Last year, Wanda Nanibush, then the curator of Indigenous art for the Art Gallery of Ontario, was in New York City, serving on the jury for the Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice. She was doing events associated with the prize when, on October 7, Hamas-led militants breached the fence separating Gaza from Israel, some 1,200 Israelis were killed, and more than 200 were taken to Gaza as hostages.

Nanibush was stunned—and fearful. Long before she entered the art world, she was a political activist and, from her teenage years on, has been involved in the Palestinian struggle for self-determination and sovereignty. She’s visited the West Bank dozens of times and has many close friends and colleagues in the region.

Nanibush stayed in New York a while longer and, in the wake of Israel’s counterattack, watched the protests that began there. In the days and weeks that followed, she posted about Gaza on her private Instagram account. One post mentioned the 1,000 children who had, by that point, been killed. (That number is now over 10,000, per latest reports.) Another defined settler colonialism—whereby colonizers displace and replace an indigenous population—and argued that “all violent resistance to settler colonialism is met with far worse and technologically destructive violence that is seen as justified as self-protection.”

Then, in early November, Nanibush disappeared from public view. Her Instagram account went dark, and her name was scrubbed from the AGO’s website. Shows that she had planned for months were cancelled. The AGO, which had formerly touted Nanibush’s work during her seven years at the museum, issued no public statement.

It soon emerged that Nanibush had abruptly, completely, left the AGO. In statements the museum and its director, Stephan Jost, would eventually release, her departure was described as a mutual decision. But in conversations with me, others would use stronger language—“squeezed out” or “obliged to leave.” While the precise nature of what transpired between Nanibush and the AGO senior leadership remains hazy, a clarifying narrative soon took shape.

From the beginning of her tenure at the museum, Nanibush’s public views on Palestinian justice, expressed on her social media and elsewhere, had irritated powerful members of the board of trustees. She’d been reprimanded before. Three years ago, the museum adopted a new social media policy that, while vague, effectively said anything staffers posted was an extension of the AGO. Nanibush felt the policy was directed expressly at her and was furious. No other staffers, she felt, were being policed as she was. But in the fractious, emotionally charged time after October 7, any advocacy for Palestine risked being interpreted as antisemitic. Those same influential trustees—just two or three out of a board of twenty-seven—could now use Nanibush’s posts as an excuse to remove her from the museum.

A number of people I spoke to—past and current staffers, committee members, artists, and independent curators—insisted that the AGO’s expansion was a major factor in the tide turning against Nanibush. In 2023, the AGO announced a $100 million, 40,000-square-foot, five-floor addition that was widely considered to be Jost’s top priority. Canada Goose’s Dani Reiss purchased naming rights to the expansion for $35 million, but Jost still needed to raise the balance of his budget. He couldn’t afford to alienate any wealthy trustee, and many believed Nanibush’s outspokenness did just that. “Wanda’s speaking out threatened Stephan’s ability to get the money for his building,” one staffer told me. (Jost has denied this, saying he had already secured the majority of the funding.)

The details of the agreement Nanibush negotiated with the AGO remain confidential, including compensation terms and whether she is permitted to ever write or speak about the experience. (A gallery spokesperson would say only that any ideas Nanibush had in development at the time she left “were her own and that she may continue those projects elsewhere.”) An open letter published by Jost on the AGO website on November 30 ostensibly addressed her exit, but in the vaguest of terms. It never mentioned Nanibush once.

For many—Indigenous communities, for sure, but also those in the more progressive precincts of the international art world and the majority of her colleagues at the museum—Nanibush’s departure was a catastrophe. Prior to her arrival, the AGO, like many museums, tended to treat Indigenous culture as something ossified and static. Nanibush changed that completely. She gave centre stage to contemporary Indigenous artists, inviting performances, artwork, and ceremonies rarely seen in the AGO’s galleries. From programming to catalogues, she insisted on the art’s relevance, vitality, and urgency. Under her leadership, nearly one-third of the museum was dedicated to Indigenous art, leading the New York Times to call her, in 2018, “one of the most powerful voices for Indigenous culture in the North American art world.” But Nanibush became a champion for more than just Indigenous culture. She was a vector for anyone historically overlooked by the museum: Black artists, queer artists, non-canonical and marginal artists of every stripe.

