Nagam, Julie. “Charting Indigenous Stories of Place: An Alternate Cartography Through the Visual Narrative of Jeff Thomas.” In Diverse Spaces: Identity, Heritage and Community in Canadian Public Culture, edited by Susan Ashley, 188-207. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013.
The site that now makes up the City of Toronto, Canada has held for the past ten thousand years, and continues to hold significant Indigenous memories and stories of place. Recently a re-migration of Aboriginal people to the city has occurred, thus making a critical investigation of Toronto as a site that contains Indigenous memories and stories relevant and timely. Nagam concentrates on hidden Indigenous geographies in the City of Toronto by examining selected photographs by Haudenosaunee artist Jeff Thomas. Thomas’s photographs challenge and contradict the general ideology that spaces, especially urban centres such as Toronto, are depicted and founded by the colonial narrative; his photographs visually create a space to recount Indigenous stories of place within Toronto. Nagam argues that Thomas does not try to return to pre-contact ideals or attempt to capture the everyday lives of Indigenous people currently living in Toronto, but challenges the static binaries - civilized versus savage, heathen versus Christian and nature versus culture - by whimsically placing stereotypical Aboriginal plastic figurines in the foreground of photographs taken in urbanized spaces that possess Indigenous history in the City of Toronto. By placing these romanticized Aboriginal figurines in modern cityscape it contradicts the notion that Aboriginal people are locked in the past. Thomas’s images become part of the larger collective memory of Canada, challenging the stereotypical pictorial politics that have followed Indigenous people for centuries.