OjibwaTableaux Vivants: George Catlin, Robert Houle, and Transcultural Materialism

Abstract

This essay reconsiders the legacy of Ojibwa travellers who performanced tableaux vivants or 'living pictures' alongside George Catlin's Indian Gallery in Paris, 1845-46, many of whom died of smallpox before returning home. Contemporary Saulteaux artist Robert Houle's architectural installation, Paris/Ojibwa, first exhibited at the Canadian Cultural Center in Paris in 2010, features a stage set peopled by paintings of the deceased travellers. Paris/Ojibwa invites us to see how tableaux vivants incorporated an Ojibwa understanding of the potential liveliness of images and objects. When wedded to complex indigenous notions of personhood tableaux viviants reversed the ambitions of nineteenth-century ethnography: instead of turning living Natives into static images, they reanimated pictures. Inviting audiences to participte in an indigenous view of a shared modernity, Paris/Ojibwa restores sociability to the archive of Ojibwa representations and models transcultural materialism inside Western institutions.