To some, Nanibush’s ouster represented significant failures: of reconciliation, of free speech protections, of the autonomy of our public cultural institutions. The AGO had, for years, seemed to be moving toward a different, more inclusive, and diverse model. Those efforts were now at risk of being seen as superficial and short-lived. “I have great respect for Wanda Nanibush,” the artist Rebecca Belmore told me. “The AGO? None whatsoever. That’s all gone.”

Nanibush didn’t lie low for long. By mid-November, she’d revived her Instagram account, and a couple months later, she was participating in public events like Gaza Lives, an afternoon of readings and music, which also included Sarah Polley. In April, I saw her at the Images Festival, where she was in conversation with her friend, Palestinian curator Nasrin Himada. A few weeks later, she agreed to speak with me, first on the phone and then in person, at a tiny Persian restaurant in Kensington Market. These conversations were the first she’d had with any journalist since her departure.

At Images, Nanibush was feisty and wry. She wore a black dress, silver boots, and dangling watermelon earrings. She swore often and laughed even more. But when we met, she’d just returned from two weeks in Turkey, and jet lag had left her relatively subdued. The toll of the past few months was also evident. Just as the drama at the AGO was unfolding, two of her siblings passed away, a brother was diagnosed with cancer, and she herself underwent surgery and had to be hospitalized. When Moving the Museum, the book she co-authored with the AGO’s curator of Canadian art, Georgiana Uhlyarik, won the 2023 Toronto Book Award, she wasn’t well enough to attend the ceremony.

Nanibush still couldn’t talk about the specific circumstances of her departure from the museum, but she was happy to discuss the unusual path she took to get there. Growing up, aside from Woodland-style painters like Norval Morrisseau, she had little experience of modern Indigenous art. But in 1992, when she was sixteen, she travelled alone, from Barrie, Ontario, to Ottawa, to see two art exhibitions that changed the course of her life. Land, Spirit, Power, at the National Gallery, with its paintings, mixed media installations, and collage, was one of the first major shows in Canada to present Indigenous art as contemporary rather than historical. Indigena, at the Canadian Museum of Civilization (now the Canadian Museum of History), was a more bluntly political survey. Taken together, the two shows represented for Nanibush a complete, powerful vision of Indigenous art, one that was resistant, resurgent, unpredictable, and pointing toward the future.

At Indigena, Nanibush was particularly moved by a complex, confrontational installation by Joane Cardinal-Schubert that addressed residential schools and the foster care system. At the time, the early ’90s, these subjects were far from mainstream Canadian conversation. For Nanibush, they had violently and tragically warped her young life. Born on Beausoleil First Nation in Georgian Bay, Ontario, she was the youngest of eighteen children. Her mother, Caroline, had been sent to residential school, and when Nanibush was just five years old, she and two of her brothers, along with nieces and nephews—all the kids who were in the house that day—were forcibly removed and put into foster homes off reserve. “We were taken because we were poor,” she said. Over the next decade, Nanibush would live with ten different families. “It was a brutal experience,” she said.

Books and political activism provided some refuge. The Russians were an early love—Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky—as was Our Lady of the Flowers, Jean Genet’s experimental autobiographical novel. She attended her first protest when she was fourteen, against the Gulf War. That same year, she visited a unity camp at Kanehsatà:ke and, on a school trip to Toronto, gave a talk about racism and education in front of 450 people at the Royal York Hotel. By her late teens, she’d read deeply about injustice around the world: in Iraq, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “There are so many places in the world where we’re doing shitty, shitty stuff,” she said to me. “Growing up a foster kid, a native kid, it’s kind of in your blood, of course, to see who’s being hurt and try to understand and speak up for them.” She dreamed of one day becoming a writer herself; by the time she was nineteen, she’d written three novels.

