Creative and Critical Studies, Faculty of (Okanagan)
DSpace
UBCO
Lawrence, Toby Katrine
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD
University of British Columbia
Reimagined Curatorial Practice: Land, Labour, and Community critically examines contemporary initiatives reshaping curation that move beyond western parameters of curation to offer something else. I am asking: How are curators reimagining curatorial praxis? How are curators intentionally caring for their practices to better care for those invited to contribute and for those who constitute their communities? How do these strategies replace, intervene, or work against or in conversation with settler-colonial models to establish accessible, ethical, equitable, and anti-racist spaces of art? Through experiential and archival research, I explore select curatorial models that operate in the intermediary space between setter-established organizations and non-dominant epistemologies, ontologies, and practices. I analyse the mechanisms of these examples in relation to the intersecting pillars of land, labour, and community to consider where and how they open up space for reimagining curation. I employ a decolonial feminist methodological approach to assess and make visible the colonial and patriarchal biases present in western curatorial praxes and to extend the scholarship on feminist and decolonial curation in Canada through models that centre direct action. Finally, I locate Canadian practices within international discourses that speak to instrumental change towards equity within dominant culture spaces and demonstrate praxes that have been built predominantly through relationships that support and underscore relational and land-based pedagogies. With emphasis on the relational methodologies that shape my own practice, my study is relative to the locations and practitioners from which and with whom these ideas have evolved, and my relationship to them.
Reimagined Curatorial Practice: Land, Labour, and Community by Toby Katrine Lawrence MA, The University of British Columbia, 2012 BA Hon, University of Victoria, 2009 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE COLLEGE OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Interdisciplinary Studies) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Okanagan) December 2021 © Toby Katrine Lawrence, 2021 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommended to the College of Graduate Studies for acceptance, a dissertation entitled: Reimagined Curatorial Practice: Land, Labour, and Community submitted by Toby Katrine Lawrence in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Ashok Mathur Co-Supervisor Tania Willard Co-Supervisor Allison Hargreaves Supervisory Committee Member Carla Taunton Supervisory Committee Member Shawn Wilson University Examiner Candice Hopkins External Examiner iii Abstract Reimagined Curatorial Practice: Land, Labour, and Community critically examines contemporary initiatives reshaping curation that move beyond western parameters of curation to offer something else. I am asking: How are curators reimagining curatorial praxis? How are curators intentionally caring for their practices to better care for those invited to contribute and for those who constitute their communities? How do these strategies replace, intervene, or work against or in conversation with settler-colonial models to establish accessible, ethical, equitable, and anti-racist spaces of art? Through experiential and archival research, I explore select curatorial models that operate in the intermediary space between setter-established organizations and non-dominant epistemologies, ontologies, and practices. I analyse the mechanisms of these examples in relation to the intersecting pillars of land, labour, and community to consider where and how they open up space for reimagining curation. I employ a decolonial feminist methodological approach to assess and make visible the colonial and patriarchal biases present in western curatorial praxes and to extend the scholarship on feminist and decolonial curation in Canada through models that centre direct action. Finally, I locate Canadian practices within international discourses that speak to instrumental change towards equity within dominant culture spaces and demonstrate praxes that have been built predominantly through relationships that support and underscore relational and land-based pedagogies. With emphasis on the relational methodologies that shape my own practice, my study is relative to the locations and practitioners from which and with whom these ideas have evolved, and my relationship to them. iv Lay Summary Reimagined Curatorial Practice: Land, Labour, and Community is a focused study of innovative community-motivated and Indigenous-led models of contemporary curatorial practice. The central research question interrogates how these models replace, intervene, or work against or in conversation with settler-colonial models to establish accessible, ethical, equitable, and anti-racist spaces of art. v Preface This research project was approved by the Behavior Research Ethics Board (BREB) at The University of British Columbia Okanagan, Certificate #H20-00689. “Architecture of the Bush,” in section II, chapter four, pages 56 to 59 of this dissertation, was originally published in C Magazine, issue 136 (Toronto: C The Visual Arts Foundation, 2018). Segments of “Protocols—Song Cycle” and “How to disrupt the conventions of display,” in section IV, chapter twelve of this dissertation, were originally published as “Open Space for Conversations, and for Songs,” in analogue (Aug/Sep 2015). vi Table of Contents Abstract………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… iii Lay Summary……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… iv Preface…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… v Table of Contents……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… vi Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………......... viii Section I: Openings………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..... 1 Chapter 1: We Can Do Something Else…………………………………………………………………………...………. 2 Mothers, grandmothers, weavers (or radicals). ………………………………………………………….….. . 2 Catalysts, proposals, responses (or radical departures). ………………………………………….….. 3 Settler-colonial legacies. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………...... 7 The Curatorial. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….…… 13 What you once thought was fixed. ……………………………………………………………………………………… 18 Epilogue to We Can Do Something Else. ………………………………………………………………….………. 24 Chapter 2: Methodologies of Undoing to Connect. ……………………………………………………........ 30 Decolonial Feminist Curation. ……………………………………………………………………………………….………. 30 Decoloniality | Re-valuation. …………………………………………………………………………………………………… 34 Relational Methodologies. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 37 Feminist Citation. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………... 43 Breath. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 45 Yet another opening. …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 45 Section II: Land…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 47 Chapter 3: Land. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 48 Chapter4: BUSH gallery. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 56 Architecture of the bush. …………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 56 #BUSHgallery / #bushgallery / #bush_gallery ………………………………………………………….…….. 59 What if? (theory and action) …………………………………………………………………………………………….…….. 67 Chapter 5: Ayumi Goto + Peter Morin: how do you carry the land?.................................. 72 The exhibition opens to the land. ………………………………………………………………………………….……… 72 Friendship without sameness. ……………………………………………………………………………………….……… 78 Calling in the ancestors. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………..……. 83 Making space for mothers to meet. ………………………………………………………………………………....... 87 Section III: Labour.………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….……...... 92 Chapter 6: Labour. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….……….. 93 vii Breathing together. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………….………….. 93 Who cares? …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………...………. 94 What is already known. …………………………………………………………………………………………………….……… 96 Chapter 7: Call and response. ………………………………………………………………………………………………........ 99 Chapter 8: Curatorial (like) methodologies. ………………………………………………………………….......... 105 Chapter 9: Ilippunga: I Have Learned. …………………………………………………………………………………….. 108 Section IV: Community……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..…………… 116 Chapter 10: Community. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 117 Approaches to community. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………. 117 How is community defined? ………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 120 Chapter 11: Project Row Houses …………………………………………………………………………………………......... 126 Round 44. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 126 Bound Up. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 129 Chapter 12: Tahltan Song Cycles ……………………………………………………………………………………………….. 133 Protocols—Song Cycle. …………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 133 How to disrupt the conventions of display. ……………………………………………………………………… 133 Locations of care. …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 139 Lineage. . . ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 142 . . .Legacy. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 143 Section V: Constellations. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 148 Chapter 13: A Love Letter, a Conclusion, or a Second Opening……………………………………. 149 Isn’t it always a storied praxis? ………………………………………………………………………………………………. 149 The essence of modelling. …………………………………………………………………………………………………....... 153 Chapter 14: Plant stories are love stories too ………………………………………………………………………. 157 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 160 Appendix: Memorial to Wilfrid Laurier………………..………………………………………………………………...……… 179 viii Acknowledgements The research and writing towards this dissertation have directly and indirectly taken place in many locations, primarily the Syilx Okanagan and Snuneymuxw territories, Secwepemcúĺecw, and Lekwungen land, the traditional territory of the Songhees and Esquimalt First Nations, as well as Tkarón:to and the St. Lawrence Iroquoians, Wabanaki Confederacy, and Wendake territories. Each of these locations have sustained me through this process and impacted this work, and my own understanding of place and self, in so many ways. Beginning my PhD in 2016, I endeavoured to place myself in circumstances I would not otherwise find on my own. At UBC Okanagan I found a perfect convergence of timing and place, with whom my co-supervisors Ashok Mathur and Tania Willard have been an instrumental part. Along with Allison Hargreaves and Carla Taunton, and Samuel Roy-Bois, I have learned with my committee and I have received continuous support to critically and creatively reimagine what curatorial work can be. I also extend this immeasurable respect and gratitude to the artists, curators, scholars, and practitioners whose work and influence appear in these pages and continue to push us into places of reimagining, with special thanks to Léuli Eshrāghi, Ayumi Goto, Eli Hirtle, Tarah Hogue, Candice Hopkins, Michelle Jacques, Doug Jarvis, Peter Morin, Steven Thomas Peterson Davies, and Shawn Wilson. I am ever inspired by my Blood, Flesh & Ink collaborators, Krista Arias and Lindsay Harris, and the unwavering love, friendship, conversation, and encouragement of Benjamin McKinnon, Jennifer Van de Pol, and India Rael Young. Their support has carried me through. Finally, for providing care and access to the archives, thank you to Jane Devine Mejia, Chief Librarian at the Vancouver Art Gallery and Nathalie Thibeault, conservatrice des archives, responsible de la gestion documentaire et de la diffusion numérique des collection, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. ix This dissertation draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Fellowship and the British Columbia Arts Council Scholarship Award, and the ongoing financial support of The University of British Columbia Okanagan Graduate Award and the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies. 1 Section I: Openings To get ready often means being prepared to be undone. – Sara Ahmed1 1 Sara Ahmed, Living A Feminist Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 27. 2 I.1. We Can Do Something Else Mothers, grandmothers, weavers (or radicals). My earliest memory of an art museum is visiting an installation of art-making machines with my mother at the Kamloops Art Gallery in the early 1980s at its previous location. At least this is what I recall. I was four, perhaps five. In first-year art history, I came to learn about Jean Tingley’s Métamatic drawing machines and made the connection. I don’t know what the exhibition was exactly, but the association, through this memory, is real enough to have influenced the way that I understand embodied experiences of art. Recently, my mother told me that as a child I used to make artworks and build exhibitions in discarded fridge boxes, standing in for what I imagined a gallery to be. She confessed that she did not know then how she could make this a reality for me. What my mother didn’t realize—my mother, one of the first eight women allowed to take woodworking in high school in British Columbia—was that she was already teaching me to work from intuition and imagination and to consider how one might build a gallery differently, based on circumstance and need. During one of my final few visits with my grandmother, in the lobby of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria where I was working at the time, she told me that she had been reading Emily Carr’s journals intently, “because Emily Carr always did what she wanted.”2 In an earlier visit, driving to Boston Pizza along with my grandfather, she revealed the circumstances that left her feeling constrained in her life choices. Still, I haven’t stopped imagining my grandmother through that very lens she saw Carr. For most of my 2 Victoria-based artist Emily Carr (1871-1945) represents many things to many people. Carr’s appearance in chapters one and four of this dissertation speaks to the canonical ubiquity of certain historical figures, but also to the question of how can the circumstances of Carr’s appearance provoke a leaning into the radicality of her life that reveals untold narratives and practices, signalling the potentiality of reimagining through modelling and/or what is yet to be seen. 3 childhood she had a yarn store in the basement of my grandparents’ house. I wanted to explore every inch. Immersed in fibrous smells, I dreamt of opening every drawer and tiny bag to explore each collection of beads or skein of yarn. I often followed my mother and grandmother around the annual exhibition circuit put on by the weavers and spinners guilds across the lower mainland; a number of which my grandmother was instrumental in founding.3 Like in my grandmother’s store, I recall the desperation, wanting to feel the textures of the woven and felted items on display with my own hands! I always thought how free she must be to make the rules. Catalysts, proposals, responses (or radical departures). On a panel at the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis in 2018, curator Candice Hopkins of the Carcross/Tagish First Nation affirmed: “I don’t want us to all have the same assumed definition of what an institution is or will be . . . We need to shape these spaces in the way we want to see them shaped . . . as opposed to thinking that we are always having to react or subvert them, because we can do something else.”4 Echoed by Hopkins, Tahltan artist, curator, and educator Peter Morin posed a question, a year prior, to the collaborators of the BUSH gallery Writers Union Retreat (Tarah Hogue, Ashok Mathur, Tania Willard, Morin, and myself): what do we want to build? This is a question initially cultivated through the activities of the O K’inādās Collective (Stephen Foster, Ayumi Goto, Mathur, and Morin) and intended to open space for expansively reconceiving documentation and presentation of Indigenous art praxes, both inside and outside of 3 Lower Mainland is a colloquial term for the Metro Vancouver and Fraser Valley region of British Columbia, Canada. 4 Candice Hopkins, “Beyond the Guest Appearance: Continuity, Self-Determination, and Commitment to Contemporary Native Art” (panel featuring Nicholas Galanin, Ashley Holland, Candice Hopkins, and Steven Loft, moderated by Dyani White Hawk, Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, MN, February 27, 2018). 4 the art museum.5 As important catalysts, Hopkins’ and Morin’s proposals are not limited to temporary or superficial solutions or mere interruptions of existing institutional models, instead they propose to imagine new terms altogether. These proposals linger. They transform the way I work. I have been thinking seriously and specifically about reimagining curation since taking a position in the curatorial department at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2015. Having worked previously in curatorial and programming positions in smaller art museums on Vancouver Island, the entrenched settler-colonial ideals persistent throughout the nuanced hierarchies, policies, and practices that support the structures of each organization were once again made irrefutably clear upon my move to Vancouver. Then again in my subsequent move to Kelowna to pursue doctoral studies and in my short tenure as Curator at the Kelowna Art Gallery in 2017. During this period in the mid-to-late 2010s, despite decades of advocacy and intersectional feminist and anti-racist labour, the vast potential of decentering whiteness and employing polyvocal methodologies seemed to be only beginning to appear at the table in ways that could effectively reconfigure organizational practices within each museum. I witnessed, in many circumstances, that without a pre-existing example or without substantial vetting or social capital, curators, administrators, and boards were unwilling to take risks or work outside of the western status quo.6 A position within Canada that inherently includes the continued elevation 5 The activities of the O K’inādās Collective were funded by the Canada Council for the Arts’ {Re}conciliation initiative and supported the conceptual framing for the 2016 Summer Indigenous Art Intensive, entitled O K’inādās // complicated reconciliations: an artist residency, hosted by the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan in Kelowna, BC. 6 In this dissertation, I use “western” to mean the institutionalized art, museum, gallery, and exhibition conventions and practices developed through a system founded based on Western European ideologies and proliferated by way of colonization and globalization. This term is an ideological positioning rather than a geographic locator, as, for example, the countries now globally recognized as Canada, USA, Australia, and New Zealand, are considered western or westernized nations, effacing the cultural worldviews of the peoples present in these lands prior to, at the point of, and continuing 5 and maintenance of whiteness. Similar observations and experiences have been publicly voiced for decades in effort to break apart the stronghold. Despite continuous efforts, this pervasiveness of systemic racism, discrimination, and heteropatriarchal hegemony within Canadian art museums and artist-run-centres was highlighted once again by a conversation with Black Canadian art historians Joana Joachim and Andrea Fatona in 2018, referencing a lack of interest and effort to engage with meaningful and nuanced consideration of the work of racialized artist and curators, in addition to “an alarming lack of social equity and representation for women, Indigenous Peoples, people with disabilities, and visible minorities.”7 Equally, Naomi Beckwith, the first Black curator to hold the position of Chief Curator at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, addresses the language and politics of whiteness to reiterate that despite the rhetoric of equity, “the judgements of the dominant art history constitute a sharp white background . . . The art world’s still-active fantasies of an ahistorical space—a white cube untouched by the social strife outside it—will be continuously disrupted by a recurring nightmare of violence and exploitation until we all do some serious social work.”8 Like Hopkins and Morin, Beckwith specifically calls for new narratives rather than simple insertion or re-organization of that which is pre-existing.9 In response, my doctoral study investigates instances where new terms of curation take shape, where commitment to redressing prejudices and imbalances resulting from colonization is demonstrated. This research critically examines contemporary initiatives through colonization. In the context of quotations, I retain the capitalization of ‘Western’ when it appears in the original publication. 7 Joana Joachim, “Embodiment and Subjectivity: Intersectional Black Feminist Curatorial Practices in Canada,” RACAR 43, no. 2 (2018): 42. 8 Naomi Beckwith, “The Sharp, White Background: Thoughts on Race and Art in the 21st Century,” Frieze 167, December 16, 2014. https://www.frieze.com/article/sharp-white-background 9 Ibid. 6 reimagining and reshaping curatorial practices with a focus on community-motivated and Indigenous-led initiatives that centre to retain Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies, while interfacing with non-Indigenous and settler practices and practitioners and settler-established organizations. I argue that reimagining curation is an essential element to challenging access, economic, gender, and racial inequalities in the arts, in conjunction with institutional change that attends meaningfully to the communities and territories within which programs are enacted, and by whom. I am asking: How are curators reimagining curatorial praxis? How are curators intentionally caring for their practices to better care for those invited to contribute and for those who constitute their communities? How do these strategies replace, intervene, or work against or in conversation with settler-colonial models to establish accessible, ethical, equitable, and anti-racist spaces of art? What are the frameworks for organizing found inside and outside of the arts that address culturally nuanced expectations and protocols? Through experiential and archival research, I discuss select curatorial models that operate in the intermediary space between setter-established organizations and non-dominant epistemologies, ontologies, and practices. I analyse the mechanisms of these examples in relation to the intersecting pillars of land, labour, and community—signifying the broad areas from which my research questions have grown—to consider where and how these examples open up and establish space for reimagining curation. I employ a decolonial feminist methodological approach to assess and make visible the colonial and patriarchal biases present in western curatorial praxes and to extend the scholarship on feminist and decolonial curation in Canada through models that centre direct action. Finally, I locate Canadian practices within international discourses that speak to instrumental change 7 towards equity within dominant culture spaces and demonstrate praxes that have been built predominantly through relationships that support and underscore relational and land-based pedagogies. The goal of this dissertation is to illustrate the importance and nuance of curatorial models that attend to ways of working beyond the status quo of the current moment that continues to maintain oppressive systemic structures within the arts. Settler-colonial legacies. As a curator, decisions to enter into creative relationships are inextricably imbued with biases alongside ever-present power dynamics within contemporary and historical constructs of artist, audience, curator, and educator. In conjunction, settler-colonial legacies persistently dominate arts organizations, particularly in the Canadian context within which I operate and within which I have been shaped. I self-identity as a white settler-Canadian of mixed European ancestry and can thus far trace this ancestry at least seven generations through my paternal lineage, descendent from France, Ireland, and the United Kingdom. The six generations before me were born and resided in Tkarón:to, now Toronto, with the most distant known generation preceding Canadian confederation. On my mother’s side, four generations have resided primarily in Coast Salish territories—in the Metro Vancouver and Vancouver Island region—descendent from Ireland by way of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, as well as the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. This firmly positions my ancestral history within that of the settler. At the same time and to the best of my knowledge, the histories of their lives and the familial histories that precede them are very much unknown amongst my living family members. Further, settler self-identification and ancestral location are not expressions of absolution, as though there is no responsibility accompanying the identification beyond 8 the claiming of the term itself—a position I have frequently observed among settler-Canadians. Rather, I acknowledge this inherited legacy as my intrinsic responsibility to unlearn perpetuated colonial narratives and behaviours of dominance, and re-learn the narratives and protocols that accurately reflect the Indigenous stewardship, rights, and connections to these lands and the dynamic cultural make-up and historical truths of the region now known as Canada. Equally, I acknowledge the complexities of the term settler in that it “presupposes a unidirectionality of migrational flow and a tacit demand for permanence of placement,”10 following the deep and nuanced thinking of Goto, whose work consistently delves into the tensions of her Japanese Canadian positionality. Correspondingly, Chickasaw anticolonial thinker, writer, and educator Jodi Byrd asks, “how might we place the arrivals of peoples through choice and by force into historical relationship with Indigenous peoples and theorize those arrivals in ways that are legible but still attuned to the conditions of settler colonialism?”11 While I understand my own ancestral history to appear as that which is presupposed (“a singular understanding of colonization, that is, British and French colonization of Indigenous people in the birth and continuation of the Canadian nation state”12), Goto’s elucidation of how this term is used and understood demands additional specificity for those to whom it applies, and has been applied, with particular attention to the misassumption and concretization of the above singularity within “the settler-Indigenous binary,” which effectively subsumes People of Colour and folks with complex 10 Ayumi Goto, “‘Good Willed Inertia’: Radicalizing the Lazy Academy,” RACAR 45 (2019): 74. 