My Mom, kahntinetha Horn, the “Military Mohawk Princess”
Curated by Kahente Horn-Miller
21 January – 21 April 2019 at CUAG
The public life of kahntinetha Horn has largely been shaped by the camera lens and reporters’ pens. In the early 1960s, she modeled fashion for print magazines and then the runway in Montreal, Toronto and New York City, garnering attention as a rare Indigenous face in an industry dominated by whiteness. She turned this early attention into an activism fuelled years earlier by the destruction of her grandparents’ home on the Caughnawaga Indian Reserve after the expropriation of their land for the St. Lawrence Seaway. She became the Indian Princess in the Indigenous and Canadian imaginations. She just might be one of the first modern-day Indigenous celebrities. This exhibition is a snapshot of the years my mother spent in the eye of the storm, as an Indigenous celebrity and activist in the 1960s. What kind of Indian spoke out? Said anything? Was heard, no less? Especially a woman.