Alex Janvier’s Iron Foot Place: Indigenous Public Art, Survivance, and Settler Reconciliation in Edmonton’s Rogers Place

Abstract

On 8 September 2016, Tsa Tsa Ke K’e (Iron Foot Place) was officially unveiled in the floor of the new Rogers Place Arena, home to the National Hockey League’s Edmonton Oilers. The circular, 45-foot-diameter tile mosaic is the creation of renowned contemporary artist Alex Janvier (Denesųłiné/Saulteaux), whose remarkable career has involved fighting for artistic sovereignty and resisting settler colonialism. This mural has prompted multiple expressions and practices of Indigenous survivance, performances and gestures of state and corporate reconciliation, and exists at the edge of some of the lived realities of exacerbated biopolitical necropolitics in Edmonton. In this article, we explore the intersections of art and professional men’s hockey as they coexist under ongoing settler colonialism at the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century. In post–Truth and Reconciliation Commission Canada, how do investments in public art in corporate-civic professional sport partnerships further celebrate Indigenous culture and persistent presence? And concomitantly, how do such investments continue to both obscure and intensify the genocidal conditions under which the settler nation of Canada was created, and just as importantly, continues to function?