11 Jodi Byrd, The Transit of the Empire: Indigenous Critique of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xxix. 12 Goto, 74. 9 relationships to residency within Canada, or effaces them entirely.13 For Byrd, the fused “entanglement of colonization and racialization”14 have worked simultaneously to other and abject entire peoples so they can be enslaved, excluded, removed, and killed in the name of progress and capitalism. These historical and political processes have secured white property, citizenship, and privilege, creating a “racial contract,”15 as Charles W. Mills argues . . . [and] should thus be understood as concomitant global systems that secure white dominance through time, property, and notions of self.16 Addressing these complexities, I continually question how to do curatorial work in ways that contribute meaningfully to decoloniality and support ongoing dialogue, growth, and new ways of working, learning, and being together. Furthermore, through my own experiential and self-reflexive praxis, I am exploring how to discuss relationships between white settler curators and racialized curators, artists, and communities that do not simply perpetuate a new focus for whiteness or take space or voice away from those whom I am working with and for. My personal curatorial, collaborative, and scholastic practice is indebted to an expansive group of scholars, artists, curators, and thinkers who precede and walk alongside me, and many of whom appear throughout this dissertation or have been interlocutors throughout my academic and curatorial journey. Their voices, importantly, challenge white Western17 European settler dominance and establish a foundational body of decolonial, feminist, Indigenous, Black, and People of Colour-centred scholarship, 13 Goto, 74; Ashok Mathur, “Complicating Non-Indigeneities and Other Considerations around Race,” RACAR 44 (2019): 56-57. 14 Byrd, xxiii. 15 Charles W. Mills, The Radical Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 20, quoted in Byrd, xxiii. 16 Byrd, xxiii. 17 “Western” in the context is a geographic locator. 10 curatorial practice, art history, and social and political discourse. Precise actions are reflected within the collaborative scholarship of settler-situated educators Allison Hargreaves and David Jefferess: This entails taking our analytical cues from the work of Indigenous scholars, artists, and activists, while not appropriating this knowledge as our own; it involves speaking from our own subject positions, while understanding the limitations of our worldviews; it means learning to think and act differently, while not making Indigenous people responsible for the re-education this transformation requires.18 Leah Decter and Carla Taunton further extend the responsibilities, as settler scholars, outlined by Hargreaves and Jefferess to include caution against re-centring the settler subject through the space and time occupied by settler decolonization and re-education.19 Drawing also on critical settler scholars from across colonized nations, Eva Mackey (Canada) and Avril Bell (Aotearoa New Zealand), settler responsibility is to acknowledge the inheritance of settler descendants and of “the political, material, and symbolic privileges seared by their [ancestors’] practices of colonization,” as stated by Bell, and, furthermore, the ways in which these practices are perpetuated in the present.20 Likewise, Decter and Taunton’s point illuminates entrenched settler tendencies, also described by Mackey, that are tied to misinformed “naturalize[d] assumption[s] that settlers are entitled to the appropriation and ownership of Indigenous territories . . . [and] that Indigenous lifeways and relationships to land are 18 Allison Hargreaves and David Jefferess, “Always Beginning: Imagining Reconciliation Beyond Inclusion or Loss,” in The Land We Are: Artists & Writers the Politics of Reconciliation, edited by Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill and Sophie McCall (Winnipeg: ARP Books, 2015), 201-202. 19 Leah Decter and Carla Taunton, “Addressing the Settler Problem,” Fuse Magazine 36.4 (2013): 32. 20 Avril Bell, Relating Indigenous and Settler Identities: Beyond Dominations (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Ltd., 2014), 6. 11 inferior.”21 In doing so, settler narratives attempt to supersede those of the Indigenous peoples, defined by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang as “those who have creation stories, not colonization stories, about how we/they came to be in a particular place—indeed how we/they came to be a place.”22 Correspondingly, settler sovereignty and rights to land have been naturalized through the dominance of settler assumptions that “the crown always already had and continues to have superior underlying title to Indigenous lands,”23 stated by Mackey, which also translates to the right to parcel and permit ownership as private property. As early as the fifteenth century, the notion of discovery, or what has come to be known as the doctrine of discovery, was utilized as legal justification by European nations for settlement in the Americas. To add more detail to Mackey’s statement above, “the Doctrine provided that newly arrived Europeans immediately and automatically acquired legally recognized property rights in native lands and also gained governmental, political, and commercial rights over the inhabitants without the knowledge or the consent of the Indigenous peoples.”24 From this point, settler imaginary has been conceived with the belief of endemic authenticity, through and justifying the appropriation of Indigenous lands, cultural traditions, and entitlement to dominant positionality.25 Because of this, “[i]t takes conscious willed and willful effort not to reproduce [this] inheritance,”26 turning to feminist, queer scholar of colour Sara 21 Eva Mackey, Unsettled Expectations: Uncertainty, Land and Settler Decolonization (Halifax & Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2016), 76. 22 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no.1 (2012): 6. 23 Mackey, 76. Italicizations in original. 24 Robert J. Miller, et. al. “Discovering Indigenous Lands: The Doctrine of Discovery in the English Colonies,” Oxford Scholarship Online, 2010. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199579815.001.0001 25 Bell, 31-32. 26 Sara Ahmed, “White Men: When we walk of ‘white men’ we are describing an institution. ‘White men’ is an institution. By saying this, what am I saying?” Common Place, December 7, 2020. 12 Ahmed. In order to renegotiate power, Mackey suggests a simultaneous process of settlers becoming uncertain regarding their positionality and Indigenous folks reclaiming certainty.27 She states, to even be able to imagine the possibilities of such material change and conceptual re-imagining will require what I call an ‘epistemological shift’ towards a stance of settler uncertainty and openness, as a starting point to imagine and practice otherwise.28 Mackey and Bell’s arguments can be further complicated by a multiplicious conception of the settler, calling in Goto, alongside an assembly of individual positions established through the interlocking mechanisms of colonization and racialization, as conveyed by Byrd, and taken by those who, for innumerous reasons, have found themselves in Canada preceding and following its establishment.29 Alongside Ahmed, Bell, and Mackey, and working collaboratively through critical Indigenous methodologies, Decter and Taunton and Hargreaves and Jefferess establish precedent for unpacking and renegotiating the ways in which the histories of the lived realities of the inhabitants of what is now ascribed as Canada are at once intertwined yet separate. In recognizing historical truths, intentional shifts in modes of organization in conjunction with locational relevance have the potential to redirect curatorial methodologies to address the ways in which “museums,” and more specifically, exhibitions, “orchestrate our particular way of seeing,” as stated by Alutiiq artist and https://commonplace.knowledgefutures.org/pub/white-men/release/1?fbclid=IwAR0V-qGFOI3hS5KeNo1wlRHE6cWadNTZex0DRRKiipA00dwWrGAVLD7Y8Kg 27 Mackey, 121-2. 28 Ibid, 126. 29 Goto, 74; Byrd, xxiii. 13 choreographer Tanya Lukin Linklater in reference to Divya Toila-Kelly.30 Continuing within western curatorial tradition is “the pretense of ‘objectivity’,” as defined by Joachim, that “stands as a veiled means of enforcing Eurocentric standards for so-called high art—standards according to which non-European artistic contributions fall short of the criteria of excellence.”31 Accordingly, it is important to understand how curatorial processes shape knowledge and representation through relationships, attention to organizational mandates and communities, as well as personal biases and variants in socio-political expectations and systems. The Curatorial. The expanding parameters of the curatorial are entangled with the power and authority exercised within its auspices, as both the framework and the referent of its development and critique.32 Moreover, as the field of study grows, the theorization of the curatorial is equally inextricable from its practice. As above, the curatorial has historically been employed to devise and fix singular narratives of history and culture, although it does not operate singularly. Many contemporary curators and curatorial thinkers are challenging this fixity through praxes that build exhibitions and encounters with art through relational and dialogic frames, and, what is more, they are actively responding to and interrogating the systems that have maintained singular narratives, colonial biases, and the status quo. Appearing in the first few pages of this dissertation, for example, Hopkins, Morin, Fatona, and Beckwith trace the important histories of decolonial curatorial work 30 Tanya Lukin Linklater (keynote Presentation, Summer Indigenous Art Intensive, The University of British Columbia, Okanagan, Kelowna, BC, July 17, 2019). Transcribed by author. 31 Joachim, 38. 32 Paul O’Neill, The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s) (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012). 14 led by Indigenous and racialized scholars across Turtle Island, many appearing throughout these pages.33 Deeply committed to intercultural and decolonial discourse, Cameroon-born, Berlin-based, and inaugural international curatorial resident at OCAD University in Toronto, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung further nuances the discourse of care within the curatorial with The Delusions of Care (2021), while articulating an important distinction moving the curatorial beyond the work of display. Ndikung looks to Jean-Paul Martinon and Irit Rogoff, co-founders of the Curatorial/Knowledge PhD program at Goldsmiths College, University of London, to set up this distinction. If ‘curating’ is a gamut of professional practices that had to do with setting up exhibitions and other modes of display, then ‘the curatorial’ operates at a very different level: it explores all that takes place on the stage set-up, both intentionally and unintentionally, by the curator and views it as an event of knowledge. So to drive home a distinction between ‘curating’ and ‘the curatorial’ means to emphasize a shift from the staging of the event to the actual event itself: the enactment, dramatization and performance.34 In response to the above excerpt by Marinon and Rogoff with reference to critical considerations of care within curatorial practice, Ndikung furthers their explication with the following: This is of particular interest because by employing the notion of the curatorial, one expands the “space” of care from selection and display to also encompass enactment, dramatization, and performance. By this, I would like to understand 33 Turtle Island is an Indigenous name for the continent now known as North America. 34 Jean-Paul Martinon and Irit Rogoff, “Preface,” in The Curatorial – A Philosophy of Curating, edited by Jean-Paul Martinon (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), ix, referenced in Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, The Delusion of Care (Berlin: Archive Books, 2021), 46-47. 15 that all “events” that have been considered extracurricular to curating like discursive programs, performances, reading spaces, and more are actually crucial components of the exhibition itself, as the artists and topics at stake receive manifold trajectories of exploration. In exploring all that is staged, and treating this as an “event of knowledge,” through varying channels and mediums, provisions are made for the artist, the art, and the themes in terms of presentation, maintenance, cultivation, protection, dissemination, mediation, and other epistemic, moral, and legal considerations that one can call “care.”35 Thinking about curation in this manner lends itself to deep consideration of emergent and establish curatorial methodologies that have been developed to give voice and make visible the discrepancies born out of colonial policies joined with discriminatory practices that allow access and participation to cultural arenas for some, but not others. Addressing diversity and inclusion is more than simply gender and racial parity. Yet, instances of strategic intervention specifically conducted through the auspices of feminist art history and curation, for example, and the recognition afforded to them, have “not radically changed the ideologies and aesthetic frames of art history, and even less so . . . within exhibition practices,” as argued in 2016 by Swedish feminist art historians Malin Hedlin Hayden and Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe.36 Likewise, in 2018, English-Spanish curator and director of the Office of Contemporary Art Norway in Oslo Katya Garcia-Antón draws attention to the ongoing need for strategic and persistent questioning and re-imaging of the westernized art system, stating: 35 Ndikung, 47. 36 Malin Hedlin Hayden and Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe, eds. Feminism is Still Our Name: Seven Essays on Historiography and Curatorial Practices (New Castle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), xiv. 16 Despite the two decades since [Linda] Tuhiwai Smith’s ground-breaking formulations [Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples], then as now the need to radically question the power mechanisms subjacent in academia, research, criticism, curation, conservation, artistic process as well as in broader societal processes, stands paramount.37 Taken together, and building into the framework of decolonial feminist curatorial methodologies, Garcia-Antón, Hayden, and Skrubbe illuminate the necessary path forwards needs to include a greater push to reimagining the systems and structures through which the curatorial takes shape. Linking feminism and decolonization, Indigenous feminist scholars Maile Arvin, Eve Tuck, and Angie Morrill, draw attention to the inseparability of colonial heteropatriarchy and the subjugation of gendered and racialized people, in addition to degradation and violence towards the Land, and ruminate on the contributions of feminist theories toward articulations of sovereignty and alliance.38 Moreover, Indigenous feminisms apply pressure to “whitestream”39 feminism to break away from the centralization of the settler and the analytical binary of Euro-dominant tradition.40 The frequent vacancy of coloniality from feminist discourse “reinscribe[s] Western imperialism”41 and historical paralysis.42 Together within curation, this combined approach—decoloniality and 37 Katya Garcia-Antón, “Sovereign World Building: Acting Within and Beyond Notions of the Curatorial,” in Sovereign Words: Indigenous Art, Curation and Criticism, edited by Katya Garcia-Antón (Oslo: Office for Contemporary Art, 2018), 195. 38 Maile Arvin, Eve Tuck, and Angie Morrill, “Decolonizing Feminism: Challenging Connections between Settler Colonialism and Heteropatriarchy,” Feminist Formations 25, no. 1 (2012). It is important to note that heteropatriarchy is not only upheld by cis male gender-identified bodies; it is a hierarchical structure operational across genders. 39 Sandy Grande, "Whitestream Feminism and the Colonialist Project: A Review of Contemporary Feminist Pedagogy and Praxis." Educational Theory 53, no. 3 (Summer 2003): 330. 40 Arvin et. al., 9; Grande, 330. 41 bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (Cambridge: South End Press,2014), 46. 42 Paulette Regan, Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential School, Truth Telling, and Reconciliation Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011), 236-237. 17 feminism—further highlights processes and guides questions relating to who is present and how. In relentlessly challenging the primacy of western-centric heteropatriarchal curatorial and art historical traditions, intentional shifts in modes of organization redirect curatorial methodologies to address vital concerns, access, and protocols specific to each place, and to break away from the prolific (and perceptually comfortable) sentiment of doing things the way they have always been done. Decolonial feminist curatorial methodologies overlay the interrelational and non-exclusive research tenets of land, labour, and community and steer towards intersectional curatorial futures. This scholarship linking decoloniality and feminism advances a named practice to counter coloniality—the ongoing systematized structures of oppression, violence, and displacement of racialized and gendered bodies/people through colonization. I must state, it is not exclusively about terminological specificity or theorization, or how curators engage with these constructs. It is about our actions, our ethics, and our commitment.43 This dissertation discusses select curatorial models that speak to such methodological approaches and guide questions relating to who is present and how, as well as how reimagined curatorial strategies contribute to the quickly changing landscape of Curatorial Studies and curation in Canada. The examples throughout this dissertation represent a cross-section of curatorial activity, including in-house and guest curated exhibitions and programs in artist-run-centers and small to large museums, as well as artist initiatives. Moreover, these models demonstrate new ways to work beyond the status quo towards equitable representation and practices 43 Lewis R. Gordon, “Decolonization and Black Aesthetics” (Keynote Presentation, Arte e descolonização conferência, Museu de Arte de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil, October 18, 2018). https://masp.org.br/seminarios/arte-e-descolonizacao 18 across art organizational philosophies, exhibitions, programs, labour, as well as geographic- and community-specific engagement. What you once thought was fixed. Replicating pre-existing museological and curatorial procedures without critical assessment denies opportunity to expand, imagine, and develop new strategies for equitable curation. As evidenced in the Vancouver Art Gallery exhibition Ayumi Goto and Peter Morin: how do you carry the land?,44 “redefinition of what occurs and is normalized within the exhibition space is a matter of testing strategies through action.”45 In support, the exhibition’s curator Tarah Hogue pointedly directs exhibition catalogue readers to the scholarship of Ahmed, who states, “organizations can be considered as modes of attention: what is attended to can be thought of as what is valued; attention is how some things come into view (and others do not).”46 In a broader sense, testing strategies and calling attention effectively pushes on certain tensions in and around the dominance of western paradigms. As a way of understanding where the boundaries lie, Linda Tuhiwai Smith explains testing is also about “learn[ing] that the boundary is not the political message, but the boundary is the rhetorical message.”47 Therein, an individual’s interpretation of and relationships to socially-established values is equally as important in considering acceptance of or resistance to the elevation of non-dominant 44 The exhibition Ayumi Goto and Peter Morin: how do you carry the land? was curated by Tarah Hogue, Senior Curatorial Fellow, Indigenous Art, and presented at the Vancouver Art Gallery from July 14 to October 28, 2018. 45 Toby Lawrence, “Its Roots and Its Innovative Departures: Considering Curatorial Hospitality,” in Creative Conciliations: Reflections, Responses, and Refusals, edited by Jonathan Dewar, Tarah Hogue, and Jennifer Robinson (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, forthcoming), with reference to Tarah Hogue, ed. how do you carry the land? (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 2018), 14. 46 Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 30 (Hogue’s emphasis), quoted in Hogue, how do you carry the land?, 14. 47 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, “The Intellectual Project of Decolonising and Kaupapa Māori Methodologies: Reporting from New Research” (keynote Presentation, Summer Indigenous Art Intensive, The University of British Columbia Okanagan, Kelowna, BC, July 26, 2017). Transcribed by author. 19 practices and leadership. Retaliation—often a defensive behaviour—for Smith, is not necessarily activated in “the comfortable structures of power,” but in the “soft human aspects” that individuals and institutions of power “didn’t know they actually had; the parts that make them vulnerable.”48 Such explications by Ahmed, Hogue, and Smith speak to the complexities and unpredictability of opposition to non-dominant, anti-racist, decolonial, and feminist approaches and the need to continuously put forward innovative models that in the words of Sydney-based Yamatji curator Stephen Gilchrist, “interrogate dominant interpretive binaries”49 and reimagine exhibitionary structures. Like how do you carry the land?, exhibitions Tahltan Song Cycle50 and #callresponse51 challenge the fixity of display elements and artist/curator roles through decolonial and feminist methodologies, and stand as foundational curatorial case studies towards my research, alongside artist-founded initiatives BUSH gallery and Project Row Houses. Facilitated by Secwépemc artist curator Tania Willard and a collective of artists including Jeneen Frei Njotli, Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, and Peter Morin, BUSH gallery places Indigenous artists, ontologies, epistemologies, and land at the centre. This collective initiative is sited primarily, but not exclusively, on Secwépemc land within the Neskonlith 48 Smith, “The Intellectual Project of Decolonising.” 49 Stephen Gilchrist, “Indigenising Curatorial Practice,” in The World is Not a Foreign Land, edited by Quentin Sprague (Melbourne: Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, 2014), 55. 50 Tahltan Song Cycle featured the work of artist-curator Peter Morin and was presented at Open Space, an artist-run centre in Victoria, British Columbia, from June 19 to July 25, 2015. 51 #callresponse was organized by Tarah Hogue, Maria Hupfield, and Tania Willard in partnership with grunt gallery and supported by the {Re}conciliation initiative of the Canada Council for the Arts, the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation, and The Circle on Philanthropy and Aboriginal Peoples in Canada. The exhibition featured artworks and performances by five primary artists: Christi Belcourt, Maria Hupfield, Ursula Johnson, Tania Willard, and Laakkuluk Williamson-Bathory, alongside responding artists, including: IV Castellanos, Marcia Crosby, Jennifer Kreisberg, Cheryl L'Hirondelle, Isaac Murdoch, Esther Neff, Laura Ortman, and Tanya Tagaq, and toured to seven host venues: grunt gallery, Vancouver, BC (October 29 to December 10, 2016), Galerie SAW Gallery, Ottawa, ON (June 18 to July 3, 2017), Blackwood Gallery, Mississauga, ON (January 8 to 27, 2018), EFA Project Space, New York, NY (March 23 to May 5, 2018), Wanuskewin Heritage Park & AKA artist run centre, Saskatoon, SK (June 1 to July 13, 2018), Eyelevel, Halifax, NS (September 7 to November 18, 2018); Stride Gallery & TRUCK Contemporary Art, Calgary, AB (January 19 to March 15, 2019). 