Wanda Nanibush Reading List
December 5, 2023
“Here’s to the freedom of tomorrow’s artists today.” – Wanda Nanibush, Mzinkojige Waabang
Rebecca Belmore, sister, 2010, colour ink-jet on transparencies | image: courtesy of the artist
The following materials are designed to share and celebrate the ongoing visionary work of Anishinaabe-kwe image and word warrior, curator, and community organizer Wanda Nanibush.
From July 2016 until October 2023, Wanda Nanibush was the inaugural Curator of Indigenous Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario. She was then forced out of her position for expressing support for Indigenous sovereignty and Palestinian life and freedom. At a time of increased censorship globally, there is critical knowledge in these materials to share, including an approach to conflict that Nanibush proposes in her 2014 discussion of women’s leadership in the Idle No More movement. She writes,
“It does not mean that we will all agree but the way we disagree is the main question. If I disagree I choose to disagree openly in front of the person, without anger or passive aggression as a form of peace offering toward understanding. I choose to ask questions and seek understanding, to deliberate before forming opinion. I choose to care for strangers. I choose to set aside my own desires for the larger picture. I choose to step forward and share my knowledge and skills for others. I choose to take the heat. I choose peaceful disobedience. I choose to obey ancient laws of respect. These tenets, if you will, are women’s teachings that they bring to the movement and affect how it operates.”
The works below appear in reverse chronological order.
– The editors, O BOD
“The Sound of the Colour Field” in Breaking Protocol by Maria Hupfield Book info | PDF
Wanda Nanibush, ed. Maria Hupfield, Breaking Protocol, Inventory Press and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics | November 2023
“The deep love we have for water and land has only ever been strengthened by the violence that has tried to rip it from us.”
“Radical Inclusivity, Relationality, and Indigenous Photography” PDF
Wanda Nanibush, Foam Magazine #64 EXTREMES – The Environmental Issue | August 2023
“No matter the artistic strategy chosen by artists, it is clear we need fewer saviours and more relations if we are to shift from extraction and destruction to continuity and peace.”
“Performing Sovereignty In the Museum” in Uneven Bodies (Reader) Book info | PDF
Wanda Nanibush, ed. Ruth Buchanan, Aileen Burns & Johan Lundh, and Hanahiva Rose, Uneven Bodies (Reader), Govett-Brewster Art Gallery | 2021
“I think that’s the kind of encounter that art gives us: this ability to stay with something that we don’t understand, something we don’t know, something that makes us uncomfortable, something that challenges our vulnerable spaces. I think museums are going way too far to make everything safe and palatable and comfortable, when that is not what art’s role in life is.”
“Feminist Art Field School – Wanda Nanibush” Video link
Art Gallery of Greater Victoria | November 2021
“I came into the institution to do work, to get some stuff done, not for my career and not for a job, but because I wanted to make space, because all of my friends and all of the people who are part of my world don’t have space in there.”
“Liquid, Love and Dreams: Decolonizing Museums” Video Link
Wanda Nanibush, ASU-LACMA Navigating Change in Museums Lecture Series | May 2021
“I am aiming at self-determination and sovereignty of our peoples. In the museum context, I aim at what is currently our desire and how it is expressed within art.”
“Making Intimacy Sovereign and Sovereignty Intimate: An Artist Talk by Wanda Nanibush” Video Link
Sovereign Intimacies, Plug In ICA | December 2020
“As much as colonization impacts intimacy, intimacy then becomes a space for sovereign acts. It becomes a space for resistance, and that has been my life’s work.”
“Wanda Nanibush on Diné poetry, Russian literature and Gabriel Garcia Marquez” Link
Athena McKenzie, Zoomer | November 2020
McKenzie: “What book completely changed your perspective?”
Nanibush: “Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers (Notre-Dames-des-Fleurs, 1943). I was drawn to Genet because he was a foster kid like me. His life was immensely difficult, but he became a writer. And he produced queer literature that was from within his own reality, not written to appease the mainstream domestication of queerness. The premise is that the writer is in jail writing about a drag queen Divine and her various lovers in order to produce erotica for his own pleasure. It completely changed my understanding of sexuality and the way certain bodies and their pleasures are automatically criminalized. He also taught me how to revel in the ways you don’t belong.”
“In Performances and Photography, Rebecca Belmore Faces the Monumental: Interview by Wanda Nanibush” Link
Aperture | October 2020
“Something that you’ve mastered – an aspect of your work that draws me in and I know draws other people in – is this understanding of what a moment is.”
