Roads

Roads. Intaglio, Digital Print, Ink Drawing, Chine-Collé. 45cm x 45cm, 2022.

Roads is the fourth print in my artist's book. One of the first steps in the colonization process of the Chaco after loosely mapping the region was the establishment of roads. The Anglican missionaries prided themselves for creating inroads and making the Chaco more accessible to European ranchers and settlers. Following these early roads and a short rail line built by timber and tanín extraction companies, the Mennonite settlers entered even further inland to settle on Enlhet territory.

As a background for this piece, I used a digitally printed rough map of the Chaco by Anglican missionary Wilfrid Barbrooke Grubb from 1910. I have highlighted his journeys in red ink. Also in red ink, I printed a road that diagonally crosses the entire Chaco. The trajectory of the road is loosely inspired by the modern day highway Ruta 9 which connects the central Chaco, and therefore the Mennonite colonies, with Paraguay's capital Asunción. The road goes through a planting of sweet potatoes, squash and beans, referencing the accompanying text (see below) of an Enlhet elder, Metyeeyam', detailing how Mennonite settlers built their village roads through their plantings.

The figures of indigenous people are pushed to the margin, becoming dispossessed and displaced. A small square of a satellite image of today's pastures and fields represents the expansion of agriculture opposite the more modest traditional indigenous plantings. It shows the impact of the scale of the change, where one is visible from space, while the other is integrated into the landscape; one requires the landscape to be cleared to create clean fields with neat, tidy rows of monocultures or grass, while the other is a sustainable polyculture adapted to the climate and the region that might look rather wild and unkempt to a European gaze.

The account by Metyeeyam' (see text page below) has hit me hard, since it shows a completely different reality to the narrative I grew up with. Time and time again we were told the indigenous people were so incredibly poor and starving when the Mennonites arrived. Yet Metyeeyam' clearly shares that they had seasonal gardens that provided food, which the Mennonite settlers destroyed. (The hunger came after the settlement). Based on the text excerpt by Mennonite missionary G.B. Giesbrecht, the Mennonites appear to have been well aware that their settlement destroyed the gardens, yet in the general settler myth, these facts are not talked about. The destruction of gardens by another farming community to me is an act of violence (among many others in the settlement process), which puts into question the entire precept of pacifism that Mennonites claim to represent. I struggle with this insight, since pacifism has always been a source of pride when it comes to my identity being linked to my Mennonite roots.