20 Indian Reserve near Chase, British Columbia and hosts artists and creative practitioners for collaborative, land-based explorations and dialogue. Importantly, BUSH gallery considers the land as “the first gallery,”52 an instrumental participant of the art practiced under its auspices, and offers opportunity for experiential learning through art alongside land-based pedagogies and community-driven actions. In Houston, Texas, Project Row Houses is a complex of shot-gun houses and adjacent properties that house art exhibitions, artist residencies, community spaces and programs, small business incubation, an affordable community housing program for low to moderate income households, and the Young Mothers Residential Program. By contrast to many projects produced and referenced through the nomenclature of relational aesthetics and social practice, Project Row Houses’s community contributions do not cease at the close of an exhibition or event. Instead, Project Row Houses offers actioned shifts in organization practice that couple art with community needs, without placing demands on the art to take on the function of social work. Equally relevant to this discussion are positions of power in the development of projects centred on the visibility of marginalized voices, and the responsibility that BUSH gallery and Project Row Houses, for example, extend toward their sited and provisional communities that is built into their operational fabric. Alongside how do you carry the land?, Tahltan Song Cycle, and #callresponse, Heather Igloliorte's curation of Ilippunga: I Have Learned at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec in Québec City additionally demonstrates commitment to redressing the imbalances within western model and settler colonial-established organizations. Such examples determine 52 “BUSH gallery Project Statement,” Summer Institute Session II: Site/action with BUSH gallery, Plug In ICA, accessed July 13, 2020. https://plugin.org/exhibitions/bush-gallery/ 21 important precedent, or “modes of attention”53 returning to Hogue and Ahmed, that have already done some of the work of critical restructuring through the labour of Indigenous and allied-accomplice practices. My study looks at the curatorial methodologies and organizing principles that shape these examples, and others, to determine how community-specific needs alongside access, economic, gender, and racial inequalities are addressed through the curatorial. Divided into five sections, this dissertation is grounded in a response to the lived realities of curating in British Columbia and observations across Turtle Island, while recognizing my relationship to the projects and practitioners presented in these pages. There are three primary sections (II, III, IV) at the centre of the text framed by the introductory and concluding sections (I and V). Chapters are numbers sequentially, threading ideation from beginning to end, from the first to the final chapter and circling back to the stories embodied in praxis. Opening with a short story of how I came to art and curation influenced by my mother and grandmother, my research weaves through a series of curatorial projects that fit within the central sectioning of II: Land, III: Labour, and IV: Community; however, projects should not be confined to such definitive distinctions as each could easily slide into the others. In section I, following this introduction in chapter one, chapter two outlines the decolonial feminist methodology that grounds my curatorial practice and academic research. Within, the tenets of decoloniality and feminism function as intersecting discursive and tangible measures for equity, accountability, reflexivity, and relationality threaded through each project presented here. Sections II, III, and IV focus on key examples that represent and have inspired and shaped my thinking around reimagining curatorial practice. 53 Ahmed, On Being Included, 30. 22 Section II, encompassing chapters three, four, and five, is focused on Land. Looking to Secwepemcúĺecw (interior British Columbia) as a place of departure, I discuss the ways in which dispossession and reclamation of land and culture have shaped Indigenous communities and relationships with Canada. This location is significant as it is my birth place, as well as an important example of one of the many Indigenous nations now encompassed by Canada fighting for rights and title to unceded ancestral land. In chapter four, BUSH gallery, also located on the Neskonlith Reserve in Secwepemcúĺecw, stands as the opening example of land-based practice and pedagogy that models ways of working outside of, but also with, settler-establish art organizations. Chapter five moves into the public art museum to explore ways in which Indigenous and racialized-Canadian practice shifts convention within the colonial white walls of the gallery by diving deeply into the exhibition Ayumi Goto and Peter Morin: how do you carry the land? Section III looks at Labour. Taking a broader scope approach, four short chapters (six-nine) consider how curatorial labour is enacted, and look at the value and potentiality of curatorial methodologies, such as call and response, tautuanaga ‘o fa’āliga ata situated within Sāmoan epistemology, and Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit (Inuit traditional knowledge), as decolonial frameworks developed through long-standing practices within Indigenous forms of understanding and organizing. Furthermore, this central section differs in format from the flanking sections by focusing exclusively on curatorial approach and moving quickly through this series of examples to reify the breadth of voice, modes, and possibility. 23 Community is central to section IV as I think through the interrelationships and relevance of Rimi Khan’s “provisional communities,” Emelie Chhangur’s concept of “in reach,” and bell hooks “learning communities.” With these community approaches in mind, I discuss the exhibition Tahltan Song Cycle and Houston-based organization Project Row Houses in relation to key components that reflect fundamental principles in Khan, Chhangur, and hooks. The final section, section V, chapters thirteen and fourteen, restates the significance of a decolonial feminist curatorial methodology and outlines the importance of reimagined curatorial models as precedent for shifting the ethos of curation and the valuation of non-dominant practices within art spaces, museums, and organizations. Bookending and bringing this dissertation full circle is a short story about my father and coming to know my patrilineal histories. Through this study, I am interested in pushing strongly against the dominance of western paradigms, with focus on western institutional and academic paradigms of art, art history, and curation that remain exclusive in many forms and curtail potential for operating differently. This compilation of my research is not a comprehensive history of decolonial feminist curation and discourse, nor does it preclude the important history of Indigenous-run art spaces, on or off reserve.54 Instead, I offer a focused study of insightful 54 Indigenous-run art spaces in Canada include: BUSH gallery (Neskonlith/Chase, BC, established 2013), Daphne Artcentre (Montreal, QC, established 2020), Indigenous Curatorial Collective/Collectif des commissaires autochtones, IC/CA (Toronto, ON, established 2005), Ociciwan Contemporary Art Centre (Edmonton, AB, collective established 2015, Art Centre established 2020), Sakewewak (Regina, SK, established 1991, incorporated 1996), Tribe Inc. (Saskatoon, SK, established 1995), Urban Shaman (Winnipeg, MN, established 1996). For scholarship on Indigenous-run art spaces and curatorial practices, see: Katya Garcia-Antón, ed. Sovereign Words: Indigenous Art, Curation and Criticism (Oslo: Office for Contemporary Art, 2018); Stephen Gilchrist, “Indigenising Curatorial Practice”, in The World is Not a Foreign Land (Melbourne: Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, 2014), 55-59 and “Indigenous Curatorial Interpellations: Insistence and Refusal,” in The Australian Field: Practices, Policies, Institutions, edited by Tony Bennett, Deborah Stevenson, Fred Myers, and Tamara Winikoff (New York: Routledge, 2020), 252-265; Candice Hopkins, “We Are Always Turning Around on Purpose: Reflecting on Three Decades of Indigenous Curatorial Practice,” Art Journal 76, no. 2 (2017): 39-47; Jaimie Isaac, “Decolonizing Curatorial Practice: 24 and radical examples of curatorial practice operating within or in relation to lands currently under colonial governance that move beyond western parameters of curation to offer something else. The structure of the text itself is an embodiment of the decolonial feminist methodologies that I employ and the relational way that I have come to know the knowledge within these pages. Reiterating the relational methodologies that shape my own practice, this discussion is relative to the locations and practitioners from which and with whom these ideas have evolved, and my relationship to them. In essence, this is writing as curatorial practice. Epilogue to We Can Do Something Else. July 2020-October 2021 I began this research and this manuscript in a different time. In a time that had not yet imagined the global shut down brought on by the novel coronavirus (Covid-19) that spread rapidly and unpredictably beginning in the Winter of 2019, throughout 2020, 2021, and into 2022, as of the time of submitting this dissertation. As a result of this global pandemic, many quickly shifted to a work-from-home model and academic institutions moved classes online and halted in-person research and fieldwork. These new restrictions impacted the ways in which I could conduct research moving forward, particularly in regards to my fieldwork which was planned for the Summer and Fall of 2020. Negotiating the uncertainty of these restriction, I expanded my archival research Acknowledging Indigenous Curatorial Praxis, Mapping Its Agency, Recognizing Its Aesthetic Within Contemporary Canadian Art” (MA thes., The University of British Columbia, 2016); Lynda Jessup and Shannon Bagg, eds. On Aboriginal Representation in The Gallery (Hull: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 2002); Amy Lonetree, Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Lee-Ann Martin, ed. Making Noise! Aboriginal Perspectives on Art, Art History, Critical Writing and Community (Banff: Banff Centre Press, 2004); Cathy Mattes, “Indigenous Littoral Curation: A Viable Framework for Collaborative and Dialogic Curatorial Practice” (PhD diss., University of Manitoba, 2021); Michelle McGeough, “Indigenous Curatorial Practices and Methodologies,” Wicazo Sa Review 27, no. 1 (2012): 13-20; and Dr. Julie Nagam, Carly Lane, and Megan Tamati-Quennell, eds. Becoming Our Future: Global Indigenous Curatorial Practice (Winnipeg: ARP Books, 2020). 25 and strengthen my focus on relational methodologies within the case studies that I had participated in or previously experienced in person. The upheaval of the Covid-19 pandemic was coupled with global protests against systemic racism and calls to defund police departments in the wake of the documented murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers on May 25, 2020; the overt tension between the political left and right in the USA leading up to the 2020 presidential election; former President Donald Trump’s persistent public denial of his defeat culminating in a rally of supporters who subsequently overtook the Capitol Hill building on January 6, 2021 in an attempt to stop the confirmation of Joe Biden’s electoral win of the 46th Presidency—and the echo in Canadian life. A number of widely publicized police killings and instances of brutality against Black and Indigenous folks occurred in the USA and in Canada in the weeks preceding and following the May 25th murder and protests continued well into the summer. Museums and arts organizations in the USA, Canada, and globally scrambled to demonstrate support for racialized creative practitioners and communities through public statements and by replacing their social media profile pictures with black squares. The hypocrisy of these gestures across many of these organizations has been made painfully visible by the absence of detailed accounts of the organizations’ role in perpetuating racist and prejudicial work environments or actions to be taken to rectify their own perpetuation and complicity in these systems of violence. In the USA, highly publicized open letters opposing statements made by prominent organizations—Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, among others—documented toxic work environments and racist behaviours. In Canada, 26 the Vancouver Art Gallery’s hire of Anthony Kiendl as CEO and Director in June 2020 resulted in a wave of criticism, not necessarily because of Kiendl’s work ethic, but as a missed opportunity to shift the demographic of the institutional leadership away from the long-standing dominance of cis, white, and male. In response, the Vancouver Art Gallery’s attempt to justify the decision was enmeshed with their proposed commitment to inclusively and the Black Lives Matter movement. Their statement was posted on June 27, 2020 only on Instagram, forgoing the gallery’s other social media pages and website, and garnered over a hundred comments overwhelmingly critical of their response. Criticism of the Vancouver Art Gallery’s statement and the hiring of a white male as the new CEO and Director outlines a lack of transparency and policy around artistic representation and employment of racialized professionals in leadership positions, beyond janitorial, maintenance, and security. As well, criticism highlights the opportunities and biases weighted in favour of a white male candidate within the Canadian art system by contrast to the limitations for an equally capable and qualified racialized candidate to obtain the same opportunities and to be viewed without unfavourable bias.55 Other organizations, such as The Bows and the Indigenous Curatorial Collective, opted for action-based tactics, not to be confused with the optics approach taken by the Vancouver Art Gallery, whose list of actions made no mention of 55 Excerpts from “A Statement from the Vancouver Art Gallery,” @vanartgallery Instagram, June 27, 2020. https://www.instagram.com/p/CB8lYJojbpz/: “We hear the concerns and acknowledge the urgency for change. Confidentiality does not allow us to speak about the search process for the position of CEO/Director of the Vancouver Art Gallery, but, from the almost 300 people who were identified or expressed interest, including Black, Indigenous and People of Colour, over a long process, Anthony Kiendl’s experiences and skills aligned most closely with what had been identified as important considerations for the Gallery moving forward . . . We are living through a time when people are rightly demanding racial justice . . . we want this institution to be a respectful space for all staff, artists and visitors. With a sense of urgency, we want to accelerate the change that has already been occurring here. Over the years, we have featured cultural diversity within our exhibitions and public programs, but we know it is not enough . . . 27 hiring, exhibiting, or including work by racialized artists and arts professionals. On June 4, 2020, Untitled Art Society (now The Bows) in Calgary put out a call for action matched by donation through social media: Calling our communities, especially those who are non-BIPOC allies, to take action this week. Write to your Ward Councillor, MLA, and MP about police brutality, inequity in these treaty territories, and disproportionate funding and resources allocated to police (see our ‘how to’ guide and template letters, linked below). For every email sent or phone call made, Untitled Art Society will donate $10 to Sankofayyc and to CommunityWise’s Anti-Racist Organizational Change project, to a maximum of $4000. When you send your letter bcc actionrecipe@uascalgary.org. Please share and get involved, our task at hand is to imagine and then build better futures together. In love and solidarity ! #abolishpolice #yycjustice #actionrecipe56 In twin spirits, on June 30, 2020, national members organization the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective, now the Indigenous Curatorial Collective, in partnership with the Canada Council for the Arts, the Indigenous Performing Arts Alliance, The Indigenous Screen Office, and the Inuit Art Foundation, launched the Community Cares: Emergency Response Fund for First Nations, Inuit and Métis Individuals Working in the Arts.57 This program offered financial support to Indigenous artists experiencing challenges resulting from global circumstances. 56 Untitled Arts Society, Facebook post, June 4, 2020. https://www.facebook.com/TheBowsYYC/?ref= page_internal. BIPOC: Black, Indigenous, People of Colour. 57 A selection of projects submitted to the Community Cares: Emergency Response Fund for First Nations, Inuit and Métis Individuals Working in the Arts can be viewed online one the Indigenous Curatorial Collective Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/indigenouscuratorialcollective/videos 28 Amongst the polarized cultural climate across Turtle Island in 2020, commonly deployed approaches favoured “baby steps” (racialized guest lecturers or guest curators; responsibility falling to curatorial staff only and not entire organization), band-aid solutions (token hires; limited term curatorial residencies and fellowships; limited number of diversity-focused exhibitions or programs that replicate colonial methodologies and structures), or simply implementing diversity training sessions without filling multiple positions at all levels with racialized professionals and making space for the way work is done and what it looks like to shift.58 This is work that has already been shouldered consistently by racialized artists, curators, and arts workers since the 1980s. For example, initiatives such as the Task Force Report on Museums and First Peoples in the early 1990s following LeeAnn Martin’s 1991 report, “The Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion: Contemporary Native Art and Public Art Museums in Canada,” in response to the controversy that surrounded The Spirit Sings: Artistic Traditions of Canada’s First Peoples, an exhibition held at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary during the 1988 Winter Olympics. Jointly sponsored by the Assembly of First Nations and the Canadian Museum Association, the Task Force Report provides guidance and outlines ethical standards for museums and museum professionals working with and approaching Indigenous communities. When I first came across this document in 2017, I conferred with a handful of curatorial colleagues, primarily within British Columbia, 58 See also: Eunice Bélidor, Sarah-Tai Black, Célia Bracmort, Charles Campbell, Emilie Croning, Julie Crooks, Pamela Edmonds, Shelley Falconer, Alyssa Fearon, Dominique Fontaine, Sally Frater, Michelle Jacques, Joana Joachim, Betty Julian, Bushra Junaid, Felicia Ming, Kenneth Montague, Crystal Mowry, Lillian O’Brien Davis, James Oscar, Lise Ragbir, Denise Ryner, and Gaëtane Verna, “A Letter from the Black Curators Forum to Contemporary Art Institutions and Organizations across This Land Called Canada,” Canadian Art, September 14, 2020. https://canadianart.ca/features/a-letter-from-the-black-curators-forum-to-contemporary-art-institutions-and-organizations-across-this-land-called-canada/ ; Sdaahl Ḵ’awaas Lucy Bell, 方靜怡 Denise Fong, and Armando Perla, facilitated by Sharanjit Kaur Sandhra, “Beyond the Black Squares: A Meaningful Conversation on Museums and Allyship” (panel, British Columbia Museums Association Conference, Online, October 9, 2020). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6nn_11DT4c&list=PLdKYeYPzhfsdqrQ-R-qHq53kafNeOUw9J& index=5&fbclid=IwAR1DwI7aNyZVRYXvvN6Oz0jgxJYnhb6xTnKv6Pcu1BuPUvCV2ShSfk3ohmI 29 regarding its application across the museum field. While colleagues that I spoke with working in universities with a specialization in Indigenous arts were in fact aware of the Task Force Report, I found that very few colleagues working as independent curators or in public galleries were aware of the existence and circumstances of this document. I have encountered the above remedial strategies—baby steps, band-aid solutions, diversity training—in the organizations that I have worked for in a vast variety of forms, as well as in many of the public statements of support that floated across the online auspices of the art world in mid-2020. Such limited modes are insufficient in bringing organizations and communities into new ways of working in the arts, together, that are accepting, accessible, anti-racist, and ethical. 30 I. 2. Methodologies of Undoing to Connect Decolonial feminist curation. bell hooks, a Black American feminist scholar and activist, defines feminism as “a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.”59 Feminism, nonetheless, continues to variably expand and contract through application and context. Within curatorial discourse, feminist theory remains equally unfixed.60 My research employs intersectional feminism and decoloniality as theoretical and methodological frameworks for thinking through the systems and structures that encircle curation and arts administration. Decolonization reasserts Indigenous sovereignty and directives and disrupts white settler privilege,61 while decoloniality is an ongoing process of operating otherwise and delinking from the interlocking systems of Eurocentric modernity and coloniality.62 The value of considering decoloniality in relation to art and curation has been previously conveyed by scholars such as Walter Mignolo, Ivan Muñiz-Reed, Tania Willard, and others. Feminist curation, decoloniality’s counterpart for my methodological purposes, takes seriously the implications of structural and thematic choices throughout exhibition spaces and praxes to expose that which continues to privilege specific peoples and cultures, curatorial framing, and artistic and gallery structures.63 59 bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (Cambridge: South End Press, 2014), xiii. 60 Hilda Hein, “Looking at Museums from a Feminist Perspective,” in Gender, Sexuality and Museums, edited by Amy K. Levin (London: Routledge, 2010); Victoria Horne and Amy Tobin, “An Unfinished Revolution in Art Historiography, or How to Write a Feminist Art History,” Feminist Review 107 (2014): 75-83; Hilary Robinson, “Feminism Meets the Big Exhibition: Museum Survey Shows since 2005,” OnCurating: Curating in Feminist Thought 29 (May 2016): 29-41. 61 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous People (London: Zed Books Ltd., 2012 [1999]); Tuck and Yang. 62 Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018). 63 Hayden and Skubbe; Maura Reilly, “Curating Transnational Feminisms,” Feminist Studies 36, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 156-173; Dorothee Richter, “Feminist Perspective on Curating,” OnCurating: Curating in Feminist Thought 29 (May 2016): 64-76. 31 Linking decoloniality and intersectional feminism specifically within curation speaks directly to the critique of over-exerted power and authority, and offers a named practice to counter coloniality—the ongoing systematized heteropatriarchal structures of oppression, violence, and displacement through colonization. As a white settler-Canadian curator living on unceded Indigenous land, my responsibility to redress imbalance is an instrumental part of my practice, through which I have adopted a decolonial feminist curatorial approach. Nevertheless, this approach does not necessitate all contributions and engagements to be conceived or defined explicitly as such, rather decolonial feminist curation is methodologically cognisant of coloniality and heteropatriarchy, centers intersectionality and critical self-reflexivity, and operates through relationality, which seeks locational specificity, collaboration, and accountability.64 In centering the above principles alongside representational equity and historical accounts that look beyond the limitation of the western canon,65 feminist curatorial methodologies reimagine structures rather than reproduce. Within Canadian art, scholarship on feminism has focused largely on artists and artworks,66 while scholarship on feminist curation in Canada is still limited, and even less directly in dialogue with decoloniality. Notably, this lack is tied to representation within art institutions and academia, with demonstrably few Indigenous women curators, as well as racialized curators holding programming positions. Although 2020 and 2021 did see a significant shift with the hiring of racialized women and queer folks in key 64 Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill; Richter; Carolyn M. Shrewsbury, “What is Feminist Pedagogy?” Women’s Studies Quarterly 25, no. 1/2 (April 1997): 166-173; Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies; Shawn Wilson, Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods (Halifax & Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2008). 