MCC's Indigenous gallery gives artists place to tell stories 'in their voice'

The Midland Cultural Centre is creating an Indigenous art gallery.

The gallery, which comes in response to the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report, will be located in the facility’s first-floor atrium gallery.

“Our hope is that this new gallery, which will focus on the work of local Indigenous artists and artisans, will be a place where their stories can be told, in their voice,” MCC board chair John Hartman told MidlandToday.

The MCC will operate the gallery focusing on work by artists and artisans of the Beausoleil First Nation and members of the Georgian Bay Métis community.

The inaugural exhibition of the MCC Gallery of Indigenous Art is entitled: Andy Trudeau 1924-2013, The Drawings.

“It tells a story about Andy’s life, lived on the outer islands of Georgian Bay, in drawings that are direct, understandable, and full of information and humour,” Hartman said.

Trudeau grew up on a homestead his family built on Spider Bay in the mid-1920s. The family is part of the historic Georgian Bay Métis community.

“There is no road access to Spider Bay, only water access from Parry Sound and access in winter over the ice, which in the days before scoots and snowmobiles, was largely on foot,” Hartman said.

The Trudeau family descends from Jean-Baptiste Trudeaux, a blacksmith with the British navy, and Angelique Papanaatyhianoncoe. They moved from Drummond Island to Penetanguishene in the 1820’s, and settled at Trudeaux Point.

Hartman recounted how when Trudeau was 87 years old and living at Hillcrest Village in Midland, he was trying to explain what a ‘scoot’ was to a fellow resident.

The other resident didn’t seem to really understand, so he asked his daughter Jo-Anne to bring him a pencil and paper. His idea was to draw a scoot by way of explaining what it was.

“After this first pencil drawing, Andy became an artist, drawing daily in graphite pencil on paper and  later with coloured pencils in a sketchbook,” Hartman said.

“By the time of his passing two years later he created an astounding group of drawings that documented the scoots and boats he built, and the animals, birds  and fish he caught and trapped in his long life on the outer islands of Georgian Bay.”

Hartman said Trudeau’s drawings are full of precise information about their subjects, even though Trudeau paid little attention to the conventions of perspective.

“Taken together these drawings form an extraordinary document of a life lived on the remote and hard-to-access islands of Georgian Bay,” Hartman said. 

Hartman said Trudeau had no formal education, but rather learned from experiencing the art of living in this unique place while also learning the habits of the fish and animals that also inhabit it.

He learned to “build boats, navigate through the shoal ridden waters, and when and where the ice was safe to travel on.”

Hartman worked for Trudeau in the fall and winter of 1973-74 and lived with him and his wife Pat at their home at the mouth of Twelve Mile Bay.

“This was my ‘finishing school’ in the art of living on Georgian Bay,” Hartman recalled. “Andy was fond of saying to me, ‘I guess they didn’t teach you that in university.’ When you needed something, the most practical thing was to make it with materials at hand.”

When the first scoots were built, these flat-bottomed boats designed to move over ice and also over open water, were powered by aircraft engines with propellers mounted in front of the engines and designed to pull.

“This meant the propellers were dangerously close to the driver and passengers,” Hartman noted.

“After some fatal accidents, it became clear that the engine should be mounted with the prop at the back but this required a pushing prop. With none readily available, Andy imagined how such a prop would work, laminated birch planks together and essentially carved one from this block.”

Hartman said Trudeau took the same approach to making drawings: just start doing it and figure it out as you go.

“At the most conscious level they are representations of the details of his life on Georgian Bay,” he said.

“But like any good artist, his process allowed his world view, more a part of his (subconscious) mind, to fill the drawings. The picture space he creates is one where people, animals, birds and fish live with equal presence, where their size is determined by their importance in the story being told, and where gravity does not always hold them to the ground.”

A prominent artist himself, Hartman said the most curious thing to him is Trudeau’s habit of drawing airplane wings on top of his scoots.

“He never built such a thing but clearly he dreamed of doing this someday,” said Hartman, who recounted how Trudeau came close to flying once during a ‘free for all’ scoot race at Penetanguishene's Winterama.

“He was in the lead, going 100 miles per hour, when he hit a bump and the scoot left the ice, achieved an altitude of six feet and for a brief  moment, became airborne,” Hartman said.

“Andy won the race. I believe that making these drawings at the end of his life gave him the same sense of accomplishment as building and racing his scoots.”

The exhibition will open as a virtual exhibition on the MCC website next Friday (Sept. 17) and will be open to the public when the MCC officially reopens its doors later this fall.