Beyond the government policies that banned Indigenous peoples from performing many of their cultural practices, the stereotypes were kept alive in art, cinema, and the media, and Indigenous women, in particular, were made invisible. Holly­wood movies, documentaries, and photographs objectivized them, showed them frozen in a reified past, or hypersexualized them. These portrayals opened the door to the perpetuation of brutal violence, as the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls has shown.³ Camera in hand, Monnet reclaims the public space by using media techniques to reverse the power dynamic by (re)presenting these women and using her voice to highlight their knowledge.

In the video Creatura Dada, produced in 2016 for the 45th edition of the Festival du nouveau cinéma de Montréal, Monnet brings together, around a sumptuous meal, the Abenaki filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin; the Anishinaabe and Quebec artist Nadia Myre; the Anishinaabe and French playwright Émilie Monnet; Swaneige Bertrand, chief, costume designer, and stylist, member of the Acho Dene Koe Nation of the Northwest Territories and Quebec; and her sister, the author Nakha Bertrand. The off-the-wall setting celebrates “a new departure and the end of the world as we know it” and highlights the audacity of Indigenous women. In this four-minute work, the six elegantly dressed and coiffed women, taking delight in a Dada ambience, break with received ideas. Creatura Dada shone at the biennial at the Whitney Museum in New York helping to pave the way for Monnet’s dazzling rise in the visual arts world.

Self-representation is vital to decolonization and to the fight against persistent stereotypes.⁴ Indigenous women have certainly not disappeared, as Marc-André Fortin writes,⁵ as they now hold the camera and are inscribing themselves in the history of art in Canada and around the world. The idea of the “vanishing Indian” and the absence of Indigenous people in art, literature, and film can be explained, in Fortin’s view, by Canadians’ and Quebecers’ desire to make Indigenous people disappear, at least symbolically, in order to affirm their own sovereignty over the land. Contemporary artworks created by Indigenous women such as Monnet, with themselves as the subject, offer unique and vital points of view: in presenting their perspectives, these artists defy prejudices and demonstrate the diversity, presence, and strength of Indigenous women today.

In 2018, the Toronto International Film Festival invited Monnet to create a work for the street-level windows at its headquarters. The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls was underway at the time. Monnet chose to cast a critical eye on the history of documentary film and ethnographic photography with History Shall Speak for Itself, an interlacing of two digital images: one presenting strong and proud Indigenous women artists and the other an archival image from an anthropology film. Through the process of quoting and remediating the National Film Board archives and portraying current Indigenous artists, she reversed stereotypes and disrupted codes in order to express new power relations. The attentive viewer would be amused by the work’s title, as history certainly does not speak for itself: it belongs to those who have the power to tell it. Yet, if the medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan wrote, and if the media are the “tools of colonization,”⁶ then Monnet uses her media as a means for updating ancestral practices and as a tool for decolonizing representations of women and affirming their presence in the public space.

In her photographic installation Debouttes!, Monnet used two contrasting series of images with a similar remediation strategy. The work was presented during the event Je suis une femme d’octobre, in 2022, which celebrated fifty years of wom­en’s activism and its profound impact on society. Exhibited in the front window of Espace Go, a Montreal theatre, Debouttes! portrayed Indigenous women’s struggle – during the 1970s, they campaigned to denounce the patriarchal mea­sures of the Indian Act – and wove connections with other Quebec women. Once again, Monnet used alternation, having archival images dialogue with colour digital photographs. She scrambled the dominant narrative and proposed a different version of history. Later installed at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, the photographic montage juxtaposing images of objectivized women from the past against those of self-representation testifies to the international struggle of Indigenous women and their agency today.

On the semiotic level, the hybrid garments used in History Shall Speak for Itself and in Echoes From a Near Future, a more recent photograph, also foster a dialogue among the past, the present, and a future to be imagined – one that includes Indigenous women. Both works highlight their knowledge, as well as motifs inspired by Anishinaabe iconography and tra­ditional objects, such as bark baskets and garments. As the Wendat curator Guy Sioui Durand has noted, Monnet revisits Indigenous artisanal artefacts by using adaptation, integration, and creativity.⁷ By using signs and symbols in Echoes From a Near Future, she also plays with space and temporalities, inscribing her practice in what researchers call Indigenous futurism.⁸ Here, she also criticized the federal government’s failure to keep its promises even as the housing crisis was gripping Indigenous communities. So many treaties signed, so few respected.

Just as she presented artisanal objects in History Shall Speak for Itself in order to position them in the present, Monnet conceives works by thinking of her sisters and choosing to interrelate different generations. She also portrays children under the benevolent eye of ancestors, elders, and a group of strong women artists. In the end, she upraises them through a strategy of political affirmation enhanced by poetic visuals and a desire to mobilize a symbolic language inspired by Anishinaabe practices.Translated by Käthe Roth