65 Richter; Shrewsbury. 66 Heather Davis, ed., Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2017); Kristina Huneault and Janice Anderson, eds. Rethinking Professionalism: Women and Art in Canada, 1850-1970 (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2012). 32 curatorial roles across Canada, historically Indigenous, People of Colour, and Black curation has been predominantly precarious labour, and thus removed from directly impacting the institutional policies and narratives.67 In this view, Hogue highlights the potential in “recognizing the fundamental shifts that can occur when the intersections of gender, race, and colonialism are considered seriously as the locus of systemic and symbolic violence,”68 a consideration central to the decolonial feminist curatorial methodologies employed in #callresponse, an example I discuss in chapter seven. In her book compiling texts on feminism and art in Canada, Heather Davis equally asserts feminist prerogatives within Canadian art contexts to imagine “otherwise and outside of colonial frameworks,”69 and makes space for scholarship directly linking feminism and decolonization within contemporary art, and specifically curation. In the Australian context, Jo Holder and Catriona Moore link feminist and Indigenous curatorial methodologies to reassert that “contemporary feminist curatorial practice re-defines ‘equal opportunity’ through advocating for policy change and governance in arts 67 In 2020 and 2021: Heng Wu joined the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria in Victoria, BC as Curator of Asian Art (Mar 2020); Allison Yearwood joined Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art in Winnipeg as Executive Director/Curator (Aug 2020); Tarah Hogue was appointed the inaugural Curator, Indigenous Art (Oct 2020) along with Michelle Jacques’ move into Chief Curator/Director of Exhibitions (Feb 2021) at the Remai Modern, Saskatoon, SK; Julia Rae Tucker as Head of Programs and Collection at the Art Gallery of Winsor, Winsor, ON (Dec 2020); Alyssa Fearon was hired as Director/Curator of the Dunlop Art Gallery in Regina, SK (Jan 2021); Whess Harman as Curator at grunt gallery in Vancouver, BC (Jan 2021); Sally Fraters move from Curator of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Guelph to Director of Oakville Galleries, Oakville, ON (Mar 2021); Haema Sivanesan as Chief Curator at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, AB (Mar 2021); Eunice Bélidor as Curator of Contemporary Art at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal, QC (Apr 2021); Art Gallery of York University in Toronto, ON hired Felicia Mings as Curator (Apr 2021) and Liz Ikiriko as Curator of Collections and Engagement (Jul 2021); the appointment of Lorilee Wastasecoot in the newly created position of Curator of Indigenous Art and Engagement at the University of Victoria Legacy Art Galleries, Victoria, BC (May 2021); Crystal Mowry as Director of Programs at the Mackenzie Art Gallery in Regina, SK (Aug 2021); Jamie Isaac as Chief Curator at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Victoria, BC (Sep 2021); Sandy Saad-Smith as Curator at the Doris McCarthy Gallery at the University of Toronto Scarborough, Scarborough, ON (Sep 2021); Rachelle Dickenson as Senior Curator at the Ottawa Art Gallery, Ottawa, ON (Sep 2021); in addition to John Hampton’s MacKenzie Art Gallery appointment as the first Indigenous Executive Director and CEO of a public art gallery in Canada (Jan 2021). 68 Tarah Hogue, “#callresponse: presence across platforms,” MICE 02, edited by Radiodress (Fall 2016). http://micemagazine.ca/issue-two/callresponse. 69 Davis, 134. 33 funding”70 and not by simply providing marginalized practitioners and communities access to space within an unchanged system, which cannot be held as a measure of success.71 In linking feminism and decoloniality, these scholars and curators speak to the politics of intersectionality, wherein, and drawing extensively on Black American feminist activists and scholars Combahee River Collective and Kimberlé Crenshaw, subjectivity is shaped through the intersection of varying and overlapping indicators of identity, not limited to gender, race, and class, with particular attention to how the experiences of women of colour are shaped through social constructs.72 Writing in 1977, the Boston-based Combahee River Collective (1974-1980) outlines their political position through “A Black Feminist Statement,” asserting “we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking,”73 echoing the intersectionality of Crenshaw’s work. The work that these women undertook speaks volumes to the expansive potential of feminist praxes, the visibility of Black lesbian thought, and furthermore challenges the “racism and elitism”74 rampant within early women’s movements. Among many salient points, the Combahee River Collective prescribe to “a combined anti-racist and anti-sexist position”75 that works against further 70 Jo Holder and Catriona Moore, “A Feminist Curator Walks into a Gallery…,” in Feminist Perspectives on Art: Contemporary Outtakes, edited by Jacqueline Millner and Catriona Moore (New York: Routledge, 2018), 18. 71 Hein, 54. 72 Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” in This Bridge Called My Back, edited by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (New York: Kitchen Table Women of Colour Press, 1983 [1977]); Kimberlé Crenshaw, "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color," Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (July 1991): 1242-1245. 73 Combahee River Collective, 210. 74 Ibid, 211. 75 Ibid, 212. 34 “fractionalization”76 within the Black community and supports the re-valuation of particular corporeal attributions. As Black women fighting against these multiple facets of oppression, the particularities of their feminist identified struggles are held at the forefront, without the prejudices of earlier feminist movements. Therein, these women hold space for one another to do the work that they need to do in their communities. Through a critical and intersectional Black feminist curatorial framework, Joachim addresses “the overlapping and differing forms of social oppression and their relationship with institutional power,”77 and makes clear the reach of colonization and the need for decolonial thinking beyond the Indigenous-settler binary, stressing, “an intersectional Black feminist understanding of the Canadian context also recognizes the history of anti-Blackness and slavery as intimately linked to settler colonialism, as well as the connections between Black and Indigenous histories.”78 Joachim’s assertions align with the important work being done by Black curators and art historians like Andrea Fatona, Liz Ikiriko, Michelle Jacques, Charmaine Nelson, and Denise Ryner, among many others, and also circle back to Goto’s complication of settler terminology outlined in chapter one and, like Goto, puts pressure on the art community to check its behaviours and mend the discriminatory gaps. Decoloniality | Re-valuation In dialogue with decoloniality, Black American philosopher Lewis R. Gordon draws attention to the thinking that has maintained the hegemonic binary of the dominant and the other. 76 Combahee River Collective, 212. 77 Joachim, 36. 78 Ibid, 35. 35 If we understand that art is about human belonging to reality, then we begin to understand that art is not a second-hand piece to human existence. Now this is correct, and we say the question of art and decolonization . . . emerges [as] what happens when coloniality is brought to art, because colonization, colonialism, and coloniality are all about in the assertion of one group of people belonging to the world, other groups of people do not. At its heart is disempowerment, alienation, and not belonging. And that means then it produces unique forms of development. For instance, colonized people are, by definition, people on whom it is asserted that they do not belong to the present.79 With his analysis of the ideological principles within western thought that simultaneously enable and deny belonging, depending on racialization and gender, Gordon further articulates the parameters of belonging in relation to voice, translating to recognition. To be seen as fully human, thus belonging, extends to possessing a voice that can be heard. This voice is further linked to power—and to past, present, and future sovereignty.80 Within decolonial thinking, Mexican-Australian curator and scholar of Latin American and Australian Indigenous arts, Muñiz-Reed reminds us that decoloniality “is not constructed from or in opposition to European grand narratives, but rather from the philosophical, artistic and theoretical contributions that originate from the Global South”81 in the 1990s. 79 Gordon. 80 Ibid. 81 Ivan Muñiz-Reed, “Thoughts on Curatorial Practice in the Decolonial Turn,” in OnCurating: Decolonizing Art Institutions 35 (December 2017): 101. 36 Decoloniality concentrates on knowledges and structures existing outside of Eurocentric epistemologies.82 Centred within an Ecuadorian and Latin American context, intellectual-activist Catherine E. Walsh explains, Decoloniality denotes ways of thinking, knowing, being, and doing that began with, but also precede, the colonial enterprise and invasion. It implies the recognition and undoing of the hierarchical structures of race, gender, heteropatriarchy, and class that continue to control life, knowledge, spirituality, and thought, structures that are clearly intertwined with and constitutive of global capitalism and Western modernity. Moreover, it is indicative of the ongoing nature of struggles, constructions, and creations that continue to work within coloniality’s margins and fissures to affirm that which coloniality has attempted to negate.83 Furthermore, Mignolo, an Argentine philosopher, semiotician, collaborator of Walsh, and key scholar of decolonial thought, together with Ronaldo Vázquez view decoloniality as “re-valuation of what has been made invisible or devalued by the modern-colonial order.”84 Presented as an option, a “decolonial method,”85 like feminism, seeks to outline the historical inheritance of colonial ideology in order to move beyond assumptions of universality towards contextual specificity. Further, a decolonial method accounts for the violent erasure, in many forms, of ways of being and knowing that do not exist within the centralized western ontological and epistemological conceptions. Finally, the decolonial method is established “as a non-normative space, as a space open to the plurality of 82 Walter Mignolo, “Coloniality Is Far from Over, So Must Be Decoloniality,” MASP Afterall 43 (2019): 8. 83 Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (Durham: Duke University Press), 17. 84 Walter D. Mingolo and Rolando Vázquez, “Decolonial AestheSis: Colonial Wounds/Decolonial Healings,” SocialText Online, July 15, 2013. https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/decolonial-aesthesis-colonial-woundsdecolonial-healings/ 85 Mingolo and Vázquez. 37 alternatives.”86 At the same time, a decolonial feminist methodology acknowledges the significance of essential, ceremonial, or, at times, simple gestures and processes, yet maintains responsibility to keep what is held as non-consumptive out of the public gaze.87 Relational methodologies. Negotiating power imbalance through polyvocality, reciprocal support, and shared resources, collaboration underscores the complexities of co-authorship and the inherent dialogic nature of curation. A discursive framing of collaboration, however, is still not the norm. Interjecting collaborative processes and discourse into dominant art structures is ultimately met with various challenges and levels of disinterest in face of the possibility of relinquishing aspects of power, authority, and authorship. Subsequently, collaboration, in the sense of co-authorship and shared labour, is not always possible. The nuance and reality of project demands, the unlimited scope of what a project could be, and the navigation of professional personalities entails constant renegotiation and openness. Following decolonial feminist curatorial methodologies, it has become imperative for me to abandon pre-existing assumptions of utopic orchestrations of equally shared work and reflect seriously on what collaboration in curatorial practice means and how it manifests. Swedish curator Maria Lind’s prolific scholarship on collaboration suggests the usage of ‘collaboration’ has become a catch-all term for the various modes of working in relation. Lind offers further understanding through her breakdown of terminology: 86 Mingolo and Vázquez. 87 Krista Arias, email correspondence with author, October 11, 2021. 38 ‘Cooperation’ . . . emphasises the notion of working together and mutually benefiting from it. Through its stress on solidarity, the word ‘collective’ gives an echo of working forms within a socialist social system. ‘Collective action’ refers precisely to acting collectively while ‘interaction’ can mean that several people interact with each other as well as that a single individual interacts with, for example, an apparatus by pressing a button. ‘Participation’ is more widely associated with the creation of a context in which participants can take part in something that someone else has created but where there are, nevertheless, opportunities to have an impact.88 At play, always, are the degrees of power embedded in transactional relationships and public participation, requiring collaborators to be mindful of the limits of personal perspectives, returning to Hargreaves and Jefferess, and to be aware of strategies to work through and around these complications to avoid reproducing over-exercised relations of power.89 Regarding those outside the art organizations, meaningful audience collaboration and participation within art are opportunities to engage critical thought or sensorial experience as augmentation or deepening of audience interactions with art and ideas, and conversely, or both, provide organizers with pertinent information about audience interactions. Likewise, Khan surmises, Much of the differentiation between these art practices comes from the different kinds of power relations invoked between artists, art institutions and audiences, and the terms on which the participation of arts spectator is enlisted. There are 88 Maria Lind, “The Collaborative Turn,” in Taking the Matter into Common Hands: On Contemporary Art and Collaborative Practices, edited by Billing, Johanna, Maria Lind, and Lars Nilsson (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007), 17. 89 Hargreaves and Jefferess, 201; Lind, 21. 39 many ‘open-ended’ artworks that invite visitors to contribute to the work through their involvement.90 However, many such artworks rely on simplistic notion of interactivity as participation, and regard any participation as a challenge to prevailing hierarchies of power between artist and spectator.91 Collaboration between art facilitators (artists, educators, curators) frequently marks an acknowledgement of power—if they are not, in fact, demonstrations of power. Nevertheless, as curation takes on new and untested or ancient or remembered forms (everyday gestures, familial alters, prayers, Indigenous knowledges, call and response, culturally-specific modes of organization and display practices, . . . ), collaborative methodologies offer space for the “risks of creativity to be spread out among the partners”92 and to get us to where we cannot get to on our own.93 Relational methodologies, like collaboration, work to de-centre singular narratives and implement responsibility beyond personal subjectivity and worldview. Relationality is the structure by which we find ourselves in dialogue and through which knowledge is understood. Advancing an Indigenous research paradigm in Research is Ceremony, Opaskwayak Cree educator Shawn Wilson emphasizes “relationality and relational accountability” and demonstrates the inextricability of relationships-and-reality.94 Moreover, relationality is not simply a pragmatic methodology for working together, nor does it operate solely amongst humans. Through Cree epistemology, Wilson demonstrates the extension of relationality to the land, the cosmos, and to ideas, while 90 Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (Fall 2004): 53, referenced in Rimi Khan, Art in Community: The Provisional Citizen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 44. 91 Khan, 44. 92 Vera John-Steiner, Creative Collaboration (Oxford University Press, 2000), 88. 93 Doug Jarvis, personal conversation with author, July 2020. 94 Wilson, 7. 40 underscoring accountability and the dynamism by which connections, learning, and research exist.95 An equivalent reference by Mignolo and Walsh, the Spanish term ‘vincularidad’ signifies “the awareness of the integral relation and interdependence amongst all living organisms (in which humans are only a part) with territory or land and the cosmos. It is a relation and interdependence in search of balance and harmony of life in the planet.”96 For Wilson, relational accountability too is that you are accountable to yourself, not just other people. You have to be true to yourself and put your own true voice in there, and those stories that speak to you. That is retaining your integrity; it’s honouring the lessons you’ve learned through saying that they have become a part of who you are. The research ceremony is grounded in the community, and with the relationships that are being built comes the recognition that I am an integral part of that community.97 Correspondingly, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson explains knowledge formation through Nishnaabeg intelligence, through her own Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg perspective: The way we are taught to access that knowledge is by being open to that kind of knowledge and by being engaged in a way of living that generates a close, personal relationship with our ancestors and relations in the spirit world through ceremony, dreams, visions and stories.98 95 Wilson, 13. 96 Mignolo and Walsh, 1. 97 Ibid, 123. 98 Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious Transformation,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3, no.3 (2014): 12. 41 Once again, Wilson concludes: “Knowledge cannot be owned or discovered but is merely a set of relationships that may be given a visible form.”99 Tracing the relationships of knowledge and considering the paths of ideation, Swiss-Italian-British artist Céline Condorelli offers yet another point of departure. Condorelli speaks of friendship as a lived condition wherein one befriends ideas and issues as well as people, that which has its own responsibilities and demands.100 Friendship, she further expresses, is “a formative, operational condition that works on multiple, simultaneous levels.”101 Through these frames, ideation is advanced through each unique relationship, performed and upheld between those in relation; the formation cannot be predetermined or disassociated from the context of that relationship.102 Working through long-term processes of relationship building within the context of project development at the Art Gallery of York University, Emelie Chhangur, a self-described biracial Torontonian, employs a parallel relational conception of knowledge building through curation. 103 Our ongoing negotiations over the three years of working together revealed that The Awakening’s significance lay in its process of becoming: both where we were going and, more importantly, how we were getting there. Acknowledging the differing forms of knowing that this process would take—from Indigenous to institutional to somatic—was a first step toward communicating with each other. Knowledge, in this context, was not what we already knew, for our frames of 99 Wilson, 127. 100 Céline Condorelli, “In Support: A Theoretical and Practical Investigation into Forms of Display” (PhD Diss., Goldsmiths, University of London, 2014), 15. 101 Céline Condorelli, “Notes on Friendship,” Mousse 32 (February 2012), 222. 102 Wilson, 10. 103 Previously, the Curator at the Art Gallery of York University, Chhangur now holds the Director/Curator at the Agnes Etherington Art Center in Kingston, ON. 42 reference were so different from one another’s anyway, but how we came to know our differences and our similarities when confronted by the challenges presented by this project.104 Each of the above articulations demonstrate the inextricability of knowledge from environment, as well as the importance of interdisciplinarity and polyvocality to build new knowledge relationships and understandings of knowledge. My own professional interactions with Wilson and engagement with his scholarship around relational methodologies have introduced a vital shift in my own curatorial thinking, from which I continue to build through practice and study of the work of Ahmed, Chhangur, Condorelli, hooks, Khan, Mignolo, Simpson, Wilson, and others.105 Through these interlocutions, I have come to better understand my own relationship to knowledge acquisition. The significance of this shift is not only evident in the exhibition space, but is instrumental in determining which projects I undertake, with whom, for whom, and how. As relational modalities, comradery and friendship in all their forms are frequent driving forces or results of creative labour—and they are essential elements of many of the examples that I discuss in sections II-IV. To reiterate, my own methodological framing of a decolonial feminist curatorial practice is relative to the locations and practitioners from which and with whom these ideas have evolved, and my relationships—and friendships—to them. 104 Emelie Chhangur, “What Can Contemporary Art Perform? And Then Transgress?” in Curating Live Arts: Critical Perspectives, Essays, and Conversations on Theory and Practice, eds. Dena Davida, Marc Pronvost, Véronique Hudon, and Jane Gabriels (New York: Berghahn, 2018), 366.. 105 Importantly, and following Hargreaves’ and Jefferess’ reminder against appropriating Indigenous knowledge (201), Wilson is clear in stating the affinities and benefits of his methodology for non-Indigenous scholars (7 and 59). 43 Feminist citation. “Feminism is DIY: a form of self-assembly.” – Sara Ahmed106 Citation is action. “Citation is feminist memory.”107 Feminist citation establishes lineage, documents relational networks of knowledge, and draws important labour forward into view. In conventional western academic form, citation “calls into being a particular idea of academic authority.”108 By contrast, #callresponse organizers Hogue, Hupfield, and Willard mobilize purposeful citation, or a “feminist methodology of citation,”109 to counter coloniality. Similarly, scholars of critical feminist and anti-racist geographies Carrie Mott and Daniel Cockayne view “citational practices [as] tools for either the reification of, or the resistance to, unethical hierarchies of knowledge.” 110 They continue, “To ignore the politics of citation risks the continued hegemony of white heteromasculine knowledge production incongruous with the nuance and richness of other understandings of and perspectives.”111 In each of their discussions on citationality, Ahmed, Gabrielle Moser and Helena Reckitt, and Maiko Tanaka speak of citation as active acknowledgement of their influences and predecessors and their contributions to shaping experiences and knowledge.112 Feminist citation is also the act of ensuring the existence of colleagues, artists, curators, and thinkers who are often cited out. Ahmed illustrates, Once on twitter I pointed out that an author had mainly cited other white men. He agreed with my description of the pattern but said that the pattern “was in the 106 Ahmed, Living A Feminist Life, 27. 107 Ibid, 15. 108 Carrie Mott and Daniel Cockayne, “Citation Matters: Mobilizing the Politics of Citation Toward a Practice of ‘Conscientious Engagement’,” in Gender, Place & Culture 24, no. 7 (2017): 964. 109 Tarah Hogue and Maria Hupfield, “Radical Signals in (Re)conciliation,” in #callresponse (Vancouver: grunt gallery, 2016), 15. 110 Mott and Cockayne, 956. 111 Ibid. 112 Ahmed, Living A Feminist Life, 15-16; Gabrielle Moser and Helena Reckitt, “Feminist Tactics of Citation, Annotation, and Translation: Curatorial Reflections on the Now You Can Go programme,” OnCurating: Curating in Feminist Thought 29 (May 2016): 43; Maiko Tanaka, “Feminist Approaches to Citation,” C Magazine 26 (Summer 2015). https://cmagazine.com/issues/126/feminist-approaches-to-citation 44 traditions that had influenced him.” To be influenced by a tradition is to be citing white men. Citing; reciting; an endless retrospective. White men as a well-trodden path; the more we tread that way the more we go that way. To move forward you follow the traces left behind of those who came before. But in following these traces, in participating in their becoming brighter, becoming lighter, other traces fade out, becoming shadows, places unlit; eventually they disappear. Women too, people of colour too, might cite white men: to be you have to be in relation to white men (to twist a Fanonian point). Not to cite white men is not to exist; or at least not to exist within this or that field. When you exercise these logics, you might come to exist, by writing out another history, another way of explaining your existence. If to cite is to wipe out your history, what then?113 Likewise, for Tanaka, the “act of turning a personal source of empowerment into collective agency is something I have learned is a legacy of feminist pedagogies for collective empowerment and transformational change.”114 Within a decolonial feminist curatorial methodology, I uphold the notions of collective agency and pedagogy within citationality as critical systems of care and as reciprocal mapping for both lineages of knowledge and entry points into new relationships of knowledge. Furthermore, I employ a strategic citational (and curatorial) practice that resists rephrasing racialized voices through a white-settler lens and white-settler enunciation, in favour of short and long quotations in dialogue with my own writing.115 At the same time, I use this methodology to bring readers into the embodied experience of 113 Ahmed, “White Men.” In Ahmed’s article, “white men” implies the institutionalization of “a persistent structure or mechanism of social order governing the behaviour of a set of individuals within a given community.” Thus, the structural processes reify the underlying behaviours and, in turn, social order. 