Over the next several years, Nanibush moved constantly—to Montreal, Peterborough, Ottawa, and Toronto—racking up degrees in philosophy, film, and visual studies. In Toronto, where she eventually settled, she picked up gigs at increasingly high-profile arts organizations, including the Ontario Arts Council and the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery at the University of Toronto. She shuttled easily between different artistic and political worlds, blurring the boundaries between creation, activism, and curation. She programmed films, made installations, was a prolific critic and essayist. For three years, she was an organizer and water carrier with Idle No More. She became known for her energy, creativity, and an uncommon forcefulness. “She really knocks your socks off,” the artist Jamelie Hassan said.

By 2015, a couple of people at the AGO had reached out to Nanibush about working there. Her unusual résumé and broad knowledge were appealing, but the museum also wanted her, Nanibush said, “to criticize what they were doing.” That year, Canada was reimagining its relationship with its first peoples: Idle No More had gathered considerable momentum, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission had issued its calls to action, and Justin Trudeau was elected prime minister, pledging a more just and equitable partnership between First Nations and the federal government. Every cultural institution, including the AGO, was finally grappling with issues of diversity and inclusion.

Nanibush wasn’t quite sure a museum was the place she wanted to be. She was busy and enjoyed her independence. But she also saw a considerable opportunity. Given shifting societal attitudes, and her own stubbornness, she believed she could dramatically reorient the AGO’s relationship to Indigenous art: “I could see that there was so much space in there for change, and that our community needed it.” That year, she took a contract position as a guest curator, and within three years, she was a permanent staffer.

Nanibush wasted no time bringing change. The first show she curated, Toronto: Tributes + Tributaries, 1971–1989, brought together scores of Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists and instantly signalled her radical ambition: among the first works visitors encountered was a photo by Haudenosaunee photographer Jeff Thomas and an audio recording by Black poet Lillian Allen. Then, in 2017, she and Uhlyarik were appointed co-curators of the newly formed Indigenous and Canadian art department. They adopted a governance model based on treaties between First Nations people and European settlers that were foundational to the creation of Canada. Those treaties, of course, were often broken, but Nanibush and Uhlyarik, as co-leads, worked as equals in a spirit of collaboration and non-interference.

Together, they redesigned the galleries thematically, eschewing the chronology that Nanibush felt privileged colonial art history. All wall texts were rendered in both English and Anishinaabemowin, Inuit work was in Inuktitut, and labels indicated if a work was created on unceded lands. There were other firsts: a seal feast, attended by thousands, was held in the middle of the museum. Belmore became the first Indigenous artist to receive a major show. In the fall of 2018, Nanibush organized the first aabakwaad, an annual gathering of Indigenous artists, curators, and writers from around the world that she would, a few years later, bring to the Venice Biennale. In 2022, while the rest of the museum coped with pandemic-related budget cuts, Uhlyarik and Nanibush’s department expanded—Taqralik Partridge was named associate curator of Indigenous art, with a focus on Inuit art.

Michelle Jacques, currently the chief curator at Saskatoon’s Remai Modern, began her career at the AGO. She remembered watching Nanibush with admiration. Jacques, who is Black, had tried for years to make the AGO less elitist—in her words, to engage “more diverse publics”—and been frustrated by the museum’s glacial evolution. It’s one of North America’s largest art museums, with approximately 600 employees and 400 volunteers. It also has a sharply defined hierarchy, in which the senior executive and board, not curators, decide on policy, budgets, and programming. But Nanibush managed, in a very short time, to turn things upside down and inside out. “One of her colleagues described her as somebody who smashed through walls,” Jacques said. “And then told everybody else to hurry up and come through.”

Jost was appointed director in April 2016, right as Nanibush was hitting her stride. Over the next few years, she said, he would be a staunch champion of her work. On a stage at the Venice Biennale, he stood up and said, “With Wanda, all you need to do is say yes.” It wasn’t selfless, of course. At a time of growing racial reckoning, Nanibush was transforming the museum into a uniquely progressive institution. “I think he recognized that the AGO could be a leader by allowing Wanda to have authority and power to make change,” Jacques said.

