Canadian Art: 3 Solo Exhibitions of Contemporary

Canadian Art: 3 Solo Exhibitions of Contemporary Indigenous Art That Delved Deeply

https://canadianart.ca/essays/3-solo-exhibitions-of-contemporary-indigenous-art/

 

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A Native Perspective: The Eye-Opening Artwork of Jim Logan

The Métis artist's work sheds light on the unique—and often difficult—northern Canadian Indigenous experience.

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National Pastimes

With National Pastimes, Jim Logan looks back on his difficult relationship with his father and his filial love that could only find an expression through their shared passion for hockey. Each of the seven paintings in the ensemble is a striking vignette of childhood. One reveals the terrifying face of a priest and alludes to the terror the notorious “residential schools” struck in Aboriginal hearts, while another shows two kids wearing hockey sweaters bearing the names Riel and Dumont, presented here like sporting heroes. From the intimate figure of the father to the historic allusions to Métis chiefs, Logan affirms his sense of belonging with verve, without a hint of nostalgia: the speaking heart is unflinching.

 

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Jim Logan, the Sacred Setting..

Jim Logan, the Sacred Setting, and the Classical Cannon: Subversion and Inversion in Representations of Sacrality and Gender by a Contemporary Metis Artist

By Yvonne Owens

Marie Curie Fellow (UCL)

With his series of paintings, The Classical Aboriginal Series, Metis artist Jim Logan performs a deceptively simple sequence of reverse cultural assimilations. Appropriating images from the “classical” iconographic canon of Western academic art, Logan neatly revises the racial (and gendered) messages of famous and influential “masterworks”, inverting and subverting their intrinsic hierarchies of meaning.  As Logan reapplies classical imagery to his own purposes, balancing and retyping cognitive values within his reconstructed frameworks, a new relationship between the ubiquitous and familiar “sacred” imagery of “Western Art” and his own, renovated meanings is established. Through The Classical Aboriginal Series, Logan accomplishes a subtle but profound dislocation among powerful religious icons and contemporary and Post-modern Native sacred landscapes, underscoring the personal and social tensions between Western iconography and First Nations’ participation in the orthodox, Christian sacred pageant.  

Problems posed to Native inclusion, such as under-representation, racialized or gendered elite roles, and culturally privileged perspectives are significantly shifted by means as subtle as unorthodox angling of perspectival viewpoints. Destabilizations of meaning might be as overt as a change in the skin color or gender of the traditional Judeo-Christian protagonists in the Occidental sacred drama. Spiritually prestigious divine tableaux are recast with Native characters and re-presented from Native perspectives. By such pictorial sleight-of-hand, the artist assimilates Christian iconography to his own ideologically subversive, moral purposes of inclusivity.  In so doing, he colludes with Native writers who have sought to overturn the terms of their participation in the dominant culture, religious sensibility and ideology. Logan¹s images resacralizing Native places can be compared to imagery in literary works by Lee Maracle, Drew Hayden Taylor, Wayne Keon, Jeannette C. Armstrong, and other First Nations writers.

In The Classical Aboriginal Series, Logan represents and portrays a Native Canadian’s perception of a Neo-classical, Eurocentric, sensible invasion. The exclusivity and elitism of “Western” academic models are re-viewed from his own inherently, culturally ambivalent standpoint as a Christian-indoctrinated person of Metis heritage.  A former lay minister, Logan seems, here, to be artistically furthering his earlier religious mission in iconographically ministering to the artistic souls and sacred self-conceptions of Native Catholics.  Deconstructing the iconographic program of cultural assimilation into the Judeo-Christian pattern, and setting it within a radically revised paradigm of meanings and significance, detoxifies the exclusivity of the Christian canon for Native imaginative and devotional participation. Entitling indigenous North Americans to full imaginative and spiritual access to the icons and sacred narratives to which their ancestors have been converted, four paintings from The Classical Aboriginal Series address some major themes and figures from the Christian ethos: The Annunciation; Jesus Was Not a Whiteman; Diner’s Club: No Reservation Required; and A Rethinking on the Western Front  (in which Logan’s God is not formally represented as a man at all).