114 Tanaka. 115 Author in conversation with Carla Taunton, October 21, 2020. 45 reading the stylistic structures and lived experiences present in the writing of certain scholars and thinkers, even as excerpts, without having to follow forgotten notations to search out these sources later. Breath. Finally, the breath ’ The emphatic care of connecting to the breath aligns the mind (as body) with the physical body and grounds us to the earth through molecular exchange. Borrowed from music notation, the breath mark signifies necessary, corporeal pause. Here, I am using the large apostrophe as this typographic mark. The words in the many pages that follow are often weighted with lived realities that carry the trauma of colonization. Of course, joy lives in these words too. As a gesture of feminist citationality that embodies the relationality of knowledge, the breath marks offer reminders—or permission—to sit with the somatic effect of the words, and with those who have extended them to you. Yet another opening. The methodological approaches that shape my research and are described above guide questions relating to reimagined discourse and curatorial strategies. Importantly, this line of questioning and modelling contributes to the breaking open of western colonial strongholds within the discipline of curation. Each example throughout these pages demonstrates intentional moves towards equitable and decolonial representation, labour, and practices across organizational structures, philosophies, production, and engagement. 46 ’ 47 Section II: Land “She learned both from the land and with the land.”– Leanne Betasamosake Simpson116 116 Simpson, 7. 48 II. 3. Land I begin where I began, in Secwepemcúĺecw. I was born at the Royal Inland Hospital, in the territory of the T'kemlúps te Secwépemc, now Kamloops, British Columbia. Although I have no familial ties to this region and I only lived there for a handful of years before age six, the land has shaped me. The dry air, rolling hills, and unique cliff formations mottled by sagebrush cradle the city of Kamloops. I took my first breath there. Yet, it was not until adulthood that I realized precisely why I am so elated and comforted to come across landscapes resembling this place. To my surprise at the time, but somewhat obvious now, a similar experience occurred when I visited Toronto for the first time as an adult. I had not been there since I was three or four years old, but I immediately felt the same familiar comfort and elation activated by dry hills and sagebrush. It was a fully embodied response. Projecting into my own wanderings and the memories of my father’s many stories about growing up and as a young adult in Toronto, I often imagine my ancestors in the streets of Toronto throughout the city’s history and wonder how they understood their own relationships to the Haudenosaunee, Anishnabewaki, and Mississauga territories on which they lived and their connections to their ancestral homelands in Europe, by way of . . . ’ 49 (These links are broken). How did they enact these relationships? Did they know about the pre-colonial history of trails converging at Tkarón:to near the lakeshore, traversed for over ten-thousand years by the many Indigenous peoples and non-human inhabitants for resources and trade?117 The main trail from the harbour front of Lake Ontario ran north to Lake Simcoe, now Young Street, like many others, encased under concrete roadways. Did my ancestors walk those trails too, before they were paved over? Land is the crux of decolonization.118 Unique to each location and circumstance, land dispossession and cultural suppression interwoven with land and cultural reclamation continues to shape relationships between Indigenous communities and non-Indigenous and settler inhabitants in Canada. In an invitational session on reconciliation hosted by the City of Nanaimo Culture and Events that I attended in Fall 2020, Snuneymuxw Elder Gary Manson reminded the group that we must not forget to bring the truth forward.119 I understand Elder Gary Manson’s directions to mean speaking not only of the important initiatives to reclaim Indigeneity or to locate non-Indigenous and settler Canadians and 117 Bonnie Devine and Richael Laking, “Tkarón:to & Turtle Island: The Remarkable Indigenous Trade Networks,” Myseum of Toronto, November 22, 2018, http://www.myseumoftoronto.com/programming/tkaronto-turtle-island/ 118 Tuck and Yang extend this argument in their seminal article “Decolonization is not a Metaphor,” stating: “Within settler colonialism, the most important concern is land/water/air/subterranean earth (land, for shorthand, in this article.) Land is what is most valuable, contested, required. This is both because the settlers make Indigenous land their new home and source of capital, and also because the disruption of Indigenous relationships to land represents a profound epistemic, ontological, cosmological violence. This violence is not temporally contained in the arrival of the settler but is reasserted each day of occupation.” Tuck and Yang, 5. 119 Elder Gary Manson, “Reconciliation & Decolonization: Advancing Ethical Change in the Cultural Sector,” Focus Group Session for REIMAGINE NANAIMO, City of Nanaimo Culture and Events, November 3, 2020. 50 inhabitants in meaningful dialogue and partnership with Indigenous communities; but, equally, of the historical and contemporary truth of Canada’s systemized violence against the rightful stewards of the land within its colonial borders. Assuming responsibility, I also take this direction to mean looking deeply at my own family histories, how these histories have perpetuated coloniality, and how I am making myself answerable to the decolonial option, as described in chapter two. Offering truth from the region I am intimately acquainted, Arthur Manuel, also born in Secwepemcúĺecw to the Neskonlith (Sk’atsin/Celewt) community 50 kilometres northeast of Kamloops, outlines the initial circumstance of dispossession for the Secwépemc peoples in Unsettling Canada: A National Wake-Up Call. Europeans made their initial land claim on our Secwépemc land in 1778 when Captain Cook sailed along the British Columbia coast, more than four hundred kilometres away from our territory. According to the tenets of the doctrine of discovery, all that Europeans had to do to expropriate the lands in a region was to sail past a river mouth and make a claim to all of the lands in its watershed. Our lands, given to us by our Creator and inhabited by us for thousands of years, were transformed into a British “possession,” not only without our consent and without our knowledge, but also without a single European setting foot on our territory.120 For context, Marianne Ignace, Ron Ignace, and Gerald Etienne outline the expanse of Secwepemcúĺecw across the plateau of what is now South Central Interior British Columbia, wherein the Secwépemc peoples have lived 120 Arthur Manuel and Grand Chief Roland M. Derrickson, Unsettling Canada: A National Wake-Up Call (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2015), 4. 51 for several thousand years, perhaps since the time when glaciers retreated after the last ice-age, and came to occupy a vast territory of 180,000 square kilometres stretching from North of Williams Lake across to Jasper, to southeastern British Columbia, the Arrow Lakes and north of Okanagan Lake across to Ashcroft and West of the Fraser River . . . Before Europeans arrived in the Interior during the early 1800s, perhaps as many as 20,000 or more Secwépemc lived in this territory, centred around thirty communities and within seven geographic divisions. Epidemics brought in by Europeans during the nineteenth century brought forth a population loss of nearly 90% by 1900. Catholic missionaries began their work among the Secwépemc during the 1860s. in the 1870s, the Federal government put people on reserves comprising only about 1% of the territory without treaties or consent, something which Secwépemc people have protested and tried to address ever since.121 Manuel further details the long, exhaustive, and continuing fight the Secwépemc chiefs and peoples have been engaged in since first contact with French and then British settlers in the early and then mid-1800s, respectively, and into the present. Likewise, historical documents such as the Memorial to Sir Wilfred Laurier, Premier of the Dominion of Canada from the Chiefs of the Shuswap, Okanagan, and Couteau Tribes of British Columbia, presented at Kamloops August 25, 1910,122 that brought the concerns and conditions of Indigenous communities across the Interior Plateau to then Prime Minister of Canada Sir Wilfrid Laurier during a campaign tour through Western Canada, demonstrate the depth and duration of this fight. 121 Marianne Ignace, Ron Ignace, and Gerald Etienne, “An Essay on Secwepemc Photography, Then and Now,” in Re tsúwet.s re Secwepemc: The Things We Do, exhibition catalogue (Kamloops: Kamloops Art Gallery, 1999), 6-7. 122 See Appendix for full text. 52 The contestations regarding land and sovereignty within Secwepemcúĺecw is merely one nation’s fight amongst the numerous examples repeated across Turtle Island since colonization. Government policies that legislated the Indian Residential and Day Schools proves a history of race-based policy and attempted erasure of Indigenous peoples through land dispossession and assimilation, following the 1850s-1860s that saw the assimilation of Indigenous peoples through education become official policy. Legislation continued to be incrementally instated until Residential School attendance became mandatory for Indigenous children in 1920, under the direction of Superintendent General of Indian Affairs Duncan Campbell Scott, and instated in the Arctic region in the 1950s. In conjunction with the forced indoctrination of settler religion and ideology through Indian Residential and Day Schools, Canada’s Potlatch Law was established in 1885, which additionally criminalized cultural practices and gatherings by Indigenous peoples, yet simultaneously allowed for the exoticization and theft of Indigenous cultural materials, knowledge, and bodies framed as vanishing races to be collected for study, displayed in museums, and adapted for unintended uses by non-Indigenous peoples. The Potlatch ban was abolished in 1951, yet the last Residential School was not closed until 1997. On June 11, 2008, then Prime Minister Stephen Harper presented the Statement of Apology–to the Former Students of Indian Residential Schools in the House of Commons. Stephane Dion, Jack Layton, and Gilles Duceppe, the leaders of Canada’s major opposition parties, also presented statements of apology, followed by official responses from the leaders of the five National Aboriginal Organizations: Assembly of First Nations, Congress of Aboriginal Peoples, Inuit Tapiriit, Métis National Council, and Native Women’s Association. The official apology was met with much criticism and 53 contention, provoking extensive political discussions as well as artistic production highlighting federal inaction and public response by Indigenous, non-Indigenous, and settler Canadians and residents of Canada. Subsequently, on September 25, 2009 at the G20 Summit in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, PM Harper made another public statement. This time denying a history of colonialism in Canada. His careless and contradictory declaration, whether misguided, decontextualized, or not, resulted in scepticism rightfully held towards the government of Canada and further responses concerning the continuation of colonizing fallacies after centuries of intentional and documented systemic racism and genocide. In 2008, the Canadian government initiated the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) aimed at acknowledging the devastating impact and harms of Indian Residential and Day Schools on Indigenous peoples through victim-centred truth-telling that is witnessed and documented, and furthermore, towards building better relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples across Canada. As summarized by Jennifer Henderson and Pauline Wakeham, the late Cree scholar, educator, and former Assistant Director of Research for the TRC Gregory Younging “raise[d] the question of what it would mean for non-Aboriginal Canadians to grasp residential schooling as an event that anticipates our present and more precisely our embeddedness in the social relations that residential schooling set in motion.”123 Reflected in the following excerpt from “Hair,” a collaborative response by Goto and Morin, the above assimilation policies are intrinsically tied to Canada’s erroneous sense of entitlement to land across the northern portion of Turtle Island.124 123 Jennifer Henderson and Pauline Wakeham, “Colonial Reckoning, National Reconciliation?: Aboriginal Peoples and the Culture of Redress in Canada,” English Studies in Canada 35, no.1 (2009): 7. 124 Hair, the second performance collaboration by Goto and Morin, was performed during Reconsidering Reconciliation, a month-long residency in the summer of 2013 at Thompson Rivers University (TRU) in 54 how much hair was cut off? whose hair? who was there to remember? who is here to recollect? in the moment, peter’s body invokes the memories of that moment the hair falls off. he remembers that the cutting itself is figurative of the canadian government’s genocidal intent behind residential schools. to kill the Indian in the child. to tear mother tongues from language. to divide son, daughter, from parent, from grandparent, greater kin. to separate culture from scent, sound, touch, unadulterated knowledges. uninterrupted knowledges . . . there was a plan. and a dream about these residential schools. the government deemed this to be the greater good. from their point of view. the church thought this to be the solution-oriented thinking to address their preoccupations with occupying the land.125 ’ Kamloops, hosted by then TRU professor Ashok Mathur, and sponsored by the Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre at Algoma University. Their written reflection on their performance was publish in 2015 in The Land We Are: Artists & Writers Unsettle the Politics of Reconciliation. 125 Ayumi Goto and Peter Morin, “Hair,” in The Land We Are: Artists & Writers Unsettle the Politics of Reconciliation, eds. Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill & Sophie McCall (Winnipeg: ARP Books, 2015), 178-179. 55 ’ 56 II. 4. BUSH gallery BUSH Gallery // Secwepemcúĺecw, Neskonlith Reserve + various locations // Artists/Curators: Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Peter Morin, Lisa Myers, Jeneen Frei Njotli, Tania Willard + collaborators and participants // Established 2013 Architecture of the bush. The teepee has been an ever-present feature of BUSH gallery; but it does not stand as the gallery. Erected two years ago, the structure has weathered, presented, and housed many of the actions of BUSH gallery. At the BUSH gallery Writers Union retreat in August 2017, the structure was dismantled; the canvas too brittle to maintain its architectural function after having ripped apart in a windstorm earlier in the summer. After travelling to BUSH gallery in Secwépemc territory from Vancouver, Tarah Hogue joined Tania Willard in dismantling the teepee, dragging its wooden poles to be stacked for future purposes. Tarah recounted a re-linking of body to land in the reverberations between body, land, and wooden pole, activated through their preparatory performance of sorts and marking the beginning of the retreat. The teepee poles are so dry and have deep cracks that run almost to the core of the poles at certain points, so when we dragged them across the ground, the sound of their being dragged was amplified. The sound was like a small echo chamber, hollow, and almost electronic. (Hogue) Following our Sunday afternoon convergence of friends and colleagues at the annual Kamloopa Pow-wow, Tarah, Tania, Peter Morin, Ashok Mathur, and I gathered at Quaaout Lodge on Little Shuswap Lake, and then at BUSH gallery the next day. The pow- 57 wow, as a shared point of departure, centred Indigeneity and located experience as material for making, performing and thinking together.126 At dinner, Tarah expressed her need to drag more poles—to utilize acts of labour to connect to place, to land, performance, situation. At breakfast, Peter asked us what it was we wanted to build. Though framed through colonial language, as Peter acknowledged, his question opened space for intellectual, textual, spatial and embodied restructuring of the ways in which Indigenous praxes, and more specifically Indigenous performance praxes, are approached in art writing and art galleries—and beyond. Monday, we cut up the teepee. We laid out the teepee canvas. We intuitively assumed roles. Within this performative action, we marked the circumference of the canvas staking pink survey flags. Peter, with a blue raven rattle, and Tania, with a tin can rattle, circumnavigated the canvas as Peter sang. Just as in our performance, we ripped long lengths of canvas fabric, so did the wind enact the inevitability of this temporary structure. (Willard) The canvas ripped easily along its weave and we made cuts to direct the tearing; the canvas pulled by two of our bodies in order to arrive at segments large enough for specific, repurposed functions. The largest uncompromised section was kept to be suspended in the trees as a movie screen (Skinwalkers: The Navajo Mysteries. The Daughters of Dawn. Netflix search: “Native American”). Smaller segments were used to produce solar prints and their edges finished with pinking shears; the excess made into ribbons. The remaining canvas segments were gathered for future uses. Enshrouded by 126 Peter Morin in conversation with Tarah Hogue, Ashok Mathur, and author, August 6, 2017. 58 the dense forest-fire smoke that permeated the region and crouched within the teepee’s flag outline, we cut ribbon and produced a series of solar prints out of rope, rattles, rocks, ribbons, collective writing, laser-cut “SITE/ation” text, and toys. Ashok prepared bison meatballs, shish kebobs, and Chilliwack corn. Wednesday, when I returned, the flags had been removed. The activities were now concentrated around the forested area and the trees that supported the large piece of repurposed canvas. No longer in its distinguishable form, the teepee remained through abstraction. The screen became the conversational “teepee.” The location shifted along with the referent. Now in segments, the canvas marks as it is marked. Material for objects and surface for solar prints, lunar experiments, backdrop for movies, foreground for shadow play, hunting ground for insects . . . In one of my trips back and forth from Kelowna to BUSH gallery, I was charged with transporting the twelve large Mylar panels produced for Ashok’s 2009 installation of A Little Distillery in Nowgong. Together, we hung them to weather and to remain in the trees at the edge of the forest with cord coloured the same pink as the survey flags. A twofold final installation. The final action of the BUSH gallery Writers Union retreat took shape through our collective curation of Ashok’s panels and as a collaborative performance by Ashok and Peter. Backed by the layering of A Little Distillery in Nowgong and the teepee, illuminated by a work light, Ashok read aloud Loveruage: A Dance in Three Parts, accompanied by strategically timed drumming by Peter. The text from one of the Mylar panels was incidentally visible through the canvas. And we all listened. 59 Changed by and changing the actions of its inhabitants and guests, the architecture of the bush is reciprocal. The collective and individual actions under the auspices of BUSH gallery are the materials that form BUSH gallery. The ephemerality and the place-based conceptual space supports the fluid architecture of the teepee. As an Indigenous “sovereign display territor[y],”127 [with reference to David Garneau] BUSH gallery functions beyond the systemized conventions of dominant culture exhibition spaces. In the Land.128 #BUSHgallery / #bushgallery / #bush_gallery The Land is participant in the activities of BUSH gallery, pushing beyond the modern-cum-contemporary convention of white-walled galleries proclaiming neutrality, to consider site possibility, contextual impact, and accountability that spans human and non-human relationships. Mathur reflects: “We cannot speak of Bush without having in mind Cube (or city gallery or artist-run space or artistic institution). And we cannot think of Cube without rendering its negative space as Bush.”129 Though primarily sited on the Neskonlith Reserve, a part of Secwepemcúĺecw, Willard’s homeland, BUSH gallery also, at times, operates elsewhere. Sometimes Cube. It is important to recognize the origin of present-day band territories and governance—such as the Neskonlith Indian Band which consist of the Neskonlith Indian Reserves #1, #2, and #3—instated by way of the reserve system in Canada. This system imposes 127 David Garneau, “Imaginary Spaces of Conciliation and Reconciliation: Art, Curation, and Healing,” in Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action In and Beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, edited by Dylan Robinson and Keavy Martin (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016), 35. 128 The section Architecture of the Bush (dissertation pages 56-59) was originally published in C Magazine 136 (Winter 2018): 72, special edition: “Site/ation,” guest edited by BUSH gallery. 129 Ashok Mathur, “Refracting Bush,” C Magazine 136 (Winter 2018): 16. 60 colonial boundaries on land and authority that was otherwise managed amongst the Indigenous nations according to local laws, protocols, and inter-tribal relationships. Pointing to the specific section of the Memorial to Sir Wilfrid Laurier from the Chiefs of the Shuswap, Okanagan, and Couteau Tribes: “When they first came amongst us there were only Indians here. They found the people of each tribe supreme in their own territory, and having tribal boundaries known and recognized by all,”130 Secwépemc scholars Marianne and Ronald Ignace demonstrate that there emerged over time among our ancestors a sense of a finite Secwépemc homeland with boundaries that was perceived as stsq’eyule̓ cw (“marked on the land”), whether through natural boundaries like mountains, watersheds, and other physical landmarks or through the deeded markings of ancestors immanent in physical features anchored to place names and stories.131 While colonial mapping and boundary making began in Secwepemcúĺecw in the early 1800s with the first European settlers, the Ignaces further evidence territorial boundaries and land usage as shared not proprietary, stating: In recent years, Secwépemc elders, many of them deceased now, continued to state that the use of resources in Secwépemc territory, in the late elder Billy Porter’s words, was “wide open” to all people of Secwépemc ancestry and that no band or community exclusively owned resource-producing areas at the exclusion of other Secwépemc bands and individuals. Neskonlith elder Sarah Deneault also commented on the Secwépemc as one people, who were, however, split up into 130 Chiefs of the Shuswap, Okanagan, and Couteau Tribes, Memorial to Sir Wilfred Laurier, Premier of the Dominion of Canada from the Chiefs of the Shuswap, Okanagan and Couteau Tribes of British Columbia, presented at Kamloops, BC, August 25, 1910. 131 Marianne Ignace and Ronald E. Ignace, Secwépemc People, Land, and Laws: Yerí7 Re Stsq'ey's-Kucw (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2017), 260. 