Public - Volume 32, Issue 64, 2021

Tunnirusiangit: Kenojuak Ashevak + Timotee Pitsiulak was a collaborative project in 2017-2018, led by four Inuit artists and curators, Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory, Koomuatuk (Kuzy) Curley, Taqralik Partridge, Jocelyn Piirainen, in partnership with Dr. Anna Hudson (Mobilizing Inuit Cultural Heritage (MICH) at York University) and Georgiana Uhlyarik, Curator, Art Gallery of Ontario. Designed to generate exchange between Inuit and non-Inuit about the role of art, beauty, and culture in shaping our relationships to the land and to each other, it celebrated the achievements of Kenojuak Ashevak and Timotee Pitsiulak, two Inuit artists who challenged the parameters of tradition while consistently articulated a compelling vision of the Inuit worldview. The team reflected on the project in a series of conversations in October 2020. This is an edited version of their discussions.

In 2020, after a year of dreaming, we officially embarked on the development of Moss Projects: Curatorial Learning + Research, an educational and philosophical space that aims at peeling away the colonial layers of the art museum, within the context of Turtle Island (now North America), to imagine something else. This initiative supports peer-to-peer pedagogies alongside Indigenous, Black, and People of Colour-led and allied inquiry and practices, valuing diverse knowledge systems and modes of organization beyond dominant parameters of curation, art, and art history. As white settler and Black Canadian curators, we are founding Moss Projects as a collaborative, reflexive, and praxis-based process, utilizing our professional resources for curatorial incubation and to establish spaces and mechanisms for sharing cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary methodologies.

This article is an examination of the intercultural alliances that made use of performative methods during the 1980s and 90s to protect the Stein Valley from industrial logging. This work historicizes the questions this special issue asks about non-Indigenous strategic disruptions of settler colonial systems and beliefs to demonstrate festival organizing and the creation of a subjunctive experiences of sovereignty using “communitas” in order to protect biotas and Indigenous relations to land and waters.

This essay reads Rita Wong and Fred Wah’s beholden and Christine Stewart’s Treaty 6 Deixes to elaborate a concept of conspiratorial poetics in the settler colonial context of Canada. The article figures conspiracy both as the practice of co-respiration and an admission to join in treasonous activities, suggesting that the poetic interventions of Wong, Wah, and Stewart offer models that readers may take up to breathe life into decolonial relationships while conspiring against the normative functions of settler governance.

Artists David Campion and Sandra Shields reflect on the role that relationships with Indigenous people played in shaping their installation Grand Theft Terra Firma which uses digital gaming to reframe the settlement of Canada as a heist perpetuated by the usual cast of colonial characters reimagined as villains. The artists provide a detailed account of the collaborative practice that became the means of co-creating photos with Stó:lō friends and neighbors as ‘actors.’ They share how relationships that grew over many years of time spent together were central to the understanding that became the foundation for the work as well as to the process of conceptualizing and executing the project.

This article uses white Canadian settler artist Mary Pratt’s photorealistic paintings of salmon to grapple with the ways in which settler colonialism necessitates anti-relationality between humans and the non-human world. I trace Indigenous (Beothuk and Mi’kmaq) histories of salmon in Ktaqmkuk|Newfoundland to grapple with what Pratt’s seemingly placid visions of everyday domestic settler life violently erase, concluding by with representations of salmon by Beothuk artist Shanawdithit.

Our work examines the complexities and paradoxes of decolonization and Indigenization, including multiple understandings, conflicting aspirations, contradictory desires, institutional instrumentalizations, heterogeneity within and between Indigenous communities and enduring limitations of efforts in this area. We start this article with an overview of the work of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures arts/research/ecology collective and the “Towards Braiding” mode of inquiry, which provide the context for our work. Next, we use this mode of inquiry to present three scenarios that illustrate how Indigeneity is consumed in non-Indigenous institutions. We conclude the article with a reflection about the difficult path towards non-consumptive modes of engagement with Indigenous peoples grounded on relations rooted in trust, respect, reciprocity, consent and accountabilityⁱ and where difficult conversations can happen without relations falling apart.

