Trade Canoe for the North Pole, 2017

Narrator: In Trade Canoe for the North Pole, Smith revisits the questions raised in the trade canoe that was the very first work we talked about on this guide. In a crisis, what do you want to save? Here Smith isn’t responding to biblical stories, but the growing reality of climate change. What should we bring to the North Pole in order to navigate a warming world? There’s an air of humorous futility to the way she’s packed the canoe. She’s included things that are important to her—the silhouette of a horse, for example. But there are also palm trees, which would seem out of place even in a warmed North Pole. And near the right, there’s a line drawing of one of Snow White’s seven dwarves, as if to suggest that there’s no escaping our cultural baggage. Presiding over the whole, there’s a drawing of Coyote, hands raised in what might be a shrug. For Smith, Native trickster symbols such as Coyote and the Rabbit often appear in moments like this one, where we are at a crossroads.