61 separate governing units, or bands, by the federal Department of Indian Affairs . . . [of which] Neskonlith ri7 nekú̓ 7 te̓ tsqwatstn. Neskonlith are one group of people.132 The Neskonlith Reserve draws its name from kúkwpi7 (Chief) Moise Nesqénell of the Sexqéltkemc (Shuswap Lakes). The Ignaces explain it was kúkwpi7 Nesqénell “who, with colonial surveyors giving him instructions that the surveyors themselves failed to follow, marked out the Neskonlith Reserve, still disputed by the federal government despite a specific claim by the three communities in the area.”133 In their present form, the contrasting territorial demarcations of the Neskonlith Reserve and Secwepemcúĺecw signal the political layering that continues to impact historical land rights and sheathe the contemporary realities of the Secwépemc people. BUSH gallery pays attention to such geographic and cultural locationality. Therein, the content and materiality of BUSH gallery may be fluid, yet the philosophy remains the same. BUSH gallery is a space for dialogue, experimental practice, and community engaged work that contributes to an understanding of how gallery systems and art mediums might be transfigured, translated and transformed by Indigenous knowledges, traditions, aesthetics, performance, and land use systems. This model of decolonial, non-institutional ways to engage with and value Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous creative production is at the heart of BUSH gallery. BUSH gallery is a trans-conceptual gallery space. To be trans-conceptual is to reposition ideas born within Indigenous and western epistemological conditions. A trans-conceptual space requires your body to be in a constant state of flux— 132 Ignace and Ignace, 287-288. 133 Ibid, 370-374. 62 never settling, like the flow of water in a river. One of the goals of BUSH gallery is to articulate Indigenous creative land practices which are born out of a lived connection to the land.134 In these first lines of the BUSH manifesto, BUSH gallery is demonstratively uncontained. It is not limited by mainstream gallery and museum conventions or frameworks—even by preparatory logistics: labels, placement of artworks, 56-inch centre, walls, spatial constraints, collections protocols, production expectations, . . . It flips them on their head, or doesn’t think of them at all. As an experiential and collaborative space, the format of BUSH gallery is co-learning and non-hierarchical creative activity, with land at the centre. A learning community, as theorized by hooks and positioned in the Masters research paper by Cierra Frances, in relation to BUSH gallery’s Beach(fire) Blanket Bingo on Ward’s Island in Toronto, a program for the inaugural Toronto Biennial of Art.135 I want to rest here for a moment to reflect on this drawing together endeavoured by Frances. ’ Hooks is speaking about the academic classroom. Her method, however, shifts intentionally away from traditional unilateral and hierarchical modes of teaching. Hooks states: “Seeing the classroom always as a communal place enhances the likelihood of collective effort in creating and sustaining a learning community.”136 As in a learning community classroom, the goal in the co-learning and collaborative spaces of BUSH 134 Peter Morin and Tania Willard, “BUSH Manifesto,” C Magazine 136 (Winter 2018): 6. 135 Cierra Frances, “Creating Learning Communities: An Analysis of Public events at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Toronto Biennial of Art,” MA Thes., OCAD University, 2020. 136 bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994), 8. 63 gallery everyone contributes and everyone’s contributions and presence are equally recognized.137 Guests and hosts share in the responsibilities, coming together through reciprocity regardless of differences.138 Moreover, BUSH gallery collaborators frequently come together relationally. My own participatory experiences with BUSH gallery have been beautifully varied, beginning with the BUSH gallery Writers Union Retreat (2017), followed by events presented in partnership with the Summer Indigenous Art Intensive on the UBC Okanagan campus, at the Woodhaven Eco Culture Centre in Kelowna, and in Secwepemcúĺecw (2017/2018/2019); BUSH gallery Beach(fire) Blanket Bingo (2019); and as a contributing curator and participant of the inaugural Contingencies of Care Virtual Residency hosted by OCAD University, the Toronto Biennial of Art, and BUSH gallery with the support of UBC Okanagan (2020). Clearly, BUSH gallery has not dismissed relationships with western institutions, as demonstrated in this list of programs and partnerships which is further bolstered by other occasions, including the Outdoor School residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity (2018) and Session II: Site/ation of the Summer Institute post-graduate research program at the Plug In Centre for Contemporary Art in Winnipeg (2018). Nonetheless, even in partnership with institutions that offer economic means to increase access to monetary and promotional support for BUSH gallery activities and collaborators, each occasion is intrinsically and uncompromisingly tied to Indigenous methodologies and land-based pedagogy. Arguably, events such as Beach(fire) Blanket Bingo are accessed and operate through a more conventional format in that they are hosted by an institution and open to the 137 hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 8. 138 Lawrence, “Roots,” forthcoming. 64 general public, in limited numbers. However, this is not necessarily the BUSH gallery norm. At small gatherings onsite in Secwepemcúĺecw or within a residency context—as hosts and/or while being hosted—collaborators primarily come together through a place of already knowing, or knowing of, one another and frequently within the context of durational relationships and community. As Australia and Canada-based Sāmoan-Persian-Cantonese artist, curator, and scholar Léuli Eshrāghi describes, projects including BUSH gallery “respond effectively to the multiple demands of sovereignty and displacement . . . Not only are these occurring in relation to the Western gallery system, but they are also taking place against a broader and more urgent present.”139 Such are those entwined in dreams of something else (ambling back to the beginning, to Hopkins and Morin), centering Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies, that may or may not reference, refuse, employ, or disrupt colonial forms and methodologies. In 2017, Willard curated Over the Horizon of Tomorrow, a performance series at the Kamloops Art Gallery in response to the exhibition, Since Then. Willard’s series included Demian DenéYazhi’ (Navajo Nation), whose durational reading of their An Infected Sunset was performed in the exhibition space and subsequently at BUSH gallery for the Land. ’ 139 Léuli Māzyār Luna’i Eshrāghi, Taeao:’O Māfaufauga O Fa’āliga Ata: Ma O Sāuniga Mo O Tātou Lumana’I, PhD diss. (Melbourne: Monash University, 2018), 55. 65 These actions not only exemplify the insurance of polyvocality that includes and supports queerness, two-spirit, and Indigenous sovereignty, central to DenéYazhi’s work, but equally demonstrates an operational multiplicity that engages the same work within a western gallery space as well as specifically through Indigenous and land-based modes, such as those described by Eshrāghi, Gilchrist, and Garneau. Prefacing a conversation with Canadian curator and artist Anique Jordan in 2018, Willard offers further context for the intention of BUSH gallery, stating: At BUSH gallery we are always thinking about creating intentional space for art-making or art-conversation or different things, but not in the gallery space. Not that it’s meant to be a binary—we love gallery spaces; we want to be in gallery spaces—but part of the impetus for BUSH gallery is finding ourselves always having to move to cities to show in galleries. There are very few [gallery spaces] that are Indigenous- or people of colour- or Black-led . . .140 This intention mirrors Gilchrist’s assertion that such “projects do not do away with the structural and structuring problem of colonisation, but rather by refusing its totalising power and insisting on reimagining the world otherwise, Indigenous curators bring audiences closer to the world that existed before the aftermath.”141 This power indicated by Gilchrist does not only overlay cultural structures, but is present in the colonial imposed restructuring of territorial boundaries, evidenced, in the context of BUSH gallery, in the relationship between Secwepemcúĺecw and the Neskonlith Reserve. Gilchrist goes on further to argue: “While it is necessary to both understand and 140 Tania Willard, “Re-centering Knowledge: An Interview with Artist and Curator Anique Jordan,” C Magazine 136 (Winter 2018): 35. 141 Stephen Gilchrist, “Indigenous Curatorial Interpellations: Insistence and Refusal,” in The Australian Field: Practices, Policies, Institutions, edited by Tony Bennett, Deborah Stevenson, Fred Myers, and Tamara Winikoff (New York: Routledge, 2020), 254. 66 deprioritise colonial projections of Aboriginal identity, it is more important to mobilise new or rather culturally resonant representations that may be less familiar to non-Indigenous audiences but are more meaningful for Indigenous peoples.”142 After working together on the production of Coney Island Baby (2017), Jeneen Frei Njootli (Vuntut Gwitchin), Amy Kazymerchyk (settler), Gabrielle L’Hirondell Hill (Cree-Métis), Chandra Melting Tallow (Siksika Nation), and Willard came together on site at BUSH gallery to discuss the events of the film’s making along with Aaron Leon (Splatsin). Articulated in their joint conversation in the special BUSH gallery-edited “Site/ation” issue of C Magazine, their experiences are akin to many of my own, such as the BUSH gallery Writers Union Retreat detailed in my contribution to the same issue and reproduced here to open this chapter. Points in the Coney Island Baby conversation express essential BUSH gallery methodologies and modes of collaboration. For Kazymerchyk, “[BUSH gallery] works at centering artistic production in familial and community life, and pays attention to the economic responsibilities of those entwined relations. Within this complexity, BUSH is still flexible about experimenting and improvising new ways of making art and taking care of each other.”143 Melting Tallow speaks of the contrasting valuation of domestic labour, and the ways in which this has been internalized to affect behaviours. Frei Njootli also emphasizes the significance of the group’s collaborations in relation to their stay with Willard and her family in their home, alongside each of their roles in sharing the responsibilities and hospitality of the household. Here, this blurring of personal and professional places significant tension on western conceptualizations of labour and necessitates acute attention to reciprocity and 142 Gilchrist, “Indigenous Curatorial Interpellations,” 254. 143 Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Amy Kazymerchyk, Chandra Melting Tallow, and Jeneen Frei Njootli, “Coney Island Baby,” C Magazine 136 (Winter 2018): 19-20. 67 self-awareness, as well as boundaries. Importantly, the methodologies of collaboration, co-experience, co-learning, and reciprocity that are foundational to BUSH gallery make space to embody this labour as valued.144 All the participants are not necessarily working on the same things, yet each action and task undertaken contributes with equal importance to the whole. “[A]utonomous collectives like BUSH gallery,” Kazymerchyk states, “have an opportunity to initiate fairer and more flexible economic and professional protocols that acknowledge those different levels of labour.”145 What if? (theory and action) The dialogue between Frei Njootli, Kazymerchyk, Hill, Melting Tallow, and Willard additionally illuminates many ways in which the interconnectedness and the pedagogy of land is omnipresent at BUSH gallery—as a place where animals and plants subsist and are cultivated and harvested for food, medicine, materials, and companionship, supporting and caring for collaborators through subsistence, refuge, and teachings. In other ways, the land is the studio and the sun is the substrate and catalyst for printmaking. Returning to Gilchrist, “the interpretive struggle for Indigenous art lies in not only recognising that it has a differential value to Western art, but that it has to be valued differentially.”146 Paralleling the pedagogy of BUSH, in “Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious Transformation,” Leanne Betasamosake Simpson tells the story of Kwenzens and the sugar bush teachings. A poetic re-telling of “a traditional Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg story that [Simpson] learned from Washkigaamagki (Curve Lake First Nation) Elder Gidigaa Migizi (Doug Williams)”147 that 144 L’Hirondelle Hill, et.al., 18-23. 145 Kazymerchyk in ibid, 20. 146 Gilchrist, “Indigenising Curatorial Practice”, 58. 147 Simpson, 2. 68 recounts the interaction between Kwenzens (little woman, or girl) and Ajidamoo (red squirrel) through which she learns to tap the Ninaatigoog (maple tree) for sap to make maple syrup. Knowledge that she shares with her doodoom (mother), Nokomis (grandmother), and Aunties. What if Kwezens had accepted the permanence of settler colonialism as an unmovable reality? What if Kwezens had no access to the sugar bush because of land dispossession, environmental contamination or global climate change? What if the trauma and pain of on-going colonial gendered violence had made it impossible for her mama to believe her or for her mama to reach out and so gently rub her lower back at that critical point? What if that same trauma and pain prevented her aunties and elders to gather around and support her when there were technical difficulties? What if settler-colonial parenting strategies positioned the child as “less believable” than an adult? What if Kwezens had been in a desk at a school that didn’t honour at its core her potential within Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg intelligence? Or if she had been in an educational context where having an open heart was a liability instead of a gift? What if she had not been running around, exploring, experimenting, and observing the squirrel—completely engaged in a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg ways of knowing? What if she hadn’t been on the land at all? What if Kwezens lived in a world where no one listened to girls? Or where she had been missing or murdered before she ever made it out to the sugar bush? What if the university got a hold of the sugar bush and made Kwezens get SSHRC funding before she could go out in the field? What if she was home reading the course outline of someone else’s learning objectives? What if she never gave the sap to her doodoom but instead went to her computer to type up her research report? What if Kwezens motivation for 69 learning wasn’t her own curiosity and joy, but recognition within the state-run education system? What then?!148 Through the excerpt above, Simpson makes visible contrasting and, at times, incommensurable methodologies and valuations that impact knowledge and play out in analogous ways in mainstream exhibition spaces. What is also demonstrated through Simpson’s telling of Kwenzens and the sugar bush teachings and, in other ways, throughout BUSH gallery activities, is the inextricability of theory and action. Simpson explains that theory, within Nishnaabeg thought . . . is generated and regenerated continually through embodied practice and within each family, community and generation of people. “Theory” isn’t just an intellectual pursuit—it is woven within kinetics, spiritual presence and emotion, it is contextual and relational. It is intimate and personal, with individuals themselves holding the responsibilities for finding and generating meaning within their own lives.149 For Mignolo and Walsh, theory is equally tied to everyday life. Theory and praxis are constructions that presuppose the basic praxis of living. Without our daily praxis of living, it would not be possible to make conceptual and second-order distinctions between theory and praxis. Following this line of reasoning, [On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis] delinks from the modern concept of theory versus praxis. For us, theory is doing and doing is thinking.150 Like Simpson, hooks’ exploration of theory is deeply personal and operational beyond “intellectual pursuit.”151 She explains: 148 Simpson, 8-9. 149 Ibid, 7. 150 Mignolo and Walsh, 7. 151 Mignolo and Walsh, 7. 70 I came to theory because I was hurting—the pain within me was so intense that I could not go on living. I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend—to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing . . . When our lived experience of theorizing is fundamentally linked to processes of self-recovery, of collective liberation, no gap exists between theory and practice. Indeed, what such experience makes more evident is the bond between the two—that ultimately reciprocal process wherein one enables the other . . . Yet, as I suggested in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, the possession of a term does not bring a process or practice into being; concurrently one may practice theorizing without ever knowing/possessing the term, just as we can live and act in feminist resistance without ever using the word “feminism.”152 I am particularly drawn to hooks’ statement around the absence of terminology. The proclamation of feminism—or decoloniality, with reference to this discussion—is not necessary for an action to be read as such, or to embody the essential principles encompassed within these terms. For each, Simpson, Mignolo and Walsh, and hooks, theory is reliant on action for activation, just as action is reliant on theory for depth of understanding. Of course, the reality is fluidity between the two that accommodates the variability of life. Within curation, the critical and acknowledged binding of theory and action advances the potential to move through convention into expanded ideation and, following, into praxis that embraces diverse methodologies as creative potential. Arguably, activated theory is also tied to context, which is ultimately determined by land, regardless of its direct 152 hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 59-62. 71 articulation or not. In this view, what if curation was consistently practiced through a decolonial feminist curatorial methodology, upholding reciprocity and accountability to avoid extractive and appropriative curation, while addressing how and why ideologies and methodologies are developed and employed, who and which histories are present and how, and how a multiplicity of cultural epistemologies and ontologies are represented, grounded, and cared for? 72 II. 5. Ayumi Goto + Peter Morin: how do you carry the land? Ayumi Goto + Peter Morin: how do you carry the land? // xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwəta?ɬ (Tsleil- Waututh) territory // Artists: Corey Bulpitt, Roxanne Charles, Ayumi Goto, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Navarana Igloliorte, Peter Morin, Haruko Okano, Juliane Okot Bitek // Curator: Tarah Hogue // July 14 – October 28, 2018 // Vancouver Art Gallery, 750 Hornby St., Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada The exhibition opens to the land. ’ 73 The Vancouver Art Gallery is situated within the territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwəta?ɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples, and sits at the centre of the many gathering places and villages of these strong and vibrant Nations. The artists and the curator acknowledge the original ancestors of these territories and all of those ancestors who come with their descendants to these lands. If you find meaning here, return it to the lands you walk upon today.153 The accompanying publication for Ayumi Goto and Peter Morin: how do you carry the land?, or more aptly the “performative gesture . . . another iteration of the performances presented,”154 opens with the above land acknowledgement, marking a significance shift in convention as it precedes the director’s forward. A similar version of this acknowledgement is replicated in the vinyl text of the exhibition statement upon entering the exhibition space155—either via the elevator that opens adjacent to the title wall or by traversing from the rotunda to the exhibition gallery and passing through Haruko Okano’s Intersistere (2018). Adorning the archway, Okano’s “ephemeral installation made up of found, natural detritus gathered over decades of walking the land [around Vancouver where she lives]. These are combined with a minimum of commercially purchased materials. Natural contents were processed and mounted so that they may be returned to nature in an ecologically sustainable manner.”156 Prefacing 153 Hogue et. al., 7. 154 Tarah Hogue in Artist Talk and Book Launch: the all of usness in the room, Vancouver Art Gallery, September 29, 2018. https://vimeo.com/296760291 155 “The artists and the Vancouver Art Gallery respectfully acknowledge the unceded homelands of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and sə̓ lílwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations, and their ancestors, past, present and future, who have been carried by and in turn have carried these lands for thousands of years. If you find meaning here, return it to the lands you walk upon today.” Museum didactic panel, Introduction, Vancouver, Vancouver Art Gallery, Ayumi Goto and Peter Morin: how do you carry the land?, July 14 – October 28, 2018. 156 Museum label, Haruko Okano, Intersistere, Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, July 14 to October 28, 2018. 74 land and extending the territorial acknowledgement at the forefront of each of the exhibitionary activities honours protocols customary to Coast Salish territories, with specific attention to the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwəta?ɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) nations, introducing oneself, family connections, and relations of belonging and land. As decolonial actions, these acknowledgements are inscribed with personal accountability on the part of the curator and artists, and the continual return to the land as a point and participant that is present in the actions throughout the artworks and exhibition components. Chief Bill Williams of the Squamish Nation was consulted on the territory acknowledgement. These gestures signal the importance of the land and territorial stewardship within the practices of the exhibiting artists and the curator, but also the central role that the politics of land and territory plays within the museum space, regardless of its mention or not. My mind returns over and over to the collaborations. To Morin’s question: What do we want to build? And to my personal conversations with Hogue about the care and work done by the preparators in building the armatures for the three wooden masks carved by Corey Bulpitt (Haida) in the likenesses of Goto, Morin, and Hogue. These questions are as inseparable from one another as they derive from the central question of the exhibition, determined by the title: how do you carry the land? The presence of, and answers to, these questions populate the spaces of imagination, and reimagination, while asking visitors to contemplate their individual relationship to place. In a conversation between Rungh editor Zool Suleman, Hogue, Morin, and Goto, Hogue discusses the intentional provocation of the title question. The title is really meant to provoke people into thinking about this question deeply from their own perspectives and experiences. By asking the question it is 75 meant to also hopefully engender a pause in approaching the exhibition. So, the title wall starts with a series of questions. How do we come to be in relationship to this place? How have I come to be in relationship to this place? How does artistic practice help us to parse that out and to think more deeply about our responsibilities to place?157 Loosely divided into three sections, how do you carry the land? showcases Goto and Morin’s individual and collaborative practices.158 The central room draws their practices together with video documentation and materials from their collaborative performances, as well as The Friendship is the Studio (2013-18), a moving series of handwritten correspondence and items gifted between the two. Bulpitt’s portrait mask of Hogue is also installed in this central room. Rounding the dividing wall into the West room, Bulpitt’s portrait mask of Morin stands amidst Morin’s installation works, documentations and materials from performances, including Cultural Graffiti in London (discussed in further detail in chapter nine). Moving through the central room into the East room, the installation is now focused around Goto’s solo performances alongside collaborations with and individual works by Cheryl L’Hirondelle and Navarana Igloliorte, and Goto’s portrait mask by Bulpitt. Here, the longest wall supports in sonorous shadows of Nishiyuu (2013), a series of watercolour painting accompanied by printed journal entries by Goto, an action-based “homage to the Nishiyuu Walkers—a group of six Cree youth and their guide who, in the winter of 2013, walked from Whapmagoostui in Northern Québec to Parliament Hill in Ottawa in support of the Idle No More movement.”159 The installation of in sonorous shadows of Nishiyuu also forms a visual 157 Tarah Hogue, in conversation with Zool Suleman, Ayumi Goto and Peter Morin, “Passing ‘through the land:’ Knowledges, Introductions and Labour in Institutional Shapeshifting,” Rungh, 2018. https://rungh.org/passing-through-the-land/ 158 Ayumi Goto and Peter Morin: how do you carry the land? Press Release, see Appendix C. 159 Museum label, Ayumi Goto, in sonorous shadows of Nishiyuu, Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, July 14 to October 28, 2018. 