Warrior Woman stands tall over Broadway

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This article was published 06/06/2017 (3028 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Through a bright and bold billboard on Broadway Avenue, Saskatoon-based artist Mary Longman draws attention to elements of Canadian history that often remain untold.

Longman received a Canada Council grant to show her billboard in three cities. Starting in Winnipeg, her digital image entitled Warrior Woman: Stop the Silence!!  went up on a billboard on the southwest corner of the intersection of Broadway and Garry Street on May 19 and it will remain there until June 11. After that, the billboard will be displayed in Calgary and Vancouver. The billboard’s placement coincided with a talk Longman gave at Urban Shaman Gallery (290 McDermot Ave.) on May 20.

“Initially, it started off as a tribute to my mother because she was a really tough woman. She didn’t have parents growing up. Her mother got killed at a young age and her father was really never in the picture. My great-grandmother took care of her after her mother died,” said Longman, a Saulteaux band member of Gordon First Nation.

“My two uncles taught her how to fight so she would be able to defend herself because she was young, she was pretty and she had a lot of things going against her. That was one way that she could survive, and she was always that way.”

Longman’s mother, Lorraine, was born in 1949 and was put in residential school as a child.
“Then she had all her children taken away in the Sixties Scoop, myself included. I was in one place for 11 years and when I was just turning 16, I reconnected with my family again,” Longman said. “Many others are still searching for their family, so I’m kind of lucky in that way.”

Her mom died in 2012, and Longman asked her uncle what Lorraine’s legacy would be. He told her she was “the toughest chick in the hood,” an image that Longman incorporated into her billboard portrayal of a woman warrior, whose appearance is modelled partly after Wonder Woman, clutching a blood red ribbon and declaring “Stop the Silence!!”
“That’s how the tough female came into my head. The face is based on my mother. Then on either side, you’ll see two primary sources of greed, which was the English lust for land and the Spanish lust for gold,” she said.

“When you look at it, that’s the two primary sources of why a lot of genocide occurred. If you look closely, those are bones and bodies underneath the soil. You’ll notice that her breastplate is made out of bullets.”

For Longman, the billboard acts as a national campaign to ensure school curriculum includes parts of the Indigenous narrative that aren’t always told.

“This billboard is really speaking to the government to step up and acknowledge that history and make it mandatory in our educational texts so Canadians know the truth about this history,” said Longman, a university professor in art and art history.

“We’re putting up memorials for other groups, but not for all the people that perished in the almost 400-year long war against Indigenous people.”

The Warrior Woman image and a detailed description is posted on Longman’s website at www.marylongman.com