A STUDY OF INDIAN-NESS | JEFF THOMAS
04.22.2006 | 06.11.2006

Jeff Thomas talks frequently of wanting his work to be a bridge spanning the gap between the images of Aboriginal peoples in museum and archive collections and the Aboriginal community. His ambition, based on his own experience, is to model how the "historical image is [a] catalyst for telling new stories, stories that really deal with the contemporary world that we are a part of." He connects the notion of history as story to the way he learned as a child in his community. His childhood was lived between urban Buffalo and the Six Nations Reserve. On Six Nations, he was taught, often by powerful women in the community, to take pride in Haudenosaune (Iroquois) culture. He remembers the stories that framed his first views of the past,

[I]t is interesting to think about those stories that we heard as children. When I was staying on the reserve there was no television, electricity, running water or central heating. In the evenings or during the day, we would sit around the kitchen table and listen to the elders talk about the old days and in my mind, they created vivid images.

Thomas’s work is not nostalgic. Like Aboriginal stories that change gradually from teller to teller and generation to generation, Thomas is conscious that the narratives he weaves around historical images be situated in the concerns of the present. He notes that historical portraits of Aboriginal people often excluded their immediate environment, leaving their subjects in stasis, floating in a placeless place. It is precisely the sense of immersion in an immediate, living world that he tries to capture in his own portraits. For him, contrary to the romantic notion, that world is an urban one. At the most basic level this is simply looking at models for survival. He reflects on the challenges his parents and grandparents faced trying to find a place for themselves in the city. For those generations, he reminds us, "there was no manual or pamphlet that said, ‘Okay, this is how you survive as a First Nations person in the city.’"

For Thomas himself, the struggle, which he has turned into a life’s work, is to engage the place of Aboriginal history and identity in the city. He says:

My photography is based on street life. [I am] an Iroquoian person, raised in the city and going around always looking [for] or hoping to find evidence of my own history. I wander the streets with this idea in mind and what I do actually find, whether it is a monument, a frieze, or a little plaque that says something about First Nation’s history [is the] evidence that we actually were here.

Excerpted from the catalogue essay by Richard William Hill

Jeff Thomas is an Iroquois/Onondaga photographer, curator and cultural analyst, born in Buffalo, New York and now living in Ottawa. His personal photographic practice is concerned with showing the perspective of an urban Iroquoian person. Thomas’s research explores various historical cultural resources in order to bring voices, stories and perspectives into the present. He has works in major collections in Canada, the United States, and Europe including such institutions as the National Gallery of Canada’s Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian, and the Museé de l’Elysée in Lausanne.