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The European concept of history has been applied to Canada, as well as many other countries around the world where colonization of the western culture has taken place. According to this concept, a people enter to make part of the history only if it can register its memories, through writing. Wall paintings, narrations, weaving…, are only considered art manifestation, not another face of history. They have been ignored for long time, because considered historically unreliable. Without a parameter to confront with, or rather, by ignoring the existing, but diverse, parameter, Canadian history has evolved into stereotypes that “shaped our social imagination” (...) As the former curator for Aboriginal Art at the AGO, Richard Hill pointed out, the vision of Canada as a land of emptiness, without any indigenous presence, so well represented in the paintings of the Group of Seven, has to be fought still today. Other thinkers, such as the literary critic, Northrop Frye, supported this idea, by defining the wild Canadian landscape in need for technology and western progress in order to become more civilized. Given this premises, Belmore as an Ojibwa artist, is determined to correct the “historical amnesia” (…), where conflicts, discrimination and oppression represent a huge, unspoken gap of past colonization that is still vivid in her memory and in the collective memory of her people. The awareness of belonging to a place and the memory related to it, has built Belmore’s cultural heritage which is a source for the representation of the collective memory of the Ojibwa culture.
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