Canada_ (Commonwealth) _ Dawna Mueller, who is 44 years old, is currently expecting her second child, and says it has been a “very long road” since she first discovered she is Métis and Anishinaabe in 2004.
When she read a bundle of carefully censored paperwork she had gotten from the Manitoba Ministry of Social Services, she discovered that she was of Indigenous and French descent.
That was “an unbelievable moment for me,” recalled photographer Mueller, a Sixties Scoop victim who had attended Indigenous studies at UBC in the 1980s and felt the course “spoke to [her] genetic memory.”
Dawna Mueller says it has been a “very long road” since 2004, when she was 44 years old, living in Vancouver, and eight months pregnant, and discovered she was Métis and Anishinaabe.
“Unforgotten My Trip Home,” a photographic exhibition by Mueller, is now on display at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts in Burnaby. She was forcefully removed from her Indigenous mother at birth in 1960, and this collection of images from her native homelands in Duck Bay, Manitoba, records some of the discovery of her identity as a child of the Sixties Scoop.
The “poetic” choice to employ antiquated, analog technology, according to Mueller, led her to purchase a large-format camera and educate herself on its use by watching YouTube tutorials. The West End Community Centre in Vancouver’s darkroom is where she eventually learned how to develop all the images she had taken of the Duck Bay scene. According to Mueller, she wanted to show her photographs in a similar manner because the 1960s Scoop was such a horrible time in Canadian history. Each image, according to the artist, is made up of at least two exposures that are stacked on top of one another. The photos are quite abstract and use a “footprint of her hometown as the foundational shot.” All of the photographs were exposed as negatives on reverse-processing paper.
