In his recent push to acquire Greenland, President Donald Trump said that just because someone landed a boat there 500 years ago doesn’t mean they own the place. Cue the enraged, hysterical laughter of Indigenous people across North America.
The moment we’re living in, full of big actions and big emotions, ridiculousness and terror, national tragedies perpetuated on a human scale — you know, history — is hard in part because no response (let alone an artistic one) seems adequate or even possible. The exhibition “Kent Monkman: History Is Painted by the Victors,” on view at the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts through March 8, proves otherwise. It is funny and grandiose, intimate and political, deadly serious and delightfully queer. And it is very, very big.
The show, coproduced with the Denver Art Museum, is Monkman’s largest solo presentation to date and the first major exhibition by a living Indigenous artist at the MMFA. Monkman is a member of ocêkwi sîpiy (Fisher River Cree Nation), located in “Treaty 5 Territory” (Manitoba) and now works in Toronto and New York City. Visitors may recognize “The Great Mystery,” which the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., commissioned for a 2023 exhibition, or the two monumental paintings he presented in the Great Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City from 2019 to 2021, which are being shown in Canada for the first time. But the exhibition is far more extensive than either and well worth the trek north.
Monkman turns history painting on its head, subverting prevailing colonial narratives by giving us new, often absurd stories set in the kinds of landscapes imagined by 19th-century American art, as well as multi-figure compositions reminiscent of Théodore Géricault or Jacques-Louis David.
Many Vermonters have likely seen Albert Bierstadt’s 1867 painting “The Domes of the Yosemite” at the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum, a wall-size scene of a raging waterfall and craggy, distant mountains. Like similar works by Hudson River School painters, it conveys that the West is large, majestic and uninhabited.
Monkman’s “History Is Painted by the Victors,” which greets visitors and sets the tone for the exhibition, gives Bierstadt a run for his money. Snowy peaks and giant redwoods tower dramatically over a glassy lake. Young, naked men lounge about and wrestle and swim, reminiscent of figures from Thomas Eakins’ paintings. They have cast off their uniforms, which are from George Armstrong Custer’s regiment. An artist at an easel paints the scene, but instead of mountains, the canvas shows Lakota artist Red Horse’s drawing of Custer’s defeat at the Battle of Greasy Grass (Little Bighorn). The fictitious painter, a genderfluid Indigenous transperson wearing fabulous red thigh-high platform stiletto boots and nothing else, is Monkman’s alter-ego: Miss Chief Eagle Testickle.
Miss Chief (get it?) acts as a kind of trickster-narrator in Monkman’s work, much as Coyote or Raven do in some traditional First Nations stories. He has described her as a time traveler who’s able to turn the settlers’ gaze back on Europeans, and who represents a nonbinary concept of gender common across Indigenous cultures but erased by colonizers. The paintings in the show include many such people, described as kâ-wâsihkopayicik — “sparkly ones.”
Miss Chief both observes and takes part in the action. In the pair of paintings commissioned by the Met, “mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People),” each of which is 11 by 22 feet, she offers a hand to shipwrecked immigrants in one and assumes George Washington’s role crossing the Delaware in the other, leading a boatful of families past a group of armed white men, threatening but isolated on a shoal. She floats like a Renaissance archangel over incarcerated Indigenous women in “The Madhouse,” seemingly protecting them from violent guards. In “The Storm,” she deploys her sheer red polyester shawl — one place where Monkman’s near-photographic attention to materials and textures is spot-on — to shield herself and a Canadian Mountie from the rain, her arm around his waist.
Miss Chief doesn’t appear in every painting, but Monkman uses her very effectively as a way to bridge his styles and subjects. In works such as “Artist and Model” and “The Triumph of Mischief” she’s painted almost cartoonishly. She often takes the part of defending Indigenous culture from appropriation by Western artists — in one case, by tying up a white cowboy-hatted photographer who is punctured with arrows Saint Sebastian-style, though he doesn’t look like he’s complaining.
Yet in other works, Monkman’s sense of scale and photorealistic style come to the fore to give Miss Chief and his other figures a real sense of pathos. “The Deluge,” for instance, portrays her clinging to the side of a cliff, rescuing children and returning them to their parents, an allegory for those who have worked to uncover and repair the damage done by the residential boarding school system.
It’s an entry into a suite of paintings that portray events from what the curators rightly and boldly describe as “the harrowing, traumatic experiences of the attempted genocide of Indigenous people in North America.” That includes “The Scream,” in which priests and Mounties literally rip children from the arms of mothers, and “The Going Away Song,” which documents an 1885 event in which First Nations children in Saskatchewan were forced to watch a mass hanging of men who rebelled against the Canadian government, some of whom were their relatives.
The most recent paintings in the show cast the present as history and offer viewers a needed dose of hope. In addition to portraits of living Indigenous activists, elders and educators, Monkman gives us works such as “Victory for the Water Protectors.” He composes the scene as a violent, balletic dance between police kitted out in riot gear and activists protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline on the Standing Rock Reservation. It’s an image that wouldn’t look out of place in recent news coverage of Minneapolis. Many of the protestors lie prone on the ground, seemingly defeated, but Monkman characterizes their collective action as a victory.
Some of these works are credited not to him alone but as “Kent Monkman Studio.” A video produced alongside the exhibition shows Monkman creating the work with his team of assistants and discussing their process, something few artists talk about openly. “It’s a way to challenge the authorship of history,” Monkman said in the video. Doing so in a major solo museum show gives the work an added subversive twist and reminds the viewer that there isn’t ever only one story, or one voice speaking.
“Kent Monkman: History Is Painted by the Victors,” on view through March 8 at the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts.
This article is part of a travel series on Québec. The province’s destination marketing organization, Alliance de l’industrie touristique du Québec, under the Bonjour Québec brand, is a financial underwriter of the project but has no influence over story selection or content. Find the complete series plus travel tips at sevendaysvt.com/quebec.
This article appears in January 28 • 2026.
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