Biography

Carl Beam (1943–2005) was a painter, printmaker, ceramicist, and performance artist who challenged assumptions about First Nations creativity and the style and content of Indigenous art. Through his work, he reflected on contemporary experiences of the peoples of Turtle Island. By 1985, Beam was in the vanguard of a movement that exerted pressure on the Canadian art establishment to include neglected perspectives in exhibitions and publications. He was the earliest First Nations artist to have work purchased by the National Gallery of Canada as contemporary Indigenous art. Beam’s artistic career reflects his commitment to confronting stereotypes and prejudices. He was a catalyst for change, propelling Canada to come to terms with its colonial and racist past.

Early Years and Names

How many words would I need to describe the power of absence, or the state of “no word,” and how much power would there be in a “written” word in comparison to a “spoken word” and a “remembered” word?

—Carl Beam, spontaneous poetry inscribed on an untitled artwork in the Carl Beam Archives, National Gallery of Canada

Carl Beam was born on May 24, 1943, in the M’Chigeeng First Nation, also called West Bay, on Manitoulin Island in Georgian Bay, an arm of Lake Huron. The world’s largest freshwater island, Manitoulin is known to the Anishinaabe as Spirit Island. It marks the heart of Turtle Island (North America) and is the home of the Great Spirit, Gitchi Manitou. Manitoulin Island is a sacred place for the Ojibwe, and for many other North American First Nations; it is where great Anishinaabe leaders have been buried for millenniums.

For the young Beam, Manitoulin Island was a place where he felt grounded by his ancestral history. Carl was taught by his mother, Barbara Migwans, and others in his community, and he also learned by interacting with the natural environment and by discovering the history and legends that animated the land. But this home was also a place of unsettling disruptions. His childhood, marred by chaos, was a product of distress and of abuse, addiction, and the social disjunction that results from the breakdown of families and communities. As an adult, Carl recognized that the dysfunctional environment in which he grew up had traumatized him. In later life, he wanted to suppress memories of childhood pain, yet at the same time, he honoured the teachings he had absorbed during his early life, and he had no fear of mining his past for creative material, no matter how painful or disturbing. Trauma required an artistic response.

Carl was the first child of Barbara Migwans and Edward Cooper, who were engaged when he was born. Edward, a U.S. Army soldier stationed in Philadelphia, had deserted to marry Barbara, daughter of Ojibwe West Bay Chief Dominic Migwans and an Ojibwe-Mohawk woman from Sturgeon Falls named Annie Commanda. When the priest who was to preside over the wedding secretly notified the military police, Cooper was returned to his regiment, and the marriage never took place. It was the middle of the Second World War, and Edward was sent to the front lines soon after. He was captured and interned in a prisoner-of-war camp in Bad Soden, Germany, where he died in 1945.

Widowed, Barbara eventually gave all her children the surname of her subsequent partner, Dallas Beam. My father recounted to me stories of physical abuse he endured at the hands of Dallas. I believe his grandparents, Dominic Migwans and Annie Commanda, were aware as well, as they took him into their home and raised him with their family until he entered Spanish Residential School, and during the summers after. Dominic was Chief of West Bay at the time, and Annie was an Ojibwe-Mohawk woman from Sturgeon Falls in Northern Ontario. They raised their grandson as “Carl Edward Migwans,” and his name is registered as such on the roll at his home reserve. As a young adult, Carl took on both surnames—Migwans and Beam.

Carl also had an Ojibwe name, Ahkideh—meaning “brave, courageous, or strong-hearted.” This was given to him by Elders in the community to honour the near mystical relationship he was said to have with his spirit animal, the bear. When Carl was a young boy, his grandfather Dominic shot a bear that was menacing the community. Other children were afraid of the animal, but Carl astonished everyone by crawling up to it and playing with it. Later, when he was around thirteen years old, Carl also fought off a bear to protect his younger siblings. When the animal neared their home, Carl moved his brother and sister to a high shelf in the cabin, where they stayed while his mother tended her trapline. Carl then held a mattress against the door as he fought the creature back with a kitchen knife. Eventually, he threw the knife into the bear, where it stuck. Neither the knife nor the animal was ever found.

