Envisioning an Enchanted World: On Christi Belcourt and The Wisdom of the Universe

LIZ GODBEY

In the face of increasing climate change and ecological disasters, it is more pressing than ever to confront this force. Contemporary Indigenous artwork like that of Christi Belcourt interrupts colonial ways of looking at the natural world through its visualization of enchanted, abundant, and interconnected world grounded in Indigenous cultural memory and place-based knowledge.

Belcourt is a community organizer, land protector, and advocate for Indigenous peoples across Turtle Island. Belcourt is a Michif (Métis) artist with ancestral ties to Manitou Sakahigan (Lac Ste. Anne, Alberta). Her ancestry also includes Cree, Mohawk, English, French, and Acadian. Her father, Tony Belcourt, is a Métis rights activist and community leader, and her practice continues her father’s activist legacy. A poster series she created with Isaac Murdoch (Ojibwe) is frequently displayed in association with land protection efforts. In 2012, Belcourt codirected the Walking with Our Sisters project, a display of thousands of decorated moccasin tops to commemorate the lives of the thousands of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit people. Belcourt has become wellknown outside of activist communities and within the “fine” art world as well. She was named the Aboriginal Arts Laureate by the Ontario Arts Council in 2014, and her work is in the collections of galleries across what is known as Canada. Perhaps her most well-known and celebrated works are her beadwork-style paintings. Georgia Phillips-Amos writes the following about one of these works:

Belcourt celebrates nature’s profusion in detail. Articulated in thousands of dots . . . her paintings are so intricate they might be mistaken for tapestries. A dab of paint, like a stitch of thread, could be subsumed by the whole . . . but Belcourt’s touch insists we see the vibrancy of the ruby-red feathers at a hummingbird’s throat or the fine veins of an oak leaf. Leaving the gallery, my eyes feel keen to see the city differently. Scanning for abundance, my gaze settles on a nearby staghorn sumac, whose crimson berry clusters are as opulent as wet paint.1

In their review, Phillips-Amos points to the potential and powerful impact of Belcourt’s paintings, in which the viewer becomes enchanted by the work and carries this out beyond the gallery walls.

Enchantment is characterized by wonder that is located in the body and soul, a wonder that goes beyond theorizing, conceptualizing, or critiquing. To be enchanted is to become spellbound and to feel a “temporary suspension of chronological time and bodily movement.” 2 It is a way of approaching the world that reminds one of the marvelous specificity of things 3 Enchantment requires “a cultivated form of perception, a discerning and meticulous attentiveness to the singular specificity of things.”4 Enchantment allows us to become attuned to the world around us. As we are enchanted, we are put under a spell of the world and are reminded that we are inextricably and joyfully bound to nature, physically and spiritually. 5 Western knowledge traditions are characterized by a mechanical worldview. As Vine Deloria Jr. (Lakota) explains, “The mechanistic worldview continues to be applied to many of the physical sciences and biology and . . . very quickly results in a methodology that is essentially dissective in character.” 6 Natasha Myers, a professor of anthropology and researcher of plant sensing and communication, speaks of the connection between mechanization and disenchantment:

By turning the living world into a machine, we’ve actually set it up to work for us . . . we’ve created a context in which we can deploy plants and organisms, molecules and other things in our service. We can run them like machines. . . . And so I think we can challenge [this] in really powerful ways by participating actively in the work of refusing to disenchant the living world . . . it could really radically change our relationship to plants as we expand our sensibilities for their forms of sentience, their intelligences, their knowledge, their ways of being.7

Perhaps the most enchanting of Belcourt’s works is the mural-scaled painting

The Wisdom of the Universe (2014; fig. 1 ), which measures 67 by 111 inches. The painting was originally commissioned by the Art Gallery of Ontario. Recently it was exhibited in Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists, a 2019–2021 exhibition organized by the Minneapolis Institute of Art

3 Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life 4.

4 Bennet, The Enchantment of Modern Life, 37.

5 Bennett further defines enchantment: “A surprising encounter, a meeting with something that you did not expect and are not fully prepared to engage. Contained within this surprise state are (1) a pleasurable feeling of being charmed by the novel and as yet unprocessed encounter and (2) a more unheimlich (uncanny) feeling of being disrupted or torn out of one’s default sensory-psychic-intellectual disposition. The overall effect of enchantment is a mood of fullness, plenitude, or liveliness, a sense of having had one’s nerves or circulation or concentration powers tuned up or recharged—a shot in the arm, a fleeting return to childlike excitement about life. Historians Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park note that, in early modern Europe, the terms for wonder and wonders—admiratio, mirabilia, miracula—‘seem to have their roots in an Indo-European word for “smile.”’” that traveled to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among other venues. A close look at Belcourt’s The Wisdom of the Universe reveals thousands of individually painted dots, 8 slightly raised off the canvas, resembling beads. The beadwork that Belcourt emulates is characteristic of the beadwork of Métis communities. 9 As Susan D. Dion explains in her book Braided Learning: Illuminating Indigenous Presence through Art and Story, “Beading tells the story of colonialism: beads were used for trade, introducing questions about the economic relationship between Indigenous people and fur traders.” 10 European seed beads proved to be a labor-saving material in comparison to the quills used in quillwork, another major practice of textile embellishment that was in practice for hundreds of years before European contact. Embroidery thread was also a European trade good, and with it came foreign designs. Although partially inspired by European craft and materials, Native beadwork is its own unique art form. It is characteristic of many Native communities around the Great Lakes and is often seen on regalia, cradleboards, moccasins, blankets, jackets, and earrings. Métis and Anishinaabe beadwork is also defined by its representation of the region’s life-forms. Elder Rose Richardson explains, “Stories and knowledge were beaded or embroidered into clothing and items of everyday use. As [our ancestors] drew the design, they told the story of the plant.” 11 Beading is not only decorative but also serves to preserve knowledge of different species and as a mapping of the natural world.

