MASCULINIDANS-24

21 March 2012

Conversation among Adrian Stimson, Terrance Houle, and Sam McKegney at Atomica Restaurant in downtown Kingston, Ontario. This discussion occurred after Stimson and Houle delivered artists’ talks at Queen’s University and prior to their performance at Stauffer Library Union Gallery.

TERRANCE HOULE is an interdisciplinary media artist and a member of the Blood (Kainai) Tribe of the Blackfoot nation. Involved with Indigenous communities all his life, Houle has travelled to reserves and reservations throughout North America participating in powwow dancing and ceremonial elements of his culture. He utilizes performance, photography, video/film, music, and painting at his discretion in his artistic work. His practice also includes tools of mass dissemination such as billboards and vinyl bus signage. His recent solo exhibitions include “The National Indian Leg Wrestling League of North America,” “GIVN’R,” and “Iinniiwahkiimah,” the last of which involves an artistic exploration of his Blackfoot name, which translates in English to “buffalo herder.”

ADRIAN STIMSON is an interdisciplinary artist from the Siksika (Blackfoot) Nation in southern Alberta whose work ranges from painting to installation to performance. He received a BFA with distinction from the Alberta College of Art and Design and an MFA from the University of Saskatchewan. His paintings include “Bison Heart” and “Tarred & Feathered Bison,” which speak to ideas of punishment and identity; his installation work utilizes fragments from historical residential schools as tools of decolonization; and his performance art often incorporates his character parody of Buffalo Bill—“Buffalo Boy”—to trouble colonial notions of gender in performances like “Buffalo Boy’s Wild West Peep Show,” “Buffalo Boy’s Getting It from the 4 Directions,” and “Buffalo Boy’s Battle of Little Big Horny.”

SAM MCKEGNEY: I’m more than happy to frame questions for you both, but obviously you two have quite the repartee with one another, so feel free to take the conversation where you think it ought to go.

TERRANCE HOULE: I like that he’s gay, he likes that I’m straight.

ADRIAN STIMSON: And I hate trying to turn him because he’s already there.

TH: I’m eminently turnable.

AS: Yeah, he wears his straightness on his sleeve.

TH: Exactly.

AS: I think about the way we play and how the colonial project skewed that. We were incredibly playful historically. I think about the stories my dad tells me, and I believe the lines of sexuality are always crossed—there’s never anything bad about that. There never was anything bad about it because it just was what it was.

TH: You have to get back to the idea of brotherhood that was intrinsic within almost any culture. But with Native people it was always: “Everyone is your brother. Everyone is your sister. Everyone is your elder.” The ideas around relationships are very different. It’s deeper than a blood tie.

AS: Oh yeah, very intimate.

TH: It’s emotional. Even like the idea of counting coup—there’s that relationship between warrior brothers, fighting alongside each other; the idea of adoptive family, you look at Crowfoot who adopted Poundmaker. When the Indian wars were happening, there was always this mythology around the Cree and the Blackfoot being enemies. That’s just not the full story. We were people that all lived together in the Prairies, and there was that unison between tribes, adoptive connections. Adrian’s got like, what, three names?

AS: Yep, yep.

TH: And they’re not all from Blackfoot. So your identity is known in other tribes. And even as you grow, you keep your young boy’s name.

AS: One of my elders came up to me a year ago and said he really thinks I should have my grandfather’s name, and it’s a really powerful name and so I may get another name soon. Because he did say, “You still have a kid’s name,” and I need to move through that.

TH: Yeah, grow up, eh? How old are you anyways?

For me identity is always the key thing. We all got Blackfoot names in my family. If you’re not recognized in your community, then how are you recognized out in the world? My Blackfoot name, I feel like I’m slowly moving into it as a man. And I never had a childhood name. Well, I guess, my grandma always called me “a little pig,” ach-e-me. And that still sticks. She still calls me that. That identity will always follow you through. And I was talking earlier about how Aboriginal men have lost their identity, and I know all these people that don’t have Indian names. And I’m like, “Well, how does your community know you if you don’t know who you are?”

