Foreword

In the fall of 1990, a small legal question concerning the boundaries of the city lot on which his London, Ontario, home and studio were located caused the Canadian painter Greg Curnoe to begin researching the lot’s legal history. Although within a month he had uncovered most of the facts pertinent to his original question, the research awakened in Curnoe an enormous curiosity - both about the history of the converted 1880 factory his home and studio occupied and about the process of European ‘extinguishment’ of First Nations land rights by which it had become possible in the 18th and 19th centuries for people in southern Ontario to ‘own’ pieces of land such as the one on which it stood. The focus of Curnoe’s research became the punning word ‘deeds’ - the deeds through which a city and its streets and neighbourhoods had come into being, the paper deeds that purported to certify ownership of land, and the deeds and misdeeds through which indigenous North American cultures had been pushed from most of their lands by the European settlement of which early London had been a part.

Curnoe undertook this research with the obsessive intensity of focus he normally gave to all the activities he cared about, particularly his art. Throughout his career he had tended to shape his art around preoccupying conceptual and formal projects rather than around individual artworks, often creating large clusters or series of paintings or collages within fairly short periods of time. In 1962 one such project had been to make collages out of all the discarded paper objects he found during his daily walks. In 1970 a much larger project had been to create full-size acrylic paintings of the views from each window of his studio, and to accompany these with tape-recordings of the daily sounds that occurred near the window. Between 1973 and 1980, a continuing major project had been a series of large watercolours of almost draftsman-like renderings of various high-quality bicycles and bicycle wheels he had collected. In 1991-92 his major ongoing projects became the two aspects of his building-lot research: one, research into the successive owners of the lot itself, their activities, and the concurrent activities of other people who had lived or worked on Weston Street; the other, research into the various First Nations individuals who had lived during the century of First Nations land surrenders that had led to the possibility of houses and factories being built on Weston Street. His painting continued at an unreduced rate, but it was done almost entirely as an outgrowth of these two large projects. In 1991 his major paintings were large (91 x 144 cm) rubber stamp and watercolour works (exhibited at Forest City Gallery in March, 1992, as part of the show ‘Deeds Abstracts’) that listed the sequence of owners who had been ‘on title’ to his property. In 1992 there were a long series of smaller rubber stamp and watercolour ‘self-portraits,’ each one saying ‘It is me’ in a different European or First Nations language (exhibited at Wynick/Tuck gallery, November 21 to December 7, 1992, as part of the show ‘I Am OUY’). The philosophical questions raised by both sets of paintings concerned the nature of ownership - of land and of selfhood. One set of paintings, by listing all the names that had been entitled to claim ownership of his Weston Street lot, made each claim seem small and temporary. The other, by saying ‘it is me’ in so many languages showed a self that changed in colour and visual pattern each time it announced itself. The claim ‘it is me’ became in these paintings as problematical as the question of ‘whose land’ had become in the land-title paintings (some of these ‘self-portraits’ are reproduced in this volume).

Working 12-hour days most days of the week, Curnoe researched and wrote Deeds/Nations, the present ‘directory’ to southwestern Ontario First Nations individuals between ca. 1750-1850, and Deeds/Abstracts, a 200-page companion volume on the history of his London lot, between the winter of 1991 and his death (struck by a truck while bicycling with his London Centennial Wheelers cycling club) on the morning of November 14, 1992. The last entries into the manuscript of Deeds/Nations were made, according to his computer records, shortly after 1 a.m. on November 14. Although Curnoe had been planning one more research trip - to Detroit with his friend Province of Ontario archaeologist Neal Ferris to try to recover first-person narratives or speeches by various Wyandot chiefs who had signed Surrender No. 2- he was very near to closing the Deeds/Nations project. The Wyandot speeches would have been included in a further appendix to the book, similar to appendix V. If he had had an opportunity to extend the project to a further phase, he would most likely have moved it into current political conflicts and into new series of paintings. He was expecting soon to acquire a historical dictionary of the Ojibwa language; he was also planning to do more consultations with speakers of First Nations languages, similar to the ones noted in the bibliography here, that had been so important to the last paintings of the ‘It is me’ series.

The publishing of such speeches as the Wyandot ones which he hoped to locate in Detroit was for Curnoe one of the most important aspects of Deeds/Nations. From the outset, he had been motivated by a strong sense of responsibility to First Nations culture as himself a white individual who had benefited directly from the injustices First Nations peoples had suffered. His own ability to speak, write and paint, together with the southwestern Ontario and national Canadian societies that supported and gave meaning to his art, were to a large extent founded, in his view, on the suppression of First Nations voices, records and art in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He had been born in London, and grown up in a society whose prosperity, sense of geography, and local culture was all founded on land and rivers that had been taken or ‘purchased’ from Native peoples. A tangible instance of this was the land on which his studio stood, on Weston road, overlooking Thames River lands that had once been Iroquoian cornfields and that in the sixteenth century had been part of a First Nations settlement of several thousand inhabitants; the title of Curnoe’s small piece of land, where his children had grown up and most of his paintings had taken shape, could be traced back to Indian land ‘surrenders’ in May of 1790 (Surrender No. 2) and September of 1796 (Surrender No. 6). The river, where his two dogs loved to romp, had been to First Nations peoples the Askunessippi River; but this name had been ‘extinguished’ by settlers who wished to recall the British Thames. In both this book and in the companion Deeds/Abstracts, each entry that is connected to this piece of land is prefaced with the symbol Ì.

