American Indian Culture and Research Journal

This article focuses on the performance work of Anishinaabeg artist Rebecca Belmore. It bridges her creative work with the living histories of the indigenous people that are part of the cities of Toronto and Vancouver. I argue that her performance work creates, records, and stores indigenous stories of place, creating a living archive. I show how the artist’s ability to use her body as a tool shifts the colonial gaze to a space that can communicate the link between the land and indigenous stories of place. In selected performances, Belmore’s body becomes a vessel, creating a visual and embodied text that narrates indigenous stories of place that confront the historical implications of space in Canada, which is colonized, racialized, and gendered. I argue that Belmore’s performance and installation work builds a geographic imagination that (re)maps the city space through her gendered, colonized body. This presence shifts the colonial gaze to challenge white settler ideologies in the occupation of space through indigenous stories of place. I argue that Belmore’s performances and installations are both the site and the sight of the colonized gendered body, which forces the viewer to be aware of the geopolitics of space.