Nadia Myre, Indian Act, 2000–2002

This transformation matters politically. The 1876 Indian Act is still a living instrument of governance. By reworking it through collective labour, Myre dislodges its bureaucratic authority and resituates it in relation through collective beading practices that bring participants into shared space and exchange, a place where knowledge is produced and shared. Weekly “beading bees” became sites of gathering and counter-legality where the bead, a unit of care, replaced the word, a unit of control. In exhibition, this serial installation produces a sense of accumulation: each page similar but not the same, marked by many hands rather than a single author. The work highlights “gaps in translation” between text and beadwork, which function less as deficits than as spaces of ethical encounter. With the rise of discourse surrounding the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC), Indian Act gained renewed significance. It became a model of aesthetics as counter-jurisprudence, materializing the endurance of law while demonstrating how Indigenous practice can overwrite it through relation, repetition, and care.

If Indian Act re-patterns the law, The Scar Project, 2005–13, turns toward the intimate archive of the body. Over many years, Myre invited participants to stitch their scars into small canvases and to write accompanying narratives. The project is both workshop and installation, a process of shared making and a visual field of hundreds of repaired surfaces, each bearing pain and resilience. Unlike projects that mobilize or use community, The Scar Project is non-extractive, leaving trauma in place. Participants retain authorship over their squares; Myre’s role was that of host and assembler. As the project travelled from friendship centres to museums and biennials, its circle of contributors expanded, forming a commons of scars. Indigenous and non-Indigenous wounds appear together, reframing harm as uneven but shared and refusing the singular narrative of trauma often projected onto Indigenous art.

In TRC and post-TRC contexts, its relevance is clear. The Scar Project offers a practical aesthetics of testimony that neither sensationalizes nor silences wounds. It creates conditions for scars to be named, seen, and held, transforming the exhibition into a temporary community of care. Along with Indian Act, both works exemplify art as testimony and care, remaking structures of harm into forms of resilience and knowledge.