Ericka Walker, Untitled

Mi'kmaqi, otherwise known as the Canadian Province of Nova Scotia, has seen over 400 years of European settlement. The occupation of this land - and that of other territories, provinces, and states throughout North America - has been in-part demarcated by the plaques, cairns, cenotaphs, and engraved marble or granite memorials significant to the establishment of colonizing rule and influence. Markers commemorating people, places, and events, fulfill an ambition that many human groups relate to, namely the desire to remember publicly and the hardships and triumphs that weave the narrative of our ancestors, visualizing a collective memory but also justifying our current sense of being and purpose. Relative to other commemorative strategies - songs, stories, tapestries, documents, or paintings - the majority of these monuments are affixed. They are heavy, immobile presentations of the facts and priorities of the dominant culture. They are weights on the landscape, by dint of both the generic way they present history, and the untold stories they imply but, for all their heroic punch, fail to truly explicate.

Using the most rudimentary of printmaking techniques - the rubbing, or "frottage" - I isolate groups of words or fractions of larger statements found on some of the monuments that surround me in Nova Scotia, depriving their monumental sentiment of its assuredness and confusing its pride. The in-between space is what some of us yearn to see in our history: gaps in an otherwise seamless story of domination and success, that express an appropriate uncertainty about our past, as well as our current trajectory. The story of Canadian colonization contains a type of heroism and fortitude that, while it might lend itself to a stoic plaque or statue, also belies more perilous and unscrupulous activities that do not make for such proud and easy reading. Nonetheless, investigating the selective history presented by these stone and metal markers may yet lead to a more accurate picture of ourselves.