6 Vine Deloria Jr. and Daniel R Wildcat, Power and Place: Indian Education in America (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Pub., 2001), 11–12.

7 Ayana Young and Natasha Myers, “Dr. Natasha Myers on Growing the Planthroposcene,” October 14, 2020, in For the Wild Podcast MP3 audio, 1:07:13, https://forthewild.world/listen/dr-natasha-myers-on-growing-the-planthroposcene-204.

Belcourt’s painting process, which involves her slowly adding thousands of dots to the canvas, takes months. As she works on it day after day, the process becomes a ritual for her. This abundance of dots is assembled to represent full living beings. The Wisdom of the Universe’s pictorial plane is full and alive. Belcourt includes classic motifs of indigenous plants, medicines, and animals—strawberries, blueberries, hummingbirds. All plant parts are included—leaves, buds, flowers, tendrils, roots. As typical in beadwork, the background is a single color: the black in this painting is reminiscent of the velvet traditionally used by Métis beadworkers. As is typical of beadwork patterns, Belcourt’s beaded imagery is nearly symmetrical, with the plants and birds on one side mirrored on the other. This symmetry implies a sense of balance and harmony that is found in a healthy and thriving ecosystem.

Belcourt’s botanical, aviary, and insectile imagery reflects her ties to a specific place and a deep understanding of the relationships within that place. This painting, housed at a museum in Toronto, exists on Mississauga, Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and Wendat land. In her artist statement, Belcourt writes that many of the beings depicted in her painting are not just local to Toronto but also designated as extinct, threatened, or endangered in Ontario. They include the spring blue-eyed Mary, the dwarf lake iris, the eastern prairie fringed orchid, the Karner blue butterfly, the West Virginia white butterfly, and the cerulean warbler (there are also other beings pictured whose populations are stable, like the mourning dove). The representations of the endangered beings in this visual Indigenous context connect their status as endangered or threatened to the larger effects of settler colonialism and extractive capitalism. Habitats are in danger and being destroyed due to residential or other land development, the introduction of invasive species, forestry, rampant deforestation, and misguided wildfire suppression efforts.

Belcourt’s paintings are also characterized by an aesthetic of abundance. I take the phrase “an aesthetic of abundance” from an essay in the Hearts of Our People exhibition catalogue. In the essay in which Janet Catherine Berlo and Ruth B. Phillips write that “an aesthetic of abundance—in expenditures of time, materials, and generosity to others—has characterized Native women’s arts across the generations,” 12 offering examples of extravagantly crafted gifts, like beaded garments or cradleboards using floral patterns. This aesthetic of abundance is in contrast to a capitalist society that encourages productivity and efficiency and relies on the myth of scarcity to sustain itself.

The Wisdom of the Universe reminds the viewer of the interconnectedness of all life on the planet. Nearly everything in the world of Belcourt’s painting is interconnected, with most of the plants and medicines sharing roots, branches, and stems. The plants, animals, and insects interact. Take, for example, the cocoon hanging from a branch or the hummingbirds drinking from the flowers. She depicts a whole ecological world: a dove, robins, hummingbirds, moths, caterpillars, cocoons, butterflies, oak leaves and acorns, irises, warblers, and a further multitude of flowering and nonflowering plants. They are intricately crafted—care is given to each tiny bud, thorn, and tendril—each one its own marvelously specific species, as made clear through the artist’s choices regarding their shape, number, color, size, and location in the image.

Belcourt’s painting also implicates the viewer in the vibrant ecological life systems it depicts. Enchanted by the painting, the viewer is connected both to the ecosystem they are viewing and to their experiences of nature outside the gallery space. The scale of the world is so large and full of life that the viewer may realize their own involvement in the same living ecosystem of relations.

