Dana Claxton’s four channel video installation tells the little known story of Sitting Bull and his band’s exodus from the 1876 Battle of Little Bighorn (Custer’s last stand) to Moose Jaw where many of their descendants continue to live. Among the exiles were the artist’s great, great maternal grandparents. Sitting Bull and the Moose Jaw Sioux consists of four digital projections. The first appears on a stand-alone wall in the middle and a third of the way into the large, dark room. It features footage of the local landscape: verdant hills and fields, tree lined paths, and the river—said to bend like a moose’s jaw. The scenes are unremarkable, but as the exhibition unfolds and the viewer learns that this was the site of Sitting Bull’s winter encampment, the images resonate with meaning and feeling. The moving camera becomes the artist searching for a connection to her past and to this place.

The three other projections are arranged into a theatrical-sized, floor-to-ceiling triptych. It begins with an image of Sitting Bull in the center panel and old newspaper clippings to the right and left. The clippings are accounts of the Sioux in Moose Jaw over the last century and some. Laid over these pictures is a scrolling text translating a conversation, in Lakota, between two elders, Hartland and Francis Goodtrack, who relate their families’ experience in the Moose Jaw area after the migration. They recount both the hardships and more positive aspects of the resettlement.

Claxton’s strategy is both good historical storytelling and creative art. The narrative is layered rather than linear, dialogic rather than authoritarian, and open-ended rather than contained. At least four accounts unspool at any one time. While they always compliment each other and advance the story, the gentle polyphony encourages repeated viewings and the sense that we can gather only glimpses and should not imagine ourselves completely informed. Unlike conventional documentaries, there is no narrative arc, rising tension, climax, and denouement. In fact, the initiating event, the Battle at Little Bighorn, does get told until near the end, and its central antagonist, Custer, is barely mentioned. This is the Sioux account of the battle and their subsequent lives. It is eventful, but, until now, only a footnote to settler history.

— By David Garneau