“Between Art and Culture: Performing First Nations Sovereignty” PDF
Wanda Nanibush, ed. Corina L. Apostol and Nato Thompson, Making Another World Possible, Routledge | 2019
“During Idle No More (2012–present), many actions were deployed that mirrored ceremonial structures or artistic practices. We held candlelight marches to honor the global resistance fighters, our ancestors, and those we have lost to oppression. We conducted water ceremonies led by Grandmother Pauline Shirt to heal the water but also to help people develop an affective relationship with the water: to feel its spirit and our relationship to it. I am convinced that people need to physically experience relationships in order to develop the value system that sees the Earth, animals, and all of creation as a web of relations.The bleeding of boundaries between art, protest, and ceremony is the consequence of an Indigenous worldview becoming more mainstream, even if it remains largely unacknowledged.”
“Notions of Land” Link
Wanda Nanibush, Aperture | Spring 2019
“Photography in the hands of Indigenous artists forms a body of philosophical, poetic and physical knowledge of our relationship to land.”
“Nanabozho’s Sisters” Link
Wanda Nanibush, Doris McCarthy Gallery | February 2019
“Through the Trickster spirit all things that seem fixed, accepted, entrenched, held sacred, formalized, and organized can be disrupted, scattered, disorganized, and transformed.”
“AGO curator Wanda Nanibush on editing the art book, Rebecca Belmore: Facing the Monumental” Link
Wanda Nanibush and Sue Carter, Quill & Quire | August 2018
“I am also centring Indigenous knowledge by using insights from my language Anishinaabemowin – our word for truth is heart-knowledge and we believe that you can only ever really speak the truth by speaking what you actually know. My curation has these values embedded in it. I curate from my body and intuition which is the heart.”
“I Am the Artist Amongst My People” Link
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson in Conversation with Rebecca Belmore and Wanda Nanibush, Canadian Art | July 2018
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson: “When Nanibush became the first curator of Indigenous art at the AGO she had three artists – ‘my queens’ she called them – that she wanted to secure prominent solo shows for: Rebecca Belmore, Shelley Niro and Faye HeavyShield. It is mind-blowing to me that this hadn’t already happened given their decades of artistic production, their international influence and the sheer integrity of their work. But we all know why. Nanibush nods as she explains that the statistics show that artists who are Indigenous women are lower-paid and have fewer shows, in less prestigious places. In this context, Belmore’s solo show this summer at the AGO is a victory for all of us, particularly those emerging and mid-career Indigenous artists making in the wake of Nanibush’s queens.”
“Thinking and Engaging with the Decolonial: A Conversation Between Walter D. Mignolo and Wanda Nanibush” Link
Afterall | March 2018
“Decolonisation involves a centring of Indigenous ways of being, knowing and loving. In this we assert sovereignty, no longer asking for recognition of it.”
“Bringing Art into Every Conversation” Video link
Wanda Nanibush, The Walrus Talks | November 2018
“Our present time is haunted. We are haunted by many, many histories, histories we have ignored. Many, many violences we have enacted. And many, many beautiful, beautiful knowledges these ghosts are trying to whisper in our ears and trying to bring forth. And the arts is one place that we do that.”
“Facing the Monumental: Rebecca Belmore and Wanda Nanibush in Conversation” Video Link
U of T Daniels Master of Visual Studies Proseminar | November 2018
“We’ve reached a point in time where we can’t even talk about capitalism anymore, we can’t be critical of certain things, using certain kinds of words, because people are tired. It’s almost like we’re fatigued with critique and resistance in a certain form, but at the same time we’re at the moment when we need it the most.”
“Land” Video link
Wanda Nanibush, Creative Time Summit: Of Homelands and Revolution | September 2017
“This idea of the land as our teacher also means that we are not in a space of dispossession fundamentally, because the land is still here. It’s still our teacher. Our culture has not disappeared. We still have all of that in us. All that strength, all that beauty, and we can rebuild and we are rebuilding everything that we want for the future.”
“Anishinaabe-kwe and/or Indigenous Feminist?” Link
Wanda Nanibush, C Magazine | December 2016
“Anishinaabe culture allowed me to consider possibilities as yet unthought in the west and unpracticed in our societies today: more genders than two; accounting for and valuing women’s needs and labour based on their differences; the idea that a man can live as a woman; the idea that it doesn’t matter who you sleep with but what responsibilities you take up; the idea that women can have power without becoming violent, aggressive, adversarial or colonial; the idea that differences mean an expansion of society and special powers in the individual; and that the spirit of the individual should never be crushed.”
“About Land: An Indigenous perspective on the contested land of Palestine” PDF
Wanda Nanibush, Canadian Art | Fall 2016
“the art of resistance is listening to the stories the land tells.”
“‘Global Indigenous?’ with Wanda Nanibush, Gerald McMaster, and Charles Esche” Video link
U of T Daniels Master of Visual Studies Proseminar | April 2016
“All the roots that we had, both “roots” and “routes,” transcended the current boundaries that we live under.”