Settler colonialism, Western science, and land cultivation are intimately entangled, and their histories are similarly intertwined—they can be fully understood only in relation to one another. The field of botany emerged from this entanglement, which is dependent upon extraction and erasure and helped enable the expansion of European empires. Botany developed due to colonial projects and exploratory voyages around the world that sought new specimens to be collected, hybridized, and turned into profit through the processing or selling of raw materials. This discipline is also centered on European practices of classification and taxonomy, systems that attempt to differentiate, name, and hierarchically order species by visual markers—a practice extended to include the development of scientific racism and the creation of categories of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Moreover, European botanists renamed Native plants in Latin or after themselves or other non-Native botanists. Local names were erased, as local knowledge was extracted and exploited. In tracing the history of colonial botany, Londa L. Schiebinger and Claudia Swan write that “the story of colonial botany is as much a story of transplanting nature as it is one of transforming knowledge.” 13 The accumulation of specimens was accompanied by a substantial visual record in the form of botanical drawing.

Christopher Parsons has detailed some of the early practices of European botany, specifically French botany, in what is frequently referred to as Canada. Parsons explains how French colonialists conceived of the land in a way that ignored Indigenous claims to and knowledge of the land. In his book A Not-So-New World: Empire and Environment in French Colonial North America, Parsons devotes a chapter to ginseng, explaining how this plant was already well-known to the nations of Iroquois south of Montreal when

French missionary and ethnologist Joseph-François Lafitau falsely claimed to have ‘discovered’ ginseng there.14 Compared to the depictions of plant life in Belcourt’s paintings, Lafitau’s drawing of a single root appears lifeless (fig. 2). The plant is displayed dissected and alone. The individual parts of the plant are all there, but they are separated and individualized. There is no sense as to how this plant exists in the ground or how it interacts with other life. In contrast, Belcourt does not see roots as individualized but quite the opposite (fig. 3). She states that in her painting “the roots are exposed to signify that all life needs nurturing from the earth to survive and represent the idea that there is more to life than what is seen on the surface. Additionally, it represents the great influence our heritage has on us as individuals.” 15

14 Christopher M. Parsons, A Not-So-New World: Empire and Environment in French Colonial North America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).

Western botany aims to dissect, divide, and disconnect. Reflecting on her study of botany in college, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, “My natural inclination was to see relationships, to seek the threads that connect the world, to join instead of divide. But science is rigorous in separating the observer from the observed, and the observed from the observer.” 16 This separation and disconnection between observer and observed is present not only in Western science but also in Western art.

Through their size, horizontal orientation, and content, Belcourt’s beadwork paintings exist in conversation with Euro-American landscape painting. Her work disrupts colonial discourses on landscape, notions of the sublime, and the exaltation of the disembodied or disconnected eye. Belcourt’s work is flat, in terms of perspective, which has the effect of equalizing the visual field; nothing is foregrounded or sent to the background, except maybe the variably sized glowing yellow dots, perhaps representing stars or spirits. Again, this is how beadwork patterns appear, in two dimensions, which is also reminiscent of Woodland style art.17 However, European landscape painting traditions abide by Cartesian perspectivalism, which depicts the world three-dimensionally, as through the gaze of the eye. This perspective, to quote Martin Jay, “privilege[s] an ahistorical, disinterested, disembodied subject outside of the world it claims to know only from afar.” 18 Jay writes, “Cartesian perspectivalism was thus in league with a scientific worldview that . . . saw [the world] as situated in a mathematically regular spatio-temporal order.”19 The flatness of Belcourt’s painting is a flattening or condensing of time and space that contradicts this idea of “mathematically regular spatio-temporal order.” All these plants and animals could exist in a single area, but they might not be present or close together at the same moment in time. One would have to look, listen, and feel closely and slowly over a long duration to notice all of these different organisms.

15 Christi Belcourt, “Metis Artist Christi Belcourt Discusses Painting ‘My Heart is Beautiful’.mov,” May 5, 2012, YouTube video, 11:04, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwNHNm9dw6Y&ab_channel=ChristiBelcourt.

16 Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2013), 42.

17 Woodland art is a Native art style characterized by flat perspective, bright color, and bold black lines that was founded by Norval Morrisseau, an Ojibwe artist, in the 1960s. Notably, Morrisseau’s painting The Great Flood (1975) is hung across from Belcourt’s The Wisdom of the Universe at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

18 Martin Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” in Vision and Visuality ed. Hal Foster, Discussions in Contemporary Culture, no. 2 (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), 10.

19 Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” 9.

Belcourt’s work depicts an enchanted world—a world that refuses to be disenchanted, to be mechanized and separated. The Wisdom of the Universe presents an interconnected world of more-than-human life characterized by an aesthetic of abundance. The numerous and various plants are vibrantly colored and crafted through the artist’s slow process of painting individual dots, which echo the art of Métis beadworkers. While translating beadwork patterns into a painted format, Belcourt retains the sensibilities of the beadwork that inspires her. She demonstrates how nature is not static or separated but complex and always in flux. Belcourt states that she intends to “offer a counter-balance to the overwhelming negative forces of destruction, despair, violence, and death to which we are exposed daily. I want to offer respite for tired eyes and weary minds.” Informed by a traditionally Indigenous perspective on land, Belcourt’s work not only shows us the beauty of the world but reminds us how to be in the world.