Bears later figured prominently in Carl’s artistic iconography, where they signified either his alter ego or a subconscious manifestation of himself. In his largest painting, a 12.2-metre acrylic on linen titled Time Warp, 1984, a handwritten inscription recalls a dream conversation he had with a bear. He remarked at the time that dreams of bears bring good luck, “but only if you aren’t afraid in the dream.”

Garnier High School

Autobiographical Erratum #502: Here I am as [a child] with a gun in each hand with a John Wayne complex. I’m sure… and the bottom 3 pics are some of the subsequent nightmares and hardships visited upon me, the artist, as a sentient human being.… But I believe I can see the folly of all this, including mine, or maybe, especially mine, you never can tell.… Sure, this is sheer poetry.

—Carl Beam, c.1988

Carl’s mother, Barbara, was determined to send her son to elementary school, as she had not been given the same opportunity. Barbara had wanted to be a teacher, but as the eldest daughter in her family, she was not allowed to attend school and instead had to help raise her younger siblings. To provide her son with the best educational opportunities, she sent him to the all-boys Garnier High School in Spanish, Ontario, on the northern shore of Lake Huron. Also known as the Spanish Indian Residential School, Garnier was the only residential institution in Canada run by the Jesuits. Carl began boarding at Garnier when he was ten years old.

Garnier was infamous for its appalling conditions and the abhorrent abuse and neglect suffered by its students. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) showed that more than a third of the Jesuits who were “credibly accused” of sexually abusing minors worked in First Nations communities or at Garnier as teachers, prefects, cooks, and coaches.  The abuse that students endured there was not isolated; it is now clear that violence permeated the residential school system across Canada. The forced separation of children from their communities was part of a mandate to assimilate Indigenous populations, and it was cited by government agents to justify unimaginable cruelty.  In his art, such as Survivor of Education, n.d., Carl sheds light on these issues. His experiences at Garnier were formative in his lifelong questioning of Western-based systems of knowledge, religion, and hierarchies of power.

The abuse Carl suffered at Garnier was cultural as well as sexual. His mother tongue, Anishinaabemowin, was banned, and Carl and his classmates were forbidden to speak it. Later, he said, “It would have been easier if they [had] told me I was going to jail. I could have understood and survived it better.”  When students returned home to Manitoulin Island for the summers, no one talked about their experiences. Even as the abuse continued, it was too much for Carl to acknowledge.

In his first act of rebellion against an educational and social system he regarded as antiquated, stifling, and harmful, he dropped out of Garnier in grade ten. He enrolled in correspondence courses and earned his high school diploma in the late 1950s, ahead of his former classmates.

A Quest for Self-Discovery

Adrift after leaving school, Carl began to look for work. He held a series of labour and construction jobs, and through the 1960s, he worked on Toronto’s Bloor–Danforth subway line, and in British Columbia on a hydroelectric dam project and on a gang fighting forest fires. The hydroelectric dam project nearly killed him. While he was standing on a cement roof cap that was being placed on a moving turbine, the crane operator’s grip on the controls slipped, causing Carl to topple into the mouth of the turbine. When he came to, he found himself miraculously resting on a thin shelf of rebar—the only thing preventing him from plummeting into the rotating blades below. He was able to climb to safety, and when he returned home, he discovered that he had been presumed dead.

In the mid to late 1960s—years marked by precarious, sporadic employment—Carl began to paint in his spare time. Experimenting with various representational styles and modes, he embarked on a quest of self-discovery and healing, and searched for an authentic creative voice. Carl also married his first wife during this decade and had five children: Clint, Carl Jr., Laila, Veronica, and Jennifer. The marriage was later annulled.

By 1970, Carl had learned that he was eligible for job-related skills training through the federal government’s Canada Manpower department. He enrolled in a drafting program at the Kootenay School of the Arts in Nelson, British Columbia, and chose commercial art as his one elective. He found the course entirely satisfying—so much so that in his second year (for which he obtained a scholarship), he switched from the drafting program to fine art.

