This Song is a Museum

This Song is a Museum was created for an exhibition called "Peter Morin's Museum" in 2011. Tahltan artist Peter Morin invited Coast Salish singer Hwieumten, Fred Roland to make a visual record of his song. Using a drumstick dipped in paint, Hwieumten inscribed his gestures on five elk-skin drums, creating patterns of dark splatters.

"This song is hundreds of years old. This song is a museum." In 2011, Tahltan artist Peter Morin invited Coast Salish singer Hwieumten (Fred Roland) to make a visual record of his song. By using a drumstick dipped in black paint, Hwieumten inscribed each of these five elk-skin drums with the act—and therefore the memory—of singing. Peter Morin explains, "The museum has a tendency to lose the singing. The voice connected to the objects becomes hard to reach. I wanted to figure out an Indigenous way to document the song using Indigenous materials. The drums are a record of his practice of Indigenous knowledge. The record of the practice relates to the environment. And the record will always be different." Named "This Song is a Museum" this work extends the idea of “museum” to encompass other ways that knowledge is carried through time and space. Peter Morin sees the drums and their songs as fluid structures that, like museums, are strong enough to carry ideas. He reminds us that the Indigenous objects we see at MOA are all manifestations of cultural knowledge tied to living people, land, and cultures.

Octagonal drum with deer hide stretched over a wooden frame and secured at the back with sinew. The face of the drum has a splash pattern at the centre in black ink. The hide is translucent along one half of the drum. The sinew, threaded through the edges of the hide, is pulled to the centre like spokes. A piece of elastic black string has been tied to two of the sinew spokes, for hanging.