Michelle Sound's forthcoming public artwork in Amiskwaciwâskahikan

As the Edmonton Arts Council implements the new public art policy, ​“Public Art to Enhance Edmonton’s Public Realm” (C458D), processes based on the policy’s principles of public visibility and accessibility, diversity and inclusion, public art appreciation, and city-wide impact are being put in place. These processes have already begun to shift the way public art is procured and the way that artists engage with the public. For Telus Transit Station, the EAC worked with three local Indigenous artists/​curators to select an artist for the project. The artist then worked with local knowledge holders to identify the imagery to be used in the artwork. The renewed policy enables these types of flexible, responsive, and curatorially-driven approaches that will help grow and develop a public art collection that is high quality, accessible, relevant, and representational of Edmonton’s diverse communities.

We asked one of the curators of Telus Transit Station, Emily Riddle, to reflect on the process and the significance of the public artwork by Michelle Sound (to be installed December 2022), in a guest article for the YEGArts blog. Read her thoughts below…

Amiskwaciwâskahikan is lucky to soon be home to one of Michelle Sound’s public artworks at the Telus Bus Station on Jasper Avenue and 100 St. This installation is part of an ongoing series by Michelle Sound that takes torn copies of black and white historical photographs and records and stitches them back together with colourful beads, moose hair tufts, and threads. I remember being in awe when I first saw the first image of this project. What does it mean for an auntie to take the archives and lovingly fill in its cracks, adorn it with her meticulous work?

Michelle Sound is a Cree and Métis artist, educator, and mother. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Simon Fraser University, School for the Contemporary Arts, and a Master of Applied Arts from Emily Carr University Art + Design. She is a member of the Wapsewsipi Swan River Cree Nation in Treaty 8 Territory. Her mother is Cree from Kinuso, Alberta and her father’s family is Métis from the Buffalo Lake Métis Settlement.

Her extended family has lived throughout Treaty 6 and 8 Territory. Michelle was born and raised on the unceded and ancestral home territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations where she currently lives, but her family has relationship to the lands Edmonton was built on and she visits frequently. Michelle Sound’s Kokum lived in Edmonton, as many families from Treaty 8 completed this migration to a large urban centre. Michelle Sound’s art practice is multifaceted from fur drums, to murals, to the archives and back. Her work is luscious, layered, smart, incisive, but always with an auntie snicker for those who know. So many of us leave nuggets within our work for our own people to discover.

I know that Michelle Sound’s work honours the complexities, messiness, and beauty of kinship. I see it in her teaching people to make drums, in the care of her work in dyeing rabbit fur for her art, and in the way she speaks about her extended family and their relationship to land. I already know the care in which Michelle is approaching this project, in visiting with people and spending time in the Archives of Alberta, positioning herself as Billy-Ray Belcourt has said as an ​“emotional historian of the future”.

When the jury met, Michelle Sound was at the top of each of our lists of artists whose work we wanted to see in Edmonton. Michelle has been very busy for the past few years, with residencies, shows, and expanding her practice to different mediums and projects. Recently, she had a show at the Art Gallery of St. Albert called kanawêyimêw (She takes care of them) which features a series of 14 dyed fur drums (Chapan Snares Rabbits) and a photographic series called nimama hates fish but worked in the cannery that speaks to her family’s migration to the west coast. Both of these works are about maternal matriarchal love, caring for your family and finding home in a new place. Her current show at the Burrard Arts Centre is called Aunties Holding it Together. The jury spoke excitedly about her most recent projects and how this site was calling for something exciting, incisive, and created with care for the land that it will rest on.

This bus station across the road from the Fairmont Hotel Macdonald, on a site that was an important outlook to Indigenous peoples prior to the construction of downtown. One of my core memories of this hotel was taking a break from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada hearings at the Edmonton Convention Centre with my mom. We had lunch in the harvest room with a painting of the fathers of confederation looking at us. Before the construction of this hotel began in 1912, this site was also at one point deemed ​‘The Galacian Hotel,’ a makeshift village of marginalized Ukrainian immigrants who were unable to find housing. [1] People continue to live in the river valley in mutually supportive but unsupported communities, a recent example of this being Camp Pekiwewin in Rossdale down the road from this bus station.

Transit connects us and many people who commute in and out of downtown or who are residents of the core will visit the art Michelle Sound’s work at this site. Michelle visited Edmonton this summer and we met up at Matthew Cardinal’s performance at the Ociciwan Contemporary Arts Centre, which naturally evolved into a group hang of Nehiyaw artists at Earls. We talked about the time she spent in the Archives of Alberta and how she had found many images of encampments on the Rossdale Flats and of Papaschase historical documents. In ​“Talking with My Daughter About Archives: Métis Researchers and Genealogy,” Jessie and Darrell Loyer write about how Indigenous people working in the archives ​“have to note the ways that primarily white people in positions of power (like Indian Agents, census-takers, and hospital staff) recorded official documents by mishearing or misidentifying Indigenous life”. [2] There is supreme beauty in using the colonizer’s records to create beautiful art reflective of Nehiyaw aesthetic and brilliance. 

Michelle’s piece is a collage of historic images of an encampment on the Rossdale flats, of both tipis and wall tents, most likely Nehiyaw and Métis people given the way they are dressed. There are a few figures in the foreground looking at the photographers and others in the background living their lives seemingly unaware that this moment is being captured. This camp includes horses, which were at one point the most populous animal on the continent and are spiritually significant to Nehiyawak.

The other component of the collage is a surveyed map dated 1899 of Chief Papaschase’s reserve, the reserve that was dubiously and illegally ​‘surrendered’ after pressure from Frank Oliver who believed this reserve was too close to the burgeoning settler towns of Edmonton and Strathcona. Much of this former reserve land ended up in the ownership of his son-in-law and we know the Papaschase are still fighting to be recognized as a First Nation who is owed a reserve as Treaty signatories.

In stitching together these two archival records with threads, beads, rick rack and tufts, Michelle Sound asks us to imagine a restitched present while we are in transit. On the hill above the site of both these photos, we are very much embedded in this history and in the forever now of a Nehiyaw present. I am so pleased this site will be home to auntie ethic and brilliance that honours impeccably dressed Nehiyawak, Treaty history, and Indigenous materiality.

Emily Riddle is Nehiyaw and a member of the Alexander First Nation (Kipohtakaw). A writer, editor, policy analyst, language learner and visual artist, she lives in Amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton). She is the senior advisor of Indigenous relations at the Edmonton Public Library. Her writing has been published in The Globe and Mail, Teen Vogue, The Malahat Review and Room Magazine, among others. In 2021 she was awarded the Edmonton Artists’ Trust Award. Emily Riddle is a semi-dedicated Oilers fan and a dedicated Treaty Six descendant who believes deeply in the brilliance of the Prairies and their people.

[1] Galician Hotel. Edmonton Heritage Council Blog.

[2] Jessie Loyer & Darrell Loyer. ​“Talking with My Daughter About Archives: Métis Researchers and Genealogy.” Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies. 22 June 2021.