Later, Carl transferred to the University of Victoria, where he studied literature and ceramics. One of his teachers was Frances Maria Hatfield (1924–2014), who was herself a student of the famous British potter Bernard Leach (1887–1979). She ignited in Carl a lifelong love of Japanese ceramics, an interest that contributed to his earthenware practice in the early 1980s and early 2000s.

Carl earned his bachelor of fine arts degree in 1974. Later that year, he enrolled in the University of Alberta’s master’s program. He wanted to write a thesis on the work of American artist Fritz Scholder (1937–2005), a member of the Luiseño tribe who often claimed he was “not Indian.”  Carl was deeply influenced by Scholder’s thinking on “the new Indian art.” In 1970, Scholder had advocated for an Indigenous form of expression that was “influenced by what is happening today.” He pointed out that a contemporary Indigenous art could and should be influenced by all contemporary trends. “For the first time,” he asserted, “Indian artists have realized that they do live in the whole world, not only the Indian world.”  But even as he called for young “Indian artists” to embrace the contemporary, Scholder equally urged them not to lose sight of their heritage.

Carl was inspired not just by Scholder’s advocacy for a new “contemporary but… very Indian” art form, but also by his paintings, lithographs, and etchings, which depict contemporary Native Americans and their living conditions. By adapting Western Pop art styles, Scholder challenged his audiences with surprising, startling images, such as Indian with Beer Can, 1969. But Carl was told by one of his professors that Scholder’s art was not a topic worthy of academic study. Offended by what he heard as a racist put-down of a unique voice advocating for a new visual paradigm of Indigenous artistic expression, Carl abandoned his studies in 1977 to become a full-time artist.

A Career in Art

Carl Beam’s decision to devote himself fully to art was an incredible leap of faith, considering that artists of Indigenous descent were few and far between in Canada in the 1970s. Kick-starting his career, he participated in his first group exhibition at the Emily Carr Centre in Victoria in 1975.

As an Indigenous artist, Carl bristled at being pigeonholed as a follower of his Ojibwe contemporary Norval Morrisseau (1931–2007), who, through his Woodland School, was bringing Indigenous art and artists to the forefront of the Canadian cultural landscape. Other Woodland School members included Daphne Odjig (1919–2016), Carl Ray (1943–1978), Joshim Kakegamic (1952–1993), Roy Thomas (1949–2004), and Blake Debassige (1956–2022). The popularity of their work had left most collectors and appreciators expecting that art created by an Indigenous person would be—had to be—a painterly expression of cultural teachings set down in a Morrisseau-esque mode.

Although Carl respected the Woodland School style, he did not feel it gave him creative latitude to explore his emerging voice. Instead, much like Fritz Scholder, he gravitated to contemporary Pop art modes—such as the “Combines” of Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008), mixed-media works by Jasper Johns (b.1930), and silkscreen methods popularized by Andy Warhol (1928–1987). He was especially drawn to pieces that were collage-based, and that he had been exposed to during his formal training. In his art, Carl began combining found objects with painting, collage, prose, and poetry to produce richly layered image fields, engaging the viewer as a dynamic and active agent in the process of meaning-making.

For early works such as The Elders, 1978, a commission for the Ojibwe Cultural Foundation in M’Chigeeng First Nation, Carl worked from reference photographs, bringing together portraits, landscapes, and images of a flying eagle, and affixing an eagle feather to a painted backdrop. Later, he would integrate photographic material into his compositions using a solvent transfer technique inspired by Rauschenberg’s lithographs. Through collage, Carl found an elastic mode of expression that aligned with his emerging interest in semiotics (the study of signs and how they create and convey meaning), which he explored while pursuing his MFA at the University of Alberta. Semiotics helped him process the conflicting (and, he felt, often ridiculous) viewpoints and knowledge systems that were rolling over him as a student.

In 1978, Carl attended the National Native Artists Conference on Manitoulin Island. There he met Elizabeth McLuhan, Roz Vanderburgh, Beth Southcott, Tom Hill, and other scholars and curators who would be instrumental in encouraging alternative modes of contemporary Indigenous art beyond the Woodland School. Carl was not a traditionalist whose iconography was rooted in tribal ritual and symbolism, or in transformation and personal development. Instead, his evolving personal style, breaking from a racist paradigm, adapted innovative modes of representation. The contrast between Morrisseau’s Ojibway Shaman Figure, 1975, and Carl’s The Elders, 1978, shows the degree to which he had distanced himself from the Woodland School movement.

