I’ve decided to create my narrative through visual art represented here in the piece titled ‘Belonging’ Oil Pastel on Watercolour.
As long as I can remember I’ve felt like an odd duck. I never fit in well with my peers at school and spent the majority of my time in University exploring the notion of ‘belonging’ inside and through my artwork. Does that give me the title of artist? Maybe. Canadian, definitely, I have a passport that says so.
I am also, gay, and so I know a little something about being a marginalized minority.
I’m not comparing growing up gay in Canada to the entire genocide of First Nations people. I do know what it feels like to be isolated from my culture, though, growing up in a small town in northern Alberta and feeling like a complete alien to the world around me. Too sensitive, feminine, creative, all I wanted was to find peace inside a community and family structure that didn’t understand me, and tried to change me.
When I look at Lawrence Pauls work I feel the physical and emotional otherness. The First Nations iconography is often juxtaposed against European ideals. The ideas play together quite harmoniously in an aesthetic context and yet the tension just below the colourful surface is evident. The piece I chose to photograph made me feel very uncomfortable. It was a mass of old white underwear in the shape of a cross to represent the children who died in residential schools. I could never, and will never fully understand their suffering, and so I felt my only option was to link it to my own and create a piece that spoke to that isolation and fear.
As previously stated, my homosexuality is not genocide. The fear and shame I felt as a child, is not the same as a child forced to attend a residential school. My experience operating in the world, as a functioning adult with ideas, opinions, spirit, and, yes, some residual shame, is what I have to draw upon to try and understand the desecration of the First Nations people. It is my personal mandate, and one of the reasons I decided to become a teacher, that no child under my care and protection, ever be made to feel inferior for any reason. I’ve spent my adult life trying to repair the guilt I feel for something I can’t control, but that has also fostered within me an empathy for similarly marginalized children, regardless of circumstance.
No one should be left behind.