Duane Linklater, i want to forget the english language, ulterior, 2020/23 

The work’s title signals this challenge with precision. Its Cree phrasing—e-nôtây-wanikiskisitotam omâ âkâyâsîmowin, kâcikâtêw—does not simply translate as a rejection of English but frames it as a condition of darkness or obscurity. Here, “english” stands in for Western epistemological dominance and its claim to universality. Linklater’s gesture is one of reorientation rather than negation. The desire to “forget” names a longing to re-enter Indigenous grammars of perception, relation, and responsibility that have been displaced, though never erased, by colonial systems of knowledge.

Formally, the installation reinforces this ethical shift. The tipi poles evoke Indigenous architectures of kinship, mobility, and gathering; however, they are detached from the ground and set upon a dolly, suggesting both movement and dislocation. Their westward lean carries cosmological weight. In many Plains worldviews, west is associated with closure, transition, or the setting of a cycle. Read this way, the work gestures toward the waning authority of colonial structures of knowledge rather than their destruction. Change here is gradual, deliberate, and relational.

Suspended from the tip is a crystal chandelier, an emblem of European domestic refinement and imperial taste. Its presence is conspicuously unsettled. No longer central or triumphant, it hangs awkwardly from an Indigenous structure, its beauty rendered uneasy. For some viewers, rather than elegance, the chandelier evokes a kind of symbolic capture: a colonial object displaced from its original hierarchy and held in tension. Linklater does not invert power so much as suspend it, forcing a recalibration of value and meaning.

This strategy aligns with miýikosiwin, a mode of knowing through making and gifted vision that emerges relationally rather than declaratively. The installation does not offer resolution or clear translation. Instead, it interrupts Western visual fluency and requires the viewer to slow down, adjust their frame of reference, and attend to relation. In this way, Linklater recalibrates kanawâpâtahmowin, the conditions of seeing. Rather than an evacuation of meaning, his abstraction is a thickening of it, asserting that Indigenous visual knowledge operates through ethical engagement rather than immediate legibility. The work reminds us that to see differently is also to be accountable differently.