In 2015, at the opening for her Nerman Museum solo exhibition, To Honour the Unidentified, artist Gina Adams was approached by a friend, who hung a gift around her neck — a Grover Cleveland 1885 peace treaty medallion.

“I immediately felt the weight of it,” Gina writes in a statement recounting the “life-changing” experience. Gina is descended from Ojibwa Anishinabe and Lakota peoples of Waabonaquot of White Earth Reservation in Minnesota, as well as from settler Americans.

“I felt the weight of the years that had passed since the medal was made, but most importantly, the weight of the fact that very little has changed in 135 years. The words on the back read ‘peace and friendship,’ but they are hollow. The promises of truth and honour the medals were supposed to represent were never kept.”

Peace treaty medals were given to “deserving Indians,” Gina explains, where “deserving” most often meant obeying U.S. government agents — agents representing a settler government which did not uphold the treaties it signed; forcibly removed Indigenous peoples from their ancestral territories onto reservations; and took Indigenous children from their family homes and placed them into residential schools, oftentimes never to return.

Gina, who is now an assistant professor at Emily Carr University, first became interested in the objects in 2013, after discovering photographs in the archives of the Spencer Museum in Lawrence, Kansas, depicting “chiefs of the plains” wearing the medallions. Having researched their histories in the years following, Gina drew on her Broken Treaty Quilts for inspiration.

Full article by Perrin Grauer: gina-adams-broken-treaty-medallions-help-create-change-through-awareness