Peter Morin: Q & A

Tahltan artist walks with his mother in touching tribute.

“My most important job is being a son. Our parents, Janell and Pierre, have worked so hard every day for us, their kids. Throughout my practice, I have been wanting to make something that honours my most important teachers like our mom. Her name in the Tahltan language is Ezūdzah. She was gifted this name by Tahltan Elder Grandma Emma Brown. Our mom helped us, her kids, to know how powerful our Tahltan culture is. She helped us to know who we are in this world. She helped us to know our Elders.”

– Peter Morin, in his artist statement

Peter Morin’s creative practice addresses identity and issues related to land, language, colonial policies and the representation of Indigenous people in museums. Born in 1977 in Prince George, B.C., he is a member of the Crow clan of the Tahltan Nation.

Fundamental to his work as an artist, curator and writer is his mother, Janell. Along with teaching him what it means to be Tahltan, she encouraged his creativity from an early age and continued to illuminate cultural knowledge as he embarked on new projects as an adult. Although she is now walking on what Morin calls “her Alzheimer’s journey” he refuses to see her in any diminished way. 

Morin, based in Toronto as a professor at OCAD University, travelled back recently to northern British Columbia for the opening of their joint exhibition, her name is Edzūdzah, at the Smithers Art Gallery. The show, on view until Oct. 8, is a tribute to his mother, but also a heartfelt outpouring of gratitude.

The exhibition brings him full circle, in a long and roundabout way, as he explained to friends when he invited them to the show: “When I was a kid, my sister Nalaine bought me an acrylic painting set. I stayed in my little room and painted copies of photographs as you tend to do when starting to learn painting. Then, it was the suggestion that my little painting was good enough to be in a gallery. And then, it was our mom who drove me over to the Smithers Art Gallery with my one good little painting and said: ‘Go put your painting up in there.’ Now, 29 years later, mom and I, together, will have our artworks on the walls of the gallery.” 

Galleries West editor Portia Priegert interviewed Peter Morin via email in early September. Their conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

You speak of your mother with such love. Can you tell me a little about her? What is she like? What is her art like?

I think our mom would have gone to art school if she’d had the chance. And these days, I’ve been realizing that her art is deeply connected to her Tahltan cultural skill and practice. Tahltan art lives very differently than Western or European art. She told me when I was younger that she liked to paint, that she liked to draw, and that she would have these tools with her when on a hunt with her father’s hunting and guiding business. 

Over the years, I would talk with her about what I was doing, and she would help me and guide me in the work. This happens because of her skill level. She knew how to be in Tahltan spaces, and she knew her actions would contribute to our collective experience of Tahltan meaning in those spaces. She continues to do this, even while living deeply inside an Alzheimer’s journey, even while living full time in the care home at the Bulkley Lodge in Smithers. 

She is a part of a sibling group of 11 brothers – Johnny, Paul, Sidney, Robbie, Scott, Chris, Vernon, Leonard, Tommy, Bruce, Jerry – and three sisters – Grace, Diane, Anna. She raised four kids with our dad – Robert, Nalaine, Cathleen, Peter. 

She loved cooking giant meals and hosting family gatherings. She was an expert cook of game meats and knew how to spice the meat perfectly.

Your mother’s Alzheimer’s journey – I think it’s been at least a decade now? How is it going? I’ve been down the same road with my father, so I know firsthand the tremendous challenges of this illness, which I came to see almost like a long goodbye. So, I was touched to read that you refuse to see your mother in “any deficit kind of way.” Can you talk a little about this?

Our family carries with it what is often referred to as familial Alzheimer’s. Within mom’s sibling group, several of her siblings have lived and passed away with this. Mom’s journey with this passenger has been for 10 years now. 

My artwork over the past years has shifted so that I can understand her experience better. For example, I became a time traveller in my practice because that is what she was becoming. There is so much literature about Alzheimer’s that focuses solely on the brain dying and doesn’t look towards the person’s other capacities for creation. The tools that I have for building understanding are artistic tools and making art opened space for me to activate all my own capacities with the goal of helping my mother, our mother. 

