{"id":45,"count":20,"description":"The series began in 1984 when my seven-year-old son Bear and I were walking down Queen Street in Toronto. I noticed some graffiti on a brick wall we had just walked by, and decided to take a photograph of Bear in front of it as a memento portrait for him. The baseball cap Bear is wearing has a reproduction of Edward Curtis\u2019s portrait of Two Moons, a respected Cheyenne leader who fought and defeated Custer at the battle of the Little Bighorn on June 25th, 1876. I was struck by the confluence of the image on the hat and the graffiti on the wall behind Bear\u2014\u201cCulture Revolution.\u201d\r\n\r\nWhen I saw the print, I saw myself as a young boy and remembered the fractured relationship I had with my father. This series explores the loss of male role models by using Bear as a marker of Indian-ness in sites where it does not exist. The first Bear Portrait set in motion a new way of looking at the city and, like the graffiti, my revolution was against the invisible urban Iroquois presence.","link":"https:\/\/jeff-thomas.ca\/map\/category\/field-work\/the-bear-portrais\/","name":"The Bear Portraits","slug":"the-bear-portrais","taxonomy":"category","parent":42,"meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeff-thomas.ca\/map\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories\/45"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeff-thomas.ca\/map\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeff-thomas.ca\/map\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/taxonomies\/category"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeff-thomas.ca\/map\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories\/42"}],"wp:post_type":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeff-thomas.ca\/map\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts?categories=45"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}