Kent Monkman

Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, a shape-shifting time-traveller, gives a cosmic history lesson.

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When you enter Kent Monkman’s exhibition, Being Legendary, on view at the Royal Ontario Museum until March 19, you see two large vivid paintings that depict the flight of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle from pâkwan kîsik, “the hole in the sky that connects this world to another behind the Seven Sisters, the stars some of you call the Pleiades.” 

The Toronto-based Cree artist uses his alter ego – the legendary gender-fluid, shape-shifting Miss Chief – to ably critique Western art and history by appropriating museological language and approaches. Given that we live within an ocular regime, Monkman’s figurative style is conducive to storytelling. Apart from the exhibition’s visual appeal, its playfulness and tongue-in-cheek sensibility is affirmed in evocative text written in Miss Chief’s voice by Monkman’s longtime collaborator, Toronto-based media artist Gisèle Gordon. 

The exhibition’s 35 works can be divided broadly into three sections: Miss Chief’s origins and her flight to Earth; the on-ground realities of the residential school tragedy; and a future Indigenous history. In this journey, Being Legendary, tells us about âcimowinak – the stories that hold truths, knowledge and histories. Monkman also evokes the legendary Cree mîmîkwîsiwak (little people), and interrogates the role of museums and how collections are presented. 

Monkman’s engagement with paleontology is manifested through a mammoth tooth, as the narrative tells us, unearthed from Indigenous homelands, and a fossilized shoe with a towering heel that Miss Chief would favour. It is his way of questioning the subjectivity of truth. We saw something similar in his 2019 work, Jackson’s Hole, made with copper leaf on ancient hand-carved, lake-smoothed limestone chosen by the artist. Monkman is raising a question: Where are the Indigenous stories of the Mesozoic era?

The exhibition includes cultural objects like beaded moccasins from the museum’s permanent collection. Some items, however, are absent. One interesting work features an empty display case lined with red velvet. There is an indentation where an object once sat. The piece is an allusion to the Creator Stone, papâmihâw asiny, a meteorite about the size of a car tire that long ago landed some 200 kilometres southeast of Edmonton. Revered by Indigenous people across the Prairies, it was stolen 150 years ago by an ardent Christian missionary, George McDougall, to leverage his conversions of Indigenous people. The meteorite found its way into the ROM’s collection, where it was displayed until 1972, before being loaned to the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton. Monkman’s call for repatriation was serendipitously answered by the Alberta government weeks before the show opened when then-premier Jason Kenney said: “It does, and must, belong to the First Nations of these lands.” 

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Kent Monkman, “Constellation of Knowledge,” 2022

Kent Monkman, “Constellation of Knowledge,” 2022

acrylic on canvas, 93” x 124” (courtesy the artist)

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Kent Monkman, “Compositional Study for Song of the Hunt,” 2022

Kent Monkman, “Compositional Study for Song of the Hunt,” 2022

acrylic on canvas, 48” x 72” (courtesy the artist)

Monkman continues with familiar themes of colonization we saw at his 2015 exhibition at Toronto’s Gardiner Museum, The Rise and Fall of Civilization, which looked at the near-extinction of the American bison, and in his diptych, mistikôsiwak: Wooden Boat People, commissioned in 2019 by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Yet, not all is known, nor the full story told, suggests the blue-hued Constellation of Knowledge, a 2022 painting that gathers unnamed figures posed amid a starry sky, evoking the unexplored and unknown.

The show encompasses tragedy with The Escape, an arresting painting of a young girl gesturing to the mîmîkwîsiwak, the little people, to keep silent. In the background, we see colonizing forces being misdirected to facilitate her flight: “When they came to take our awâsisak, they said they were taking our children to schools,” Miss Chief’s narration continues. “Those places were not schools.” Next is a painting that references the 1885 hangings of eight Indigenous men at Fort Battleford after the North-West Rebellion. Then, like a bookend, we see a haunting painting, Study for The Sparrow. Displayed in a dark recess, it pulls you away from the rest of the show. It shows a child reaching for a bird perched on the sash of an open window. Across the room, beneath a cross hung on a grey wall, two children sleep on metal cots. 

Being Legendary makes me think of Pekka Hämäläinen’s 2022 book Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America, in which the Finnish historian argues that “sovereign Indigenous America persists in the dynamism of modern Native communities, in the endurance of traditional ways of life, and in the continuation and evolution of the primary Indian response to colonialism: resistance.”  

But Monkman does not want the narrative to be trapped in colonialism. He breaks free from the compulsion of history in the show’s third part: a set of 11 large portraits of inspirational Indigenous people of the present, the Shining Stars series he started in 2020. These paintings are monuments to an Indigenous future. 

If you are in an exploratory mode – rather than simply touring the exhibition with existing assumptions and truths – your experience will be fuller. Being Legendary is pedagogical in tone, offering a pathway to a new museology with its reclamation of a colonial institution. ■

Kent Monkman: Being Legendary at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto from Oct. 8, 2022, to March 19, 2023.

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