This even included language, and how I was using it, like – ‘we walked with her into the care home.’ This means we are still walking with her. We didn’t ‘take’ her to the care home. We walk on this Alzheimer’s journey with her, especially because at some point, my sibling group will be experiencing it. She is teaching us still. And we need to be present as possibility for her teachings. Also, she is still a Tahltan Matriarch, a skilled practitioner of Tahltan culture. 

You have said your mother’s Alzheimer’s leaves you feeling lost — can you share a little about her role in your art practice, and how her cultural knowledge and community connections inform your work?

This is a very complicated question to answer because I feel like my whole life has been some sort of art-making, and that mom has been so careful to nurture a deep love and respect and care of Tahltan ways of being inside of my spirit. There is also a consideration of Tahltan art here, and how Tahltan art is every day.

And inside all of this, she would help me with the cultural pieces of some of the performances through very specific guidance. In some of the other performance works, she would help me to feel stronger in the work just by the nature of being who she is and my growing up watching her actions in cultural settings.

I changed my curatorial practice to be centred around her and our grandmother by prioritizing their presence in the curatorial thesis. I would ask myself, “How did I make sure our mom and grandmother were invited into the space?” And if our mom and grandmother weren’t present, then I’m not doing it right and I need to start again.

This joint exhibition must be very emotional for you. Can you describe it a little and talk about how you are paying tribute to your mother and why it is so important for you to do this? 

There is probably a lot of answer to this question also. One of the things I was reflecting on with this work was how much our mother worked with me, inspired me and helped me with my artistic work over the past 20 years. 

There is work in the exhibition that reflects this – my graduating piece from Emily Carr University in 2000, for example. Our mother directly contributed to this artwork because she asked her mother to gift me a bag of knitted squares. These knitted squares were put together by a community member named Mary Lux. She stayed with mom and me during a healing period after her surgery. Mary was also a person that our mom helped as a kid. Our mom did these types of things a lot for many people who needed help. 

This exhibition is my way to acknowledge her efforts, her incredible skill level. And it is also a way to acknowledge a well-lived life. There are people who think that because you have Alzheimer’s or dementia you slowly disappear. I don’t think this is right. She is still present. She is still vibrant. And she is still an active producer of knowledge and knowing while she is walking down an Alzheimer’s road.

One pivotal moment for you was your 2011 exhibition, Peter Morin’s Museum, at Vancouver’s former Satellite Gallery, a downtown space shared by several cultural institutions, including UBC’s Museum of Anthropology. That show seems, in some ways, to be about decolonizing the museum, an issue that has come to the fore in mainstream museological conversations over the last few years. Can you talk a little about why this performative work is important for you? What involvement did your mother have?

That project was focused on bringing Tahltan land into that space. This was important as an action and intention before even starting to unfold the performances and articulations of Tahltan Nation knowledge and Tahltan epistemological traditions. The work is experienced as a decolonizing action also, and this adds to the complications, and also adds to what was learned as a result of the exhibition. 

Our mom helped me with this. We worked together. The Museum of Anthropology / Satellite Gallery put together a loan agreement, and we borrowed all our mother’s family pictures from the walls at home because Peter Morin’s Museum is also a story of a family. 

Tahltan knowledge is lived through the family, practiced through the family. We asked mom to give a curator’s talk, and she was paid for her time and skill. She told the stories of the family photographs because this was a way to speak to an archaeology of knowledge. 

Her talk was exceptional. She is a leader in knowing our family’s relationship to the cultural matrix practiced by Tahltan people. Her talk brought people closer. I called her a curator of Tahltan history, and that was her talk. Before her talk, I sang to all the objects in Peter Morin’s Museum to wake them up for the talk.

