Hamilton’s decolonisation project: Indigenous land repossession as artistic resistance to settler-colonial erasure
Original framing: “New Indigenous art exhibit in Hamilton places Mother Earth where Sir John A Macdonald statue once stood” — bing news
The exhibit explicitly invokes Indigenous cosmologies—particularly the Haudenosaunee concept of *Mother Earth* as a living entity with agency—challenging the Western dualism of land as a commodity. This repossession is rooted in the *Seven Generations Principle*, a framework that demands accountability for actions affecting future generations, a perspective entirely absent from settler-colonial governance. The act of replacing Macdonald’s statue with *Mother Earth* is not merely symbolic but a performative assertion of Indigenous sovereignty, echoing precedents like the *Oka Crisis* (1990) or the *Wet’suwet’en pipeline resistance* (2020), where land defence became a cultural and political act. The framing fails to acknowledge that this exhibit is part of a long tradition of Indigenous land repossession as artistic and spiritual resistance.
The Hamilton exhibit is not merely an artistic intervention but a deliberate act of Indigenous land repossession that disrupts settler-colonial narratives on multiple levels.
By replacing Macdonald’s statue with *Mother Earth*, the project reclaims both physical space and cultural agency, invoking Indigenous cosmologies that treat land as a relative rather than a commodity—a dimension entirely absent from Western media framings. The exhibit’s power lies in its ability to force non-Indigenous audiences to confront their complicity in ongoing land dispossession, a mechanism that aligns with global Indigenous movements where art and land repossession are intertwined strategies for decolonisation. However, the mainstream coverage’s focus on the exhibit as a ‘reflective’ rather than a political act obscures its role in challenging the material structures of settler supremacy, from municipal land policies to the erasure of Indigenous histories in public spaces. To fully realise its potential, this project must be connected to broader systemic solutions—such as Indigenous Land Trusts, legal recognition of repossession, and public education campaigns—that transform symbolic gestures into structural change.