Art, Truth & Reconciliation

By Gerald McMaster

Chapter

Jeff Thomas, Broken Treaties, 1613–, 2020

A panorama composed of five photographs that respond to the ongoing dispute over the Haldimand Tract land claim.

In Broken Treaties, 1613–, Iroquois photographer Jeff Thomas (b.1956) presents a panorama composed of five photographs that respond to the ongoing dispute over the Haldimand Tract land claim. In 1784, the British Crown, after negotiations involving Mohawk Chief Joseph Brant, granted approximately 384,450 hectares along the Grand River in Ontario to the Six Nations in recognition of their alliance during the American Revolutionary War and the loss of their homelands in New York. Over the years, the Six Nations alleged that portions of this land were improperly sold or transferred by colonial and Canadian authorities. The dispute remains unresolved and has led to decades of protest, including the 2006 occupation of a housing development site in Caledonia—events that form the historical and political ground of Thomas’s work.

The images in this artwork depict sites connected to the Haldimand Tract dispute, including contemporary scenes from Caledonia, alongside textual and cartographic references that mark the land as contested territory. Together, they combine Thomas’s long-standing strategies of photography, mapping, and archival reference into an indictment of how treaty promises have been reduced to lines on a map, constrained, and ignored. The work’s wide, mural-like format reads as a corridor of contested space: texts, coordinates, and site imagery are sealed into a single visual field that behaves like a map one can walk, insisting that history is not abstract but locatable—on a street, a river corridor, a fence. By naming the Argyle Street South occupation in Caledonia and plotting GPS points (as identified in the work’s accompanying captions and catalogue records), Thomas draws a bright line between the eighteenth-century Haldimand Tract and twenty-first-century land defence, refusing the amnesia that typically severs protest from its legal and historical grounds.

A composite image of a painted portrait and a colour photograph of a man standing in front of a monument.

Thomas has called himself an urban-Iroquois artist. Broken Treaties proceeds from that stance by situating Iroquoian sovereignty within the infrastructures of settler modernity: roads, signage, property lines, press photographs. The composite aesthetic of the photographs counters the more common single-document view by layering image and text so that no one element claims authority. In place of the demanding evidentiary photograph, Thomas offers a multilayered surface that invites viewers to make connections among archival fragments, place names, and protest vernacular. This navigation is ethical as much as optical: to read the piece is to accept that land rights are intelligible and verifiable, not merely symbolic.

Formally, the choice of pigment print on aluminum gives the assembled picture a crisp, industrial presence that echoes the built environment it critiques. Its extended proportions imply a river-course and roadway alike, aligning with the Haldiman Tract’s description—“six miles on each side of the Grand River”—and turning a legal phrase into a physical register. When a sign shouts “OH CANADA” inside this treaty-anchored frame, the national motto is recoded as a question: What, and whose, Canada is being invoked here? The juxtaposition reveals a double exposure—patriotic spectacle overlaid on a cartography of dispossession.

Within discussions of contemporary Indigenous art, Broken Treaties exemplifies visual sovereignty by means of both positioning and citation. Rather than presenting an ethnographic “Indian” subject, Thomas presents a treaty: a relationship and a legal instrument. The subject is the agreement itself—and its breach. This shift redirects the act of viewing from looking at people to looking with them at evidence, infrastructures, and obligations. It also resonates with truth and reconciliation frameworks that call for public education about treaties and their continuing force. Thomas’s image functions as a learning tool and a public reminder, compressing archive, map, and protest memory into one accessible plane.

By tethering the geographic promise of 1784 to the Caledonia occupation in 2006 and to the present, Thomas reasserts continuity against the legal and visual tactics that isolate events. Broken Treaties is less a lament than a tool, an image that returns viewers to the situations where promises were made and where they can still be honoured.

Art, Truth & Reconciliation

Jeff Thomas, Broken Treaties, 1613–, 2020

Collection of A New Generation of Witness