In his Annunciation (fig. 1), Logan embeds a plethora of semiotic iconographic references to the Western cannon’s body of masterworks on this venerable and hugely popular theme.  The pictographic text of the Angel’s announcement superimposed over the sea and sky, like a thought balloon or dialogue caption, refers to classical precedents, as do the exact postures of the two protagonists in the scene. Simone Martini’s Annunciation presents an early version of the compositional pattern for this type of image. The confronted figures of Mary and the angel, in full or three-quarters profile, would remain a typographic pictorial convention more-or-less consistently until the present day, with Logan’s (and other artists’) re-appropriation of it. The suggestion of Mary existing and dwelling in her own, human, mundane, feminine space – with symbols of feminine industry and virtue such as the Bible or sewing paraphernalia -- is also begun with the earliest depictions. Meanwhile, though depicted within the same frame, in close proximity to the Virgin, the angel exists of another reality, in a subtly altered space. Mary’s ‘enclosure,’ set off by the vase of lilies, refers to her virginity, the ‘enclosed garden’ of her sovereign, pristine, unsullied womb. It is presented as innocent of the Original Sin that is the inherent stain of Woman as Daughter of Eve, according to the doctrine of her own ‘immaculate conception’ as the miraculous result of her own mother’s ‘virgin birth.’  The iconographic trope of the hortus closus, soon to be invaded and usurped by God, as her Divine Husband, becomes greatly developed throughout its career; it performs as a signifier of God’s omnipotence, indicating the measure of God’s inseminating ‘light,’ ‘virility,’ or virtu. Mary’s bounded ‘garden,’ or womb, is resistant to penetration and usurpation; yet her total and complete capitulation to God’s will and subsequent impregnation comprises her greatest virtue and feminine value.  Mary’s lowly estate, but for God’s use of her, was traditionally used in oppositional dichotomies to emphasize God’s invulnerability and preeminence. The Church Fathers, Jerome and Augustine, had utilized dialectical representational strategies to intensify the oppositions between the gross or physical aspects of Christ’s birth and his spiritual divine nature. Rufinus, in his Exposition of Symbol (written in 404 for the instruction of catechumens), used the same tactic in order to accentuate Christ’s spiritual immunity to feminine pollution:

[I]t seems unsuitable (indignum) that such majesty should pass out through the genitals of a woman, for while there may be no contagion from contact with a man, yet there will be in this childbirth the injury of obscene touching… When therefore this is the case with material things, do you suppose that any pollution or obscenity could happen to that supereminent and incorporeal nature which is beyond all fire and all light?

The angel’s announcement is portrayed as a kind of transmission.  It consists of an indecipherable, esoteric, ‘divine’ cuneiform in gold script – receivable only by Mary as divine vessel.  In some historical European depictions, the transmission is depicted as a seminal ocular transmission issuing from the eye of God.  It is received – or ‘seen’ -- in a kind of magical, pregnant response  – by Mary’s womb. In line with Renaissance theories of gynecology postulating women’s ability to spontaneously conceive by sight alone, classical humanist representations portray the Virgin’s womb as being magically synonymous with the feminine eye.  In Mary’s case, this uterine receptivity to ocular/seminal transmission is of course portrayed as virtuous, as she is receptive only to the sight, word, and gaze of God. But the convention’s dichotomous counterpart, in the dualistic Christian cosmology of God and the Devil, is the time-honoured trope of the feminine ‘evil eye,’ exacerbated during menstruation and after menopause, to which are attributed demonic (or monstrous) conceptions. Beautiful male children were commonly featured on fifteenth and sixteenth-century birth plate imagery, as it was believed that women conceived according to the sights that entered into imaginative conception through their eyes. Paracelsus asserted that, “What the body sees and desires during pregnancy will also come forth in the child.” The feminine imagination was thought to be fuelled by strong magnetic powers: “It drew into the matrix what the eyes perceived; in this way it was believed to resemble the imagination of a painter who reproduces what he first sees with his inner eye.” Mental concepts and uterine conceptions were thus configured as magical correspondents in feminine reproductive process.  Women could curse or bless with their gazes; they could cast the ‘evil eye’, ensnare male lovers, or bewitch judges into leniency. Their eyes were not merely vents for the womb’s ‘evil vapours,’ but also direct conduits for the womb’s tyrannical influence.