Carl’s path was an unconventional and creatively courageous one for an Indigenous artist to pursue at that time, and yet, it was his own—informed by Western-based art movements, styles, and modes that he co-opted to express a different take on modern indigeneity. As he later noted, “I wasn’t initially screwed by my own talent or anybody saying I was a natural. I was absolutely an unnatural.”  But he was well on his way to finding his own voice—one he would continue to hone over the coming decades.

Family and an Expanding Creative Practice

Carl Beam met his future wife, Ann Weatherby (1944–2024), during a trip to Toronto in August 1979. An American who was raised in Fairmount, New Jersey, she arrived in Canada as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War and became a landed immigrant in 1967. When she met Carl, she was living in Toronto and was an active member of the local art community, teaching at the progressive Three Schools of Art. Ann first saw Carl’s art while working as a medical illustrator at the University of Toronto’s Instructional Media Services. He had left pieces there for the consideration of collectors Levi Courier, a researcher in the Institute of Medical Science, and Dr. Bernhard Cinader, who headed the university’s Department of Immunology.  When Ann asked whose work she was looking at, she was told that the artist would be in the office the following day. From the moment Ann and Carl met, they were inseparable.

On October 24, 1979, two months after they met, they were married in New Mexico. As Ann states, “Right from the beginning, we travelled a lot.”  The two shared a profound respect and appreciation for each other and their individual artistic practices, and they collaborated often and occasionally exhibited together. As a result of Carl’s career trajectory, Ann became his general archivist, tracking sales of his works and their locations, and documenting many of their personal and professional discussions about contemporary art.

Ann and Carl returned to Toronto for my birth in December 1980. When I was eight months old, our family headed back to the American Southwest, first settling in Arizona and then finding a small adobe house in Arroyo Seco, New Mexico, just north of Santa Fe. This “land of enchantment,” as my parents referred to our new home, allowed them to explore their Indigenous roots as creative artists and ceramicists while also tuning in to the ancient mystical, creative energy they felt there. My mother later remembered:

This is where we connected with Native American pottery techniques, which were to become an all-consuming “buzz” for the next several years. We were living on the high desert plateau of northern New Mexico, near the northern pueblos… and right on top of the ancient Anasazi world.

Works by Ann and Carl were quickly embraced in the more accepting art markets of Santa Fe and Taos, and the couple were able to freely pursue their creative endeavours. They became interested in Native American pottery styles, particularly Santa Clara blackware and hand-building techniques. Although Carl painted primarily large-format watercolours while in the Southwest, this was also a prolific period for him and Ann in the production of pottery pieces. They dug their own clay and searched for slips, paint stones, and temper. They also visited the hot springs near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, where the famous Apache war chief Geronimo had retired to heal his wounds and gather strength. The site so deeply affected Carl that images of Geronimo found their way into many of his prints and paintings throughout his career.

In the summer of 1981, Carl and Ann relocated to Manitoulin Island, Ontario, where they worked and held pottery workshops. A year later, their ceramics drew the attention of Jerry Brody, the curator of the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico, for their “idiosyncratic” imagery. The couple also exhibited their pottery at the Museum of the Southwest in Midland, Texas. In the fall of 1982, my parents once again returned to the Southwest, to Black Canyon City, Arizona, where they continued their pottery practice using the distinctive red earth of the region. They also researched Navajo loom weaving, a technology and tradition they later brought back to Manitoulin Island.

Gaining Critical Recognition

In the early 1980s—a period of travel and heightened creativity—Carl’s work was included in two landmark exhibitions: New Work by a New Generation, 1982, a cooperative project of the World Assembly of First Nations, the Saskatchewan Indian Federated College, and the Norman MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina, curated by Robert Houle (b.1947); and Renewal: Masterworks of Contemporary Indian Art from the National Museum of Man, 1982, presented at the Thunder Bay National Exhibition Centre and Centre for Indian Art (now the Thunder Bay Art Gallery). Both exhibitions challenged the prevailing notions of so-called Indian art. Carl’s work—which took a new approach to urgent contemporary themes and issues facing Indigenous peoples—was a natural fit.

