Best of Maclean ’s: The curious case of Gina Adams

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The Curious Case of Gina Adams

On a sunny afternoon in June of 2018, artist Gina Adams took the stage at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. She wore a large medallion of colourful beads, which caught the light and glittered as she spoke.

Adams, who was in her early 50s at the time, talked nervously but with evident delight as she expressed her gratitude for being selected as summer artist-in-residence for the department of studio art. She took a deep breath and greeted the audience in Anishinaabemowin, her voice and manner relaxing momentarily as she spoke: “Boozhoo, aaniin.”

Adams began by talking about her Ojibwe grandfather. “As a young child, I spent time with him, walking through the woods, talking about plants and spirit medicine. My grandfather is of Midewiwin descent, and I am of Midewiwin descent from the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota,” she said. “My grandfather, however, was removed at age eight. He was sent to the Carlisle School.” The Carlisle Indian Industrial School, founded in 1879 in Pennsylvania, was the model institution for the 367 federally run residential schools in the United States, which sought to forcibly assimilate Indigenous children.

Adams was born in Connecticut and grew up in York, Maine, a seaside town two hours’ drive from Dartmouth. Her artwork is heavily influenced by the crafting traditions of her Lithuanian and Irish-American ancestors, and by the history of violent displacement and cultural fracturing of Indigenous communities. According to Adams, her great-great-grandfather was the Ojibwe chief Wabanquot, signatory to the Treaty with the Chippewa of the Mississippi. She is often pictured wrapped in one of her pieces from the Broken Treaty Quilts series, in which she embroiders the text of 19th-century treaties on vintage quilts.

In a 2020 interview with Public Radio Tulsa, she explained that the inspiration for the series came to her in a dream. “My Anishinaabeg ancestors are very tied and connected to our dreams, and with the medicine that can come from our dreams,” she said. “I’m very directed intuitively that way.” As a child, she told the interviewer, she was haunted by recurring nightmares of Indigenous people being massacred; her grandfather would take her for walks and calm her by speaking Ojibwe.

A year after her residency at Dartmouth, Adams joined the faculty at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, a small, public post-secondary institution in Vancouver. She was one of four new Indigenous faculty members recruited as part of a targeted cluster hire, which brought the number of Indigenous faculty to nine and increased the faculty body to 74. In a press release, Gillian Siddall, the university’s president and vice-chancellor, wrote that the cluster hire signalled “our genuine commitment to Indigenization and creating a safe cultural space for Indigenous students.”

The moment of triumph did not last. Soon after the hire, doubts about Adams’s identity cast a shadow on the school, and led to conflict among faculty, staff and students. The allegations raised serious questions about how universities hire Indigenous people—and what administrators should do if a professor is not who she claims to be.

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Gina Adams was hired by Emily Carr University in an effort to recruit Indigenous faculty. She rose to the role of Assistant Dean. Then questions arose about her identity...

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