Return to: Vestige and Carrying Memories of the Land

full image-Vestige_2022TW-Toni Hafkenscheid
Vestige
Tania Willard, 2022
Medium: garnet sandpaper, copper nails
Documentation: Toni Hafkenscheid
An
archival image of a Secwepémc woman posed astride on a horse contrasts
the multitude of brass equine monuments of man and horse as a call to
remembrance, often of colonial history. Here the afterimage etched onto
garnet sandpaper, functions to remind us of exploitation, labour,
injustice and the unstable and abrasive content of the history in Canada
when it comes to Indigenous women. The image was found by Willard, as a
postcard with the text ‘Shuswap Native’ on the front, in the Uno
Langman collection of BC photography at UBC special collections library
and then encountered again in a family archive. Learning about the
ancestor in this image, which in the family archive is inscribed on the
back as, Sophie Paul- died in mid 30s, the sister of tskwayásxn,
Neskonlith Reserve, challenged the idea of the trade in postcard images
as racial types and the association with landscape and travel in Canada.
Here the image takes the form of a vestige of the original image, the
moment on the land as an empowered Indigenous ancestor, with all it’s
attendant remembrance of land struggle that continues today.