AS: If you look at the transition from tribal society, rites of passage, growing up together, sharing everything, all of that was beaten out of us in the residential school era. Traditionally, as you grow and you start to become a man, you share all this stuff. You get together as groups of young men and there are things that occur within that milieu that are very natural and involve learning about and understanding your body and how it functions. I don’t believe it was ever thought of as being dirty or bad. And the convoluted thing is that you enter into residential schools, where a particular morality is pushed upon you and sexuality becomes so taboo that the opposite happens and it becomes abusive. At one point it was innocent and just a natural process, all of a sudden those same things become abusive, violent, and convoluted. I hope that we’re getting back to our original way of being, that we’re starting to return. That’s certainly what we’re trying to do. To show that this play, this sexual play between a Two-Spirited man and a straight man, doesn’t mean that either of us can be labelled. That it is just play with a brother, with a friend. It may look sexual but, you know, I don’t really want to blow him.

All: [Laughter]

TH: He does. He does. Be honest, man.

AS: I think that those things are shifting a bit, in time. Look at the whole queer movement and gay movement and the activism there.

TH: That comes with having that strong identity within your people. Adrian and I, we have such strong identities, and we’ve kept such strong identities—male identities—that, like you said, it’s not about gender. It’s about brothers playing and this acceptance within our roles, because we’re both men still.

AS: And it’s interesting, I think, how sexuality evolves. At a really young age, I certainly knew that I was different, then all of a sudden I went to this age when I was very heterosexual and girl crazy, having sex with girls all the time and girlfriends.

TH: In a Trooper shirt.1

SM: You were here for a good time but not a long time.

AS: Absolutely! So, you know, I’ve tasted all the fruits in the world. No, that doesn’t sound right.

TH: Very biblical.

AS: And I still have friendships with some of the women who I dated when I was a young man. And then I became bisexual and had relationships with both men and women, and now I’m exclusively homosexual. But that doesn’t mean that my appreciation of women has waned or that I worry that when I find a woman attractive it goes against my queer identity. I say it’s fluid. I see sexuality as fluid. Who knows? God forbid if my partner ever passed away, maybe I would end up with a woman.

TH: If that happens, we’re going to the strippers.

AS: Within tribal societies sexuality was fluid and it was quite acceptable for a warrior, a man, to team up with another man for a while. And he was never looked at as being queer or gay. It was just at that particular time, he wanted to be with that person. A Cree friend told me about how there were actually societies of men who were Two-Spirited who would leave the tribe and go off together for a period of time and have one hell of a party.

TH: Guys weekend! I’ve never said it out loud but I’ve always been conscious of being contrary in my work—going against the grain, being opposite, doing opposite things—and I’ve always wondered if people would pick up on it. I know that Adrian picked up on it early on, and I think that’s what really gelled with the work that we’ve done.

AS: It’s interesting because we’re put in the opposites of “traditional” or “contemporary.” I disagree with all that. I believe that we’re both traditional and contemporary, and that what we’re doing is part of the continuum of our Blackfoot history. When people get caught up in saying, “Oh, that’s not traditional,” they’re falling into this Western idea of labelling and dividing…

TH: …an anthro kind of thing.

AS: I see it as much more fluid in the sense that I am still doing what my ancestors did way back then. I’m still doing it here and now. And it’s the continuation of that into the future that I think is exciting.

TH: The idea that traditionalism is a stop in time—like the Calgary Stampede, with the Indian Village—yeah, it’s a great thing that the Stampede’s kept this thing alive, but at the same time, it’s caught in time.

AS: It creates a lie of a dead culture.

TH: And dealing with the male body, I always love these powwow dancers that would never wear anything but arm bands and muscle and a big belly hanging out with the chest plate up. I’m like, “Yeah, that’s a real Native powwow dancer who doesn’t give a shit!” My father was always like that. He’d wear his glasses whenever he danced, so that’s why in my work I’m always wearing my glasses. This was back in the seventies and the eighties. Powwow’s changed now. It’s more glamorous. But if you go to a real traditional powwow, it’s a lot more fun.

