ᓄᐦᑕᐃᐧᕀ ᐊᐢᑯᑖᐢᑯᐱᓱᐣ nohtawiy askotâskopison, My Father’s Cradleboard by Morgan Possberg Denne
“Cradleboards have been used for thousands of years by our ancestors to carry and love for our future generations. They have protected us, acted as an external womb, and given us a place as children to watch our parents' culture and learn from a safe distance. I’ve always wondered if the fact that neither my father, his father, or myself was ever put in a cradleboard may have had a long term impact on our development, personhood, and our coping mechanisms to the ways that colonialism, residential schools and the foster care system has affected my family.
Now as an adult I deeply wish I could rewind the clock and put myself, and my father before me, and his father before him in a cradleboard as a child. To softly sing songs to us, give us safety, and to give us a connection to our culture in a safe environment. Maybe this would fix things. As kids when we were supposed to be kept safe and playing in the woods we were instead being prepped for the meat factory - the eternal meat grinder of colonialism.
The western world teaches us to push aside this childhood imagining and innocence - “These things can’t be undone!”, but what if they could? In another world somebody took better care of us, in another time we learned to drum and sing and dance, in another place we were listened to by adults who had the capacity to love and care for us.
These hot chest and aching throat feelings, the times of biting back angry tears and saying “It’s fine” have to count for something….right?”
“Morgan Possberg Denne is Two-Spirit millennial scoop and foster care survivor; with settler, Cree, Metis, and Chippewa blood connections. They have grown up in treaty 7 territory, and have relatives in southern and northern Ontario. Morgan creates imaginative, illustrative objects which could be seen as pieces of possible narratives, different ways to connect with the past and potential futures through layers of abstraction with no right or wrong answer. What matters to them is not accurately recreating the past or to predict the future, but rather to capture an inner truth and a possible alternative reality of colonial experiences. In a sense, creating new culture from a series of “what-ifs” and new stories / lore. Their work has been recently shown at the Confederation Centre for the Arts and Gallery Gachet.”
(Photos belong to me and the description and artist bio are courtesy of The New Gallery’s website)
[IDs:
1. a large wall hanging made from fish leather,
2. a close up of the same piece. the artwork has faint text cut out of the green tea tanned fish that reads “it’s not your fault, you know that right?”
3. a photo of the space showing a video projected onto several fish skins, a table with a vest and a hat made of fish leather, and on the table are cartons made from rawhide.
4. a coatrack on which are a rawhide hunting ruffle and rawhide fishing net resembling a badminton racket
5. a shelf seen in the background of image 3 containing a astro-turf shirt, a hand gun and pocket knife made from rawhide and a fish leather circular clip with a piece of dark hair hanging off the shelf.]
