Warrior Woman
- Andréa Ledding | September 12, 2014
A giant warrior woman on
Saskatoon’s 20th street is getting a lot of attention and raising
awareness of murdered and missing women. Mary Longman’s latest work, Warrior
Women: “Stop the Silence!” is on a huge billboard above AKA art gallery. Mary explains that it began as a memorial work inspired by her
mother Lorraine Longman, a courageous and resilient survivor.
Regular beatings in Residential
School caused a severe head injury at age 8 - and a lifetime of grand mal
seizures, and premature dementia. Young, attractive, and poverty-stricken, but
no longer able to attend school, or to work as an adult, her uncles taught her
to fight in order to survive the violence, crime, and vulnerabilities of her
position, and she became known as “the toughest chick in the hood.”
Born in 1949, she passed away in
2012, but had seven children in a row beginning at age fifteen; all of them
were apprehended by social services. By the time she was 21 she was parentless
herself when her pregnant mother, Emma, was killed by a drunk driver in Regina,
at the same time injuring her grandmother. The driver was given six months
sentence – the length her grandmother was in hospital.
Mary’s tribute to her mother’s
tenacity and courage in the face of every loss is transformed into the
Indigenized version of Americanized Wonder Woman, symbolic of the Indigenous
struggle in the aftermath of centuries of deliberate assault, not only with the
residential schools and the ‘60’s Scoop, but the ongoing assault on Indigenous
peoples for over five hundred years.
Her image and legacy in the billboard calls for an
end to the violence, and silence, as she becomes the voice for millions of
Indigenous people slain from 1492 onwards by colonial armies: settlers inhumanely
competing for resources, land, gold.
“Canadians want the truth, and feel betrayed when
they have learnt that they have been lied to by omission,” Mary noted. “History
in Canada did not start five hundred years ago with European contact. Human
history started in Canada 30 000 to 40 000 years ago with the Indigenous
people.”
But this erasure in the history texts and
government discourse of an occupied genocide has not been acknowledged,
apologized for, or memorialized, notes Longman. Raising a tightly clutched red
and white campaign ribbon calling to action a national campaign for Indigenous
Genocide, “Warrior Woman” shouts out, “Stop The Silence!” Mary hopes to bring
justice and truth, a paradigm shift that acknowledges both the genocide, and
the Indigenous guidance and knowledge shared with newcomers.
“My mother’s story was the
incentive to draw a bigger picture on Indigenous genocide in history, whether
it was direct or cumulative.”