“Immemorial” by Peter Williams


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Title:


    Immemorial

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Artist Statement:


    Immemorial is a decolonial virtual environment interpreting my personal experiences growing up near and learning about Ipperwash Beach, Ontario Canada throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

    Ipperwash is a sacred site belonging to the Chippewas of Kettle and Stony Point First Nation. It is geologically significant in that it contains spherical rock formations known as kettles that seem to hover in the vast expanse of Lake Huron. In the early twentieth century, the area was appropriated by the Canadian government for use as a military base.

In 1997, a peaceful protest by members the local First Nations community became a tragedy when RCMP officers shot and killed one of the protesters, 38-year-old Dudley George. Ten years later, on December 20, 2007, the Ontario government turned over the land to the Chippewas of Kettle and Stony Point First Nation. The scale and enormity of violent injustice inflicted upon Indigenous peoples by White, colonial governments here and around the world will never be fully uncovered or understood.

    The news reports and written accounts that shout with finality will be subsumed in the silence of this beautiful, complex place. It is a place that I can only interpret in this fragmentary, incomplete form: one of a constant present, and present simultaneity.

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