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zhigwe/aim week 2

Lori Blondeau, Lonely Surfer Squaw (1997)


​Lori Blondeau, Lonely Surfer Squaw (1997)
digital photograph                                                            

“I grew up around art and I studied dance and then went and studied theatre at Native Theatre School in Toronto,” explained Lori. “Then I realized I didn't want to do theatre, I wanted to tell my own stories.”

Best known for her performance art, Saulteaux artist Blondeau also works with other media and installation art. Of performance art, Blondeau has stated, “It's about the here and now, it's live action: whatever the viewer takes from it, all you have is your memories as an audience member or viewer. Then it resonates more, because most people who witness performance art, they bring in their own experience into it, so they become a part of the performance in a way.” Blondeau draws on her own and family stories of what it means to be Indigenous, to have experienced a history of colonialism and especially what it is to live as an Indigenous woman.

Blondeau has a number of irreverent personas such as the Lonely Surfer Squaw (1997) or Cosmosquaw (1996). In these personas, Blondeau takes on the dominant aesthetics of (contemporary white) media culture, by inserting her own body onto iconic images of white pin-up girls. The Lonely Surfer Squaw, with her beaver-skin bikini and gigantic pink surfboard, appropriates and transforms the early pin-up girl of California’s white surfing culture.

As Blondeau has said, “It’s a photograph of me as a 1950s or 1960s surfin’ babe—only I’m an Indian woman standing on the prairies in the middle of winter!”

In addressing the continuing imperialism of present-day popular culture, COSMOSQUAW and The Lonely Surfer Squaw also talk back to colonial stereotypes of Indigenous women. As the name-caricatures of her personas indicate, Blondeau is clearly inviting her viewers to think again about colonial hate speech, with its violent stereotypes of Indigenous women as either squaws or Indian princesses.

For more information on Blondeau please visit:

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