Cornies: Canada Day, a mile-marker on our country’s road to diversity

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Nancy Deleary leans over a small wooden table in the atrium of East Lions community centre in London. She is sketching silhouettes that will be affixed to her newest mural, Way of Life, before its unveiling just ahead of Canada Day.

The figures, to be mounted against a brightly painted wampum belt that wraps around the tall interior fireplace, depict healthy, active individuals: a hockey goalie, a pair of walkers midstride, a tennis player, a lacrosse player, an aquafit class.

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Deleary lapses easily into an explanation of the wampum belt’s significance. It represented an agreement “among the tribes of this land” that its resources – water, animals, plants – would be shared and not exploited.

“We all had to live in this dish with one spoon,” she says, alluding to broken promises of the past, but also to aspirations for the future. “People need to learn about the treaties and agreements made with the people of this land. We’re in a very important time now. People need to work together for the future.”

Way of Life is only Deleary’s second commission outside her home, the Chippewas of the Thames First Nation. An earlier work, All Are My Relations, was installed in 2021 on the exterior of the St. Thomas Public Library.

Just a dozen or so metres from Deleary at East Lions, another mural project already is finished and in place. Firekeeper, a series of seven colourful panels by Ojibwe artist Mike Cywink, connects visitors to Indigenous creation myths. Fish, turtle, muskrat, fox, fire and eagle all tell their stories, surrounding a central panel in which two silhouetted figures, surrounded by butterflies, dangle precariously from a bright white orb.

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“It’s a message to everybody in society that we have to lift each other up and look out for each other. Those figures are doing that,” Cywink says.

Deleary’s work is the first public art project to showcase an artistically interpreted wampum belt. Cywink’s mural is the first to be complemented by a connection to the City of Music’s Songlines project. Using a QR code, viewers of the mural can connect to a Spotify channel and hear local musicians, including Indigenous artists. In addition to the money that comes from the city’s culture services public art budget, Songlines is supported by the Rotary Club of London.

The dual murals are the first two works in what will comprise the city’s permanent Indigenous artwork collection. Funding was arranged through the London Arts Council’s purchase-of-service agreement with the city, whereby council designates funds for the city’s public art and monument program. Another project will be unveiled later this year in the Carling Heights neighbourhood.

Deleary is grateful for the commission, of course. But she can’t help pointing out that the same city that is celebrating her work also continues to flush more than 100 million litres of raw, untreated overflow sewage down the Thames River each year during heavy rains.

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“Chippewas of the Thames is downstream from London,” she says. “We can’t fish; we can’t even go near the river anymore. Every time it rains, the city opens up its gates and raw sewage comes down. The dish with one spoon, it’s being violated.”

The city’s wastewater treatment operations department continues to work at the problem, modernizing sanitary and stormwater systems and making incremental progress each year. But it’s a slow, expensive process.

London is riddled with those kinds of ironies. Despite the declaration of a “climate emergency,” for example, city hall can’t summon the political will to stem the use of gasoline powered mowers, blowers and trimmers, even though a mower, for example, spews as many pollutants in one hour as an average automobile produces by travelling 70 kilometres.

But back to those murals, intended to remind us of our obligations to each other and to the planet.

Eunju Yi, executive director of the London Arts Council, makes the point that, as a community, we need to move beyond lip service, symbolism and land acknowledgments. We need to continue pushing toward real change.

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“As we move toward meaningful reconciliation-related actions toward the surrounding First Nations community, it’s very important that we don’t repeat the baby steps,” she says. Public art projects highlighting Indigenous themes and artists are one way to move toward greater commitment. “We’re not just talking about it. We’re actually making it happen and encouraging other people to participate in this journey with us.”

Alongside all its festivities, Canada Day should remind us that, as diverse peoples, we’re on a journey and there’s still a lot of work to be done.

Larry Cornies is a London-based journalist.

cornies@gmail.com

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