Restoring the river, restoring relations: on Anishinaabe artist Michael Belmore’s stone series, Replenishment

Abstract

In his work and creative practice, Anishinaabe artist Michael Belmore shows that materials have language and rock tells a story. Belmore’s land-based installation on Manitoulin Island, a three-part granite series titled, Replenishment, tells a story about place that is activated by relationship and reciprocity between people and with the Earth. It reinscribes Indigenous presence on the land, rewrites settler-colonial narratives about place, and broadens the scope and intent of ecological restoration. Drawing on my interactions with the artist and his work during the 2017 Manitoulin Island Summer Historical Institute, a field school on Anishinaabe history, I explore the circulation of knowledge and agency in an Anishinaabe world and consider relationship as essential to decolonizing geography’s engagement with Indigenous peoples and territories. Through rock as mnemonic device, Belmore demonstrates the restorative power of subtle and not so subtle acts of interconnection and relationship.