Teharihulen Michel Savard, Reciprocity (Réciprocité), 2009

The forest setting is equally deliberate. By removing the Act from courtrooms and archives and bringing it onto the living land, Savard situates colonial law within an Indigenous territorial frame. The land, not the state, becomes the ground of judgment. The rifle, a tool historically turned against Indigenous Peoples, is here turned against colonial legislation itself—its use both confrontational and ceremonially precise. The intimacy of the work’s scale amplifies rather than diminishes this force: close viewing reveals that what appears to be destruction is also restoration.

The title names the ethical principle at the work’s centre. Reciprocity—mutual accountability, relational obligation, the two-directional nature of treaty—is exactly what the Indian Act systematically denied. By invoking it, Savard does not merely critique the legislation, he names the alternative framework that colonial law displaced, asserting that genuine reconciliation requires this foundational return. Thus, the piece operates simultaneously as critique, ceremony, and proposition.

A useful counterpoint is An Indian Act Shooting the Indian Act, Healey Estate, Northumberland, September 14th, 1997, 1997, by Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun (b.1957), in which a public, high-spectacle performance turns the same document into a target before a live audience. Where Yuxweluptun amplifies dissent through scale and confrontation, Savard’s approach is meditative and materially specific, with meaning carried through wampum and paint as much as through the rifle shot. Both works insist that the Indian Act is not an abstraction but an object, and one that can be handled, disrupted, and symbolically refused.

Ultimately, Reciprocity resists easy consolation. Its wound remains visible; its beads and paint do not mend what the Act destroyed. Yet, the work holds open the possibility of something beyond the colonial relation: a future grounded in reciprocity, land, and the enduring presence of treaty. Savard positions art as an enactment of Indigenous legal and ethical memory rather than a representation of history.