From Little Bighorny to residential schools
You might not expect the performance artist behind Buffalo Boy’s Battle of Little Bighorny to be a former politician but Adrian Stimson assures me that’s exactly what he was for many years. “Being an aboriginal person makes you political from the second you’re born whether you want that or not” he explains. “In Canada and the Americas there is such a huge history and a heavy history…. I’ve been an activist all my life — it was a natural progression into politics. ”
For eight years Stimson served as a tribal councillor for the Siksika Nation the Blackfoot reserve southeast of Calgary. “First Nations politics are regular politics times 100. It’s pretty intense” he says. “It’s not only dealing politically with the government and with the province you’re dealing within family situations on a close-knit reserve and so you have those issues compounding all of that other stuff.”
When Stimson decided to wind down his political career he was forced to examine what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. Increasingly he came to see art as having power over politics. “Art in many ways speaks truer” he says. “I think you get away from a lot of the rhetoric and what you see is what you get.”
After completing his bachelor of fine arts at the Alberta College of Art and Design with a focus on painting Stimson moved to Saskatoon to obtain a master’s degree in fine arts from the University of Saskatchewan. “When I went to U of S I started to delve into installation art and performance art” he says. “Now I call myself an interdisciplinary artist so whatever the mood or the medium I’ll choose to sort of suit what I want to do.”
To understand the range of his artistic pursuits one need look no further than the contrasts between Old Sun Stimson’s exhibit at TRUCK gallery (October 10 to November 8) and Buffalo Boy’s Battle of Little Bighorny a performance presented by TRUCK and the Mountain Standard Time festival at the University of Calgary on October 11. While Old Sun is a haunting meditation that draws upon found objects from the Old Sun Residential School the Battle of Little Bighorny is a performance by Buffalo Boy Stimson’s alter ego — a campy trickster who blurs the lines between Indian and cowboy male and female.
“My performance character Buffalo Boy is a character parody of Buffalo Bill” says Stimson. “That definitely comes from my own history. My grandfather was an Indian cowboy in the Calgary Stampede and my father certainly has that cowboy persona. It’s almost like an oxymoron the Indian cowboy. So within that I love to play. I looked at the spectacle that Buffalo Bill created in his Wild West shows and the portrayal of the Indian within that is always this conquest narrative.”
Old Sun on the other hand is an exhibit consisting of two older pieces and one brand new installation. Stimson created Old Sun and Sick and Tired as a graduate student at the U of S. Both pieces use found objects from the Old Sun Residential School to create layers of meaning surrounding the residential school experience.
“I attended residential schools up till when I was about Grade 4. Being there and living with the students is part of my history too” says Stimson. “As an artist I get to play in this arena and show what’s been internalized in myself and the signifiers of things that come back to me.”
Stimson isn’t just showing old work. “I’m making a brand new piece called Inhumation ” he says. “I’m creating an old burial platform but I’m turning it upside down. And then I’ll have a projection of Old Sun Residential School and some historical images and then a banner that says ‘All one in Christ Jesus.’ Religion and religiosity play into my work because I’m a huge critic.”
Stimson has no illusions about changing people’s minds with his art. He leaves it up to audiences to react to his work based on their own histories and experiences. Still he remains optimistic about the role his art has to play in the ongoing dialogue about colonialism. “Given our recent history and the apology from the Parliament and the real understanding of what that history was all about this in a sense is a part of that whole truth and reconciliation.”
