From them to we

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This article was published 27/02/2025 (549 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When Heidi McKenzie first saw the photo of her great-great-grandmother Roonia, it unlocked something in her imagination.

“When you look at her, wow,” says the Toronto-based ceramic and installation artist. “You see the weathered skin and the deep creases and the set-in face and then on the back of the photograph, it says that she was 105 when the photograph was taken.”

From 1838 to 1917, 1.6 million Indians were exported to British colonies (including British Guiana, Trinidad, Jamaica, Suriname, Mauritius and Fiji) to work sugar, cocoa and coffee plantations in indentured servitude as part of the Indian indenture system, a replacement for slavery, which had been abolished by the British just years prior.

Roonia was one of them.

McKenzie’s great-great-grandmother is one of many inspirations behind her solo exhibition Reclaimed: Indo-Caribbean HerStories, opening at Gallery 1C03 at the University of Winnipeg today. McKenzie’s work explores the little-known histories of indentured Indo-Caribbean women in the mid-19th and early 20th centuries, using photographic portraiture on ceramics.

McKenzie pulled a variety of threads to make the works in Reclaimed. Reading Gaiutra Bahadur’s book Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture was particularly foundational; Bahadur’s great-great-grandmother’s story was very similar to McKenzie’s.

“Reading that was really transformative for me in terms of getting an appreciation and starting to understand that people often assume that women who are migrating are coming to make families and make babies, but really, these women were not coming to do that. They were coming to work the sugar-cane fields and do hard, back-breaking labour, and so then (I really started) imagining my grandmother doing this,” McKenzie says.

McKenzie kept going, following paths of inquiry and curiosity, meeting people and hearing their stories.

“Research is a really big component of what I do. I tend to be very much in my head and very conceptual, and I struggle, sometimes, to get it into my hands,” she says.

It was Sequoia Miller, curator at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto, who asked McKenzie what she really wanted to say with Reclaimed, which was first mounted at the Gardiner in 2023.

That question set her focus.

“I wanted to talk about these women. I wanted to talk about not only these women, but, gosh, us women. We women.”

Reclaimed is composed of three main installations: Coinage, Bangle and Crescent Moon; Looking Back; and Holding Ancestry.

Coinage, Bangle, and Crescent Moon are three abstract sculptures inspired by Indo-indentureship silver jewelry.

Indentured women had no access to banks, so they had their earnings — one, three or five British silver shillings a day — fashioned by fellow Indo-indentured workers into jewelry.

“They wore their banks on their bodies, heavy bangles, necklaces, nose rings, earrings, arm bands and foot bracelets,” McKenzie writes in an essay.

Looking Back features two hanging window frames featuring a collage of “Coolie Belles” photographs and ephemera on porcelain, inspired by early 20th-century postcards.

In 2019, McKenzie had befriended York University Prof. Amar Wahab, who had lent her a treasure trove: a four-inch ring binder filled with period postcards from the Caribbean.

“I think when I first received the photographs, I didn’t understand the whole situation, so I didn’t have this, ‘Oh my God’ thing. I was like, ‘Oh these are really pretty’ — I didn’t understand it,” she says with a laugh.

“I started reading the back of the postcards. I was really interested in who was sending these postcards. Where were they going? Who sent them and why?”

The Coolie Belles were indentured women featured on postcards that were traded by wealthy Western tourists. These women were dressed in traditional dress and jewelry and photographed on sets, exoticized by their male colonial photographers.

These photos, McKenzie points out, erase the hardship of their lives on the plantations.

“It was really only after I really understood the full context of those photographs that I started to think, ‘Oh, wow, I have to shed some light, literally, on these women.’ That’s what I had to do.”

Holding Ancestry is composed of porcelain-mounted portraits of contemporary Indo-Caribbean women — representing a wide cross-section of class, gender, age and diasporas — holding a photo of their chosen matrilineal ancestor.

The portraits are lit from behind and are accompanied by short videos so viewers can actually hear the subject’s voices. McKenzie’s subjects also had agency over how they appeared in the images — in other words, the opposite experience of the Coolie Belles.

And McKenzie is in one of them, holding the photo of Roonia.

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com