Ariel Smith: Your latest work MEDICINE AND MAGIC consists of two separate videos that are then presented as a dual channel video installation. One of the videos reflects on your nêhiyawak family history and one on your Scottish family history. Can you speak about the choice to create two separate videos that are then shown simultaneously in the same physical space?
Thirza Cuthand: They’re two different stories coming from two different cultures, but at the same time those two cultures are both living within my body simultaneously. I think that’s why I wanted to have the videos separate but playing at the same time. Almost like they are in conversation with each other.
AS: Mixed-race Indigenous identity is a theme you’ve frequently returned to in your work, I’m specifically thinking of earlier tapes like THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS, and also more recently with THIRZA CUTHAND IS AN INDIAN WITHIN THE MEANING OF THE INDIAN ACT. You’ve said you feel more connected to your nêhiyawak culture...
TC: Yeah. I really didn’t know that much about Scottish things. I mean, there’s some food that my grandma made that my mom would make too sometimes, but that turned out to pretty much be British food actually. I wasn’t really raised that way. My grandma was the only white person in my family. I wasn’t really raised around white people except for who I went to school with and when I would go see my grandma.
AS: Right, so you were raised around your Cree family and family history, but you say you know less about your Scottish ancestors.
TC: Yeah.
They’re two different stories coming from two different cultures, but at the same time those two cultures are both living within my body simultaneously.
AS: In one of the videos in MEDICINE AND MAGIC, the one featuring the bears, we learn a story about your Great Great Grandfather Misatimwas being doctored with the bear robe. This is a part of your family’s recorded and oral history, something that you grew up hearing. The second video tells us about a woman from Scotland, Isobelle Sinclair, who you learned about recently through your own internet research and may also be an ancestor. How does your relationship to the two stories differ? Does one feel more emotionally proximate or more authentically yours?
TC: Yeah, I mean because Misatimwas who is my Great Great Grandfather, I’m a direct descendant of him. I know for sure that I am related to him and exactly how and I heard the stories of him throughout my childhood. And then Isobelle Sinclair is more of... It’s more tricky because I just know that Sinclair is a name associated with my family history in Scotland. And she lived close to the area that my Great Grandmother immigrated from to get to Canada. So there’s a high potential we’re related, but at the same time it was 1633 when she died, and I don’t know much about her. There was very little information in the database….
AS: Yeah you found out about her in the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft which is an online resource right?
TC: Yeah. Exactly. So there wasn’t much information there about her. I don’t think it even said how old she was when she died. And I don’t think it says if she had children either. So I don’t know how she could be related to me. It’s just that we have the same last name in our histories. So it’s more tenuous, which is how my relationship is with my father’s side anyway.
AS: Tenuous?
TC: Yeah. So I’m much more connected to the story of Misatimwas because I’ve known that story from a young age whereas Isobelle Sinclair is just some name and some tragic history that I found online in this database about witches that were executed. It’s also more removed from me because it was so long ago, and whereas the other one was in 1885 which is a long time ago, but it’s also not that long ago, comparatively.
AS: How did the difference, in terms of your connection to the two different stories, how did this difference impact the way you decided to impart the stories to the audience?
TC: I think there’s some distance in the imagery and the way this story is told about Isobelle. There’s just the facts about her presented in text, and then some general facts about witch hunting in Scotland whereas the story about Misatimwas being doctored for that wound comes across as more intimate or more…
AS: Visceral?
TC: Yeah! I’m actually making a whole separate video about why Misatimwas was wounded, a whole separate video on that story.
AS: Cool
TC: Yeah
AS: It’s interesting because there’s a part of me that while I was viewing this new work, I was thinking about your experience of finding, through your own internet research, about this person that may be a distant relation, and it reminded me of when non-indigenous people do that with an Indigenous ancestor…
TC: 23 and Me.
AS:Haha yeah. But it was a flip of the script. The opposite of what we’re used to hearing, which is the non-indigenous person, like a settler person, discovers that they have a distant indigenous relation, and then suddenly their identity forms around this narrative. So I just thought that layer was interesting and wondered if it had crossed your mind at all when you were making the piece, but...
