intergenerational people coming out and we have a Métis, obviously, and we have different flags that were brought. So here's the story of environment, resistance, voicing today and then of course, so many stories to tell but we start going to, okay let’s look at some partnerships. because it's about duty to consult, making change, being a voice in environmental development and what happens and not being ignored and silenced anymore. So we talked about Haida Gwaii and the co-management and these great incentives to have proper, ethical, duty to consult, not false consultation but really rooted. So we have this conservation officer and the traditional person, also as a conservation officer, working together for environment. This artwork is not just me. It's my style, it's my signature way I put things together but really it's the faculty advisory group who made the artwork turn out the way it was. And I guess I have to actually to Tracy Bear and Alena who supported too, that they really helped inspire me to go with it. [MUSIC]