76 timeline of Goto’s 104-day durational engagement with lands she visited and inhabited, performed through long-distance running. As previously indicated, the recognition of land is central to this exhibition. This inclusion additionally signals moves towards decoloniality embedded within the curatorial and artistic processes involved and plays out in the exhibition’s conceptual and spatial elements, in the exhibited artworks, and in the events of the Community Opening, which opened with opening remarks by Hogue, followed by a series of performances and participatory actions. In support, Gilchrist posits, Returning cultural authority to Indigenous people by honouring relational prudence, within and occasionally against dominant cultural fields, activates Indigenous agential power. To represent these artists within exhibitionary projects is to enter into a relational bond which demands both modes of refusal and insistence. It is necessary to shoulder the ethical responsibilities of curating cultural material.160 These "modes of refusal and insistence”161 carry through the work undertaken by Goto and Morin, where, in Hogue’s words, they “meet at the limits of how difference is articulated, both inscribing forms of difference and togetherness that destabilize the very notion of cultural (or ethnic or racial) otherness by refusing fixed frames of reference and institutional cooption.”162 Equally, I recognize this within Hogue’s practice. As a Métis curator working within an institutional context, Hogue expounds on the racialization of artistic production and criticism for C Magazine in 2020. 160 Gilchrist, “Indigenous Curatorial Interpellations,” 261. 161 Ibid. 162 Hogue in Kim Dhillon, “What Else Might Be Possible? Towards a Decolonial Criticism,” C Magazine 45 (Spring 2020): 42. 77 I cannot imagine a timeline without the history of colonization. My inherent multiplicity as the daughter of a Métis father and Dutch immigrant mother obfuscates this possibility. Just think of the generations of kinship relations, the confluences of historical events and the agency of individuals that overwhelm these designations of “Métis father,” “Dutch immigrant mother,” which might otherwise be read as political positionings or genealogies (although they are also these things). Pushing against “hard-and-fast racial designations,” Adam Gaudry articulates that a failing of historical determinism is its lack of addressing Métis’ agency in their construction of a “political and social entity on their own accord,” across their culture, language, songs and lives. What I am trying to articulate is an approach that confounds the naturalization of whiteness as an invisible ground (or “absent centre,” as Sara Ahmed names it) against which otherness is articulated and becomes legible. How can we relate to one another, and to the world with which we are enmeshed, using terms that do not capture and close, but rather open up to radical possibilities?163 Elsewhere, Hogue speaks to this opening up in relation to the work shared by Goto and Morin. Goto and Morin’s invitation of Indigenous, racialized, and settler artists to participate in their assemblage activation is a multivocal strategy seen throughout their practice. Multivocal, not as a result of their presence as Indigenous, racialized, and settler bodies or identities (as if these markers could somehow stand in for the subject) but as many individual voices that constitute a porous collective structure.164 163 Hogue, in Dhillon, 41. 164 Hogue, how do you carry the land?, 14. 78 Friendship without sameness. The artists’ care for each other and for the land permeates their individual and collaborative works. The opening text panel further articulates the breadth and reach of relationality that frames their work. Through collaboration, the artists interface Tahltan Nation knowledge of the circularity of time and the life force of objects with the Japanese/Taoist notion of 陰陽 (inyō) that conceptualizes the universe as a circle, wherein contrasting forces are also interconnected and constantly in motion. Through performance, Goto and Morin live through past and future moments simultaneously, collapsing them into the present.165 Therein, friendship is foundational to how do you carry the land? and the “best friendship”166 shared by Goto and Morin was seeded in their first collaborative performance in 2013. Hogue explains, “Their collaboration is an ongoing, everyday practice of 合作 (gassaku)—of building something together—in order to imagine and to create a world otherwise.”167 Their work in and around friendship is clearly also about land and the confluence of each other’s uniqueness that their bodies and histories represent, side by side. This depth permeates their relationship and is tangibly mirrored in their video work included in the exhibition, Assemblage Activation 2 (2018), a video of the confluence of the Stikine and Tahltan rivers overlayed with sounds of Goto and Morin’s heartbeats. ’ 165 Museum didactic panel, Introduction, Vancouver, Vancouver Art Gallery, Ayumi Goto and Peter Morin: how do you carry the land?, July 14 – October 28, 2018. 166 Hogue, how do you carry the land?, 11. 167 Ibid. 79 The pair consciously respond and reflect on these parts of themselves to weave them into dialogue, and, ultimately, to make space for their mothers to meet. I will return to this. In thinking through the centralization of friendship and support, I am moved to consider the radicality of these kindred positions within art, particularly in the westernized exhibition spaces of art. As the frequency of friendship narratives increase, abrading the hard edges of individualism, valuation shifts. For Billy-Ray Belcourt of the Driftpile Cree Nation and Ontario-born white, queer, non-binary settler Maura Roberts, Friendship is messy: it’s a form of kinship whereby two disparate bodies and their histories hastily come together. Friendships aren’t usually held together by biology or romance but by the promise of shared investment in the world, a world in which we see and want the same things. . . . For us, friendship carries a kind of forward-dawning futurity (to borrow José Muñoz’s term): it can make possible and easier the labour of getting through the day, keeping you in this world when things have run amok (and we know that things are almost always running amok). Friendship can make space for forms of difference in ways that don’t destroy that difference, paving a route to a shared lifeworld, even if it’s small or makeshift. A radical sort of friendship is about making the world more workable or livable for one another, throwing a wrench into the future that settler colonialism narrates.168 168 Billy-Ray Belcourt and Maura Roberts, “Making Friends for the End of the World,” GUTS: Futures 6 (May 23, 2016). http://gutsmagazine.ca/making-friends/ 80 A rare moment, when text and corporeal reality meld, occurred during my first reading of Belcourt and Roberts’ article, “Making Friends for the End of the World,” about a year or so after it was published. BILLY-RAY BELCOURT: I met Maura in a moment of collective—though uneven—exhaustion. It was the first week of a course on Indigenous literatures and we were sorted into the same group to go over assigned readings. There, another student, as if provoked by his proximity to a Native body, quickly announced that colonialism wasn’t that bad. He insisted that there was more to the story . . . Maura threw me a lifeline, turning a war into a teach-in . . . MAURA ROBERTS: We didn’t meet in the way that most friends do: at a social setting like a party, through mutual acquaintances, or because of immediate common interest. We met in a moment of crisis; not the kind that makes headline news or gains public attention. No, the crisis that was also our introduction came in the form of an older white man talking about colonialism. My stomach dropped and my skin started to prickle (a reaction usually reserved for moments of my own objectification or other discomforts) . . .169 My personal story that renders their words so affectual is not for these pages; still, what I find so significant in Belcourt and Roberts’ text is the circumstance of friendship and the idea of friendship as a radical act, as stated above. Elsewhere, Belcourt responds to the 169 Belcourt and Roberts. 81 violence of Canada’s endurance with the nurturance of kinship. “Despite the stories of progress and equality at the core of Canada’s national identity, a long tradition of brutality and negligence is what constitutes kinship for the citizens of a nation sat atop the lands of older, more storied ones.”170 Belcourt continues, speaking to his nôhkom (grandmother), “I can’t promise I won’t become snared in someone’s lethal mythology of race. What I can do is love as though it will rupture the singularity of Canadian cruelty (irrespective of whether this is a sociological possibility). Herein lies my poetic truth.”171 Across these excerpts, there is also the notion of support—and care, a recurring expression in Belcourt’s writing—as radicality. Contextually different, I have also found that Condorelli’s work on friendship offers support for the occurrences and instrumentality of friendship within art spaces and amongst artists and curators.172 Condorelli resists an abstracted explication in favour of exploring “how to be and work in friendship, and inhabit it as a condition.”173 [F]riendship as a specific model of relationship in the large question of how to live and work together—and autonomously—towards change, as a way to act in the world. Friendship, like support, is considered as an essentially political relationship, one of allegiance and responsibility. Being a friend entails a commitment, a decision, and also describes the implied positionings that any activity in culture entails. In relationship to my practice, friendship is at its most relevant in relation to a labour process, as a way of working together. The line of engagement I am following therefore is that of friendship as a form of solidarity: 170 Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body (Toronto: Penguin Random House Canada, 2020), 4. 171 Ibid, 4-5. 172 I was introduced to the work of Céline Condorelli through Gabrielle Moser and Helena Reckitt’s 2016 article “Feminist Tactics of Citation, Annotation, and Translation: Curatorial Reflections on the Now You Can Go programme” published in OnCurating 29 (May 2016): 42-48. 173 Condorelli, “In Support,” 15. 82 friends in action. Working together can both start from and create forms of solidarity and/or friendship, which are therefore pursued as both condition and intent, motivating actions taken and allowing work undertaken.174 From here, Condorelli moves into a historiography of the theoretical attention to friendship in western philosophical traditions that trace their lineage to Ancient Greece. Therein, friendship was positioned as of the polis, a realm staunchly maintained as one of men and a place from which women and slaves were excluded. Within this sect of philosophical discourse, friendship has also been primarily taken up by men (those discussed and those who discuss). Condorelli writes, no women philosophers have written about friendship, to the best of my knowledge, and more crucially, there seems to be something inherently patriarchal, perhaps fratriarchal about these constructions of friendship, that are based on the idea of a nation of brothers (and the terrifying notion that we can only live together because we are the same, we share the same land, the same birth, the same blood, the same language, etc.).175 An intimate look at the politics of such findings is beyond the scope of this dissertation; yet, even with this brief historiographical grounding, friendship between male and female (of the many other possible signifiers of identity that fall beyond the dominant position of cis white male) reveals itself as a radical act. Once again, I find intrigue in the suggestion of the possibilities inherent in the radicality of friendship (which I draw out to encompass both in life and in curation), and of love and care between friends—and further, between friends without sameness. A sentiment 174 Condorelli, In Support,” 294-5. 175 Ibid, 297-8. 83 echoed in the kinship built by Belcourt and Roberts; reverberating in the interview with Goto and Suleman for Rungh. I find too that in the work that needs to be done, you do want to find those friends that you can count on. Whether they are sometimes visiting the institution that you are a part of, or they are outside, or they are alongside with you in the inside. The people who nurture you and then you take care of each other and no strings attached. No conditionals and it's like, we have to look out for each other and when you find those people your heart knows this deeply. Sometimes just to be able to talk to somebody or to develop a friendship amidst all the craziness is a moment of rest or that moment of just care. I think by centering a friendship, it's not just a singular friendship anymore; these friendships are mushrooming out and proliferating.176 My emphasis on friendship is not to say all colleagues must strive to become unwavering friends, rather it is to employ critical awareness to the structures and mechanisms of relationships within art spaces. Even where friendship does not occur, mustn’t we explore how trust and support exist and can be nurtured? Calling in the ancestors. This shift into the language of friendship (and friendship without sameness), and then to collective activation, ensures space for polyvocality, which is present throughout how do you carry the land? and has been extended through the invitation of Corey Bulpitt, Roxanne Charles, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Navarana Igloliorte, Haruko Okano, and Juliane Okot Bitek to exhibit alongside and in response to Goto and Morin. Additionally, it 176 Ayumi Goto in conversation with Zool Suleman, Tarah Hogue, and Peter Morin, “Passing ‘through the land:’ Knowledges, Introductions and Labour in Institutional Shapeshifting,” Rungh, 2018. https://rungh.org/passing-through-the-land/ 84 provides space to gather the artists together in performance and to call in the ancestors; these actions taking place during the Community Opening with hundreds of visitors present as witnesses. The crowd, large enough to fill the ground floor interior foyer of the Vancouver Art Gallery, followed Goto and Morin up the rotunda staircases and then the escalator to the third floor. Morin ascending to the West, Goto to the East. I made my way up, moving with the crowd, chatting with and catching the eyes of old friends and colleagues. Filling the central exhibition space of how do you carry the land?, the crowd was entrusted with den den daiko hand drums and rattles made by Goto and Morin as they began the participatory performance, Assemblage Activation. As the setting for how do you carry the land? and the collaborative actions facilitated by Goto and Morin, there is no denying the historical implication of the old provincial courthouse that the Vancouver Art Gallery currently occupies. Hogue explains, Held in conjunction with the opening reception, the performance responded to the history of the Gallery’s built infrastructure—a former courthouse, where Indigenous ways of life were literally persecuted as crimes, located on land that continues to be unceded. As the first gesture of the show, all gallery visitors were invited to take up noise-making instruments (den-den daiko and rattles) handmade by Goto and Morin, and to make as much noise as possible, calling in our ancestors, whomever they might have been in these histories, to understand the once courthouse and now gallery space as a place where all of us belonged.177 177 Tarah Hogue, Assemblage Activation, Performance Description, accessed April 14, 2021. http://www.tarahhogue.com/ayumi-goto-and-peter-morin-how-do-you-carry-the-land 85 Morin sang and the asked audience to “make noise” with the drums and rattles; to “make enough noise to welcome the ancestors, who have never felt welcome in this building, into this building!”178 Along with the crowd of visitors, Goto and Morin jumped and cheered, each wearing blue ‘Haruko Okano is magic’ t-shirts under their near-matching sports coats and revealed once the coats were removed. Following, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, flanked by the other exhibiting artists, shared two songs, accompanied by her hand drum. Unable to travel from Kelowna to Vancouver on July 21, 2018 for this is not us, the live performance by Goto, Hogue, and Morin, I am reliant on the video documentation, personal conversations with Hogue, and textual descriptions. Activating portrait masks carved by Corey Bulpitt of Goto, Morin and [Hogue], the performance traversed the four floors of the Vancouver Art Gallery, intervening in the concurrent exhibitions and old courtroom spaces to explore ways of being and looking from within the institution. The portrait masks conversely protect the face from view while also revealing a likeness. They also draw upon histories of production and artistic practice across cultural contexts. What becomes visible in this encounter? The performance was live streamed via [Facebook].179 this is not us, like the overall exhibition, is significant in relation to this study in its acknowledgement and articulation of the curatorial voice in collaboration with the artists within exhibition-making. Softening the rigid distinction between artist and curator of previous decades, Goto, Hogue, and Morin observe “collective responsibility.”180 178 Peter Morin, Assemblage Activation, performance, Vancouver Art Gallery, July 13, 2018. 179 Hogue, this is us, Performance Description, accessed April 14, 2021. http://www.tarahhogue.com/ayumi-goto-and-peter-morin-how-do-you-carry-the-land 180 Ayumi Goto, the all of usness in the room. Goto also breaks down ‘collective responsibility’ to ‘collected’ and ‘collecting’, wherein the connection already is in the encounters. 86 Beginning on the fourth floor, Goto, Hogue, and Morin circumnavigated the exhibition spaces. As she moved through the exhibition Emily Carr in Dialogue with Mattie Gunterman on the top floor, Hogue began to speak out the name ‘Sophie Frank’ to each painting by Carr. Morin followed. Hogue’s actions link the Vancouver Art Gallery collection and continual presentation of works by Emily Carr to how do you carry the land? by making visible the underdiscussed friendship between Carr and Sewiṉchelwet Sophie Frank; research conducted by Hogue in the development of the 2020 Vancouver Art Gallery exhibition, Lineages and Land Bases: At the centre of the exhibition is a case study that assesses the intersections between the basketry of Sewiṉchelwet (Sophie Frank) (1872–1939), a woman from the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish Nation), and the late landscape paintings of Emily Carr (1871–1945). The two women were close contemporaries and friends for 33 years, a relationship also shaped by the profound inequalities of their time. The comparison of these two distinct, yet interconnected, perspectives both prefigures and extends the critique of the separation of nature and culture seen elsewhere in the exhibition, urging us to think anew about the meaning of self and its ties to the non-human world.181 The correlation between these two exhibitions, performed through this is not us, further demonstrates the relationality of knowledge and the incremental processes of understanding, looking to Wilson.182 Moreover, in the activation and exchange of Bulpitt’s portrait masks, Hogue, Morin, and Goto reiterate the possibilities of many bodies within each of us,183 as is the circumstance in many of Goto and Morin’s collaborative 181 Museum didactic panel, Introduction, Vancouver, Vancouver Art Gallery, Lineages and Land Bases, February 22 – August 30, 2020, organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery and curated by Tarah Hogue, Senior Curatorial Fellow, Indigenous Art, with Sḵwx̱wú7mesh advisors Chief Bill Williams and Tracy Williams. 182 Wilson, 7. 183 Morin, the all of usness in the room. 87 performances. The continuous return to collective activation and polyvocality through how do you carry the land? is further reflected in the smallest actions of changing exhibition labels throughout the exhibition run to mark events that have taken place and artworks that have shifted or been added over time, such as the labels for the three portrait masks that were changed to signal their inclusion in this is not us, and, in more substantial ways, two poems by Juliane Okot Bitek (both Untitled, 2018) were commission and installed in cut vinyl in the rotunda and the adjacent exhibition gallery in response to Assemblage Activation (July 13, 2018), this is not us (July 21, 2018), and edlā moeder 母親 (July 23, 2018). Making space for mothers to meet. Through a number of conversations with both Goto and Morin since 2016, I have witnessed the growing monumentality of this gesture: making space for their mothers to meet. This building of intentional space and the responsibility this presents for them. The significance of this meeting is not singular, but one that drives much consideration and creative exploration between these two friends. Striving to build and shape ways to expand cultural understanding between their mothers. Excitingly and a long-time-coming, the exhibition offered a point of culmination for their extensive ruminations, which transformed the third floor of the Vancouver Art Gallery into that intentional space. The galleries adorned with the work and documentation of Goto and Morin’s individual practices and collaborations, meticulously laid out in anticipation of hosting their mothers. 88 edlā moeder 母親. A truly affirming moment of the exhibition was the closure of the exhibition space to visitors during regular hours for Ayumi, Peter, and Tarah’s mothers to meet and visit. ’ . 89 Hogue describes the meeting at the Vancouver Art Gallery as follows: During the Gallery’s regular open hours, we closed the exhibition for a private tour for our mothers—Margriet Hogue, Kyoko Goto and Janelle Morin—and our families. We gave our mothers gifts, and Kyoko made beautiful calligraphic scrolls with our mom’s names in kanji. Within their practice, Goto and Morin ask of themselves and one another: How do I honour your ancestors? How do we make a space for our ancestors to meet and to work together? How do I honour your mother? How do we make a space for our mothers to meet and to visit together?184 Hogue’s emphasis on the act of making space within art and exhibitions extends not only to living collaborators and communities, but to each other’s ancestors. Likewise, Métis artist, curator, and scholar Suzanne Morrissette offers an analysis of the embodied depth that runs through Goto and Morin’s actions, stating, “Peter and Ayumi’s collaborative work can be said to acknowledge and tend to each other’s ancestral histories and to their present realities, seeking new forms of understanding through acts of mutual and reciprocal knowledge-building.”185 With great significance, Morrissette speaks of this work as fully considered, intentional actions that centre their ancestor, families, and communities, not simply actions towards art. The artists’ engagement with their mothers extended beyond their position as subjects of the work, to locate them as the primary audience as well: in conversation with Ayumi’s partner Ashok, I learned about a tour that the artists had organized for their mothers and Tarah’s mother during the exhibition run, a move which Ashok framed as altering the conventions of art spaces by prioritizing 184 Hogue, edlā moeder 母親, accessed April 14, 2021. http://www.tarahhogue.com/ayumi-goto-and-peter-morin-how-do-you-carry-the-land 185 Suzanne Morrissette, “Practices of Learning,” The Capilano Review (Spring 2019): 47. 90 the mothers’ visits and requiring all others to wait while this took place.186 Taking this time with those individuals who have inspired the work and whose labour and lives are honoured by the artists’ guiding questions enacts a kind of accountability to this source of knowledge—one that both governs their practice and suggests new models for engaging family-based knowledge through artistic research. These kinds of frameworks for understanding ourselves in relation to an idea of knowledge that comes from families, and from communities, is one which also acknowledges forms of pedagogy which come from knowledge keepers within various communities.187 In an essay for the exhibition catalogue The World is Not a Foreign Land, Gilchrist details a parallel circumstance. The late Gija artist Mick Jawalji, then aged 86 years old, heard that three of his works recently acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria would be hung in the survey exhibition Land marks. He asked if he could observe cultural protocol and ‘responsibilities and ensure that the ancestral spirits embodied within the paintings would be both honoured and placated in their new ‘home’. As befits the gravity of this event, the gallery was closed to the public, and was attended by a small group of people familiar to the artist. Accompanied by his own clap sticks, he sang for close to an hour, demonstrating the epic and circular song cycles. Activating a cultural network of associations, Jawalji performed a multi-modal approach to Indigenous art making that incorporated music, visual art, song and ancestral homage. As this was not a public event, it avoided the pitfalls of cultural 186 Mathur and Morrissette, Personal conversation, December 19, 2018 referenced in Morrissette, 47. 