The roster of canonized European depictions of this highly fraught, sacred moment of Mary’s ‘fruitfulness’ in the Christian ethos is extensive and illustrious. A brief list of some of the more well known examples serves to underline the extent of Logan’s visual subversion of this trope.  In Fra Angelico’s Annunciation, the quickening transmission comes directly from God as solar golden celestial orb. The Expulsion is shown occurring in the left background, where Adam and Eve are forced to leave the Garden.  Fillipino Lippi’s Annunciation, as in Fra Angelico’s, shows the angel entering aggressively, looming into Mary’s virginal, female space or enclosure like a kind of proxy for the divine phallus.  Her open Bible and other missals and prayer book suggest her virtuous industry, just interrupted. Botticelli’s many images of the Annunciation typically show the angel floating in ethereal space, entering stage left, and portrayed in three-quarter profile, as does Logan’s.  Giotto, early on, depicted Gabriel as floating, in his own ethereal space, in the traditional stage-left entrance, profile posture referred to by Logan. Rogier Van der Weyden depicted the Angel’s spoken transmission as the (by now, familiar and conventional) golden script. But he included the image of the quickening beam of God’s seminal Word, shown entering the window as solar light, with the Holy Ghost descending on it like a tiny, holy escalator. This is a ‘two-prong’ approach, incorporating depictions of both the divine Word and Sight.  These motifs are also used by Logan, but with significant, differences of directional movement, significance, relationship, and dynamics.

Traditional European Assumption iconography portrays a specific moment of divine penetration of the Virgin, whereby the annunciation itself represents, and is portrayed as, the potent and potentiating ‘Word of God.’ The angel’s speech, sometimes accompanied by a divine ray entering from a high window (or ‘Above’), constitutes the inseminating, impregnating vehicle.  The faux Hebrew lettering, or invented esoteric texts, that signify the fructifying Word of the Creator, stream toward Mary. These seminal rays are aimed variously at her brow, her heart, her vision, or her womb in the canonical Annunciation imagery of the European academy.  As soon as she hears, sees, or is so much as touched by this ‘ray’ (that is actually a Word and/or divine conception from the Mind of God), Mary ‘conceives’ God. She is humbled and overawed, submits unconditionally, and becomes naught but God’s vessel.  A complete surrender and abdication of the Self is what constitutes her physiological ‘purity,’ moral cleanliness, spiritual holiness and feminine virtue. The absence of any self-gratification on her part, or on the part of her flesh (and in the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, on the part of her mother’s flesh also) is the necessary character of this injection of the phallic, seminal Will of God.  In the dualistic contest between the fortunes of the Chosen of God and Eve’s seditious flesh, in which this trope of disembodied, ‘pure’ conception (and, in some doctrines, birth) is expressed, ‘lustful’ (or willful, bodily) volition or participation on the Virgin’s part would constitute subversion, perversion, and pollution.

These representational conventions are positioned well within the fundamental ‘purity and pollution discourse’ that underwrites patriarchal Indo-European theologies. In this ubiquitous ‘solar’ value scale that privileges concepts of fire and light, in which high-caste (‘Light,’ ‘White’) masculinity is paradigmatic, all that falls away from its dominant standard of what constitutes ‘good’ represents specific grades, castes, or ranks of contamination or ‘pollution.’  Woman signifies the prime ‘Other,’ opposing God’s masculinity with subversive feminine physiology, with menstruation, or the lack of it in menopause, being particularly virulent forms of moral and physical ‘pollution.’ By the terms of this discourse of cleanliness and ‘filth,’ the contaminating ‘sin’ of feminine will is constructed as, and perceived in, subversive feminine physiology, that usurps paradigmatic masculine will.  Renaissance humanist science and theology, sourced –like Medieval Natural Sciences -- in classical paradigms, constructed women’s ‘inferior flux’ of menstruation as constituting the defective processing and toxic purging of the fire humor. Renaissance and Medieval theories of women’s toxic or inferior physiology were informed by Aristotle’s De generatione animalium (which represented feminine physicality as defective from the masculine norm), disseminated through the works of Galen, Avicenna, and others.