×

1 of 2

“cultural graffiti: a song for our People’s Princess,” 2013

“cultural graffiti: a song for our People’s Princess,” 2013

performance at the Princess Diana Memorial, Hyde Park, London, installation view in “her name is Edzūdzah, Peter Morin and Janell Morin,” 2022, Smithers Art Gallery, Smithers, B.C. (performance documentation by Dylan Robinson; photo by Michelle Gazely)

×

2 of 2

“Mom’s Button Blanket,” 2013

“Mom’s Button Blanket,” 2013

installation view in “her name is Edzūdzah, Peter Morin and Janell Morin,” 2022, Smithers Art Gallery, Smithers, B.C. (photo by Michelle Gazely)

I saw your 2015 exhibition, Tahltan Song Cycle, at Open Space, an artist-run centre in Victoria. The exhibition included documentation of cultural graffiti, a project you undertook during a 2013 visit to Britain. I guess it could be described as a gentle confrontation – is that a good characterization? – at the heart of colonial power. Can you tell me a little about why you conceived this project and how your mother was involved?

I don’t think I have ever heard that characterization of cultural graffiti. It sure didn’t feel gentle while I was doing those public performance interventions. After each one, my body hurt. I was performing Indigenous power, specifically Tahltan Nation power, inside of the system that aimed very directly at ending the lives of all Indigenous people in Canada. 

I was invited to be a research fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London. Every day, I was running into a very live ‘Imaginary Indian’ and seeing how much British culture loved that Imaginary Indian. I found this was so painful. It also became very clear that British culture wasn’t interested in anything other than that. I would introduce myself, would immediately be challenged, and immediately would be invited to disappear. 

I went to 14 different sites and marked the surface of a monument or building with my voice. I was doing this also because Idle No More was happening in Canada, and I wanted to add energy to that important Indigenous movement. These actions culminated in two final performance interventions – cultural graffiti: a Tahltan NDN declares war on the British monarchy and cultural graffiti: a song for our People’s Princess. 

In the declaration-of-war performance intervention, I made button-blanket armour. This button-blanket armour was for our mother, and before the Alzheimer’s got worse, she wore and danced this button blanket in ceremonies back home. 

After this, we went to Princess Diana’s memorial site in Hyde Park. I went there specifically for mom because she loved Princess Diana so, so much. She woke me up for her funeral. She woke me up for the coverage of Diana’s death. I went there, with mom’s blanket on, laid down on the ground in that crowded park, and sang a love song into the earth underneath the memorial monument and left sage and tobacco on behalf of mom at that site. I also left the sage on behalf of all the Indigenous Elders who loved Princess Diana. 

Fundamental to so much of your work is Tahltan philosophy and ways of being. Obviously, this is a complex subject, but could you say a few things about what it means to be Tahltan, perhaps things your mother emphasized when she taught you about your culture? 

Tahltan people have been returning to our shared territory during the summer months to gather and harvest food for over 10,000 years.

Tahltan people love to laugh. Tahltan people love to make jokes. Tahltan people have fought, and continue to fight, through the pain that the Indian Residential School ­– and the governmental policies that supported this particular system – caused. 

Tahltan people have a beautiful art history, and it is the privilege of my life to contribute artworks that help continue that story.

Tahltan people love politics.

Tahltan people love the land and are exceptional hunters.

Tahltan people are exceptional orators.

Our mother taught us about who we were related to.

Our mother taught us about why we need to work for elders.

Our mother taught us about the places to go on the territory.

Our mother taught us how to respect and what respect actually means.

Our mother taught us about family, and the importance of family.

Our mother taught us how to work hard.

Our mother taught us how to work hard, and not expect anything in return.

Our mother taught us how to behave in cultural spaces.

Our mother taught us that we are Crow Clan, Tahltan Nation people. ■

her name is Edzūdzah, Peter Morin and Janell Morin, at the Smithers Art Gallery in Smithers, B.C., from Sept. 6 to Oct. 8, 2022.

PS: Worried you missed something? See previous Galleries West stories here or sign up for our free biweekly newsletter.

Smithers Art Gallery

1425 Main Street (Central Park Building), Smithers, British Columbia V0J 2N0

250-847-3898

please enable javascript to view

Visit Website

Tues to Fri noon - 4 pm, Sat 10 am - 2 pm