Rebecca Belmore: March 5, 1819

Rebecca Belmore (Anishinaabekwe)

JAN 17 >> MAR 9, 2025

The Gallery brings the film March 5, 1819 by Rebecca Belmore to Thunder Bay for the first time. Two figures dressed in jeans and plaid shirts flee in terror through a snowy forest. The man is shot. The woman is captured. The work re-enacts story of the Demasduit, a young Beothuk woman (later renamed Mary March) captured by colonists at Red Indian Lake in Newfoundland. Her husband Nonosabasut, dies trying to save her. Re-staging a historic moment, Belmore collapses time and speaks to the present struggle of Indigenous peoples in Canada, and the continued violence perpetrated upon them. This two-channel video installation is on loan from the The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Image: Rebecca Belmore, March 5, 1819 (film still), 2008. Courtesy of the Rooms Provincial Art Gallery.

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