Honouring Their Names

Last July, Campbell River RCMP officers boxed their cars around 38-year-old Jared Lowndes in a Tim Hortons parking lot, attempting to stop his car because of an outstanding warrant for his arrest. In the resulting altercation, officers shot Lowndes multiple times, killing him. Lowndes was from the Laksilyu Clan of the Wet’suwet’en Nation. At the time of his death, he was grappling with the trauma he had endured as a child in the foster care system. He expressed feelings of fear of the police in an essay he wrote days before he died.

Today, Jared’s mother Laura Holland is remembering her son. She and other Indigenous parents and family members who have lost loved ones at the hands of police have made artwork remembering those they’ve lost into part of an exhibition now showing at Gallery Gachet in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

The exhibition launch yesterday coincided with the 25th annual International Day Against Police Brutality. Called Honouring Their Names, the show features commemorative artwork by families of people who have died in addition to gallery events that connect people through workshops and a community feast.

“I am a Black man. I understand that despite my struggle, I still have a responsibility to the original people of these lands. I have found that as a curator, the least I could do is highlight these voices and make them heard when I am given the opportunity to,” said Moroti George, Gallery Gachet curator and programming co-ordinator.

George hopes the exhibition will highlight contemporary Indigenous values and cultural practices while spotlighting the flaws in policy that “have caused harm and death to Indigenous bodies and other POC bodies that happen to be marginalized in the Canadian state.”

As the CBC reported in their interactive feature on fatal encounters with police in Canada, Black and Indigenous people are “overwhelmingly overrepresented” among fatal police encounters in Canada while they form a small percentage of the total population.

Back at Gallery Gachet, George considers the art on the wall. There is a collection of posters, banners and blankets from Wet’suwet’en protests, protests against police violence, and canvases bearing Indigenous motifs and the names of Indigenous people who police killed.

“Laura [Holland] has made a good point to make sure [people know] that she is not the only mother [who] has lost a child to Canada’s police and policies,” George says. “It shows how multifaceted and insidious the policing policies are right now.”

Anyone who’s lost someone they love knows that grief isn’t about finding silver linings in the clouds. But in Honouring Their Names, “there is kind of a solace that can be found in the way these works show community,” George says.

“That’s something this project has really shown me: the community and the way people have been engaging in this project. It fills me and it also fills Laura with a sense of hope.”

'Honouring Their Names' is on view at Gallery Gachet (9 W. Hastings St., Vancouver) from 12 to 6 p.m. until March 19.