AS: Or even a sundance. You go to a sundance and the people are stripped of everything and all they have is their identity and their humility and their faith. I draw from that in my own work. It’s traditional, it’s contemporary. When my mother said we grew up nomadically, to me that’s traditional, as opposed to just ceremonial. I mean, why can’t those things change?

YOU GO TO A SUNDANCE AND THE PEOPLE ARE STRIPPED OF EVERYTHING AND ALL THEY HAVE IS THEIR IDENTITY AND THEIR HUMILITY AND THEIR FAITH. I DRAW FROM THAT IN MY OWN WORK. IT’S TRADITIONAL, IT’S CONTEMPORARY.

Having said that, I also think it’s really important that there are certain practices within the culture that are still maintained and nurtured, but I look at that as being part of the continuum as well because we’re taking those histories through the context of here and now. I know within my lifetime, I want to get involved in certain societies; it’s a crazy fast-paced world, but you’ve got to make the time. That would be another continuum within my own evolving understanding of my culture through time.

TH: I’ve been criticized for a lot of stuff that I’ve done by other contemporary Aboriginal artists—people who are, like, “Oh, I’m a traditional drummer,” whatever. But I go back to my own community and I always show my work to my folks and my elders. There’s this one older guy, and he’s a sundancer. I show him the work, and he always looks at me and he goes, “Good. You’re out there in the world. We need more people out there in the world doing and saying those things.” He always respects what I do and respects what I say, even though it’s out there—like boners under loincloths. And he gets it. That’s the critique I want, to have him as an elder, a medicine man, say, “Yeah, that’s it.”

AS: Also, you have to be cautious of elders who come out really negative about things like that because it’s not their role. From my experience, if they’re troubled by something, they won’t actually tell you what it is. But they’ll give you clues. And it allows you to think through it—“Oh, okay, maybe I should do this or do that.” Gentle. In our time now, there are many new elders coming out that have convoluted ideas about traditional history, layered with Western Christianity. Sometimes I would receive a negative reaction from a particular elder, but then you start unpacking their history and you see, “Okay, there it is.” I would never go back and tell them they’re wrong because they have a point of view and I respect that. But I don’t necessarily have to take it to heart.

SM: In A Recognition of Being, Kim Anderson and Bonita Lawrence discuss what’s at stake when traditionalism becomes filtered through a Eurocentric, gendered lens. So instead of being a way to honour women’s power, menstrual taboos around the sweat lodge become an exclusionary means of asserting male power, for example.

AS: Yes, because women are already cleansing, but men need the sweat because men don’t menstruate. Women cleanse every year, every month, and the men need to cleanse, so that’s part of it.

TH: But ceremonies were made for that. Where I come from, women have their medicine and men have their medicine. It’s not a gender or a feminist thing. You know, historically in our culture, women were way up here, and supposed “equality” has dropped them down here to the level of men. That was the demise of these things. And my mother was part of the Motokiiks. And my daughter goes there and my sister, and they’re powerful. They’re powerful. My mom and grandma are the most powerful people I know.

AS: The Motokiiks are the Buffalo women society. It’s exclusively a women’s society. Back on Kainai, there’s a man in the Motokiiks. He’s a Two-Spirited man, and he’s taken on the woman’s role, and he’s very well accepted into that role. So that just blows my mind when I start thinking about these relationships and how enlightened we are.

TH: Being a father, I see my daughter now, she’s eight, and she’s just a strong little woman, you know? It’s partly because of me and her mom, but also my parents. She has such confidence in what she does and who she is, and she knows she’s Blackfoot. She’s got three names: Nicole Long Houle. I can’t pronounce her name in Blackfoot, but it’s Peacekeeping Woman. And then she’s got a Chinese name, which is Woo-wong-ying-nee. That she was given by her great-grandfather on her mother’s side, who was Chinese. Buddhist. She has those names. And she’s grown up even better than I did, more like her grandparents—my parents—with Blackfoot names and with that identity that I never got as a young man because I didn’t get my name until later.

