Fillip

Architectural Deception and the Indians of Canada Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montréal
Courtney R. Thompson

The Advisory Committee on Architecture at Expo 67 in Montréal first met in January 1964 and consisted of recognized and respected design professionals.1 The minutes of these meetings demonstrate consideration of managing the varied forms among neighbouring pavilions: lighting, public art logistics, and careful oversight of pavilion design and consistency of Expo aesthetics. On March 22, 1966, the committee reviewed the presentation of forty-five pavilions, representing both industry and nations. The following day, one of the pavilions, designed by Indian Affairs Branch seconded architect J. W. Francis, drew an adamant and unanimous resolution:

The Architectural Advisory Committee is in strong disagreement with the proposal submitted by the Indian Affairs Branch and wishes to make a positive recommendation that an architect with particular exhibit design capacity and another person keenly familiar with the Indian, his arts, his aspirations and his problems be commissioned to prepare a new proposal.2The rejection is unique in the archives, and the belief that the design was a gross misrepresentation of Indigenous Peoples is clear, yet little is revealed about the design process.

An undated set of concept drawings for the pavilion (originally titled the Canadian Indian Pavilion Expo 67) shows a totem pole on the site nestled next to an enclosed ramp, which winds its way toward what appears to be a tetradecagon form imprinted with Coast Salish mask designs. A tipi structure perches on top, with two sides of visible markings echoing the mask figures below.

The design of the Indians of Canada Pavilion proposed convictions of consultation representing Indigenous representation throughout its planning and final display. However, as the minutes reveal, this representation was viewed as inauthentic by members of the Advisory Committee on Architecture. This sentiment was also shared by a number of Indigenous artists and leaders. Bill Reid, one of Canada’s most recognized Indigenous artists, received an offer to design the totem pole outside the pavilion. In a letter to one of the exhibition designers, he wrote:

First I want to make it quite clear that if your group is determined to impose Joe Francis’ California style roadside diner teepee on the landscape in any form, I have no interest in being involved in any way....So if you build the teepee, I’ll pass up the pole, but would like to bid for the genuine beaded [illegible] hide moccasin concession.3Reid’s sarcastic remark alludes to sentiments toward the cheap souvenir shops and commercialized images of Indigenous culture that peppered the North American landscape as roadside attractions.

The Indian Advisory Council was struck as part of a proposed checks and balances system that involved the pavilion’s task force, the National Indian Advisory Board, and the Canadian government’s Department of Indian Affairs. The politician George Manuel, a member of the National Indian Advisory Board and Indian Advisory Council for the pavilion, recounted its design process as one without prior consultation with the Indigenous community. After a select invited group of Indigenous artists gathered in December 1965 to showcase artworks to inspire the pavilion’s design, the National Indian Advisory Board held its first meetings, in mid January.

Manuel describes a meeting within this timeline where government officials gathered the advisory board together and presented an hour-long slide show of a model pavilion commissioned by the Department of Indian Affairs:

They pulled the wraps off a scale model on the table—a completely finished and landscaped model of the building that had been in the slides we had been watching.4The model was built, and no funds had been shared with the Indigenous artists invited to contribute their vision and work:

You have already spent money that was credited to us for our development, our presentation. You have deceived the Indian people. When you put up this building you will deceive the Canadian people.5The pavilion was an architectural deception—a failed attempt to represent Canada’s so-called recognition of diversity and its rhetoric around respect for cultural production and collaboration.

The next meeting of the Indian Advisory Council, held in mid April 1966, presented modifications to the design that incorporated new structural features derived from further consultations held with Indigenous groups across Canada. The new model’s text presented its design rationale as a cohesion of clustered spaces:

These are linked together and rise in spiral fashion to encircle and embrace the teepee figure. Those at the lower end, where the visitor enters, will echo traditional Indian styles of dwellings from coast to coast—deliberately, none are truly realistic, but like the teepee figure, suggesting the unifying influence of the various Indian cultures in today’s world.6On November 3, 1967—shortly after the close of Expo—a request for feedback on the Indians of Canada Pavilion went out to several Indigenous stakeholder groups across Canada. The responses were mixed, but one letter from the regional director of Indian Affairs Manitoba perhaps frames its best:

To be quite honest and frank, we have not heard much in the way of comment in Manitoba from either the Indian people or non-Indian people with respect to the Indians of Canada Pavilion at Expo, other than with respect to its design and to the confusion as to what its message was intended to convey to Expo visitors.7The pavilion was demolished in the late 1980s.