“Dear Agnes” is a fictitious correspondence that I shared with Agnes McCausland Richardson Etherington (1880–1954) during my doctoral studies in the Cultural Studies Program at Queen’s University (2014-2019). Agnes Etherington is a key figure in the development of fine arts programs at Queen’s, including its art collection. Owing to her bequest of the Etherington House, the university’s art facility bears her name. The entire correspondence that we shared, and that was inserted as textual interruptions into my final dissertation portfolio, includes personal photos and a genealogy that chronologically records activities of Indigenous resurgence that occurred during my studies. What follows is an excerpt of the correspondence. This text is based on one of the four letters found in the portfolio.

In the summer of 2021, the sun melted the King Edward VII Equestrian Monument in Queen’s Park into a heap of bronze, releasing the occupants of the city of Toronto from the sculpture’s (both symbolic and material) colonial power. The sun finally did its work in the wake of artistic engagements that, in previous years, had defied the monument’s authority and challenged its permanence. These aesthetic actions both reveal the value of the equestrian monument to the neocolonial state (as a method of maintaining structures of hierarchy, exclusion and dominance), and offer the city’s occupants opportunities to practice how we can live together otherwise.

In this article, I describe the methodology I understand as admin activism within the context of cultural institutions to consider how we may generate sustainable, productive and enjoyable relationships in decolonial work. Admin activism includes specific priorities, behaviours, and strategies associated with decolonial resistances that can be mobilized by people working within art galleries, museums, and universities. Drawing from scholarly and grassroots practices of settler responsibility and Indigenous methodologies, my professional experience as a curator and educator, as well as important lessons learned from friends, colleagues and family, I intend this article to contribute to growing toolboxes for institutional change.

Providing a glimpse of the ongoing wrestle with ethics and practice involved in the Reclaiming Shingwauk Hall exhibition, an iterative residential school Survivor-led reclamation project, this article considers critical methods for implementing museal projects reckoning with difficult knowledge, and the ethical latitude they require. Doing so, it discusses risks of misrepresentation/recognition and the necessity of hopeful wounding, exposing the manipulations, fakery, and the prosthetic memories that exhibitions with great affective force produce. Exploring a range of exhibition-focused museal strategies that seek both to redress and prevent the recurrence of genocide and mass violence, this article articulates the tensions between i) affective power and cultural safety, ii) absence and presence, and iii) prosthetic and “authentic” memory that permeate the process of exhibition design. Returning to the evidentiary landscape of the Shingwauk Indian Residential School, interventions hybridizing examples discussed, putting them into the service of Survivors, offer a direction for future reclamation.

Many scholars and institutional critique artists have made the role of the museum in the formation of national/state ideologies clear. However, interventions that extend this critique to the private space of the home and its domestic cultures and practices remain few and far between. This article considers the decolonial and queer feminist curatorial methodologies that framed the creation and development of the exhibition Unpacking the Living Room (MSVU University, Kjipuktuk/Halifax, Nova Scotia, 2018). This exhibition was posited as not only an intervention into the settler colonial taxonomies and display practices of Western museum systems and modernist white cube galleries, but also an invitation for guests visiting the Living Room to reflect on their own living room as sites where power and meaning and identity are constantly negotiated. This article outlines the process of curating Unpacking the Living Room and shares it methodological growth and research outcomes.

This article reviews Rafico Ruiz’s Slow Disturbance, which presents a strong analysis of the temporal dimensions of infrastructure and the resource frontier through the case of the Grenfell Mission in Newfoundland and Labrador, an evangelical Protestant medical mission. Ruiz highlights infrastructure as ongoing relational processes that are also media productions and is especially attuned to how relationships are oriented around the repair and maintenance of infrastructure in order to create the resource frontier.

Review of: A Bounded Land: Reflections on Settler Colonialism in Canada Cole Harris

(Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 2020), 344 pages

In A Bounded Land: Reflections on Settler Colonialism in Canada, distinguished Canadian geographer Cole Harris republishes a selection of his many writings and thereby reframes his interrogation of the meaning of the term “settler” in “settler colonialism.” Through an exploration of various immigrant experiences at specific locations, Harris lays out a broad architecture of settler colonialism through an analysis of the organization of immigrant space and the contraction of Indigenous space since settler colonialism began in Canada some 500 years ago.