Elwood Jimmy
Indigenous Programs Curator
Musagetes Foundation

Mike MacDonald, 1941-2006, was a queer media artist and gardener from Nova Scotia. Apart from his media artwork, he had a passion for butterflies and planted 20+ butterfly gardens in conjunction with art museums, galleries, and other institutions across the country as part of his artistic practice.

Over a decade after Mike’s passing, curator Lisa Myers would work with his estate to revive his butterfly garden practice with her collaborators at Finding Flowers, an interdisciplinary research project studying the intersections of art, ecology, and education. Out of this initiative, three new Mike MacDonald butterfly gardens emerged in this region – one at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, one at the Woodlands Cultural Centre, and one at the site of the Boarding House Arts building in Guelph, where the Musagetes Foundation is headquartered.

Detail of the location map for the Mike MacDonald garden site in Guelph. Artist: sophia bartholomew

This garden at Boarding House Arts is supported by the Indigenous Otherwise program at the Musagetes Foundation. It is a program I curate that engages primarily Indigenous artists, but also non-Indigenous artists/allies, who within their artistic practices commit to cultivating wiser relationships and futures within their communities, with the non-human, and with the planet in a time of climate emergency and volatile global instability. In my curation of the program’s land-based learning initiatives, I actively seek out artists whose practices are in service to our human and non-human relatives as well as the Earth. This was the nascent context/framework for wanting to work with Lisa on expanding her engagement with Mike’s work to Guelph in a partnership with the Indigenous Otherwise program/Musagetes.

I met Mike MacDonald twenty years ago. It was 2005, a year before he would pass away. My dear mentor and collaborator, Lynn Acoose had invited Mike to be part of a multidisciplinary initiative conceived by her, and co-curated by both of us, called The Garden Project. At the time, Lynn and I were both working at the Godfrey Dean Art Gallery, a regional gallery in Yorkton, Saskatchewan. Yorkton is a small rural town about two hours northeast of Regina, the provincial capital. It is a town of approximately 16,000 residents, with a substantial Indigenous population living alongside settlers within the town. It is also surrounded by many First Nations communities in the region. Lynn was from Zagimē Anishinabēk, one of the surrounding First Nations (at the time, Lynn was a leader in the arts both locally and nationally, and a few years later, would leave the arts and run for Chief of Zagimē Anishinabēk and become a widely respected Chief/Indigenous sovereignty leader to this day).

Lynn’s vision for The Garden Project was a spring-summer-fall-long project populated with visual arts exhibitions, a series of knowledge gatherings, performances, community making sessions and the creation of space for two gardens on the gallery grounds. The work we undertook that year was exciting and invigorating and very educational for me and will be the subject of its own essay or publication one day. When we undertook the project, Lynn had lived in the area for most of her life. It was very segregated, with a lot of anti-Indigenous racism and violence. I had recently moved there for a two-year curatorial residency and wanted to work with Lynn in supporting her vision. The metaphor of a garden was employed as both a foundation for all the programming we co-built, as well as an ephemeral place of encounter between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous (both human and non-human), on a site of colonial dissonance.

As I mentioned previously, Lynn had envisioned two gardens. One was a community garden on the gallery grounds where local people were asked to contribute plants/medicines that they grew or used in their daily lives. It was a mix of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people who contributed to this garden, with a variety of Indigenous plants, and non-Indigenous plants that had migrated here. There were medicine gatherings/plant talks in support of this garden throughout the season, as well as the plants being labeled and free for anyone to harvest as needed throughout the summer and fall.

The other garden planted was one of Mike’s butterfly gardens. Lynn had invited him to both plant a garden and participate in a group exhibition she had curated called Constitution. Other artists in that exhibition included Colleen Wolstenholme, Helen Marzolf, Robin Brass, and Taras Polataiko. The exhibition was about health and in Lynn’s words “intimately tied to factors such as environment, economics, education, and self-determination. Personal health, as a response to personal circumstances, is therefore naturally managed on a number of levels – by the individual, the practitioner, the expert, the community, and the state. Absent from the western complex of modern medicine are concerns about the disconnect between the sources of medicine, or good health, and the politics of health management.” (excerpt from her curatorial statement).

Our encounter with Mike before he passed away was short. He was only in Yorkton for about a week, primarily working on his garden, with maybe half a day spent installing his media work in the gallery. The first few days he was there, he was very aloof, very guarded, cranky even. But he warmed up to us as the days went on. About mid-way through his time in Yorkton, I asked if he wanted to go for lunch. At that time, the local casino used to be across the street from the gallery. My cousin worked in the restaurant there, and I thought why not kill two birds with one stone. I needed to see her, and we needed lunch. Of all places and circumstances, that seemed to be the place and point where he started to warm up and become much less guarded. As I recall, the last few days of his time in Yorkton seemed to become much more relaxing for him.

The experience in Yorkton that year conceived a deep love of gardens for me. They are such incredible foundations, vessels, and portals for learning and engaging and encounter. At the time between 1995-2005 when Mike was creating these pollinator gardens across the country at different galleries and museums, not a lot of people were incorporating the non-human in their practice in such a gentle, generous, and ethical manner. He was ahead of his time in his practice, as now there are many contemporary projects, gestures and entanglements between art and the natural world.

Very recently, there have been questions around Mike’s claims of Indigenous heritage, specifically his claim of Mi’kmaq heritage. At the time of writing this text, nobody is certain, but there are people actively undertaking on-the-ground research into his claim and connection to community. In the context of settler and Indigenous relationships, the act of pretendianism, or falsely claiming Indigenous identity, is a harmful one that sets us all back. It is a truly pervasive and destabilising action when co-building trust, accountability, and responsibility within our human relationships, interactions, and exchanges.

This recent questioning certainly complicates Mike’s practice, especially in a time when Indigenous communities need more queer/2-spirit elders and community members who have extensive plant medicine/land knowledge, and who have cultivated committed, long-term practices in service to the non-human world. In the end, may the chips fall where they may in terms of his legacy in Indigenous arts, BUT, I will continue with the support and maintenance of Mike’s butterfly garden at Boarding House Arts for the time being, because it’s a space where plants and pollinators grow and co-exist, and we need to maintain and hold the space for more – not less – physical sites for our non-human relations to exist and thrive and learn from. Like everything, this particular moment has its complexities and contradictions and adds to our ongoing learning journeys.

In the end, while small in scale, and with its emergent complexities, the Mike MacDonald Garden reminds us of what it means to be wiser and kinder relatives to the non-human beings that share this Earth with us. It is an exercise in feeling and experiencing the invisiblised and often violent labour it takes to maintain and hold a space of integrity and accountability and encounter with our non-human counterparts.

Map of the garden layout by sophia bartholomew

There have been many hands involved in the planning, building, and maintenance of the garden over the last few years. I offer my gratitude to the plants and the pollinators – our non-human collaborators in the garden; local artist and gardener sophia bartholomew for tending and maintaining the garden and for the design of the printed map/guide; Lisa Myers, Dana Pietro, Crystal Mowry & Eric Roesler for their early guidance and conversations with me in the building of the garden; Domingo Bernal for preparing the ground and the structure; Anna Bowen for managing the build of the garden, and Curtis Walker for support; Christina Kingsbury for planting and tending the garden in its first year, and Sel Mullins for watering; Boarding House Arts/Tyrcathlen Partners for allowing the garden to be housed on its grounds; the Musagetes Foundation – executive director, Shawn Van Sluys and the  board of directors for supporting the Indigenous Otherwise program; and Mike MacDonald and his estate for providing the blueprints to build the garden.