Daughter of Wikwemikong elder and First World War war bride
KELOWNA, BC—Daphne Odjig, a giant of the Canadian artistic community and indomitable champion of indigenous issues and rights, has begun her spirit journey at the Kelowna nursing home where she lived. Ms. Odjig was 97.
Ms. Odjig was born in Wikwemikong Unceded Territory on September 11, 1919, growing up and attending school there as a young girl. Although she was forced to withdraw from school at the age of 12, she later went on to formal art studies in Ottawa and Sweden and became established as an artist of international renown.
Ms. Odjig was the first child of Dominick Odjig, a Pottawatomi World War I veteran and his English war bride Joyce Peachey. She received much of her early artistic training from her grandfather Jonas, who was the village stone carver and a gifted storyteller. Ms. Odjig often credited her family as an inspiration for pursuing an artistic career and dedicated a book about her life, ‘A Paintbrush in my Hand,’ to her grandfather, mother and father.
“Her passion was her art,” said Wikwemikong Chief Duke Peltier, contacted in Calgary where he was attending a conference on oil pipelines. “She was very successful at bringing people together. She created a dialogue and discussion of First Nations issues throughout her whole career. Her artwork was very inspirational to many young artists all across Turtle Island and she inspired generations of people who did not think they had a voice to stand up and make their voices heard.”
Like many Anshinaabe before and since, Ms. Odjig was forced to leave her ancestral home in Wikwemikong to seek employment, even changing her name for a time from Odjig to its English translation of Fisher in an attempt to shake the stigma of being Native in the late 1930s and early 40s.
She moved to Toronto where she found employment in a peanut factory and a war munitions assembly line and later even a dog food plant. Inseparable from her sister Winnie, Ms. Odjig followed her out to British Columbia where she married and settled down.
In her early days of artistic endeavour, Ms. Odjig used the creative parsimony she learned in the hard scrabble days on the rez to stretch canvases recycled from tents.
In 1962 an impressionistic oil painting her sister submitted to a juried competition led to her admission to the British Columbia Federation of Artists.
A founding member of what became known as the ‘Indian Group of Seven,’ Ms. Odjig’s works fused indigenous and European styles, often drawing deeply on her Anishinaabe roots of stories and legends.
“Odjig’s work is defined by curving contours, strong outlining, overlapping shapes and an unsurpassed sense of colour,” according to the National Gallery of Canada website.
“The circle of life, our whole life being is a circle,” she once said in describing why she used them. “You’re born, you evolve from one stage to another, derive the lessons into adulthood, it’s a continual circle.”
She exhibited her work as part of the ‘Indian Group of Seven’ along with artists Alex Janvier, Jackson Beardy, Eddy Cobiness, Norval Morrisseau, Carl Ray and Joseph Sanchez.
“Daphne was the one who pulled us together,” Mr. Janvier said in a statement following the announcement of her passing. “Daphne had the vision to recognize that it was as a group we would be able to make a breakthrough with the art we were doing. The art world in Canada was not accepting us at that time.”
“The doors weren’t open to us,” noted Ms. Odjig in a CBC interview before her death, “so we had a reason to tell the people who we are and what we can do.”
“All indigenous artists, past, present and future, owe Daphne a debt of gratitude for helping us move our art from craft tables at flea markets into some of the finest art galleries and collections in Canada,” emphasised Mr. Janvier.
Moving to Manitoba, Ms. Odjig founded the first Native print company, providing a venue and an outlet for indigenous artists where little had existed before.
Ms. Odjig continued to explore and develop her style throughout her career. She took part in her first solo exhibition in 1967 at the Lakehead Art Centre in Port Arthur, Ontario. In 1970 she exhibited at the Canadian Pavilion at Expo in Osaka, Japan, and in 1972, along with Jackson Beardy and Alex Janvier, she was included in a pivotal exhibition, Treaty Number 23, 287 and 1171, at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. This was the first time a Canadian exhibition comprised solely of aboriginal artists was featured in a public art gallery.
Her work has often been cited as having erotic tones, and indeed her illustrations of the book ‘Tales from the Smokehouse’ was “burned in Boston” as they say, for exhibiting a sexuality that was hitherto unheard of in depictions of Native life and stories. When the book was exhibited, it was censored and shut down by the police.
Ms. Odjig’s influence crossed many boundaries and Debajehmujig Storytellers has based a number of works on her stories and art.
“Back in the past we did ‘Ever That Nanabush’ based on the illustrations she did in the 1960s for the Nanabush Stories and we had ‘Dear Daphne’ based on letters to Daphne written from the young artist perspective,” said artistic director Joe Osawabine.
“She was a real trailblazer and opened up a lot of trails for all of us that came after,” he said. “Before that, no one seems to have even realized that we existed.”
Mr. Osawabine and the Debaj crew have just taken down an art exhibit, ‘From the Heart of Turtle Island,’ at Debaj’s Creation Centre in Manitowaning which featured one of her earlier works.
“It is a very sad day,” said Mr. Osawabine.
“Daphne was a very beautiful individual,” said Anishinabe artist Mike Cywink, who credited Ms. Odjig with inspiring him to expand the boundaries of his own style of work. “She was the top international artist to come out of Wikwemikong,” he said. “She was an incredible role model for both Native and non-Native artists across the world.”
Ms. Odjig was made a member of the Order of Canada in 1986, received a National Aboriginal Achievement Award in 1998, was presented with a Governor General’s Award in Visual Arts in 2007 and was featured in a series of Canadian postal stamps in 2011. Several universities have acknowledged her contribution to education, social justice and the fine arts with honourary doctorates, including one in Letters from Laurentian University in 1982, in Law from the University of Toronto in 1985, in Education from Nipissing University in 1997 and in Fine Arts from the Ontario College of Art and Design University in 2008.