A number of people, however, didn’t want the AGO to change. Or at least not in the ways Nanibush was pushing for. She didn’t always stick to budgets and sometimes appeared to shrug off the practical considerations that went into mounting a show, exasperating an already overworked staff. Some of the gallery guides, who included women who’d been with the museum a long time and represented a portion of the donor base, bristled at her innovations, and they weren’t afraid to let Jost know. When Nanibush and Uhlyarik decided to retitle the 1929 Emily Carr painting Indian Church as Church in Yuquot Village—the original title, they said, denigrated and discriminated—they were inundated with angry letters from the public. Even Robert Houle, a good friend of Nanibush’s, and whose 2022 retrospective she curated, told the New York Times that the retitling was “political correctness.”

For Nanibush, the fundamental issue was that her changes frightened some people both inside and outside the museum. “We were bringing in artists and art that they weren’t used to,” she said. “Having conversation around race and colonialism that they’re not used to. I think all of that is scary because it challenges people’s identity as Canadians.”

Then there was Israel and Palestine. In May 2016, Nanibush travelled to the region for the first time, with Hassan, for a conference in Bethlehem called “Art and Resistance.” Nanibush loved the place, its beauty and people, but she was also appalled by what she calls “the daily humiliations” of Palestinians. “Colonialism in Canada is still really strong,” she told me, “but not so nakedly violent as it is there. It always makes me think of our family members and what they went through when it was harsher.”

A few months later, Nanibush wrote about the trip in Canadian Art magazine. She wrote admiringly about a couple of local artists, drew parallels between Indigenous and Palestinian experiences of occupation, and described the pomegranate and olive trees still surprisingly thriving in a confiscated Palestinian village as “sites of resistance.” Soon after the essay was published, Jost called Nanibush into his office. In the meeting, according to Nanibush, Jost told her that the essay had upset some of the AGO’s trustees, though he didn’t say who. Nanibush told Jost that she hadn’t written anything that wasn’t true, that she wasn’t going to apologize, and that she wasn’t going to stop thinking and working in this way. When she asked if she was being terminated or censored, he said no. The meeting concluded with Jost requesting that, if Nanibush planned to publish anything similar, she give the gallery advance warning so they could prepare. (When asked about this meeting, Jost said, “The AGO does not comment on personnel matters.”)

Nanibush left his office, still with her job and, generally speaking, with Jost’s support for her curatorial work. But she also knew that this specific subject was going to come up again. Over time, she would connect certain dots; her particular criticism of Israel was being singled out, she felt, specifically because she was Indigenous. “I thought it was just a fear of what I was writing,” she said, “but no, it’s a fear of who I am.”

In the weeks and months after Nanibush’s departure, artists quit committees at the AGO and pulled out of programs and exhibitions; other cultural organizations dissolved partnerships with the museum; staffers—Partridge, most notably—left. Thousands of Indigenous, Canadian, and international artists, academics, and culture workers signed various open letters in support of Nanibush. The Indigenous Curatorial Collective, comprising eleven Indigenous artists and culture workers, sent Jost a letter titled “Let Wanda Speak,” demanding that the AGO release her from the legal restrictions preventing her from discussing her ouster. The day after Nanibush left for good, Uhlyarik went into the museum and removed the long wall text that spelled out the nation-to-nation relationship they’d adopted. The treaty had been broken.

Much of this discussion around Nanibush and the AGO turned on conflicting questions of safety—the safety of those living in Israel and Gaza, of course, but, closer to home, the safety of those who chose to protest and those who felt threatened by that protest, the safety of an institution’s staff versus the safety of the people in charge of that institution. There was no doubt who was more vulnerable in these relationships. But that didn’t lessen the ferocity with which each claim was fought.

Two moments in Nanibush’s story illustrated the ways those claims collided. One of the projects she brought to the AGO was Indigenous Fashion Arts, a biennial festival scheduled to open in May 2024. With Nanibush gone, the IFA’s executive and artistic director, Sage Paul, felt it impossible to proceed and told Jost she was pulling the event. Jost invited Paul to discuss the matter further. She went, along with Nanibush, the Indigenous Screen Office’s Kerry Swanson, also the IFA’s co-founder and strategic adviser, and Jason Ryle, the festival’s board chair. The IFA team went into the meeting looking for two things: one, a precise explanation for why Nanibush was no longer with the museum, and, two, assurances that the hundred Indigenous artists they were bringing to the AGO, most of whom, the IFA felt, shared Nanibush’s views on settler colonialism, would be safe from censorship or attack.