The pieces shown in both exhibitions established Beam as a visually strong artist whose ideas found form in a decidedly contemporary mode. In New Work by a New Generation, he exhibited Stone Geometry, 1980; Buried Images, 1980; and Stellar Associations, 1981. For Renewal: Masterworks of Contemporary Indian Art, he exhibited his painting Renewal, 1980, which gave the show its name. The exhibition’s curator, Elizabeth McLuhan, highlighted the complexity of the work’s composition, noting, “The image contrasts past and present in the juxtaposed depictions of flight: the natural grace of the eagle, and the unnatural technology of man.”  An early and active supporter of Carl’s career, McLuhan also curated his first major solo exhibition in a public institution, Altered Egos: The Multimedia Work of Carl Beam, at the Thunder Bay National Exhibition Centre and Centre for Indian Art in 1984. Altered Egos showcased his controversial life-sized watercolour on paper, Self-Portrait in My Christian Dior Bathing Suit, 1980.

In sketchbook after sketchbook, my father documented this fertile, formative time. These volumes are filled with love notes and portraits—some by Ann of Carl, and some by Carl of Ann. They include details of their lives and life together, along with schematics that Carl would often draw (envisioning future sculptural projects), ideas for paintings, and notes on architecture. Inspired by the work of Jack Kerouac and other beat generation poets, Carl also used his notebooks to record his spontaneous writing. His stream-of-consciousness ideations would inform much of his work. He called these writings “koans,” in reference to the Zen Buddhist tradition of challenging students with often paradoxical statements, questions, or pieces of dialogue as part of a meditative practice. Koans require students of Zen to create new meaning from seemingly illogical relationships—something Carl’s collage format was ideally suited to do. Many of his koans are written across the surfaces of his watercolours and oil paintings, such as Stellar Associations.

In the mid-1980s, Carl continued to develop his skills in different media and began adopting the photo-transferring technique in his work. It was perfectly suited to his collage process, which involved juxtaposing subjects and pictures from different historical periods and even different disciplines—including science, philosophy, and anthropology. In bringing together unrelated images in a single composition, he was able to make political comments, as can be seen in works such as The Artist with Some of His Concerns, 1983, and Exorcism, 1984, which was commissioned for Altered Egos.

A Fight for Equal Treatment

In 1983, after growing increasingly dissatisfied with how Native American art in the Southwest was presented primarily as a decorative commodity, without regard for Indigenous aesthetic and conceptual traditions, Carl returned to Canada and his unfinished battle to assert his creative voice and personal style as he saw fit. After spending the summer of 1983 on Manitoulin Island, we moved to Peterborough, Ontario, and into 222 Carlisle Avenue, a rent-controlled property that was part of a federal program that made houses (often in poorer neighbourhoods) available to Indigenous people living off-reserve. My father then purchased a large etching press from Praga Industries and began experimenting with different methods of printmaking.

Carl’s entrance into the art market had been upsetting to him. He wanted to be an artist in the same way that he felt other Canadians could be, with the space to explore visual thinking and their own iconographies, hopes, dreams, and innate creativity, without racial qualifiers being applied. He wanted to break down the wall of expectations related to “Indian-ness” that stood in the way of his and his peers’ creative evolution and critical acceptance. Time after time, he would show his work to collectors, museum administrators, curators, and fellow artists and feel a persistent invisible barrier of disapproval.

I remember watching these interactions, and I can recall my father’s anger and confusion. I see him arriving at a gallery—and other places where collectors would gather—and he would pull out a painting to display to the person we were visiting. Most often white, this individual would take the work in hand and then laugh in an odd way, pronouncing, “Carl, what is this?” Or, “Well, this isn’t Indian art.” Such dismissals enraged my father, who questioned the racial bias they betrayed. How could it not be “Indian art” when he was the person who had made it? How was it that his main goal in their eyes was to create something that looked like a projection of “Indian art”? This was where he would explain, time and time again, “I’m the artist! I am marking my experience in this way!”

