Abstract

Over a twenty-year period, renowned artists such as Edward Poitras, Robert Houle, Jim
Logan, Kent Monkman, among others, appropriate renowned colonial landscape
paintings and art historical canonical works, and then alter them to include First Nations
narratives, as methods of critiquing the exclusionary nature of grand colonial narratives
and their associated historical, art historical and, by extension, anthropological
discourses. Using counter-appropriation as an artistic strategy, they critique: the West’s
disregard for First Nations histories in North America; Art History’s past failures to
classify their art objects as Fine Art; and contemporary cultural constructions of
“Indianness” originating from colonial history and ideologies about the “Vanishing
Race.” With their works, the artists offer their viewers insight into First Nations histories
and stories, thereby enriching the multiple narratives and pluralist discourses existent in
North America.