Scout’s Honour
Michael Belmore and Frank Shebageget reunited, planned and set out on an expedition leading them back home to the northern community of Upsala, Ontario. The artists, both from the Anishnaabe First Nation, came together to unravel truths and their desire to honour their interrelated histories and encounters within a place integral to their nation, families and selves. Along the paths of the social, environmental and cultural landscapes forever inhabited by their ancestors and occupied by settlers, Belmore and Shebageget scouted their respective places of origin: Lac Seul and Lac Des Mille Lacs in Indian country, Northern Ontario. They found the onetime familiar landscape between Thunder Bay and Kenora a place with a dwindling population and for the most part, abandoned. Even as their immediate families have moved away, this landscape stays etched in their memory as the place where they find sources of inspiration, respect, dignity and integrity from the land, water, trees and rocks that guide them far and wide.