The Hippocratic medical standard held that the humours, bestowing one’s personal nature, character and physical type, resided in the blood. Build-ups or imbalances, as well as toxins or diseases, could be defused by bloodletting. Purgations of sickness and sin were characterized as somewhat synonymous in the theological-medical construct, of benefit to the purgator in confession, menstruation and therapeutic bleeding. Medical discourses strove to accommodate the theologically inspired theory of women's physiology. Menstrual blood was configured as the inadequately heated and improperly catalyzed blood of colder feminine nature resulting in the inferior menstrual flux. According to the Hippocratic model of the humours, this feminine blood was constructed as polluted due to the improperly processed fire element, which – in theological terms – is to say transgressively processed lust: “sanguine per ardorem libidinis putrefacto.” Fire is virtuously heated into semen and virile face and body hair in men, but defectively purged as improperly converted bodily corruption in women as menstruation. Women’s cold and moist (phlegmatic) nature results in her weaker, softer, ‘unformed’ or ‘defective’ body in the Aristotelian/Galenic paradigm popularized by Albertus Magnus. The efflux of menstrual blood is seen as beneficial to the woman but adversarial to the territories external to her body, assuming the character of infection, plague or contamination. Menopause was thought to simply heighten and exacerbate menstrual malice, as the post-menopausal woman was no longer able to expurgate her toxic, inadequately heated fire humours.

Mary, and all of womanhood as representing the Daughters of Eve, are only redeemed of their inherent pollution of evil by a complete and unconditional surrender of their naturally subversive, sovereign, feminine will, symbolized by feminine reproductive physiology. This must be subsumed to masculine domination and control in order to be ‘cleansed’ of the pollution fo menstruation by impregnation.  The only ‘decent’ posture for a Daughter of Eve, even if she’s lucky enough to be the chosen vessel of God, is a fundamentally masochistic stance. Thus, she is ‘cleansed’ of her ‘stain,’ made ‘clean’ and holy – a fitting vessel for masculine, ‘divine’ conceptions. Spiritual autonomy, physical integrity, personal boundaries, or menstruation are signifiers of insubordination and contamination, instigated by an indwelling feminine propensity for evil, In this persistent, archaic hierarchy of male-dominant ranking ideology and values, the hermeneutic is ubiquitous but cohenrent, holding up at any degree of magnification into theological doctrine or reduction into tropic iconographies. But Logan actively militates against this subordinate positioning of feminine gender. In every instance of his representation of female figures, whether from sacred or secular iconographies, he positions them as equal, or even perhaps in positions of superior dignity, to the male figures within the frame.

In the Annunciation, Logan positions Mary as a sovereign, autonomous being. She is posed with the immanence of grave personal danger, and the nearly insurmountable problems of cultural, ideological, social, religious, economic and personal colonialism, it is true.  But she is made aware of these imminent disasters (which must be seen to include her subordinating conversion) more-or-less respectfully, whereby the angel’s annunciate speech hangs decently in the air between them as pictographic script. The ‘Word,’ whether of God or Manifest Destiny, declines to penetrate her mind’s ‘eye,’ her will, her heart, or her womb in this instance.  Logan keeps it above-board in his portrayal of Native Mary’s considered appraisal of these realities, ‘truths,’ and probabilities. They do not over-run, invade, over-awe, subjugate and/or impregnate her. She is not degraded from an autonomous being to a mere host vessel ‘cleansed’ of a sovereign feminine will. She’s presented with the facts, which hang suspended in the air above the scene. Both she and we are positioned coolly, objectively; we can regard the proposition and come to our own choices and/or conclusions on the matter. Logan’s depiction of sacred/sexual violation, or penetration by the omnipotent, inseminating Word of God, is more modest than its canonical forbearers. It conforms less to the dominator model of patristic Judeo-Christianity and more with Native scruples about spiritual autonomy, personal dignity, and privacy.  That said, there does seem to be a fatalistic aspect to Logan’s rendering of his Native Mary’s predicament – at least from the 20/20 perspective of historical hindsight.

Another context for Logan’s representation is found in the ethnographic figures presented in early, colonial collectibles and exoticisms.  Deliberate mixing of the attributes of enslaved peoples with New World occupants was practiced in sculpture by Bellini, among others, fulfilling Jesuit commissions for images valorizing colonialism and missionary activity in the New World, a commercial theatre where the Jesuit orders proliferated the greatest volume in slave taking, import and ownership. The 17th-century painting by Dutch painter, Albert Eckhout, Tapuya Woman With Basket and Human Limbs is another such enthnographic study. Its depiction of Native femininity is very different from the noble and heroically posed figuration of pseudo-Native masculinity in the previous image, due to the (by now) pervasive ‘ideology of femininity’ dominating European conceptions of gender, figuring females as primitive and amoral, like children or animals.  In this image, the female primitive is a cannibal, cheerfully collecting human arms and legs from the forest floor.  European assumptions of moral superiority are displayed in images like this one; the contemporaneous audience must have received the image without skepticism, assuming that brutally severed human limbs lay carelessly strewn about on the jungle floor, like fallen fruit in a depraved Eden. The New World wilderness is depicted as beautiful, but amoral and savage. Like their Germanic predecessors – the paradise wildernesses portrayed in Altdorfer’s so-called ‘Danube landscapes’ that arguably began the genre of ‘sublime’ landscapes -- they sensationalized primitiveness as exotic.  However, 17th century readers of Eckhout’s image of the cannibal tribeswoman, living in the colonizing capitals of the ancien regime, besides enjoying a measure of shocked titillation and moral superiority, would have perceived their economic surpluses as justified. The thought that these people were in desperate need -- not only of proper clothes and food, but also of much civilizing and missionizing. Their subjugation was doing them good, a panacea that also operated as a major rationale for Bible-quoting slave owners in North, Central and South America.

