Making Art from a Human Rights Standard
Fundamental human rights documents have many virtues, but a poetic turn of phrase is rarely among them. Here, Brian Phillips analyses the practice of Anishinaabe artist Barry Ace to argue that through arts-based consciousness raising and collaborative creation, it is possible for human rights standards to find compelling new lives as works of art.
For as long as the sun shines, the grass grows and the river flows (2018) and waawiindmawaa – promise (to promise something to somebody) (2022) by Barry Ace and collaborators. Reproduced with permission from the artist. Courtesy of NONAM (Zurich).
Introduction
It’s unlikely that anyone would ever mistake an international human rights standard for a poem. While international human rights treaties, declarations, guiding principles and their like have many virtues, a poetic turn of phrase is only very occasionally among them. The core texts of the post-1948 human rights project are most decidedly works of prose rather than models of verse. And yet, as the remarkable Anishinaabe artist, Barry Ace (b.1958 – Sudbury, Ontario, Canada) has made plain in his groundbreaking work with international law students and others, even a relatively prosaic human rights instrument may have the potential within it to transcend its linguistic limitations and find fresh, compelling new life as a work of art. Ace offers human rights practitioners and educators an inspired strategy for using the arts to foster a genuinely personal connection with what are often regarded as rather closed and sometimes off-putting documents. Ace’s visionary interventions point the way to exciting new possibilities for rights promotion across continents and cultures.
Consciousness, commitment, and creativity
Ace’s approach is grounded in a programme of consciousness-raising and an ongoing series of collaborative workshops. For Ace, one of the crucial aims of these workshops is the stimulation of deep reflection among the students on the content and significance of UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) Calls to Action - as well as on the relationship of those texts to the historical and contemporary experiences of Indigenous peoples across the globe. In a March 2023 conversation with Art Rights Truth, Ace suggested that these workshops ‘provide a platform for [him] to talk to the students about testimony, to talk about history from an Anishinaabe perspective. And [he] used these highly complex documents to engage the community’. As Ace recounted in our conversation:
“I worked with 46 international law students in Switzerland in 2022 – at the North American Native Museum in Zurich and the Musée d’Ethnographie de Genève. We created a piece of work – entitled waawiindmawaa – promise (to promise something to somebody) - around the UNDRIP. We tied this to the TRC – emphasising that the students’ participation in creating an artwork would basically meet some of the Canadian TRC’s 94 Calls to Action. I said to them: ‘You 46 international law students have actually met two Calls to Action. Very few people in Canada can say that they’ve ever even met one of the Calls to Action’.” [1]
Ace’s 2022 Swiss workshops were very much a companion piece to a 2018 program of consciousness-raising, education, and artmaking that the artist completed over four days with 94 law students, art students, faculty, and participants from the Indigenous community at the University of Windsor (Ontario) Faculty of Law and School of Creative Arts. According to Ace, he and the Windsor workshop participants jointly produced ‘54 mixed media beaded panels with 94 handwritten TRC Calls to Action scrolls that were mounted together in a continuous horizontal row, set against a larger painted blue strip referencing a wampum belt’. The result was stunning work of art called For as long as the sun shines, grass grows and water flows.[2]
At the start of all three workshops, Ace began with a bracing, imaginative exercise that he views as ‘a wry reference to the Indigenous experience of surrendering one’s rights – as with the treaty process in Canada’. Ace elaborates:
“To get them to become involved with the project, the participants had to sign a contract to surrender their rights. And I gave them one Canadian dollar or one Swiss franc. And then they could participate. I wrote the contract in a very complex legal language so that they couldn’t really understand what they were signing away. In the Windsor workshop, one person said that they wouldn’t participate because they didn’t understand what they were signing away. And I said, ‘well, you’re signing away your rights to the work if I sell it for $100,000. You get nothing. You got your one dollar, you know’. So, it was basically a way to introduce the whole concept of not understanding something within and between cultures and the treaty-making process.”
In the Zurich and Geneva workshops, participants were tasked with hand-fashioning a beaded floral pattern - a traditional Anishnaabe motif - which was then applied to the surface of a disc. Each participant also inscribed the text of an individual article of UNDRIP (randomly assigned by having the students draw an article from a hat) in graphite on a vellum sheet. The vellum sheets were then rolled up into scrolls – with the beaded discs affixed – and placed into three large pottery vessels. Underlining the importance of fostering a kind of intimacy between participants and text in this process, Ace commented: “The scrolls are handwritten on vellum. I thought it was really important for them to write on the scroll in their own handwriting, because it gives them time to think about it rather than just reading something or typing”.