AS: As a Two-Spirited male who doesn’t have any progeny that I know of—I had a lot of unprotected sex when I was a young man—in the Blackfoot way, I have adopted all of Lori Blondeau’s kids. Her kids are my kids and I take care of them just like my own. A few years back, her one son, Chuck, was getting into trouble. She asked my husband and I, “Can you help me out?” And I was like, “Of course we can.” So we took him under our wing and took him to Burning Man.2

He was a fifteen-year-old and she says today, “he left home a boy and came home a man.” His biological father basically abandoned him; although he has had male figures in his life, he never really had a father figure. And so we’ve become his fathers, he’s our kid. He calls us and visits us all the time, we care, we’re building trust. And that’s the same with his brothers and sisters. They are our kids, too. Absent fathers can really mess with a kid’s development.

TH: Who doesn’t have daddy issues?

AS: Yeah, ha, I know. And it’s so wonderful to be in this position where I can call them my kids, and they both—Nigel and Dakota—they refer to Happy and I as their gay dads. And they’re just very forthright about that with all their friends and they’re not embarrassed or try to hide it. They say, “No, you’re our dads.” So that’s amazing because I may not have biological kids of my own—though I tried, Happy and I tried to have a biological child…

TH: If you ever need advice.

AS:...I’m not lacking, as a Two-Spirited person. I have many children in my life who I nurture. I look at that and that’s the traditional way back home. There’s aunties and uncles to step in the place of parents. Or usually what would happen as parents is, you’d have your kids and then you’d give them to your grandparents to raise. The grandparents would usually raise the kids.

MY DAUGHTER HAS TAUGHT ME MORE THINGS ABOUT HUMILITY, ABOUT CARING AND NURTURING, ABOUT BEING—SHE CALLS ME A DADDY MOM.

SM: Can I ask you both what you’ve learned about being a man through the process of parenting these children? What is it you’ve learned about yourselves?

TH: Just before I became a father, I asked my dad, “Do you have any advice?” And I hardly ever get advice from him. My two older brothers have kids. I’m the middle child. And I asked him, “Do you have any advice?” And he goes, “Three things: Listen to your elders. Listen to your kids. Take care of your fucking shit.” And I looked at him and I go, “Oh, that’s pretty solid advice,” and he goes, “Damn straight.” And I go, “Well, I hope I’m as good of a dad as you are,” and he goes, “Highly unlikely.” And I thought, that’s it: How do you become better than your forefathers or your fathers before you? He said later on—I had some friends with me to go talk to him—and he said, “If my life was the extension and this was the beginning and this was the end,” he said, “I’m only here in the middle as a Native man.” And I thought to myself, “Holy shit, I’m only at the beginning.” And it takes a lifetime to realize these things.

My daughter has taught me more things about humility, about caring and nurturing, about being—she calls me a Daddy Mom. I have that experience of being a nurturing sort of mother but also being stern like my father in a sense. And, you know, she informs my work, she informs what I do as an artist. I made the choice to be a full-time artist because of her. Because when I graduated, Steph got pregnant, and it was either I get a job that I’m going to hate in an office or some shit like that or I just fucking go for it. And I’ve decided I’m going to be an artist. So she’s going to grow up and be a part of that and see it her whole life. She’s going to experience it and, in the end, that’s going to make her that much stronger. It’s informed everything.

AS: As human beings, we all have that empathy, that need to nurture someone. And I’ve been really fortunate to nurture these kids and to gain trust with them. I look at my own childhood and how spoiled I was, and I guess if I look at my partner and I, Happy is able to say no and I’m the one who can’t say no, I tend to spoil them. I’m terrible sometimes! Terrible in the sense that I find it really hard to discipline. But I think I have what my father has: these certain looks that you know if you’ve done something wrong. I’d just look at them and that’s enough.

TH: That’s like my folks. My dad could say anything to me and I’d just be like, “Whatever and go fuck yourself.” But when my mom got mad, that’s when shit hit the fan.

AS: My father never hit me as a child. Never hit me or disciplined me in a physical way. All he would have to do is just raise his voice or look at me and it was enough to put the fear in me forever. And I greatly respect him for that. I think I picked up on that a bit. You never really know, unless you ask your kids, what kind of effect that you’ve had on them.