My father was known for his dynamic personality; when he stepped into a room, the electricity was palpable. I used to watch people change as they approached him, almost as if melting. He was always at the centre of a crowd. He was adamant about his absolute right to choose the themes and topics of his art—in this, he would not be moved—and he was not afraid to let people know that he considered their inability to accept this as an expression of their ingrained racism. More than one conversation with museum directors or curators ended with: “Call me when you get over your racism.”

While the art market expected Carl to take inspiration from Indigenous (and, specifically for him, Anishinaabe) cultural traditions, he confounded his critics because he was drawn to decidedly non-Indigenous modes of artistic expression. Differences between the “traditionalist” and “modernist” camps in Indigenous contemporary art were debated at the third National Native Indian Artists Symposium, held in Hazelton, British Columbia, in 1983. Following a peaceful gathering that included traditional feasts and a performance, the discussion turned to the term “Indian art.” Some of the artists present—including Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun (b.1957)—suggested that the term was here to stay, given how institutionalized and commercialized it had become. Advocating strongly for the modernists, Carl argued for a change of term and insisted on the right to a personal aesthetic vision.

Carl told the group that his ambition was to be exhibited in the National Gallery of Canada, and he declared that he would fight for the equal treatment of his creative output.  It was in the living room studio of 222 Carlisle Avenue that he created The North American Iceberg, 1985—the first artwork by a contemporary First Nations artist to be acquired by the National Gallery of Canada.

Confronting Colonialism

Also in 1985, Carl Beam began a new project with the goal of working through his lingering trauma from his time at Garnier High School. During a trip to the Netherlands to attend the opening of Challenges, an exhibition at de Meervaart Cultural Centre in Amsterdam, he gave a press conference in front of the Anne Frank House. He staged this opportunity like a piece of performance art in the manner of German artist Joseph Beuys (1921–1986), who had advocated for the social potential of art in his own highly symbolic performance works. Standing there in a suit with half of his face painted red, Carl told reporters that he had travelled from North America to warn the world of the ongoing dehumanization of Indigenous peoples. He also spoke directly about the culture of silence surrounding the systemic child abuse at Canada’s residential schools, which were still in operation at this time and had not yet come to be regarded as tools of a state-sponsored cultural genocide against the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island.

Upon his return from Amsterdam, Carl began a series of pieces incorporating the image of Anne Frank. With this series, which includes paintings, prints, and ceramic works, he developed resonant strategies for treating difficult, urgent subjects. Indeed, the image of Anne Frank—perhaps one of the most well-known victims of the Holocaust—evoked a painful past, but Carl believed that her story could foster new modes of cross-cultural understanding. Through these works, his viewers voyage with him across centuries to witness the development, deployment, and devastation of colonial structures. These associations would evolve over time as he continued to confront harmful doctrines, institutions, and systems of thought in his creative practice.

In 1988, an invitation to attend a Garnier High School reunion prompted my father to grapple further with his residential school experiences. He viewed the invitation as a brazenly insensitive act, and he responded to it by creating posters for the Spanish School Reunion of ’88 and printing T-shirts, which he brought with him to the event and distributed free of charge to his former classmates. At the reunion, I remember, as an eight-year-old, walking with my father through what remained of the school. He showed me a large communal sleeping hall containing tiny metal beds, brick bathrooms, and showers. When we came to a room with a bookcase, he searched through it and found his copy of a Canadian history textbook, which he had signed and filled with caricatures when he used it as a student. My father took it with him. It sat on the bookshelf in his painting studio for the rest of his life.

While we were in the building, the other students remained outside, sitting under white tents. Few were willing to enter. The priests were surprised to find that many of the students were unhappy and distraught, and they were dismayed there could be such resentment.

Carl’s anger about his experience at Garnier is reflected in works such as Veni, Vidi, Vici, n.d.; Forced Ideas in School Days, 1991; and Sauvage, 1988—a multimedia work that features an image of Christ crucified in the graveyard of Garnier, above an image of Hiroshima after the detonation of the atomic bomb. These pieces provide contexts and vocabularies to discuss the residential schools’ notorious history. Following the Garnier reunion, Carl embarked on an investigation of the history of colonialism on Turtle Island—an investigation that would link his work on residential schools to the upcoming quincentennial of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the so-called New World. His research led to The Columbus Project, a large body of work made between 1988 and 1992 in several media, including painting, photo emulsion on canvas, and large-format etchings.