“Outside of time: Salvage ethnography, self-representation and performing culture” PDF
Wanda Nanibush, ed. Anna Agathangelou and Kyle Killian, Time, Temporality and Violence in International Relations, Routledge | March 2016
“There is authority and power in what is allowed to be said, filmed or written for any time period. The legitimacy of certain knowledges and histories is always a site of conflict within the colonial situation and implies a delegitimization of other forms of knowledge.”
“Idle No More: Strong Hearts of Indigenous Women’s Leadership” PDF
Wanda Nanibush, ed. The Kino-nda-niimi Collective, The Winter We Danced: Voices from the Past, the Future, and the Idle No More Movement, ARP Books | 2014
“The teachings gathered at the skirts of our grandmothers have also required a different set of principles for working cross culturally… When the relationship is not defined from thought alone but also includes the spirit and the heart the work takes on a different character.”
“Mzinkojige Waabang (To Carve Tomorrow)” PDF
Edited by Wanda Nanibush on behalf of the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective | 2011
“My assumption is that Indigenous artists are and have always been historical agents, not a marginalized ‘other.’ We have been here since time immemorial and will be here tomorrow, whether or not we are acknowledged, understood, included or accepted.”
“Pirates of Performance: Wanda Nanibush in Conversation with Cree Performance Artists Cheryl L’Hirondelle and Archer Pechawis” PDF
Fuse Magazine | December 2008
“In performance art, one cannot deny the bodily existence of Indigenous People or our contemporaries.”
Moving the Museum: Indigenous and Canadian Art at the AGO, ed. Wanda Nanibush and Georgiana Uhlyarik, 2023
“I truly believe artists have a necessary capacity to look differently at the world and take us to different places within ourselves. Art can be a way to feel comfortable with the unknown and opaque by creating a safe space to feel vulnerable in the face of difference.”
–Wanda Nanibush, Moving the Museum
Facing the Monumental: Rebecca Belmore, ed. Wanda Nanibush, 2018
“She has taught me all the ways that space can be a material of artmaking, which has influenced my own curatorial style. Belmore often creates work in response to specific locations, and the environment itself becomes part of the work. She gently reveals how a space is organized – all the structures that we take for granted – allowing us to recognize and potentially transform those power relations.”
– Wanda Nanibush, Facing the Monumental
Robert Houle Red Is Beautiful, ed. Wanda Nanibush, 2021
Toronto: Tributes + Tributaries, 1971-1989, ed. Wanda Nanibush and Georgiana Uhlyarik, 2018
Rita Letendre: Fire And Light, ed. Wanda Nanibush and Georgiana Uhlyarik, 2017
still image from Wanda Nanibush, Arrivals and Departures, 2012
Notable installations and films by Wanda Nanibush
Carrying 2010–2016, installation in the exhibition Unsettled Sites: Marian Penner Bancroft, Wanda Nanibush, Tania Willard at Simon Fraser University Gallery, 2016
Arrivals and Departures, lyric film, 2012
LandMines, installation in the exhibition Homeland In/Security by Jeff Thomas at the University of Waterloo Art Gallery, 2011
The Gift, short drama film, 2005
Wanda Nanibush is an Anishinaabe-kwe image and word warrior, curator, and community organizer from Beausoleil First Nation. She was the inaugural curator of Indigenous Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario from 2016–2023. Nanibush has curated major exhibitions including Robert Houle’s Red Is Beautiful (2021) Rebecca Belmore’s Facing The Monumental (2018), Rita Letendre’s Fire and Light (2017), Sovereign Acts (2012, 2017, 2020), and Nanabozho’s Sisters (2019). Nanibush is the founder of aabaakwad, a gathering of Indigenous artists, curators, and thinkers that focuses on Indigenous led conversation on Indigenous art. Nanibush’s art practice includes film and installation works, including Carrying 2010–2016 (2016) in the exhibition Unsettled Sites: Marian Penner Bancroft, Wanda Nanibush, Tania Willard at Simon Fraser University Gallery; the lyric film Arrivals and Departures (2012); LandMines (2011) in the exhibition Homeland In/Security by Jeff Thomas at the University of Waterloo Art Gallery; and the short drama film The Gift (2005). Her writing has been widely published in books, exhibition catalogues, and magazines.
Acknowledgments
We express deep gratitude to Wanda Nanibush for sharing her ongoing work with the world.
We express deep gratitude to Rebecca Belmore for permission to place sister (2010) alongside this article. rebeccabelmore.com
We express deep gratitude to Josh MacPhee for creating an original poster to accompany this article. justseeds.org
Continued thanks to the artists, writers, and publishers who have provided permissions.
To comment email obodmag@gmail.com.