There is no such moral superiority permitted the White audiences of Logan’s Annunciation. And, where a Native Gabriel brings his revelations to a Native Madonna on the white-sand beach of the New World, the Native audience for such a work is given to know that the Divine Child is also Native.  In Logan’s Annunciation parable, the Indigenous Madonna sits at her work -- that of gathering fish in her basket -- much as the many Madonnas from Western tradition sit spinning, sewing, or reading the Bible.  Not only the Messiah is recast, his futurity radically altered and the meanings and implications of all the intervening history substantially changed, but the Native viewers’ rights to their own perspectives are guaranteed.  The right to draw personal and collective conclusions about the “coming of the Christ Child” or its mythology, and the legacy the Christianized future will bear, is delivered into the hands of Native participants in the unfolding saga of Christianity in the New World.  Certain sacred rights and privileges, such as the right to determine one’s own role and destiny, come back into the hands of those who occupy and inhabit the myth, or who see their own representations within it.

How different is it for Native viewers (especially Native women viewers) to witness Mary as also Native?  Obviously it constitutes a very different experience to view a feminine Native representation as the Mother of God than as the many “mundane” stereotypical representations of Native women.  Comparing the complex of messages in Logan’s work with those embedded in the painting by Albert Eckhout, portraying a Brazilian Tapuya tribeswoman as a primitive and amoral cannibal, makes an almost shocking iconographic contrast.  Yet for all the grace and spiritual esteem conferred upon Native women by Mary’s recasting as Native in The Annunciation, her character is in possession of no greater control over what is about to happen to her than was the Nazarene Mary.  Made to say, “…as God wills it, let it be done unto me,” and “I shall be as a handmaiden unto the Lord,” the Virgin of the gospels is primed for the ultimate colonization, that of her womb.  She is made complicit in her own subordination, prepared to be over-run by the divinely-ordained masculine will, just as European colonial authorities postulated the ‘good,’ ‘virtuous,’ and compliant subjugation of both male and female Natives within the ‘civilizing’ engine of Christian conversion.

It is in his subversive commentary (such as this discourse upon gender representations in monotheistic orthodoxy) that Logan’s critical, discursive analysis shows. With the terrible foreknowledge forged of hindsight, we -- as the audience for this work -- watch helplessly as the genocidal catastrophe of colonization descends upon this blithe woman. She must be necessarily “pure of stain,” as she is sporting a gold-leaf halo just like her classical sisters, but we have no idea if her ‘sinless’ estate is on account of the same reasons given for her classical sisters.  Late adjustments to Catholic dogma instituted the doctrine of the “Immaculate Conception,” so that Mary’s evasion of the “original sin” afflicting all other mortal souls was scripted to have derived from her own mother’s sexless conception of her.  Does this mean that Classical Aboriginal Mary’s mother, too, was surprised by spontaneous pregnancy?  

