Terrance Houle.The Wagon Burner (video still), 2003.
The Wagon Burner and Other Stories
July 4 - September 8, 2024
What are the ways in which wagon trains were instrumental to European settlers' westward expansion across Turtle Island; and how did Indigenous peoples mobilize to protect their lands from encroachment by settlers? What are the afterlives of wagons today, and what place do they occupy in Western Canada, including within the Calgary Stampede?
Departing from – and centered around – Blackfoot artist Terrance Houle's The Wagon Burner (2003), The Wagon Burner and Other Stories reflects on the social and political history of the wagon, and the ways in which it has shaped our collective imaginaries of both the North American landscape and the Indigenous communities that have lived on this land for thousands of years.
Bringing together newspaper clippings from the Library of Congress, montages of Western films, and posters from the Calgary Stampede, The Wagon Burner and Other Stories offers a snapshot of the history of this land, seen through the lens of a seemingly benign – yet often overlooked – mode of transport: the wagon.
About the Artist
Terrance Houle
(he/him)
Terrance Houle (b. 1975) is an internationally recognized interdisciplinary artist and member of the Kainai Nation, with ancestry from the Sandy Bay Reservation, Manitoba. His late mother, Maxine WeaselFat, was a member of the Kainai Nation; and his father, Donald Vernon Houle, is from the Sandy Bay Reservation, Manitoba. Both were third-generation residential school survivors, with the latter currently residing in the Blood Reservation in Southern Alberta. Houle’s work ranges from the subversive, the humorous, and the absurd to the solemn and the poetic. His practice often relates to the physical body, addressing questions around history, colonization, Indigeneity, and representation in popular culture, as well as memory, home, and reserve communities. He recently co-directed a short animation film, Otanimm/Onnimm, with his daughter Neko. The film has been widely screened at festivals in Los Angeles, New York, Toronto, New Zealand, Vancouver, and Oxford, among others.