Each of the vessels was then situated on a sandy mound into which a mixture of tobacco, sage, and cedar had been blended. With the Windsor workshop’s For as long as the sun shines, grass grows and water flows mounted behind it as a backdrop, waawiindmawaa – promise (to promise something to somebody) was exhibited at Zurich’s North American Native Museum. In April 2023, waawiindmawaa – promise (to promise something to somebody) was featured on the cover of a special issue of the journal, Les Cahiers du CIERA(Laval University - Quebec), devoted to interpretations of the UNDRIP.
waawiindmawaa – promise (to promise something to somebody) (detail 1 of 3 vessels) (2022) by Barry Ace and collaborators. Reproduced with permission from the artist (NONAM, Zurich).
When we spoke in March 2023, Ace was keen to emphasise the centrality of the collaborative aspect of what had been achieved in both Zurich and Geneva. He recalled telling the students that their names would always accompany the piece they had created together, and that wherever it was exhibited, “their names would be on the wall as testimony and a witness that these are the people who participated. I said to them, ‘a lot of times in collaborative work the artists will take ownership of it, and it’s only their name displayed. But I wanted to make sure that your name travels with this piece – as long as the sun shines and the grasses grow.’ That really meant a lot to them”.
waawiindmawaa – promise (to promise something to somebody) workshop participants working on medallions and UNDRIP Articles (MEG, Geneva). April 27, 2022. Courtesy of Nicolas Seguel-Eduardo (MEG). Reproduced with permission from the artist.
Conclusion
Canada’s history with UNDRIP is a rather long and tortuous one. It was only in June 2021 – 15 years after Canada and just three other states had voted against the successful adoption of UNDRIP by the UN General Assembly - that an Act of Parliament committing the country to full implementation of UNDRIP has come into force (the Declaration itself is a statement of aspiration rather than a legally-binding treaty). In the wake of this kind of painstakingly slow progress and ever-increasing public inattention, it’s perhaps not surprising that many human rights practitioners are questioning the continued efficacy of traditional methodologies for human rights education and awareness-raising. Where might we look to discover new languages, new approaches to activism that could restore a measure of vitality to key words like advocacy, testimony, solidarity, and justice? With these brilliantly conceived and executed workshops, Barry Ace has given us an extraordinary example of what might be accomplished in partnering with innovative artists in this urgent quest – preparing new generations of well-informed activists and at the same time allowing them to experience the exhilaration of adding to the world’s store of beauty and truth.
[1] TRC Call to Action 28 enjoins ‘…law schools in Canada to require all law students to take a course in Aboriginal people and the law, which includes the history and legacy of residential schools, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Treaties and Aboriginal rights, Indigenous law, and Aboriginal-Crown relations’. Furthermore, TRC Call to Action Number 83 urges the Canada Council for the Arts to prioritize the development and funding of ‘…a strategy for Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists to undertake collaborative projects and produce works that contribute to the reconciliation process’.
[2] According to the Association of First Nations (AFN) Education Toolkit, this phrase originates with the seventeenth century Two Row Wampum Belt. The Two Row Wampum Belt ‘…embodies the concepts and principles that were the basis of all Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) agreements or treaties with other nations, including the Dutch, French, and English settlers...’ Embedded in the belt is the core conviction that ‘As long as the Sun shines upon this Earth, that is how long our agreement will stand – as long as the Water still flows – as long as the Grass grows green at a certain time of the year. We have symbolized this Agreement and it shall be binding forever as long as Mother Earth is still in motion’. As the AFN Toolkit explains, ‘Wampum Belts commemorate events and agreements with other nations, told stories, and described customs, histories or laws. They are not a form of writing. Rather, wampum belts are visual symbols that serve as a mnemonic or memory-boosting purpose – a wampum belt triggers and stimulates the reader’s memories of the significance and meaning of the details woven into the belt’. (‘Treaties and Why They Are Important’. Association of First Nations (AFN) Education Toolkit. 2021) Available at: https://education.afn.ca/afntoolkit/