Kitsch depictions of Indigenous culture, as found in the souvenir shops and tourist attractions mentioned in Courtney R. Thompson’s text, still plague Indigenous representation and infect architectural design. Nango’s collection of architectural references to the lávvu offers a case in point, showing the pervasiveness of this type of representation. It is not that these symbolic representations are individually negative, as Indigenous place-making is an important political action in sustaining cultural visibility; rather, the problem is that they have limitations, as the forms become reductive. This is precisely what Nango’s investment in process aims to mitigate. He focuses on Indigenous building practices that move beyond any specific form, shape, or style, and as such highlight their adaptive, improvisational, transitory, resourceful, and functional traits. These qualities define Indigenous ways of living now and in the past, and move beyond form to look at the methodologies behind architectural construction.

The gumpi is another common form of Sámi architecture, which is a mobile hut used for reindeer herding, moving the animals from their winter grazing habitat to the spring and summer coastal areas. An episode of Post-Capitalist Architecture-TV, a video series that Nango and his cousin, filmmaker and producer Ken Are Bongo, began as an exploration of Sámi architecture, focuses on this mobile vernacular architecture. The TV series overall engages topics such as nomadism, the resource economy, and decolonization and includes interviews with scholars, architects, builders, and mechanics as well as performances by dancers, musicians, poets, and performance artists. In the episode on the gumpi, Nango describes the form as having “become a unique architectural typology of the North, one that merges a nomadic lifestyle in the winter with traditional knowhow and building skills of the North.” He joins a group of herders on a trek and explores the diversity of these structures. He also traces the origin of the word “gumpi” and the form’s first maker to the 1960s, when the gumpi started to replace the lávvu. The importance of drawing this origin story is in part to point to the ingenuity of Indigenous cultures, whose relationship to the land makes them resourceful and adaptive, as well as to express how knowledge of new and old techniques and technologies are shared. It also brings forward contemporary scholarship that moves beyond folkloric stereotypes.

The Sámi gumpi draws a line to Uncle Doug’s Fishing Shack, Nango’s site-specific installation for STAGES 2019. The installation contained an ice-fishing hut, built to shelter those fishing in winter on the shallow, frozen surfaces of Lake Winnipeg. Nango built it in collaboration with Doug Thomas—architect Dave Thomas’s brother, who is a builder, Indigenous community leader, and the work’s namesake—primarily from repurposed materials. The installation was showcased within a larger art installation-cum-basecamp, which included a gathering space, a firepit, a hammock, stacked stones, and other assemblages of found materials. It was sited near the tourist attraction of Fort Gibraltar—a reconstructed historical site focusing on the fur trade and the Métis communities that burgeoned around it. The original fort was a headquarters for the North West Company fur traders, which was relocated and remodelled in the late 1970s. Nango used found materials from the original site, including wood from the discarded main gates, which had been replaced a few years prior. Some of these elements were used to build the “shack” itself, along with materials that made it a functional and transportable hut for Doug to use in the coming winter.

Uncle Doug’s Fishing Shack is emblematic of not only Nango’s process as an artist but also his objective to describe the commonality with which Indigenous cultures relate and adapt to the land as a means of livelihood and community. Improvisation is a methodological tradition taught and reinforced in Indigenous communities and best described through the word “Indigenuity,” a term coined by Nango:

Indigenuity is...thinking fast on the spot when you need to think fast. And you see every object or every material around you as a potential problem-solving material, which really explodes the idea of the commodity and the consumer mentality. It’s a way of seeing objects and materials as something else, as something more, and giving them more value, or giving them some kind of a philosophical value.8 Indigenuity is visible in Indigenous histories, but most importantly, it is present.