TC: Yeah, I didn’t really think of it that way, but that’s interesting to point out because I actually know a bunch of Cree/Scottish people specifically who are trying to connect and explore their Scottish side. It’s different obviously because learning about having Scottish ancestry isn’t going to have the same problems with people taking on an identity to get grants and jobs. But it’s true, it does flip the script…
AS: In this new work there seems to be a commentary on the oppression and repression of both nêhiyawak medicine and ceremonial traditions, and I guess what you would call Scottish medicine and ceremonial traditions or practice, through British colonization.
TC: Yeah. I mean that’s the problem when you make Indigenous art, everything circles back to colonization. Obviously Scottish folk magic was a big thing and then Christianity came on the scene and started pushing people around and trying to get rid of what they saw as pagan or demonic because it was of the devil and all that kind of thing. The same thing with Cree and other Indigenous rituals and ceremonies and practices happened. Actually the medicine bundle that is talked about in this piece, the bear robe that was used in the doctoring was buried in an unmarked grave so that anthropologists couldn’t steal it and sell it to the Smithsonian or whatever.
AS: Grave robbers
TC: Yeah! So I think about that, about the actual burying of this ceremonial object, and then comparing that with actually burning an entire human being, which is what was done to Isobelle Sinclair, because she was doing a ritual that the locals didn’t agree with. It was actually a really benign ritual. She was just doing a spell or a prayer I guess to protect cattle.
AS: Yeah it’s interesting to make that correlation because I mean the “British Empire” learned how to do what they did from the colonization of Scotland and Ireland, and then used what they learned from that and went to their genocidal empire building project all over the world including here in what’s now called Canada.
TC: Exactly
Usually, I’m in my own videos but these stories were about real people who aren’t me so it seems like it was better to have them represented by the animals they were attached to when the two stories happened. Bears and Cows.
AS: You made this piece during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and various stages of social isolation and quarantine, or what I’ve just been referring to as “End Times”. What was it like creating in this context and did it affect the project?
TC: Well, I mean, a lot of the images are taken from stock footage that I purchased so that would have happened with or without COVID because I wanted to have the ocean in there and I don’t live near an ocean anyway. I couldn’t go to Scotland to shoot regardless of the pandemic because I don’t have the money to do that. The footage of the cows I could shoot because they were in my neighborhood.
AS: Cows?
TC: Yeah. They’re just on the next block, there’s a farm. So I could just walk over there and film them, but
AS: Oh yeah. Riverdale Farm!
TC: Yeah, and then the footage of the bears came from some Super 8 that I had shot in Saskatchewan last summer. I used that footage and then some stock bear footage. It was really complicated, though because you can’t really do shoots. While I was making it, you definitely couldn’t. I’m actually doing a shoot later this month that’s with actors and a set and everything, and that will have to be very different now.
AS: Yeah. It’s interesting because even when I was coming up with this question, I was thinking about isolation, social isolation when you’re creating and I guess that there always is a period of isolation with creating art at least in part of it if not all. So in some ways maybe it didn’t feel that different really?
TC: I don’t know. Without COVID it might’ve turned out differently. I’m not sure. It would have expanded what I would have been able to do, but at the same time, I think there’s something about the use of the stock footage that is related to the distance between me and the two stories. Usually I’m in my own videos but these stories were about real people who aren’t me so it seems like it was better to have them represented by the animals they were attached to when the two stories happened. Bears and Cows.
AS: You’re very present in the majority of your media artwork, either your body or your voice or both. In this new work, as you just mentioned, you’re not featured in it in the same way you usually are. Not only did you not film yourself, you also used the words of other people as a storytelling device. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a piece from you that has neither your voice, words or body. The bear video features the words of FineDay. It’s the story of your Great Great Grandfather, but it’s through the account by FineDay. So you use his words and then in the video featuring the cows the text you use was taken directly from an internet database. Why did you decide to go a different direction with this new work?
TC: Yeah. I did try at first actually to write monologues that would be added to the videos as voice-overs and they just weren’t working. And then I remembered I wanted to... I remember reading that account or finding that book we had growing up by FineDay that had that story of Misatimwas being doctored with the bear robe, and just how magical and interesting it was to read this story about my ancestors. And so I wanted to present it, similar to the way I first experienced that story from somebody’s text from a long time ago. Like I mentioned I’m trying to tell that story about Misatimwas in a more personal way in another piece, but this one, I think I just wanted it to be less coloured by my take on it and my feelings about it.
co-published by imagineNATIVE and Vtape
