page_title: Indigenous Art Park
section_title: mikikwan - Duane Linklater
hierarchical_section_title: Indigenous Art Park / Featured artists / mikikwan - Duane Linklater
caption_attribution_description: English: mamohkamatowin (Helping Each Other) by Jerry Whitehead at the Indigenous Art Park ᐄᓃᐤ (ÎNÎW) River Lot 11∞
context_page_description: Indigenous Art Park ᐄᓃᐤ River Lot 11∞ is a public park in the Edmonton, Alberta river valley built on the previous site of the Queen Elizabeth Pool. In June 2019, the Americans for the Arts' Public Art Network recognized the park as one of the 50 best international public art projects. Plans to build the park and curate installation pieces by Indigenous artists began in 2013, and the park opened in September 2018.
context_section_description: Duane Linklater is an Omaskêko Cree artist from Moose Cree First Nation in Ontario who specializes in sculpture, installation, and film. Linklater's installation is a large scale reproduction of a bone hide scraper, or mikikwan, that sits on a hillside in the art park. During his research for the project at the Royal Alberta Museum, Linklater looked at thousands of objects in the museum's collection and settled on using a 9,000-year-old buffalo bone hide scraper excavated in southern Alberta as the basis for his piece. Bone hide scrapers are an essential tool for turning animal hides into clothing, and for drums and rattles. Linklater chose the object to "memorialize the work of Indigenous women and the relation of that labour to the land," and to pay respect to the role that buffalo played in creating community in this place before their herds were destroyed by European settlers. 
  To create the installation, Linklater photographed the original artifact and worked with a fabrication studio in Calgary to create a concrete cast. The resulting piece is much larger than the original. In his artist statement, Linklater says: "With an increased scale and a new material in cast concrete, mikikwan, deliberately aligned with the new Walterdale Bridge, proposes this humble tool as a monument to the labor, practice and design of Indigenous people who still use this tool today."
caption: Mamohkamatowin (Helping Each Other) by Jerry Whitehead
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