The piece by Haida Chief James Hart was installed along with a work by Huron Wendat artist Ludovic Boney to mark truth and reconciliation day
The towering bronze sculpture, titled The 3 WatchMen, shows three sentinels sitting back to back, standing guard on top of totem poles.
“Our ancestors have developed these three watchers who are like sentinels,” Hart said on Sunday during rehearsals for the ceremony, organized by the National Battlefields Commission. “They look out for you, and they look out for danger.
“They’re looking out in the spirit world at the same time. And this is day or night, winter, summer, rain or shine. They’re up there all the time,” he said.
Hart’s sculpture is paired with a work by Huron Wendat artist Ludovic Boney, titled Remembering Through Beads (Des perles en memoir), made up of a series of large-scale rings representing wampum beads. Quebec City is on the traditional lands of the Wendat.
The two sculptures are installed at Cap Diamant, a cape overlooking Quebec City’s Plains of Abraham. For over 10,000 years First Nations gathered in the area to hunt, fish, trade and live. It was also the site of some of the earliest encounters between First Nations and European settlers.
Hart said the sculptures are intended to spark conversation: between east and west, between the Haida and Wendat, between First Nations and Canada.
“The Plains of Abraham is the beginning of Canada, in a sense,” Hart said. “So it’s kind of interesting to have a piece of mine there.”
“I know (Indigenous Peoples) have suffered in our dealings with Canada and what they’ve done to us,” he said. “But we’re on the mend. We’re hoping to work with Canada for the future — for all our futures. That’s the whole idea, to work for a future together.”
Creating The 3 WatchMen took months, Hart said. A rubber mould was formed from a foam sculpture based on one of Hart’s earlier — though much smaller — works that he carved out of yellow cedar.
Pieces of cast bronze were created from the mould, about 67 of them in total, according to Hart. Then the pieces were welded together, ground, cleaned and refined before the final jade-green patina was applied.
“I love the piece because the volume is really nice — a 20-foot height is just perfect for me. I like working in that type of form,” Hart said.
“Big pieces never scared me at all, ever. I just loved diving into it. Same as today. I just dive in and take care of problems as they arise,” he said.
Hart was born in 1952 into the Eagle Clan in Masset on Haida Gwaii, B.C. In 1999, Hart took the hereditary chief name of 7IDANsuu, passed on to him by his mother’s older brother, Chief Morris White, in an age-old act that made him a member of the Hereditary Chiefs Council of the Haida Nation.
He started working with bronze in the early 1980s, eventually coming to Vancouver to work with renowned Haida artist Bill Reid, whose large-scale pieces stuck with Hart.
“I wasn’t directly involved in working on his big bronze pieces, but I was there when it started off, and then I just carried on getting into the bronze world,” Hart said.
“We consider Hart’s bronze sculpture a gift to the people of Quebec, from those of us who dwell in British Columbia,” Audain said in a statement.
The two new works are the most significant acquisitions in almost 90 years for the National Battlefields Commission, which manages the park that includes the Plains of Abraham — the site of a pivotal 1759 battle between France and its Indigenous allies and Britain, which would soon after claim all of what became Canada.