The Intellect, 1997

Private collection, Cologne

“If you allow only the colonialists to record history, they record it to their own glorification. I wanted to take that position of power, of historical painting, and put it into my own hands-take possession of history. I’m just an Indian trying to emancipate myself, but I still will look at these things. I may be under colonial occupation, but I will think about these things.”

Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun

The works of Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun are visual protests unequivocally criticising the history and the colonial continuities in Canada. In many of his works, the Coast Salish / Okanagan (Syilx) artist processes his own past as a student of a residential school – one of the Christian boarding schools established by the Canadian state.

With The Intellect, Yuxweluptun shows his solidarity with resistance movements outside Canada. Here, you see a figure holding the book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, which narrates the violent expansion in the American West and the displacement of the First Nations along with the associated traumas a, ending with the massacre at Wounded Knee. Published in 1970, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee had a major impact on the awareness of First Nations genocide.

Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun (born in 1957 in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada) is a Canadian painter. His strategy is to document and promote change in contemporary Indigenous history in large-scale paintings, using Coast Salish cosmology in British Columbia, formal design elements of the Northwest Coast and Western landscape tradition. His paintings address political, environmental and cultural issues. Yuxweluptun’s work has been featured in numerous international group and solo exhibitions. In 1998, he was awarded the Vancouver Institute for the Visual Arts (VIVA) prize.

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Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun
The Intellect, 1997
Acrylic on canvas | 128 x 90 cm
Private collection, Cologne