TH: As soon as we turned fourteen, old enough to get a job, my dad was like, “You’re out there working. Don’t sit idle on my couch.” But, fuck, I remember my dad used to smack me upside the head all the time. “Smarten up!” I’m pretty stern with my daughter, but it’s hard. She’s taught me patience. I can’t even fathom what my dad had to go through with us. But he came from a pretty abusive family. My grandfather was really mean and an alcoholic.

AS: I’ve heard that my grandfather was tough and could be pretty mean, too.

TH: And it was from residential school and things.

AS: They learned how to be tough—they learned it.

TH: They never had parents. Ours is the first generation, all us cousins, to actually have parents.

SM: The residential school system enforced a lot of shame and stigma toward the body. In your work, you both grapple with that history while affirming the body—particularly the male body—in various ways. Why is that affirmation so important to you?

TH: There haven’t been a lot of artists that have dealt with the male body in contemporary Native art. James Luna is one of them. The granddaddy of it. He’s been an inspiration in my work.

AS: I remember going to residential school as a young kid, I was a day school student, I spent a lot of time in those dorms. I went to day school so I could go home at night, but my parents were both working in the system at the time, my father was part of the first wave of Native people working in these schools, so I lived in those situations. I stayed in the dorm many times. The separating of the genders, on top of the strict military ideas of order and discipline imposed on little kids, that screws with the mind. And then, of course, you have a bunch of young men who are coming of age and dealing with all those hormones, and so you get the abusive stuff happening to the younger boys. Many times older boys in the residential school would molest me; although this was abusive, today I can’t help but feel their actions were done in a very loving way. We were all kids in a very fucked-up system.

TH: You learn.

AS: Yeah, exactly, it’s a learned thing. In my trajectory, I want to come to understand more. Of course, the residential schools were terribly disruptive, especially in terms of segregating male and female. I’m only at the beginning of understanding it and how that’s going to reflect in my work in years to come because I haven’t really begun to start unpacking my own experience, because it is hard, when you start to really think about the shit that went down. In many ways, I have come to terms with things that occurred, but there are things that are so deep that you’re trying to like understand how that affects you now as human being… There’s still a long way to go to unpack that history.

FOR ME, IT’S LIKE A FEARLESSNESS. I GOT TATTOOS ON MY ARM. THESE ARE MY COUP MARKS. THIS IS BASED ON MY REGALIA, BASED ON MY FATHER’S REGALIA, BASED ON MY OWN KNOWLEDGE OF THINGS.

TH: For me, it’s like a fearlessness. I got tattoos on my arm. These are my coup marks. This is based on my regalia, based on my father’s regalia, based on my own knowledge of things. When I got these tattoos, I felt liberated. I felt like I had a connection beyond just the last 200 years of being an Aboriginal man. I’m actually wearing my marks on me that everybody can see and identify. And for me, it’s been a process over these last ten years to really shed everything and get down to this body that I’m comfortable with. I probably learned it earlier with my father doing sweats growing up, but now my body is a symbol of issues that permeate Aboriginal men with our diet, with our health, with diabetes, all of these things that are plaguing our culture. We’re not werewolves, hunky studs, you know? But that’s the image.

Even with powwow, the flashy image is built around competition. I grew up dancing but I stopped because it got too competitive; that’s just not my own ethics as a Blackfoot Ojibway man. I don’t want to be a part of that. I want to be a part of these things that I’ve always grown up with and part of that is stripping myself of all these other things and being comfortable with who I am. One of the biggest compliments I get with my work is, “You’re a real Indian. That’s real Indian shit. You’re not afraid. You’re baring it. There’s an honesty there.” That’s one thing that’s lacking with us now. Even in contemporary Aboriginal art, I don’t see a lot of honesty.

AS: And also I’m highly skeptical of the whole healing paradigm because, quite frankly, I think it can become another crutch.

TH: It becomes addictive.