In the end, according to Paul, Jost could provide neither. Instead, he admitted that Nanibush had done nothing wrong and that her Instagram posts had not been tantamount to hate speech. AGO staff and board had experienced a “trauma response” to October 7, Paul recalled him saying—they were in an “attack mode,” and that response “landed on Wanda.” The AGO, he added, was “an unsafe place for her.” Paul told Jost that Nanibush had been attacked because she was Indigenous, and asked him how other Indigenous artists could trust they’d be protected. How could they stay after someone they loved and trusted had been treated this way? “Because, honestly, if you don’t, the AGO will be set back five years,” Jost responded. Paul and her team were unmoved. They ultimately left, with the AGO providing undisclosed financial compensation, and relocated the festival to the Eaton Centre and Toronto Metropolitan University.

It’s conceivable that the context for Nanibush’s departure might not have become public were it not for a letter sent to Jost that leaked mid-November. Written by the directors of Israel Museums and Arts, Canada, it began, “We have been down this road before. As you likely heard, Wanda Nanibush has resumed posting inflammatory, inaccurate rants against Israel,” and went on to dispute Nanibush’s characterizations of the country as a colonizer and to question her bona fides as a curator.

The letter ended by asking the AGO to implement mandatory antisemitism training for staff and to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which argues that holding Israel to a standard not demanded of other democratic nations is antisemitic. The government of Canada as well as hundreds of other countries, cities, and universities have adopted this definition, but it’s not without controversy: even the definition’s creator, American lawyer and avowed Zionist Kenneth Stern, has repeatedly complained that it’s too frequently deployed to suppress legitimate criticism of Israel.

The letter didn’t explicitly ask for Nanibush to be removed. But its ire certainly rhymed with the displeasure of the trustees who wanted Nanibush out. And with the names of those trustees kept secret, IMAAC became, for supporters of Nanibush, the villain in the story—particularly Sara Angel, IMAAC’s most high-profile director.

Angel is the founder and executive director of the Art Canada Institute, an educational charity, and also a volunteer member of the AGO’s Indigenous and Canadian Curatorial Committee. After the letter leaked, a number of artists and scholars immediately cut ties with the ACI. When the charity launched a new book in May, several protesters interrupted the proceedings. Angel did not respond to my specific questions about Nanibush or the ACI but told me in an email, “Regarding the IMAAC letter, I co-signed it as someone with a PhD on Nazi-era history. I teach university courses on how starting in 1933, speech throughout Europe that was harmful to Jews led to the death of 6 million in the Holocaust. In mid-October 2023, just days after the wake of the greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, IMAAC asked Stephan Jost to give AGO staff anti-semitism training.”

But long before October 7, IMAAC had sought to police Israel’s critics in the Toronto art world. In 2021, after more than 250 people were killed in Gaza during a battle between Hamas and Israel, over 1,000 Canadian artists joined a boycott of Toronto’s Koffler Centre of the Arts, urging the art gallery to divest from the United Jewish Appeal Federation, a key supporter. IMAAC blacklisted artists and artist-run centres that supported the boycott, and it demanded that the Ontario Arts Council revoke funding to all organizations that had joined. In its 2022 newsletter, IMAAC tied the protest to the global boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign against Israel and told supporters, “We believe there are effective ways to promote peace and coexistence between Jews and Palestinians. Unfortunately BDS wants Israel to disappear and anyone who is associated with Israel to be ostracized.”

In late march, five months after Nanibush’s departure, the AGO went on strike. The job action wasn’t a direct response, but it made clear the larger discontent within the museum’s walls. A long-time staffer told me they had never seen morale so low. “It’s very bad,” they said. The strike lasted a little over a month, and throughout, the union and staffers frequently pointed out the vast gulf between Jost’s and his employees’ salaries, while also drawing attention to the cost of the expansion—a sore point with employees who already felt overtaxed and underpaid.

