Blood, Shells and Money
Wanda Nanibush
Standing inside First Nations and specifically Anishinaabe understandings of economy and money, a few key truths stand out that run contrary to commonly held truisms about capitalism and currency, historically and today. The first truth is that capitalism and colonialism are mutually reinforcing and co-constituting systems of racialized oppression. The removal of First Nations globally from their lands, taking control over their resources and turning them into commodities, the creation of captive markets, and turning humans into commodities in slave labour have been the building blocks of capitalism and are at the heart of neo/liberal economies today. Another truth is that wealth does not have to mean capital but when it does it is usually wrought from theft and dispossession of First Nations globally (including Africa/parts of Asia.) And lastly, our economic systems were not separate from governance and spiritual value systems. The exchange of goods and the setting of their value took place within notions of gift, reciprocal relations, and radical relationality not the idea that with civilization came trade, money and wealth. You would not have capitalism without colonialism nor the current wealth of nation states and their billionaires. The three following art works have helped me think through these critiques of current economic thought.
Taloi Havini, Beroana (shell money), stoneware, earthenware, porcelain, glaze, steel wire, dimensions variable, 2015. Image credit: Sharjah Art Foundation
|
United States of America, California, Pomo and Chumash-Indians, Hawock Shell Money (Wampum). Image credit: Money Museum, Zurich, Switzerland
|
Taloi Havini is a Nakas nation artist born in Arawa, Autonomous Region of Bougainville, Papua New Guinea whose sculpture Beroana (Shell Money) IV, 2016, I saw exhibited at the 12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art and for Sharjah Biennial 13. Beroana makes the connection between capital and colonialism by bypassing that system of exchange entirely and focusing on an even older form in the trade and exchange of shell money. Traditionally women would have gathered the shells and reworked them into specific shapes, slowly and often communally – both actions that are anti-capitalist in nature. Havini’s sculpture is made of thousands of earthenware and porcelain ceramic replicas of the shells, wired together into one long spiral string and suspended from the ceiling. Its beauty encourages contemplation and in doing so a whole other economy emerges. Shell money existed all around the world and has been misunderstood as equivalent to coins. Instead, it existed within social and political ceremonies, and as beautification and social exchange systems that make it a challenge to capitalism. Visually, spirals seem to be in constant motion, with a non-linear sense of transformation and time. They are associated with the cosmos, spirituality and economic shifts. This is a fitting metaphor for the First Nations philosophy of economics, in which the economy is never distinct from spirituality and the cosmos, and can thus never be purely self-interested or disinterested, or about ownership or profit.
|
In 2017, I was in Brisbane at the Institute of Modern Art (IMA), Brisbane at Ryan Presley’s solo exhibition called Prosperity. Presley, a Marri Ngarr artist from the country now called Australia was exhibiting paintings and bills from his ongoing project called Blood Money. He had created his own currency adorned with First Nations figures who collectively form a story of resistance to the colonial project and the active creation of alternatives. The image you see here is of Dundalli (c. 1820-1855), who was an early Dalla diplomat who was charged by his community to negotiate trade relations with the colonizers. When their efforts were met with the extreme violence of massacre by food poisoning and murder, Dundalli led the fight to protect the people and their lands. He was eventually murdered by the colonial state for his efforts. Each bill honours different figures and contains aspects of First Nations value systems. Presley highlights how dispossession and violence led to lack of money in First Nations communities and the colonized Australia. Blood money refers to the debt for a murdered person paid to their family but also to the infinite deaths at the hands of colonialism and its twin, capitalism.
|
Ryan Presley with his latest Blood Money Infinite Dollar Note, featuring Uncle Stephen Gadlabarti Goldsmith. Image credit: Art Gallery of South Australia/Saul Steed
|
In another way, he is also showing how they had another kind of wealth in the love, land, resistance and knowledge they carried from their ancestors. Like Havini, Presley connects the economy to the art world. He says “I'm also looking at the overlap of the art economy and the political economy. Blood Money is a gesture, not a real parallel currency. If you were looking at this more rationally you would see that you are getting a very affordable, limited edition print of one of my paintings, so it was interesting that many people were looking at this as a genuine exchange.” When you offer money for his currency the exchange is not dollar for dollar in value - the value of his currency is akin to art where it depends on the value assigned at each moment. Will people understand the pricelessness of a print?
|
The translation of treaty obligations, land rights, and First Nations rights into a dollar value can never compensate First Nations for what has been stolen in terms of language, land, wisdom, health and life. In Free Ride (2022), Anishinaabe artist Frank Shebageget creates a multi-media work out of fifty five-dollar bills. He collected one five-dollar bill for every year of his life. The five dollars represents the treaty payment he receives yearly from the Canadian government as part of Treaty 3, signed in 1873. Treaty 3, from the colonialist viewpoint was about clearing First Nations off of land needed to build a road between Winnipeg and Thunder Bay in Northern Ontario and has also become about resource extraction and financial wealth for the settlers. For First Nations it was about securing fishing, hunting, land and cultural rights and maintaining obligations to care for the earth and waters. The government has broken treaties consistently and yet has grown considerable wealth while First Nations have become economically poor. The title refers to the stereotype that First Nations get a free ride from the government by living off of tax payer dollars but in a dark ironic twist he also points out that Canadians have truly had the free ride from the theft of our lands and resources. The work draws out the underlying problem of assigning value and the power of colonialists to decide value and benefit from it. First Nations keep fighting to have their own value and values honoured, respected, instituted only to be labelled criminals or terrorists for doing so. When we lose First Nations economic systems we lose the alternatives that can correct global inequality and the destruction of our first mother, the earth.
|
Frank Shebageget, Free Ride, framed bank notes, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist and Central Art Garage
|
Wanda Nanibush is an Anishinaabe-kwe curator, image and word warrior and community organizer from Beausoleil First Nation, in Georgian Bay. Based in Toronto, Nanibush was the inaugural curator of Indigenous Art and co-lead of the Indigenous + Canadian Art Department at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO). She did her undergraduate studies at Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario, where she overlapped with Tariq Gordon, Embassy Cultural House Managing Editor and Website Developer. They worked together on The Arthur, Trent’s student newspaper. She went on to receive her M.A. in Visual Studies from University of Toronto where she has also taught graduate courses. She was the 2013 Dame Nita Barrow Distinguished Visitor at University of Toronto.She also organizes the aabaakwad, a gathering of international Indigenous artists, curators and thinkers that moves around internationally. Nanibush is a sought-after commentator and change-maker for decolonizing and Indigenizing museums.
