In Jacqueline Morrisseau-Addison’s public art installation on the façade of the Anvil Centre, the sun rises above a silhouette of prairie grass with the artist’s hand-embroidered floral beadwork adorning either side of the landscape photograph. Centred in the image is the beaded word spelling sagawakisis, which refers to the cycle of the rising sun in the Saulteaux dialect of Anishinaabemowin. Their public artwork, sagawakisis, our ancestors are always with us honours Indigenous medicine, spirit guides, lineage, and creation stories. It is an image that affirms the challenging journeys Indigenous people face as they retrace connections to their family histories, recognizing the powerful role of cultural belongings which guide their paths.
As a graduate student in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia, Morrisseau-Addison has an interdisciplinary and collaborative art, curatorial, and writing practice that works toward envisioning “a future in which all beings thrive.” In tandem with their studies and while creating this public artwork, Morrisseau-Addison visited the sacred belongings of Saulteaux, Anishinaabeg, and neighbouring nations that are in the collections of the Museum of Anthropology and the City of New Westminster Museum and Archives. From an Indigenous world view, these belongings are not aesthetic objects but are living entities that have their own specific creation stories and exist in relation to community. A question this artwork invites us to reflect upon is: How can institutions work toward making these reconnections? sagawakisis, our ancestors are always with us, speaks to the journey in searching for these stories of cultural inheritance and piecing together fragments of Morrisseau-Addison’s own family’s story.
Chelsea Yuill
Much of your practice is dedicated to retracing lineage to rebuild connections that have strategically been disrupted by the Canadian government. By gleaning stories from relatives as well as your inquiries into civic and museum archives, how do you navigate the empathy-centred relations that contrast with the brutality of the institutional archive?
Jacqueline Morrisseau-Addison
I’ll start by introducing myself. Boozhoo. Nindišinikaaz Jacqueline. Gaawiin mashi ingikenimaasiin Anishinaabe wiinzowin. Nindoodem mukwa. Niidoonjii Lethbridge, Alberta. Niin shiigoo daaya Vancouver, maanpii Musqueam, Squamish miinwaa Tsleil-Waututh akiing. Chi miigwech kina geghoo. Hello. My name is Jacqueline. My last names are Morrisseau and Addison. On my father’s side, the Addisons came from England and settled in Southern Saskatchewan in the 1900s. On my mother’s side, we are Saulteaux from Keeseekoose First Nation in Treaty 4 Territory. On her side, my great-grandfather is Alfred Morrisseau and my great-grandmother is Alice Compton (née Genaille). My grandmother is Maryanne Morrisseau and my mother is Jean Morrisseau-Addison. I am Bear Clan and I was born in Lethbridge, Alberta, but currently live in Vancouver. I express my gratitude to the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations whose lands I am very fortunate to live with.
My work is grounded in my family’s story of reconnection. In a way, my practice is a series of love letters to my family and kin. We have endured and continue to endure so much, but despite it all, we find a way to embody love, humour, and joy in all that we do.
My great-grandma Alice, we call her Grannie, is a residential school Survivor, which has significantly disrupted our family. My mother is a ’60s scoop Survivor, which was another way that the Canadian government attempted to assimilate Indigenous children by removing them from their families and cultures, having them adopted into white families. For a long time, my mom and I felt that void, and it was really important to us to look for our relatives who we hoped to find. When we requested information about our family from the Manitoba Post-Adoption Services, we received an information package including birthdays, health records, and social worker notes; however, all the names – except for my kokum Maryanne’s – were redacted. They also included a photograph of my mom when she was a baby that was in a newspaper clipping from 1965. The article, which spotlighted the foster home my mom was in, was titled, “Like Getting a Bank Loan: Foster Mother to 144.” This was the first photograph and, so far, the only photograph my mom has of herself as a baby. This photograph and the context that we received it in has really shifted the way I think about photography and archives. Every photograph we have is precious, and with each piece we find, our understanding of who we are becomes a bit clearer. Because of the information that is withheld from us, we had to do our own research to find names and contact people through social media platforms, sharing the fragmented story we had, until we luckily found our family.
Shortly after finding them, I came across the Anishinaabemowin term bīskabiyang, in a book called As We Have Always Done (2017) by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Bīskabiyang encouraged me to reflect on the deeper meanings of reconnection and the reality that this process is not and cannot be an individualistic endeavour. From how I understand it, bīskabiyang is the ongoing process of returning to ourselves. It is a lifelong journey of learning and unlearning, and requires continued efforts to connect in genuine ways with kin and teachings that have been passed on through generations. It is inherently interconnected to all that we are in relation to – and that comes with many responsibilities.
Therefore, creating art that embodies bīskabiyang means that my family is always a part of this work. This is not just my story, but our story, and so I have a responsibility to ensure that I am sharing what is allowed to be shared and telling our story in a way that we all feel good about.
CY
Land, place, relations, time, and material: all of these are connected for you. Can you speak to your process in making this public art installation and its icons of personal and cultural significance?
JMA
I spent a lot of time at the beginning of this project reflecting on how to share a story specific to who and where I come from in a space that would be witnessed by so many people, from many unique cultures. The Anvil Centre is situated in unceded Coast Salish territory and in the urban setting of New Westminster. It’s an active multidisciplinary arts space with year-round programming and houses the City’s archives and museum collection.
Alongside this project, I’ve been working as a Cultural Interpreter at the Museum of Anthropology (MOA), researching plains and woodlands Anishinaabe belongings, and creating a pair of moccasins that I am gifting to their teaching collection. Of course, since their inception, museums are complicated spaces that haven’t always prioritized Indigenous peoples’ voices or perspectives. A lot of our belongings and relatives are in these spaces and have arrived there in many ways – theft, coercion, public and private sales, donations, and gifts – and during periods when we weren’t allowed to practice our respective cultural practices.
The process of researching belongings at MOA and the Anvil Centre has felt similar to how it felt looking for our family. I’m grateful to my auntie Irene Compton, who reminded me that all of these belongings are sacred. They all have creation stories and are connected to living people, the land, the cosmos. Unfortunately, the way a lot of these belongings are displayed or presented doesn’t communicate this connection. Sitting behind glass cases and in storage drawers, given identification numbers, and the reality that their creation stories haven’t been carried with them to these places result in these institutions having little to no information about them. In a way, they feel neglected, but they still exist and deserve attention and care. I believe that they can be reunited with their creation stories once again, and I believe that this work is part of the responsibility of these institutions who house them.
With all of this in mind, I wanted to create an image that affirms the difficult journeys that I and many Indigenous folks are on as we search for answers and connection to those we come from, all while being so far from home and navigating urban settings like New Westminster and Vancouver. The base of this image is a photograph of a sunrise I watched with my mom when we went back home last fall. Whenever I think of home, I’m reminded of the deep relationships our people cultivate with the land, and the knowledge we learn from one another. Sagawakisis refers to the rising sun, which signals a new day, a fresh start. Along the sides of the image are beaded plants that guide me. As I don’t have references of my family’s beadwork styles (as they may be lost or we have not been reunited yet), I’ve been learning from the beadwork in these collections and other makers to create my own beadwork styles. The florals in this image will be present on the moccasins I’m creating for MOA. So in a way, it traces my footsteps in both institutions, acknowledging the belongings I’ve visited who reside there, and is a part of my work of constructing and repairing my own family’s archive.
Chi miigwech to my mom, Jean Morrisseau-Addison, and my aunties, Irene Compton and Dolores Compton, for their guidance in this project.
