Bronze sculptures being installed along Peel Street to honour Indigenous communities

The first phase of an urban art installation that will feature bronze sculptures along Peel Street was unveiled Tuesday ahead of National Indigenous Peoples Day.

The bronze spheres will be installed at 11 stations along the popular Montreal street – from the Lachine Canal up to Mount Royal.

The art project, which is expected to be completed at the end of fall, was designed to highlight the stories revealed by the archaeological digs carried out on Peel Street between 2016 to 2019.

Those digs revealed traces of an Iroquoian village dating back to the 14th and 15th centuries.

The project is called “Our Stories, Our Way: Peel Trail” (Tsi niionkwarihò:ten) and is meant to be a collaborative work between Indigenous communities and Montreal. The bronze sculptures were created by artists MC Snow and Kyra Revenko.

“It’s dialogues of getting to know each other and expressing our point of views because these are important dialogs that we need to make,” said MC Snow. “So the piece in itself, they are seats, they invite the person, the passers-by to come and sit and then they realize, ‘Oh, it’s about dialogue.'”

“So now that we’re invited to come sit at this at the table where we’re able to have these hopefully able to have these these discussions that are bringing us closer together,” Snow added.

The first installation is at the intersection of Peel and Smith streets, one of what will eventually be 11 stops. Each stop will have two spheres — one representing the Indigenous experience and the other representing the non-Indigenous perspective.

“These two spheres in particular represent a giving thanks to the water and giving thanks to all the life that comes from the water,” said MC Snow.

“This idea. I’ve watched it from the beginning,” said Chief Ross Montour of the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake. “But to come here today and to be confronted by a realized vision, I haven’t got the words for that and it just so deeply moving.”

The art installation is part of a broader redevelopment project along Peel Street. The city says more trees have been added along the street, with grates mean to be reminiscent of motifs found on pottery discovered during the 2016-19 Peel Street digs.

About 2,000 shards of pottery, fragments of ceramic pipes, food remains, animal bones and charred plant seeds were discovered.

“The ancestral remains that were found at the intersection of Peel and Sherbrooke where my peoples walked, probably here remembering their steps, walked along here long before there was any of this,” said Montour. “But this is where we are now, so we need to come together.”

#WATCH: The first phase of an urban art installation that will feature bronze sculptures along Peel Street was unveiled Tuesday ahead of National Indigenous Peoples Day. The bronze spheres will be installed at 11 stations.

READ: https://t.co/y6mCZor2By pic.twitter.com/bqYgAoa4dZ

— CityNews Montreal (@CityNewsMTL) June 20, 2023

Grand Chief Kahsennenhawe Sky-Deer of Mohawk Council of Kahnawake was on hand for the unveiling.

Also present were Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante; Quebec Minister of Culture and Communications Mathieu Lacombe; and Minister responsible for Relations with the First Nations and Inuit of Quebec Ian Lafrenière.

“A lot of artifacts have been found on Peel as the city was planning on redoing it,” said Plante. “And we thought, what an amazing opportunity based on the process of reconciliation, that we’re really attached to the city of Montreal to work with artists and to showcase those artifacts to a piece of art.”

The urban furniture represents 11 themes and is expected to be completed in the fall.

“I hope you will see this journey of reconciliation. and feel it, live it, breathe it in your hearts as you take the journey and you make your way up to the base of Mount Royal,” said Montour.