Curnoe’s aim was to place the First Nations signators of these surrenders, together with other First Nations individuals of the period, back on the public record not merely as names or totems but as multi-dimensional human beings, with voices, accomplishments, anxieties, hopes, verbal skills, and culture. Early in his project, realizing that to proceed on his own, with whatever ‘good intentions,’ would be merely to repeat in spirit the earlier acts of colonization, he began to consult with the descendants of those First Nations peoples: among these Chief Del Riley of the Chippewa of the Thames, writer Gord Crisjohn of the Oneida Nation, educator Margaret Jackson of London, Ken Albert, Doris Fisher, Sylvester Simon and Mary Sturgeon of the Chippewa of the Thames at Muncey, Dean Jacobs of the Walpole Island First Nation, Roberta Miskokomon of the Muncey Nation, Darryl Stonefish and Diane Snake of the Delaware Nation at Moraviantown, Tom Hill of the Six Nations Woodland Cultural and Educational Centre, Phil Montoure of the Six Nations Administrative Office, and, in the fall of 1992 accompanied by Margaret Jackson and Mary Sturgeon, with Rita Sands and other clan mothers of the Walpole Island First Nation. Without their agreement, help, and encouragement, Curnoe would not have brought the book to its present shape.

Even so, he remained intensely aware of the irresolvable complex of ethical and epistemological problems his inquiry into the othernesses of history and identity had brought him. His ‘It is me’ self- portraits in French, Ojibwa, Cornish, and Iroquois were indeed ‘self-portraits’ but not necessarily of someone named ‘Greg Curnoc.’ Similarly, his career-concluding series of figurative self-portraits - a numbered series of 25 very different watercolour paintings - argued the instability of selfhood. A self that could only be experienced through mirror-like tricks of externalization - ‘I am OUY’ - was also a self that was constructed by the Other: by the you-viewer who perceived and imagined the ‘I.’ What kind of First Nations subjects a white-Curnoe-viewer might perceive, and how these might relate to their own self-perceptions, or to the perceptions of their descendants, troubled Curnoe greatly. Whether these eighteenth and nineteenth century others could still ‘speak’ in their ‘own’ voices also troubled him: so often the records of their speeches, written down by white translators and scribes, seemed marked by European as well as First Nations rhetoric. Curnoe’s solution here was one he had often used before in his art: the solution of collage - to include, in a non-hierarchical, juxtapositional way as much information and as many images and words as possible, so that accumulatively some sense of ‘otherness’ might be glimpsed and experienced.

In the process, Curnoe inadvertently created documents that open up large areas of First Nations materials to further study and which fill in an important period in North American history. For most parts of North America, the events and social conditions of the period between European discovery and the beginning of settler history have been left to archivists and the occasional papers of scholars. The usual impression given by general North American histories is that nothing of much consequence happens in First Nations cultures once discovery occurs and European dominance is asserted. It is settlement history that is subsequently important: the arrival of immigrants, the surveying of townsites, the establishment of industries. What Curnoe’s work documents is an other to that process of settlement. During the approximately 1750 to 1850 period of this book, southwestern Ontario, from a white perspective, is sparsely populated, and on the brink of prosperity and expansion; from a First Nations perspective it is richly populated, with cultural connections that range far to the south and west, and in the midst of terrifying uncertainty and crisis.

Curnoe’s first plan for this volume was to publish it as part of one large book that also contained the legal and anecdotal history of his Weston Street lot. It was not to be only a scholarly book on southwestern Ontario First Nations cultures in the nineteenth century but also part of a personal statement that the social interaction with the landscape here moves from the First Nations peoples thousands of years ago in an unbroken process right to the present moment of each individual today - from prehistoric tool makers to a painter and writer in 1992. To the various anecdotes and speeches that enlarge the life-records gathered in Deeds/Nations, Curnoe added in Deeds/Abstracts similar anecdotes about horseshoe pitching on Weston Street in the 1930s, and about friends visiting his studio in the 1970s, and about his ongoing family life. The difficulty of publishing such a volume led him in the fall of 1992 to begin to reorganize his research into the present two volumes.’

The format of Deeds/Nations reflects both Curnoe’s long commitment to collage principles and found materials and his determination to let the historical record speak in its own voices. Each entry begins with descriptive statements in Curnoe’s own voice about the individual’s birth, death, tribal affiliation and principal role. Clauses that follow (separated by semi-colons) summarize historical attributions and descriptions that Curnoe had found could be associated with the individual; in each of these Cumoe has preserved spelling variations and stylistic idiosyncrasies that occur in his source. The entry concludes with a parenthetical note that identifies these sources he has used. On numerous occasions on which the sources are ambiguous, or allow inferences that Curnoe had been unable to confirm, he has inserted a question mark after the ‘questionable’ fact. Wherever possible, he has appended to the entry a fragment of a speech attributed to the individual.

In preparing this manuscript for publication, I have made no attempt to clarify items marked with a question mark or to otherwise expand or alter Curnoe’s research. Apart from making minor changes to typography and punctuation, tidying up numerous editorial details that Curnoe had not had an opportunity to consider, and carrying through his plans to separate Deeds/Nations from Deeds/Abstracts, my main contribution has been to compile, from his notes and research materials and the memory of Neal Ferris, the bibliography of works cited. I apologize for my not having been able to identify and locate a few of the sources (three, I believe) that appear in the parenthetical notes.

Frank Davey
October, 1993

Deeds/Abstracts The History of a London Lot, was published by Brick Books in December, 1995 (ISBN 0-919626-78-5)