Indigenous speakers series recap: Greg Staats

On Thursday, Nov. 28, another installment of the University of Waterloo’s Indigenous Speaker Series was hosted featuring Gregg Staats, a decorated artist of the Hodinöhsö:ni community. 

Launched in 2017, UW, in connection with the Waterloo Indigenous Student Center (WSIC), the Office of Indigenous Relations, the Dean of Arts Office, and the Departments of History and Communication Arts, created the Indigenous speakers series. This series was initially designed to allow students, faculty, and staff the opportunity to understand and engage with Indigenous issues. These speaking events take place a few times every year and feature speakers who are members of the Indigenous community who have been successful in their work of displaying and working to reconcile past Indigenous mistreatment. Speakers attending this event have ranged from artists to professors and practicing legal attornies. 

The third and final addition for the 2024 year of the Indigenous Speaker Series featured Gregg Staats, a member of the Hodinöhsö:ni Six Nations community. Staats is a well-established Indigenous “Lens Artist” with an illustrious  40+ year career. According to Staats, he shared at this event that the main purpose behind a large majority of his work is to focus on re-establishing the Hodinöhsö:ni’ way of life and bringing Indigenous culture into the public eye. Throughout this event, Staats showed various pieces of his art and discussed how he uses photography as a medium to navigate relationships with land, nation, communication, and self. 

Staats’ approach to art is “autobiographical” by nature. This means that much of his work depicts important aspects of his upbringing deeply rooted in his personal emotional and cultural experiences. He also hopes to have a restorative aesthetic in the sense that he intends his art to contain symbolism that displays trauma and resilience aiming to educate and build bridges between Indigenous and non-indigenous audiences.

On top of Staats using visual media such as sculptures, paintings and photographs, he recently started venturing into written components of Art. He would write a little blurb that in some cases would describe his artwork or would include a common or special saying or phrase that is used in that particular area to truly depict its connection. 

The event began with a traditional display of a drumming circle, and Staats opened the event by displaying a video showing his recognition of the 2024-2025 Governor General’s Award for Visual and Media Arts (GGArts). Greg Staats is an affiliate with the Long House Labs here at UW located in East Campus Hall. This space includes a studio, gallery space and an Indigenous Archive.