Museums often present Indigenous cultures as ‘frozen in time.’ Artist Kent Monkman on shifting that narrative [Video]

In the past, museums have presented Indigenous life as being frozen in the past. Cree artist Kent Monkman is shifting the narrative and celebrating the life and resilience of Indigenous people. Watch So Surreal: Behind the Masks now on CBC Gem and the CBC Docs YouTube channel.

Museums are inherently colonial, according to Cree artist Kent Monkman.

“You don’t see Indigenous people going around the world collecting artifacts and material and putting them under a roof like the way that these colonial European cultures have done,” he says in this bonus clip from So Surreal: Behind the Masks. “We would never do that.

“You can’t really decolonize [museums] because they are inherently colonial. But you can change the conversation about what’s inside them.”

In 2019, two of Monkman’s paintings were unveiled in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Great Hall in New York.

“[The Met] commissioned me to create two paintings for the Great Hall,” he says. “They decided to open …