For four years, The Columbus Project in all its iterations dominated my father’s studio work. It takes aim at notions of “discovery” and the assumption of the superiority of Western European and rational knowledge systems over other approaches to gaining, conveying, and feeling knowledge, especially by First Nations on pre-contact Turtle Island. It raises the idea “that the moment of contact between the old and new worlds could no longer be celebrated as a triumphant moment of discovery” but should be seen, instead, as a prelude to centuries of genocide and cultural annihilation.  The Columbus Project was one of many exhibitions re-evaluating the colonization of the Indigenous peoples in the Americas.

While Carl was working on The Columbus Project, he also explored the theme of colonial domination in the multimedia series Burying the Ruler. The title is an ironic play on words, meaning both measurement and monarch. In the video that captures his performance, the system of knowledge symbolized by the ruler is laid to rest—buried—in the land, rendering it inaccessible, dead. Photographs from this burial rite became the basis for other works in the series, including Burying the Ruler (three panels), 1991, which was included in the landmark exhibition Indigena, held at the Canadian Museum of Civilization (now the Canadian Museum of History) in 1992, and Burying the Ruler (photo emulsion), 1992, one of four photo-emulsion works shown in Land Spirit Power at the National Gallery of Canada in 1992.

Final Years and Legacy

In 1999—after building an adobe house with his family on Manitoulin Island, and after eating potatoes and corn that he had cultivated on his own land, and after meals of wild meat and fish from local farmers—Carl descended on monolithic Toronto. There, he continued to refine his printmaking practice, working with Gordan Novak to develop techniques for screen printing on a variety of surfaces, including silk. But the speed at which he developed his thoughts and plans did not match the glacially slow pace of contemporary Toronto art consumers; consequently, Carl’s late work was decidedly outside public expectations and taste.

By the turn of the millennium, my father was exploring both the connections between the plant and human worlds and the connections between the human and natural worlds. From this interest evolved The Whale of Our Being series, 2001–03, which, in addition to the mixed-media work of the same name, includes pieces such as Big Dissolve, 2001, and Only Poetry Remains, 2002. To express his thesis that humans are bound to the same fate as whales, he collaged images of commercial whaling and butchering with others that showed symbols of the human capacity for killing on a massive scale, such as the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, which appears in Driver, 2001.

During the final years of his career, Carl found a champion in curator, author, and administrator Joan Murray (b.1943), who presented The Whale of Our Being at Oshawa’s Robert McLaughlin Gallery in 2000. It was Carl’s last art exhibition in Canada during his lifetime. He stayed true to his interests and his inner critical and creative impulses, which, when combined, made the exhibition openly critical of the art market and consumer society, and their inability to provide options and access for Indigenous artists. In an essay for the exhibition catalogue, Murray quoted my father to give context to his ecological concerns in relationship to the Canadian public and the art market: “Under the umbrella of the whale are commodification and dollars and killing, all things possible. Take it apart and look at the aesthetics, the beauty, the red and green mixtures. The Whale of Our Being includes whatever has happened to the whale, which in some kind of way happens to everything else. Maybe to our collective disappearance in the world.”

In 2005, Carl received the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts. His health and vision were failing, and he had to use a wheelchair at the ceremony. He was assisted to the dais, where Governor General Michaëlle Jean presented him with the award. Later, when a picture from the event was delivered to his home in a stately frame, he said, “I don’t even need to see it. She’s probably just standing over me, looking down.”

On July 30 of that same year, my father passed into spirit from complications of Type 2 diabetes. Three years later, Prime Minister Stephen Harper signed a restitution bill for residential school survivors and publicly apologized to them. Perhaps prophetically, my father was asked, in an interview with CBC Radio after receiving the Governor General’s Award, if he felt “validated,” knowing that all his work had at last been recognized. He responded, “No, this is not a validation. My work is its own validation.”