At a town hall meeting, held right after the strike concluded, the first question from a staff member to Jost was this: “Mr. Director, when are you going to tender your resignation?” Jost didn’t resign, but in late June, twelve staffers were quietly laid off, with Jost writing in an email that this was the result of “a restructuring that the AGO needed to do for financial and operational reasons.”

This economic uncertainty underpins the Nanibush episode. The AGO, like so many beleaguered Canadian cultural organizations and institutions—from Hot Docs to Just for Laughs—is navigating shrinking audiences and diminished government support. And like those other organizations, it relies both on corporate sponsors and private donors whose values may not align with those of the artists they support and who are also able to wield undue influence. This funding crisis was brought into sharp relief after October 7, with many artists and activists pressuring Hot Docs, Contact Photography Festival, and the Giller Prize to cut ties with Scotiabank over its investment in Israel-based weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems.

A number of people told me that Jost had been between a rock and a hard place. Choosing to protect Nanibush meant possibly losing significant financial support. Choosing to side with the trustees meant sacrificing a well-known and valuable staffer, embarrassing the museum, and tacitly supporting Israel. It’s difficult to know how much long-term damage Jost’s choice has inflicted on the AGO. While some members of the public and the art community continue to boycott the museum, most people have moved on. In May, Jacques, the Remai chief curator, attended a curatorial conference in San Francisco, where the majority of participants were American. The AGO’s name, she said, kept coming up. Not because of Nanibush but because the museum remained an attractive venue. “In terms of their big-sibling organizations, the AGO is going to be able to find partners and collaborators, no problem,” Jacques said.

For the local and global Indigenous communities, it’s another story. It will likely be many years, and certainly a new director, before a major Indigenous curator agrees to work there again. When I asked Eli Hirtle, a filmmaker and spokesperson for the Indigenous Curatorial Collective, if the museum could repair its relationship with his community, he said not under the current leadership. “I don’t think expending any more energy or resources towards the AGO is wise at this point,” he said.

The AGO seems ready to move on too. Right around the time that Nanibush was leaving the AGO, the National Gallery of Canada appointed a new director and CEO, Jean-François Bélisle, who publicly questioned previous efforts at decolonization. “I’m interested in building something,” he was quoted as saying in an article, “not de-building it.” Jennifer Smith, director of the National Indigenous Media Arts Coalition, argued that thinking like this, and what happened with Nanibush, suggested that the Canadian art world had a limit to how far it would go. “Maybe there’s a cap on the energy these institutions are willing to put into Indigenous art,” she told me.

Nanibush’s decolonization of the AGO, however, did exactly what Bélisle wants: it introduced new ways of seeing and thinking that the museum had previously been blind to. It took nothing away from what the AGO previously privileged—culture’s not a zero-sum game—but rather fashioned the museum into a richer, more complex, more surprising place.

Now, Nanibush is taking her energy elsewhere. Once again, she’s moving between places and mediums, with much of her new work happening far from the AGO—far, even, outside of Canada. She’s put together another edition of aabakwaad, the international Indigenous art festival, that will take place this fall in Brisbane. In January, she’ll be a visiting professor at the City University of New York. She is part of a team curating Counterpublic, the massive civic art exhibition that takes place in St. Louis every three years.

In between all this, there are documentary films, a book, new shows. Gaza is never far from her mind either—she has only become more vocal since leaving the museum, speaking out on Instagram, at conferences and festivals. “I still have lots going on,” she told me. “I still have the life I always had. I think I always knew that if I have to quit or be fired for making a moral choice, I would. So I kept one foot out the door to protect myself and my decisions. Because if you are so dependent, you can’t make an independent choice.”

Jason McBride

Jason McBride is a Toronto-based writer and editor. His first book, Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker, was published in 2022.

Robin Gartner

Robin Gartner (robingartner.com) is a Metis commercial and editorial photographer based in Toronto.