In the heart of Winnipeg’s Exchange District, the newly reopened Indigenous Plains Gallery feels like a rebirth. Owned and operated by Jacques Goddard, the gallery now spans a space four times larger than before, a testament to the growth of Indigenous art and its undeniable pull on Manitobans and beyond. Yet, behind the success, there lingers a tension that Indigenous artists know all too well: What is Indigenous art and who gets to decide?
When I walked through the gallery with Jacques during his grand re-opening, the answer seemed to spill from every wall. Paintings, soapstone carvings, prints, and jewellery, pieces from legends like Jackson Beardy, Daphne Odjig and Norval Morrisseau, alongside established names such as Linus Woods, Alex Janvier and Jackie Traverse. “The culture, the stories, the history, the teachings, it’s all in the art,” Jacques told me. “Every painting, every carving has history, a story, a teaching to it.”
For more than 30 years, Goddard has been building relationships with artists across Manitoba and Northern Ontario, first through the Aboriginal Arts Group in 1995 and then as a gallerist on his own. His new gallery is both a celebration of survival and a challenge to the narrow expectations that have long confined Indigenous creativity.
The box Indigenous artists are pushed into
My late uncle, Cree artist Noel Wuttunee, once told me back in 2012 that he felt suffocated by what buyers demanded of him. “I like to challenge myself, to push my art,” he said. “Sometimes my art doesn’t look Indigenous. And then people push back. They say, ‘We only want to buy Indigenous art.’ I tell them, ‘I am Indigenous. I am Cree, a Nehiyawak. So this is Indigenous art.’ They say, ‘It’s not the Indigenous art we want.’”
His frustration echoed a truth many Indigenous artists carry: being pushed into a box. Buyers, collectors, and even institutions often want Indigenous art to fit a set image, beads and feathers, animal motifs, dreamcatchers. But Indigenous art is not a costume. It is not a frozen idea of the past. It is alive, experimental, contradictory, and modern.
Morisseau and the controversy of authenticity
One wall of Goddard’s gallery features a rare Norval Morrisseau print. With controversy swirling about forgeries in recent years, Goddard points out the score marks of color separation to prove its authenticity. “That’s a real one,” he says firmly. But the very fact that he has to defend its legitimacy points to another tension in the art world: the policing of what is real, authentic, or “authentically Indigenous.”
And yet, art resists simple definitions. What makes a Morrisseau painting more Indigenous than a Patrick Ross canvas, or a contemporary piece by Jackie Traverse? The truth is that both spring from Indigenous realities. Both are different styles, they speak to different realties and both a beautiful.
A blend of old and new voices
Walking through the new Plains Gallery, the sheer variety is striking. Paintings by established masters hang beside works from artists who are just beginning their careers. There are carvings large and small, modernist lines and traditional iconography, experimental forms and deeply historical symbols. Goddard’s curatorial vision makes space for all of it.
“It’s a good blend,” he says. “Artists who have passed on, some established, some emerging. It’s about continuity. It’s about showing that Indigenous art is not just one thing.”
The deeper meaning
What matters most is not whether a piece looks “Indigenous enough,” but whether it carries story, identity and spirit. Art is where history and future meet, where Indigenous peoples define themselves on their own terms.
For me, my uncle’s words resonate more than ever. Indigenous artists are not relics of a museum but creators of the present and future. When Noel said, “I am Cree, I am Nehiyawak, so this is Indigenous art,” he was asserting a truth: the artist defines the art, not the buyer, not the market.
The reopening of the Plains Gallery is more than a business move. It is a statement of survival and self-determination. It creates a space where Indigenous artists can be free to be themselves, whether their work looks “traditional” or “modern.” It insists that Indigenous art belongs everywhere, inside the box, outside the box, and in spaces we haven’t even imagined yet.
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