AS: It’s this Pan-Indian idea that we, Indigenous males, have to be a certain way and act a certain way and heal a certain way. I’ve done many “healing” paths, including the “Red Road.” After a few years, I said, “What the fuck is going on here?” I really felt like my mind was being messed with. It was another dependency thing. I’m the kind of person who’s maybe a little skeptical, my practical side said, “It just is what it is.” And yeah, shit went down and it was pretty bad shit and, yeah, I have certain neuroses because of that today, but you know, I’m working on it and I’m living my life and I’m enjoying it. And damn it, today was a good day. That’s not to say I don’t have my bad moments, but I refuse to get caught in that whole Western idea that you have to be a certain way, and that at some point you will be healed. I don’t think we’re ever healed. I think that life just happens and you just have to be practical about it, find the tools that work for you and enjoy it as much as you can.

TH: For me, at an early age, it was always just dealing with your body. I’d always hang out with these big chubby Native dudes at sweats, but then the body was still taboo.

AS: In Putting the Wild Back Into the West, I use my eagle feather headdress that my grandmother did all the beadwork on. And people say things like, “Oh, that’s wrong. You shouldn’t be doing that. Those things are really sacred.” And I asked my dad about it, and he said, “No, you have been given the rights to that headdress. It’s up to you to take care of it and renew it in your way.” So by allowing other people to put on my regalia, I am sharing that power, renewing the energy that will be a part of that headdress’s history and being.

TH: Sometimes Aboriginal people have adopted these Western ideologies and imported them onto their belief of traditionalism. What I see plaguing a lot of people are these weird ideologies—their attitudes just sound so Christian. It’s like, “No, no, no, no, no, no,” like when I was getting in trouble with the boner pieces.

IT TAKES TIME FOR INDIGENOUS MALES TO UNPACK THEIR OWN COLONIAL PROGRAMMING AND THEN REALLY ASK THEMSELVES THOSE TOUGH QUESTIONS.

SM: In the Pitchin’ Teepees piece, your models actually perform the type of discomfort that’s plaguing men in a lot of ways, around their own sexuality, around their own senses of self. Is the discomfort that’s created for the male Indigenous viewer meant to spur that self-awareness that will hopefully allow that person to inhabit the comfort each of you have with your bodies—a comfort that others may not have?

TH: Native people are majorly sexual beings. We’re one of the fastest growing populations. There’s a society of kids having kids and the male role within that family unit has been broken. None of these men are looking after their kids. So my grandmother is looking after three or four generations of kids because my uncles can’t fucking be men about their shit.

AS: It takes time for Indigenous males to unpack their own colonial programming and then really ask themselves those tough questions because you take a look at some of the shit that happened, a lot of sexual abuse, a lot of convoluted ideas of what sex is and isn’t, I think our work pushes their button. Then they really have to turn around and ask themselves, what’s wrong with this picture? Why am I reacting so negatively to this?

TH: My father was actually the one that gave me the idea for “Buckskin Mounting.” Brokeback Mountain was actually filmed near my reserve, and I kinda wanted to steal it back in some way. And my dad was like, “Oh why don’t you do a Brokeback parody thing, or whatever?” And I was like, “You want me to be gay?” And he was like, “It’d be funny.” But we were scared, doing this homoerotic thing in a room of 200 mostly Native men. I guess our stereotypes took over of the straight Native male. Yet they loved it. I don’t know how many people came up to me after and were like, “That was so funny.” So my own reaction and my own stereotypes of Native male identity, they were just blown away by the acceptance. But then another time I showed it to a younger audience for a summer media program and this guy literally wanted to punch me out. [speaking to Adrian] You had to deal with some stuff in Edmonton last year.

AS: Oh yeah, I was doing The Life and Times of Buffalo Boy. It was really on the edge for a public show, and I had thousands of people come through over the days that I performed. The vast majority of Indigenous people that came in got it right away, but apparently this one Native guy was going to come and give me shit. I wasn’t there at the time, but the volunteers were there. He never showed up. I was ready for him though—I was like, “Bring it on. I’ll talk to you about what I do and why I do it, and if you have a real problem with that, well, then … talk to my cousins!” [Laughter] (My cousins are known for being big and tough.)

