Postcolonial University

Lori Blondeau - Graduate Researcher

Lori Blondeau is a Cree/Saulteaux/Metis and is based in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. She is currently completing her MFA at the University of Saskatchewan and sits on the Advisory Panel for Visual Arts for the Canada Council for the Arts. She is also a co-founder and the current director of Canada’s most innovative and exciting aboriginal arts organziation, TRIBE.

Lori's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. She remounted her performance "We Want to be Just Like Barbie That Bitch has Everything" for the group exhibition, The People's Plastic Princess, at The Walter Phillips Gallery in Banff, Canada.Her most recent work is a collaborative performance piece with artists Bradlee Larocque and James Luna entitled, Dead Fall Reveue. This new work was presented at the Institute For American Indian Art (IAIA), Santa Fe, NM, in May 2001.

Artist Statement

The images of the Indian Princess and Squaw have had a significant impact on societies’ perception of Indian women and serve as inspirations for most of my work. Surprisingly, we still see popularized images of the Indian Princess being created by both native and non-native people. You can find these products being sold in Indian Museums and souvenir shops across North America. These are testament to the general public’s idealized perception of beautiful Native women as being exotic and hard to find – virtually non-existent. The other side of the Indian Princess is, of course, the squaw – another of societies’ iconic scapegoats meant to desensitize both the general public’s view of Indian women (their political, historical and social issues as well), and the self perception among Native women themselves.
My work explores the influence of popular media and culture (contemporary and historical) on Aboriginal self-identity, self-image, and self-definition. I am currently exploring the impact of colonization on traditional and contemporary roles and lifestyles of aboriginal women. I deconstruct the images of the Indian Princess and the Squaw and reconstruct an image of absurdity and insert these hybrids into the mainstream. The performance personas I have created refer to the damage of colonialism and to the ironic pleasures of displacement and resistance.