Ideological questions abound from the act of knowledgeably viewing of this work as set against its art historical, iconographic context. Despite Logan’s disclaimer, there is nothing at all “simple” about any of this. The heavenly vault is typically filled with angels as incorporeal, celestial beings in historic European examples.  But in Logan’s portrayal, in this precise zone, the ships of the conquistadors loom on the horizon. They appear as abstract, ominous, and inexorable nemeses. Though bearing the “Good News” of the Gospels, that of Christ’s Coming and Salvation, we know the ship also conveys disease and calumny, both physical and spiritual – more along the lines of Christ’s ‘second coming’ in the Apocalypse.  As far as her gender allows in this classical scenario, Native Mary, much like Semitic Mary or Europeanized Mary, is helpless to decline the colonization of her body and mind by a patriarchal standard. With her back turned to the horizon, she can’t even see it coming.  Moreover, the only character traits available to her as Mary are those of a servant or slave.  She must display submission and obedience to her divine overlord’s will, as proxied by His priests, missionaries, and conquistadors. As exemplified in the Gospel texts, she must also say, ‘let it be done unto me…’; this is the only acceptable and ‘virtuous’ response of a good, Christian woman. She, too, must be ‘as a handmaiden unto the lord,’ though, like the Mary of the Bible, no significantly divine status will ever be awarded her.  She will popularly reign in the hearts of her public, but never assume a positioning within the Trinity as a part of (or a participant in) the Nature of God.  She, also, is a passive receptacle – the  ‘pure vessel’ of God’s will.  Therein, and in nothing else, lies her virtue according to Church doctrine.  

Except in popular Church tradition, where the Church succumbed to public pressure and crowned her Queen of Heaven, the only insignia of sacred ranking Biblical Mary may claim is a saint’s halo, the traditional regalia of sacred victims and martyrs.  In viewing Logan’s Annunciation, it is Native Mary’s helplessness, very like that of the classical Mary’s, which we feel. Powerless to ‘just say no,’ Aboriginal Mary must make new meanings from the limited repertoire available to her in her predicament as a female, Christian icon.  Though racially empowering, the role of Christ’s mother is sexually disempowering, which was ever the true purpose of its casting as the role of ‘handmaiden unto the Lord’ within the orthodox, patristic canon.   

These perspectives are represented, simultaneous to the European-styled representations of Conquistador-laden ships, in the pictographs that tell the tale from the Indigenous point-of-view.  The Annunciation itself here refers, not only to the introduction of the mythic character of the Christ Child as divine savior figure, sacrificial hero, and imported icon to Native peoples of the New World, but also to the advent of Columbus’ mercantile and ideological imperialism upon their shores.  This is similar to Lee Maracle’s portrayal of how the Captains Cook and Vancouver (and others like them) arrived upon the western shores of the continent in Ravensong.  Her visionary child character, Celia, ‘sees’ the square-riggers standing offshore, as well as the lengthy plague of ill events that followed in their wake.  The nature of the imminent arrival is no ‘blessed event,’ seen from this standpoint, but an invasion of alien and alienating ideology, and a corrupting spiritual pollution of epidemic proportions.

In Logan’s vision, it is unclear whether the pictographic text superimposed upon the Western pictorial representation of the same event shows the landing party led by an armed man with a raised weapon, or a missionary priest wielding a crucifix.  The Angel seems to be prognosticating more than the immediate arrival of the Christian message, European Imperialism, and the whole socio/economic, colonizing horde; the pictographic texts communicating Mary’s future realities speak of more ships than the mere three shown poised on the horizon in the conventional, Western-styled, figurative representation of the main event.  While the three ships in the distance may initially appear benign, they reference the sinister red cross of the Crusaders, the Templars, The Knights of Rhodes, the Reconquista, and the Holy Inquisition -- and the five ships of the pictographic text descend into the upper left corner of the frame like a plague of locusts.  The pictographs actually narrate an event more along the lines of Jeannette C. Armstrong’s vision in her poem History Lesson:  “Out of the belly of Christopher’s ship/a mob bursts/Running in all directions/Pulling furs off animals/Shooting buffalo/Shooting each other/Left and right...”  

When Logan’s tableau is viewed through the lens of Armstrong’s images, which come later in her poem, describing a paradise “forever lost,” the Angel of the Annunciation, Gabriel, becomes the Angel of the Expulsion, Michael.  From this perspective, Mary is also Eve, soon to be evicted from the Garden (along with her unholy ideological progeny).  “Somewhere among the remains/ of skinless animals/ is the termination/ to a long journey/ and unholy search/ for the power/ glimpsed in a garden/ forever closed/ forever lost.”  The classical tradition of Mary’s representation as the ‘enclosed garden’ referred to here, resonates with both Logan’s and Armstrong’s evocations of threatened innocence, where the toxic internalization (or Biblical “knowledge”) of an alienating dualism and doctrine of Good and Evil brings Death into the Garden and augers a cruel and lengthy exile of Native populations, disinherited from their integrated unity, or ‘paradisiacal’ heritage.