Naadohbii: To draw water

Rebecca Belmore. Body of Water, 2019. cast aluminum. Commissioned by the 16th Istanbul Biennial. Produced with support from the Canada Council for the Arts. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Courtesy of the Audain Art Museum by Scott Brammer.⁠

Winnipeg Art Gallery - Qaumajuq, Manitoba, Canada, 14 August 2021 - February 2022

Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre – Melbourne Museum, 23 September 2022 – 26 March 2023

Pātaka Art+Museum, Porirua, Aotearoa New Zealand, 01 July – 29 October 2023

Curatorial Team:

Jaimie Isaac, Curator of Indigenous and Contemporary Art at Winnipeg Art Gallery

Reuben Friend, Director of Pātaka Art+Museum and Ioana Gordon-Smith, Curator, Pātaka Art + Museum

Kimberley Moulton, Senior Curator, South Eastern Aboriginal Collections, First Peoples Department, Melbourne Museum, Museums Victoria, Australia.

Pronounced NAH-DOH-BEY from Anishinaabemowin language, Naadohbii: To Draw Water was developed for the 2021 Winnipeg Art Triennial at the Winnipeg Art Gallery in Manitoba, Canada as an investigation into Indigenous perspectives on water sovereignty and solidarity on environmental concerns through art. In 2022 the exhibition went on to be exhibited at the Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre at Melbourne Museum in Australia, and in 2023 at Pātaka Art+Museum in Porirua, Aotearoa New Zealand. 

Maria Hupfield (with poem by Natalie Diaz), The First Water, billboard banner at the entrance to Pātaka Art+Museum in Aotearoa New Zealand, 2023. Photo courtesy Reuben Friend.

The following is an extract from an essay I wrote about the project in 2023 for Lagoonscapes, The Venice Journal of Environmental Humanities, a digital, open-access, international, and trans-disciplinary journal based at The New Institute Center for Environmental Humanities of Ca’ Foscari University in Venice.

Naadohbii: To Draw Water

By Reuben Friend

A river is a body of water.

It has a foot,

an elbow,

a mouth.

It runs.

It lies in a bed.

It can make you good.

It has a head.

It remembers everything.

(Natalie Diaz, 2020)

On the 13 September 2007 the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was adopted by the General Assembly with a majority of 144 states in favour, and only 4 votes against. The Declaration is the most potent and comprehensive international agreement recognising the rights of Indigenous peoples, establishing a framework of minimum standards for the survival, dignity and well-being of Indigenous peoples around the world. The nations that voted against the Declaration were Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the United States.

The countries that voted against the Declaration have since reversed their position, and a 2021 exhibition has brought together a group of artists from each of these four nations to create an international dialogue on Indigenous water rights. The exhibition, Naadohbii: To Draw Water, was gifted its name from Elder Dr Mary Courchene from Sagkeeng First Nation Treaty 1 Territory in Canada, and refers to the process of drawing, seeking or gathering water in the Anishinaabemowin language. I was fortunate to be part of the all-Indigenous curatorial team with Anishinaabe artist and curator Jaimie Isaac, Yorta Yorta Aboriginal Australian Curator Kimberley Moulton, and Sāmoan New Zealand curator Ioana Gordon-Smith. Beginning at Winnipeg Art Gallery-Qaumajuq (WAGQ) in Canada during the first Winnipeg Indigenous Triennial in 2021, the exhibition went on to tour to Victoria Museum in Melbourne, Australia in 2022 and Pātaka Art+Museum in Porirua, Aotearoa New Zealand in 2023.

From the outset, the curatorial team set out to develop the exhibition on the philosophy of a global Indigenous axis of solidarity, to collectively champion each of the four curators and twenty-eight Indigenous artists represented in the exhibition, utilising a place-based Indigenous-led framework to create a forum for multicultural empowerment. Learning from the principles of Indigenous cultural, political and environmental resurgence described by Mississauga Nishnaabeg writer, musician and scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, the fluid curatorial process that was followed in the development of Naadohbii allowed for a respectful trans-Indigenous approach to understand the different socio-spatial conditions and practices that inform Indigenous ways of being across our various territories.

Artworks by artists such as Nova Paul (Māori, Ngāpuhi) demonstrate the ability of artists to do more than raise awareness of historical injustices, but to take the next step and hold governments and corporations to account. In Paul’s Ko te ripo (2018) two-channel moving image installation, viewers are provided with an opportunity to hear an unedited transcript of court proceedings held by Paul’s Māori whānau (family) and community in Aotearoa New Zealand for claims to Indigenous rights over freshwater springs and streams on their lands. On one screen we see footage of the artist walking through the disputed Waipao springs at the centre of the court case, and in the second screen we see Paul’s cousin, oral historian Dinah Paul, sitting at the foot of their ancestral maunga (mountain) Whatitiri reading evidence presented during their court claim to the Waitangi Tribunal.

Nova Paul, Ko te ripo, two-channel moving image installation, 2018.

The political messaging of Naadohbii is not confined to the gallery but is also embodied on a series of giant billboard-sized banners by Anishiinaabe performance artist Maria Hupfield. A banner artwork entitled The First Water was placed on the exterior of the WAGQ and at both venues in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. Asking the question ‘what separates a body from water’ the artwork shows a documentary image of the artist ringing water from her hair during a performance on a canoe on land. In bright yellow text overlaid on top of this image is a portion of a poem by Mojave and Akimel O'odham poet Natalie Diaz that conceptualises a river as a body with a head and a mouth, a foot and a bed. In the same way that a river sustains and carries our bodies in a canoe, the river itself is carried and sustained within our bodies. As a later portion of Diaz’s poems beautifully articulates, “No matter what language you speak, no matter the color of your skin. We carry the river, its body of water, in our body”.