Museums often present Indigenous cultures as ‘frozen in time.’ Artist Kent Monkman on shifting that narrative

Museums are inherently colonial, according to Cree artist Kent Monkman. 

“You don’t see Indigenous people going around the world collecting artifacts and material and putting them under a roof like the way that these colonial European cultures have done,” he says in this bonus clip from So Surreal: Behind the Masks. “We would never do that.

“You can’t really decolonize [museums] because they are inherently colonial. But you can change the conversation about what’s inside them.”

In 2019, two of Monkman’s paintings were unveiled in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Great Hall in New York. 

“[The Met] commissioned me to create two paintings for the Great Hall,” he says. “They decided to open their collection and have artists come in and do interventions.” 

Monkman explains that the Met’s collection includes romantic, idealized representations of Indigenous people. Works like Eugène Delacroix’s The Natchez, for example, reinforce the theme of the dying or vanishing race. 

The painting shows a couple with their newborn after they fled the French forces that decimated their tribe. According to Monkman, it implies this is the last of the Natchez people, but in fact, they are very much alive. 

“I’ve really taken to task artworks of that period to examine how devastating those kinds of representations are,” he says. “It reinforces over and over again that Indigenous people only existed in the past and that we’re not relevant today or in the future.”

Monkman says he wanted to celebrate the life and resilience of Indigenous people in his two murals for the Met. 

While change in museums is slow, there is movement, Monkman says. He has served on museum boards and has seen museums hire Indigenous curators over the last 20 years. 

“These are all significant changes in terms of how Indigenous people are able to interact and reflect on the stories that have largely been told by the settler culture,” he says.

The documentary So Surreal: Behind the Masks explores how Indigenous masks from B.C. and Alaska made it into the hands of European Surrealists. Watch it now on CBC Gem and the CBC Docs YouTube channel.