Ethnography will die

Rocio Graham explores ritual, ceremony and relationality

Text and art by Rocio Graham

Cultivando raíces con sueños compartidos
(Growing roots from shared dreams)
August 20 – November 12, 2022
Gallery 2 – Grand Forks Art Gallery
Grand Forks, British Columbia

Listen to Rocio Graham being interviewed by Redeye program host Jane Williams on Vancouver's Coop Radio on Sunday February 26, 2023.

I spent the last two years getting to know a group of Mexican temporary farm workers in the Boundary area of British Columbia, an area rich in culture and agriculture located in the southern interior along the US border.

During the lockdowns of early COVID times, while many of us sat in our comfy PJs at home, farm and food production workers had to work (in many cases in high risks jobs) to ensure that all Canadians could afford to hoard food and supplies.

Rocio Graham. Ethnography will die.

Driving past the fields surrounded by beautiful mountains, where many worked, I wondered if anyone had asked them how they were fairing or what they thought about their life on Turtle Island. How working a foreign land perhaps made them miss home like me? What stories were they telling themselves to cope being far away from home during pandemic times?

As a Mexican Mestiza from a family of farmers in Mexico, I understand the nuances in the identities of land people. I felt a deep need to connect with my compatriot farmers; in uncertain times, we tend to gravitate to our people. I met them at the local supermarket where I knew they went each Sunday for supplies. Hesitant at first about my motives to befriend them, we eventually became friends over Sunday suppers at my house. I know that nothing says home like a bowl of rich Pozole soup soaked in Mexican music and friends. What became evident is how working in the land and the landscape on Turtle Island has percolated into their soul like drip coffee.

Their identity transformed, unperceivable at first, a slow water trickle, but evident like spring runoff in the Kettle River. I see those changes in my own identity after many seasons surrounded by foreign lands. I felt hesitation telling stories that involved them through my art. I had to question myself, why should I be the one telling those stories? What were my honest intentions of engaging them? Who benefited by telling those stories? Could I honour them and maintain integrity in my project?

I am very aware of the harm that art with ethnographic and documentary tones has done through telling the stories of bodies of culture. How many times have artists outside of their represented communities harmed them, regardless of their best intentions?

Ethnography and its colonial and imperialistic approaches has dictated how artists tell stories of people of colour. It has allowed artists to objectify and certainly cement ideas of othering. Who gets to decide what is highlighted in a culture and what is left behind? Many times, what is highlighted in these types of art projects are the aspects of a culture that cement western positionality and hierarchy that justify colonialism. Ideas of pre-civilization cultures, the “noble savage”, lay ground for exploitation and oppression.

The way visual stories of bodies of culture are told by outsiders tend to be extractive. It presents other cultures in contrast to what is considered palatable to the western aesthetic, creating a visual spectacle to be consumed and easily discarded. Food, music and documentary photography are easy examples of that.

It is important to consider who gets to tell those stories and why. Allowing people to tell their own stories from their own vantage point is a way to decolonize visual arts. It allows us to change the course of our own history, a self-agency act that challenges oppression. To achieve this, we require surrendering to a neo Indi-futurism that collectively acknowledges that the only path forward for bodies of culture is to define their own framework of sharing.

There are times when a group perceives no agency within, and normalized ideas of extraction blur their ability to see their own power. When outsiders feel like they are the only ones capable of telling their stories, we fall into the trap of the “saviour complex” that perpetuates patriarchal structures. As visual artists, perhaps engaging with a community and supporting it to find its own voice, while we work with it, is a way to make justice.

Bodies of culture do not need saviours to come to make artwork that makes us relevant in current art systems. We do not need to fit the western aesthetic values; we need to decolonize them and open them instead.

For me, working with my fellow compatriots in the project Growing Roots from Shared Dreams, I acknowledged that in spite of our shared culture, lived experience, spirituality, language, and values, there are fundamental differences. I have legal and economic privileges in this country that they do not have. In representing a shared story, I needed to make room for different ways of working; always naming the power dynamic and keeping self-agency in representation at the forefront.

Doing this work required self-reflection and investing time building connections that counter balanced hierarchies. By the time the exhibition was installed at Gallery 2, I had many months of weekly conversations with this group of migrant workers. I cried with a couple of them when their mothers died and saw the grief and guilt in their eyes for not being able to be by their side for their last breath. Creating meaning required life to happen between us. I danced with them in my living room, celebrated holidays, and learned to notice the changes in their emotions as subtlety reflected in their eyes. I cannot claim that the artwork created with them was unbiased, nor that it does not have western aesthetics. Certainly, I spent many nights thinking about the responsibility on my shoulders. Our shared dreams and the ways we are growing roots in this country allowed us to highlight our communal love for this land and the epistemology of our identity as “gente de campo” (people of the land).

Seeing them, standing tall and proud during the exhibition opening night, recognized by our community and as part of it, made me hopeful. As we tell our own stories ethnography will die and we will have a more inclusive future.