I think it’s important, when you’re challenged, to face that challenge right away and nip it in the bud. We can have a good discussion, and we don’t have to agree, but you have to respect what I do. I respect what you say, but we can be different.

TH: That’s the deconstruction of it, especially a male identity that is so machismo.

AS: You never know what’s going to happen in these public realms. If somebody crazy comes in, I’ll sometimes need someone to back me up and help me out. My older brother passed away this last year. When I was a kid, he was my protector. He’d take care of me. In grade five, I was getting beat up every day after school, this was in Gleichen, the town beside my reserve. Finally I broke down and told him what was going on. And so he went right to town, found the guy and beat him up. He never bothered me again. My brother was a macho guy, best hockey player, best ball player on my reserve, and has three daughters, his oldest daughter is Two-Spirited. She was a hockey player when she was young, and she just got married to her partner this past summer. And my dad, her grandfather, went to the ceremony and supported her. It’s pretty amazing.

TH: The male body. It’s raging hormones. My brother is like 6’ 3”, like 280, body builder, probably doing some ’roids or some shit, and he would always tell me his scrap stories. I had to grow up that way because everywhere we moved, we were always the Native family and I always got picked on. I had long hair and I just learned not to take shit from anyone.

AS: I was the other way. I was sort of a smaller kid, so others protected me. I always got protected. My dad actually wanted me to be a boxer. And so I was at Gordon Residential School Boxing Club, stuff like that.

TH: Your dad was a boxer, eh?

AS: Golden gloves. Yeah. And I was sort of learning how to box and my big bout was coming up, my very first bout, so I get into the ring and I get up to the guy and the guy just whacks me right in the face. “Waaaaaah!” And I just started crying. And my dad was like, “Don’t cry, Adrian, come on!” I couldn’t stop crying. I was hysterical. So that ended my whole fighting career. And he never put me in the ring again. He knew right away that it wasn’t what I should be doing and I think my mom got mad at him, too. Again, being protected.

SM: Your grandfathers were both in the rodeo—is that right?

AS: We’re horse people. The Blackfoots were horse people.

TH: My grandfather wasn’t in the rodeo but he was a rancher, a cowboy. Actually, if you watch a movie called Circle of the Sun, which is an NFB film on my uncle Pete Standing Alone, my grandpa’s in the film. My uncle goes and hangs out with him and they’re punching cows and stuff like that. And I remember my grandpa, he was just a dude. He was a fucking dude. But horse culture and rodeo and riding and everything, it’s always been a part of our people.

AS: My grandpa, too. He was like six-foot-five, really big man, really tough guy. I have this great photo of him in the Calgary Stampede where he’s riding a bucking horse called Shorty. That’s my grandfather. But he was also the very first person who taught me how to draw. He drew a farmyard for me, stickmen stuff. He was incredibly gentle with me. Very gentle, very nurturing. He had scarlet fever when he was a kid, which affected his heart; he died in the early ’70s. And I remember he was always going back and forth to the Indian hospital on the rez, and coming through the field, this big man with this white cowboy hat. And I’d go running out to see him.

TH: Yeah, the white cowboy hat, eh? My grandpa always had a white cowboy hat. He was a smaller man but he was the biggest dude I’d ever seen in my life. What I always loved about the real cowboy culture is that it’s fucking hard honest work. I’ve got mad respect for people who do that. Even just farming in general, it’s fuckin’ hard work. We’re pretty fuckin’ pampered.

AS: Waaay pampered. With fusilli pasta and sundried tomatoes. That’s the new idea of macho.

TH: I want cheese on this. Even though I’m lactose intolerant, I’ll fucking do it!

1.Trooper is a Canadian rock band that gained fame in the late 1970s for songs like “Raise a Little Hell” and “We’re Here for a Good Time,” the latter of which contains the refrain, “We’re here for a good time, not a long time.”

2. Burning Man is a week-long event held in the Black Rock Desert in northern Nevada. It is described by participants as an experiment in community, radical self-expression, and self-reliance.