187 Morrissette, 47-48. 91 tourism that can often overtake such cross-cultural encounters and eclipse their real purpose. This event was a powerful assertion of intangible cultural heritage, demonstrating the central relationship between performative and material culture.188 Together, these gestures woven into these two exhibitions—edlā moeder 母親, making space for mothers to meet in how do you carry the land? and the cultural protocols observed by Mick Jawalji prior to the opening of Land marks—establish important precedent in rethinking the potential of curatorial and exhibitionary hospitality. These gestures signal the importance of relationships in art- and exhibition-making and open up the question of who is the exhibition for? In both cases, the processes were driven by the needs and protocols of the artists, their communities, and the land first; only then was the space set to invite audiences in. What is supported in these instances is the shifting functionality of the exhibition space and the objects within it. No longer mired in single-use narratives, such instances model necessary acknowledgement of visiting in these ways—with humans, non-humans, and objects—as imperative cultural practice, essential to building community, and honoured in their non-performative purposes. Rather than lingering in (presumptive) universalized conceptions of the white cube and viewership, these gestures furthermore challenge who has access and how, to expand exhibitionary functionality in relation to locationally- and culturally-specific protocols, values, and needs. 188 Gilchrist, “Indigenising Curatorial Practice”, 59. 92 Section III: Labour Art is where what we survive survives – Kaveh Akbar.189 189 Kaveh Akbar, “The Palace,” Poems, The New Yorker, April 18, 2019. https://www.newyorker.com/books/poems/kaveh-akbar-the-palace. 93 III. 6. Labour Breathing together. In the melded continuum of personal/professional/online/in-person realities, I came across a post on Instagram by a relatively new colleague: “In Farsi, ‘companion’ is ‘ham-dam’ meaning ‘one you breathe with.’”190 There is profoundness in the meaning of ham-dam. The languaging places the most basal act of human life within companionship. One you share a breath with. One you breathe with. ’ Exhale. I was immediately taken to a place of sensorial thinking around the friendships that bolster these pages, as well as to my ongoing inquiry into curatorial hospitality, and the residual ways these approaches continue to ground and grow my individual and collaborative curatorial research and work. Danny Butt’s writing articulates an analogous construction within the ideation of curatorial hospitality that evokes shared life, with or without sameness. My own articulation of curatorial hospitality encompasses the vital and variable tenets that perforate curatorial labour, including protocols, power, expectations, boundaries, and care. Essentially, curatorial hospitality is centered around 190 Elham Puriya Mehr (@elham.puriyamehr), “In Farsi, ‘companion’ is ‘ham-dam’ meaning ‘one you breathe with,’” Instagram photo, November 6, 2021. https://www.instagram.com/elham.puriyamehr/ 94 how we are in relation.191 Although not as specific as the Farsi term above, Butt, a member of the Aotearoa New Zealand-based Local Time collective and a Melbourne-based scholar of social practice and artistic research, expresses the transformative potential of, and the responsibility embedded within, acknowledging the limits of individual positionalities and “learning to live other models of hospitality, to continue to live with others with whom these models appear.”192 I have invoked these ideas through this quote in other writings, as it offers a foundation from which the nuances of living-with can be explored. Who cares? The work of curatorial care “pushes against the commodification of the art experience and arts administration as service—often undertaken as hierarchical labour and understood through the frames of gender, class, and race,”193 as I have argued elsewhere. Underlining the fissure between differential identities, Phanuel Antwi, a writer, artist, and scholar of critical race studies and Black Atlantic Canada, draws attention to the bodily imprinting resultant from a system that is inherently hostile to otherness.194 Though Antwi centres his discussion in academia, these experiences are mirrored in the western art system, recalling baby steps, band-aid solutions, token hires, and guest rather than staff positions, as discussed in Epilogue to We Can Do Something Else at the end of chapter two. This exemplify yet another layer to the conceptions of labour, hospitality, 191 The specificities of this explanation—curatorial hospitality as being in relation—comes out of a period of frequent visits and ongoing conversations with Angela Somerset and Denise Lawson, curators at the Comox Valley Art Gallery in Courtenay, BC roughly between 2018 and 2019. 192 Danny Butt, “The Curatorial as a Liveable Subject Position: Hospitality and Differential Consciousness,” accessed January 30, 2018. https://ayearofconsciouspractice.com/texts/curatorial-hospitality-and-differential-consciousness 193 Johanna Burton, Shannon Jackson, and Dominic Willsdon, Public Servants: Art and the Crisis of the Common Good (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016), xvi, referenced in Lawrence, “Roots.” 194 Phanuel Antwi, “On Labor, Embodiment, and Debt in the Academy,” Auto/Biography Studies 33, no. 2 (2018). 95 and care. Corporeally entrenched over-productivity can also be found in the often-rhetorical position of care within the curatorial.195 British feminist curator and researcher Helena Reckitt distinguishes curatorial labour that enhances the cultural capital of the curator or organization from the gestures of care that cultivate relationships, trust, personal well-being, and shared praxes within and beyond the gallery space.196 Herein, Reckitt calls attention to the discrepancies through which curatorial care and support is received or managed.197 Meaning care is often not distributed equally. Like Reckitt, Serbian curator Maja Ćirić expounds on the exploitative potential through which care is merely thematic and “hospitality [is] abused in a way that stimulates the spectacle of differences in order to prevent the institution of art from achieving any real change.”198 This pairing of curatorial care with caution that speaks to an absence of power redistribution is once again conveyed by American artist Andrea Fraser, widely known for her work focused on institutional critique: If this work is to succeed . . . it must do more than serve the repression of relations of economic exchange. It must recognize that those relations, including relations of economic exploitation, are not replaced by but only refigured by being framed as relations of care; that these relations of exploitation are not only a bad outcome 195 Dylan A. T. Miner, “Mawadisidiwag miinawaa Wiidanokiindiwag // They Visit and Work Together,” in Makers, Crafters, Educators: Working for Cultural Change, edited by Elizabeth Garber, Lisa Hochtritt, and Manisha Sharma (New York: Routledge, 2018), 131 and Jennifer Van de Pol in conversation with author, Courtenay, BC, April 27, 2019, referenced in Lawrence, “Roots.” 196 Helena Reckitt, “Support Acts: Curating, Caring and Social Reproduction,” Journal of Curatorial Studies 5, no. 1 (2016): 9. 197 Reckitt, 11. 198 Maja Ćirić, “The (Un)spoken Abuse: Curatorial Hospitality through the Lens of Criticality,” in Cultures of the Curatorial: Hospitality: Hosting Relations in Exhibitions, edited by Beatrice von Bismarck and Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016), 208-209. 96 of hospitality, but are also the source of the need that occasions it and contains it, from which hospitality can never completely free itself.199 What these scholars reveal is the continuity of prejudicial frames that historically and contemporaneously determine the parameters of access and acceptance in regards to labour, positionality, participation, and support in the arts. Reckitt’s modest question: “who is or who is not cared for?”200 maintains emblematic and pragmatic importance here and can be qualified further with my own question that I address in further detail in chapter seven: “how does the enactment of curatorial care renegotiate power imbalance?”201 What is already known. Tabulations illustrate current and past discrepancies in diversity and dispersal of opportunities for artists and arts workers in museums and galleries, and further provide important reflections of gender and racial positioning throughout society.202 Nonetheless, gender and race-based tallies serve to reify what is already known: the inequity of arts labour in Canada and across Turtle Island. In the 20 years since the publication of Monika Kin Gagnon’s seminal book Other Conundrums: Race, Culture, and Canadian Art, which arguably could have been written in contemporary times, a rhetoric 199 Andrea Fraser, “‘As If’ We Came Together to Care,” in Cultures of Curatorial: Hospitality: Hosting Relations in Exhibitions, edited by Beatrice von Bismarck and Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016), 44. 200 Reckitt, 8. 201 Lawrence, “Roots.” 202 Select gender and diversity surveys include: Anne Dymond’s book Diversity Counts: Gender, Race, and Representation in Canadian Art Galleries (2019); articles by Maura Reilly for ArtNews (June 2015) and Alison Cooley, Amy Luo, and Caoimhe Morgan-Feir for Canadian Art (April 2015); Micol Hebron’s Gallery Tally (2013-ongoing); Joy Zemans’ research accounting for the position of women in Canadian art (1998); Guerrilla Girls’ Gallery Report Card (1986); as well as the Canada Council for the Arts’ Diversity in 25 Canadian Arts Organizations Report (2019); the first comprehensive survey to assess the ethnic and gender diversity of the staffs of art museums across the United States by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in partnership with the Association of Art Museum Directors, and the American Alliance of Museums (2015); and the long-standing Task Force Report on Museums and First Peoples jointly sponsored by the Assembly of First Nations and the Canadian Museums Association (1992). 97 of equity continues to obfuscate action. Gagnon, like Beckwith, Fatona, Joachim, Hopkins, and so many others since and before, addresses institutional racism and exclusion, and reiterates the need to interrogate the perpetuated conditions that reproduce divisive narratives in the arts, and, generally, on a national level.203 Joachim rightly argues that identifying “relations of power and privilege is a crucial aspect of curating in a way that broadens the horizons of the exhibition, and that centres voices that have historically been set aside.”204 ’ Still applicable in Canada today, Gagnon writes: “Providing ‘access’ to excluded or underserved communities identified by race, gender, sexual orientation characterizes the dominant rhetoric of most cultural organizations tackling issues of gender and cultural equity.”205 Repeated again and again, the language around equity has become an organizational crutch that “invites diversity and embraces change [yet] can continue to maintain a paternalistic approach that leaves existing relations of power intact.”206 The impacts of recurring tactics that determine the biased composition of curatorial labour and exhibition programs are also inscribed with social and economic disadvantages, made static through canonization and dominant narratives grounded in whiteness. Moving forward, Fatona posits, “that Black diasporic sensibilities and aesthetics cannot simply place the Black subject back into a narrative of nation without transforming that 203 Monika Kin Gagnon, Other Conundrums: Race, Culture, and Canadian Art (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2000), 70. 204 Joachim, 38. 205 Gagnon, 52. 206 Ibid. 98 very narrative or questioning the legitimacy of its foundation;”207 and only through self-representation, both within exhibitions and as organizers, administrators, and caretakers of art and exhibitions, can dominant history break away.208 207 Andrea Fatona, “In the Presence of Absence: Invisibility, Black Canadian History, and Melinda Mollineaux’s Pinhole Photography,” Canadian Journal of Communication 31 (2006): 229. 208 Gagnon, 106. 99 III. 7. Call and Response #callresponse // xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwəta?ɬ (Tsleil- Waututh); Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation; Mississaugas of the Credit, Seneca, and Huron-Wendat; Munsee Lenape; Treaty 6 Territory and the Homeland of Métis; Mi’kmaq Territory; Treaty 7 Territory and the Blackfoot Confederacy, Tsuut’ina First Nstion, the Iyarhe/Stoney Nakoda, and Métis Nation of Alberta // Artists: Christi Belcourt, Maria Hupfield, Ursula Johnson, Tania Willard, and Laakkuluk Williamson-Bathory, alongside responding artists, including: IV Castellanos, Marcia Crosby, Jennifer Kreisberg, Cheryl L'Hirondelle, Isaac Murdoch, Esther Neff, Laura Ortman, and Tanya Tagaq // Organizers: Tarah Hogue, Maria Hupfield, Tania Willard in partnership with grunt gallery and supported by the {Re}conciliation initiative of the Canada Council for the Arts, the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation, and The Circle on Philanthropy and Aboriginal Peoples in Canada // grunt gallery, Vancouver, British Columbia; Galerie SAW Gallery, Ottawa, Ontario; Blackwood Gallery, Mississauga, Ontario; EFA Project Space, New York, New York; Eyelevel Wanuskewin Heritage Park & AKA artist run centre, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan; Stride Gallery & TRUCK Contemporary Art, Calgary, Alberta // Tour duration: October 29, 2016 – March 15, 2019 #callresponse is a clear and intentional example of decolonial feminist curatorial methodologies. My understanding of this touring exhibition is through the exhibition catalogue, the twelve episodes of the Broken Boxes podcast dedicated to #callresponse contributors, documentation across its multiple host venues between 2016-2019, as well as personal conversations with co-organizers Hogue, Willard, and Maria Hupfield, a multimedia and performance-based artist identifying as an off-rez Anishinaabe belonging to Wasauksing First Nation. The extent of discussion around this durational project could fill an entire dissertation. However, without having had the opportunity to experience the exhibition firsthand, my focus here is on the overarching curatorial methodologies that demonstrate decolonial feminist approaches, which for the organizers, “opens spaces of intersectionality, presenting strength in tangible alterities that resist occupation through work with humans, nonhuman living beings, lands and waters.”209 Drawing connections and circling back to Wilson: 209 Hogue and Hupfield, 15. 100 Knowledge is shared with all of creation. It is not just interpersonal relationships, not just with the research subjects I may be working with, but it is a relationship with all creation. It is with the cosmos, it is with the animals, with the plants, with the earth that we share this knowledge. It goes beyond this idea of individual knowledge to the concept of relational knowledge. Who cares about those ontologies? It’s not the realities in and of themselves that are important; it is the relationship that I share with reality.210 Adopting the format of call and response, “a form of rapid, spontaneous interactions of unity building between speaker and listener as demonstrated in the chants of social justice movements,”211 the exhibition mobilizes this mode of practice through polyvocality, relationality, citationality, and institutional intervention. The intentional application of these feminist methodologies centralizes the leadership of Indigenous woman (call) and the tenets of accountability (response) at the forefront of actions and conversation that address contemporary social and political issues, and those that have been shaped by the discourse of reconciliation.212 Disabling hierarchical authority and expanding creative inclusion beyond the networks and knowledge of the organizers, the five principal artists—Christi Belcourt, Maria Hupfield, Ursula Johnson, Tania Willard, and Laakkuluk Williamson-Bathory—were invited to select artist respondents—Isaac Murdoch, IV Castellanos and Esther Neff, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Marcia Crosby, and Tanya Tagaq—producing a full series of public and private events and actions organized throughout the tour’s duration and with each host venue. The project also supported Willard and Hupfield working in the dual-capacity as both artists and curators, blurring 210 Wilson, 74. 211 Hogue and Hupfield, 14. 212 Ibid, 15. 101 modes of consideration and practice while expanding engagement with each other’s communities.213 The totality of #callresponse as an “event of knowledge”214 and the processes of nurturing and building new knowledges, networks, and relationships is equally as important as the exhibition itself. Even still, the organizers were often confronted by conflicting schedules and artist availability, resulting in the difficulty to facilitate engagement between all contributors. An inherent challenge of collaboration. In 2016, during the final period of production and the opening of the first iteration, the organizers expressed “centring the work of women in the actions of reconciliation,” 215 and questioned if and how they even want to use the word ‘reconciliation’ and how they wanted to respond in the wake of the TRC.216 What was clear, however, was a necessary point of departure. In Hogue’s words, in conversation with Ginger Dunnill for Broken Boxes podcast: We wanted to start with the women that we were working with; and the presence alone of Indigenous women is a radical thing when you consider the history of colonialism and heteropatriarchy that we have been subjected to and survived through. And so, we wanted to start with the good the work that these women are doing in their communities, whether their communities are at home on the rez or where they live and work in Brooklyn [for example]. We wanted to really go to where these women were at and support the work that they are already doing. And I think that that is a feminist ethos, in itself. In doing so, in the 213 Tania Willard in conversation with Ginger Dunnill, Episode 43: Introduction to #callresponse: Interviews with artist/curators Tania Willard, Maria Hupfield, and Tarah Hogue, Broken Boxes podcast, February 21, 2016. 214 Martinon and Rogoff, ix. 215 Hogue, Ep. 43, Broken Boxes podcast. 216 Ibid. 102 context of this project around reconciliation, we wanted to think about how we can shift this discussion. 217 The intentional citationality embedded in the work of Hogue, Hupfield, and Willard consistently acknowledges artistic lineages, mentors, and trajectories of ideation. Moreover, a “feminist methodology of citation,” as explained by Hogue and Hupfield, “recognizes and refuses the dehumanization, violence, rape and murder of Indigenous women, girls, trans, two-spirit and gender-variant identities that is systemic to the continuation of the current power dynamics of capitalist and colonial heteropatriarchy.”218 They continue, In recognizing the radical presence of women, this citational and intersectional approach provides the toolkit to shift the centre of violence/state power that Indigenous and female bodies are defined in relation to. This standard calls into question the practices and questionable processes of consultation that results in Indigenous women going unnamed historically, being infantilized, represented as a primitive other, and ultimately rendered invisible, worthless and stripped of power by merit of their ethnicity alone.219 The “radical presence of women”220 also speaks to the simultaneous objectification and obfuscation of trauma in contemporary culture, and specifically the objectification and capitalization of Indigenous suffering as virtue signalling within the arts. Within a “feminist ethos,”221 the care of removing the imposition of healing from the language and intention of the project aligns with the organizers’ own shifting relationships to the 217 Hogue in conversation with Ginger Dunnill, Episode 54: Interview with Tarah Hogue, Broken Boxes podcast, October 20, 2016. 218 Hogue and Hupfield, 15. 219 Ibid. 220 Ibid. 221 Hogue, Ep. 54, Broken Boxes podcast. 103 terminology and actions of reconciliation, and made space for authentic response. Acknowledging, also, that healing may still be a part of an artist’s work or a result of experiencing #callresponse, though not a requirement.222 The project is significant as multi-sited and as a touring exhibition as it reveals the immense potential and viability of decolonial feminist curatorial methodologies to operate in a variety of organizational contexts and formats, and extends the reach of these conversations that are not necessarily taking place to the same extent in art galleries across Turtle Island. Moreover, the expanded format “decentralized institutional partnerships, paralleling the artist’s own preferencing of multiple voices across multiple sites.”223 #callresponse, along with tautuanaga ‘o fa’āliga ata and Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit discussed below, represent what Michelle Jacques notes as requiring a type of systemic accommodation. As a Black Canadian curator of Caribbean heritage, Jacques writes we need “practices that require the art system to flex to accommodate the needs of historically underrepresented practitioners and communities, rather than the need to flex to a system that is an uncomfortable, and sometimes unsafe, fit.”224 The potential impact a project such as #callresponse can have in an institutional context was further confirmed during a conversation in April 2018 with representatives of the Blackwood Gallery at the University of Toronto Mississauga, one of the host venues. The inclusion of #callresponse within the context of the larger exhibition program, Take Care, led to a rare instance of exhibitions directly contributing to amendments made to the gallery mandate—which was viewed not as a static but as a living document—to include 222 Hogue, Ep. 54, Broken Boxes podcast. 223 Hogue, MICE. 224 Michelle Jacques, in Toby Katrine Lawrence in dialogue with Michelle Jacques, “Plant Stories are Love Stories Too: Moss + Curation,” PUBLIC 64 (2022): 55. 104 specific language: “strategies of anti-oppression, feminism, and social justice.”225 This important shift in mandate signals the impact of the curatorial on institutional praxes, when centrality of artistic and curatorial practices is taken seriously and not as secondary to institutional performativity. 225 “Mandate,” Blackwood Gallery, date last accessed October 25, 2021. https://www.blackwoodgallery.ca/about#mandate Blackwood Gallery Mandate: The Blackwood is committed to thinking about the gallery as a space for living ideas—for holding together research, creation, inquiry, interaction, and conversation. / We ask questions and offer a diagnosis of our contemporary times in essay-exhibitions, discursive events, commissioned artistic works, performances, publishing platforms, and educational projects. / We offer visitors opportunities to grapple with the conflicts, challenges, and questions of our time: How do our respective living conditions impinge upon each other? What kind of a future do we want to live in? How can we shape our world more intelligently, but also more poetically? / We support and activate artists, curators, and writers who incite us to be responsive, cooperative, critical, and answerable. / We nurture connections between local and international communities, believing in the importance of working across varied social contexts and feeding the conversations that support artistic, curatorial, and pedagogical practices. / We cultivate cultures of learning, provide mentorship, and facilitate professional development. / We respond to diversity mandates within the Canadian art ecology and work to promote equity and inclusion through strategies of anti-oppression, feminism, and social justice. / We continually strive to open up new perspectives. / Here visitors can experience art as the practice of experimenting, questioning, discovering, dismantling, rebuilding, amplifying, imagining, conjuring. 105 III. 8. Curatorial (like) methodologies. Reallocated power and taking non-dominant modes of curation and organizing seriously means looking beyond the western art paradigm. Notably, this position is reinforced by Gilchrist and extended in Eshrāghi’s doctoral work on Indigenous display practices: “Although not defined as such, there are curatorial-like practices that exist within Indigenous cultures.”226 Correspondingly, Eshrāghi puts forward the following: Local and global First Nations artists, curators and writers are working hard to anchor their exhibitions, critique, collections and public programming in diverse Indigenous knowledges rather than solely within the dominant Euro-American frameworks. These efforts can easily amount to nothing within omnipresent Euro-American practices, unless and only if Indigenous curators, artists and writers command agency over their representations, discourses, finances and spaces. Settler-colonial institutions could learn humility and perspective through learning the First Nations histories and cultural practices that they do not know.227 For example, Eshrāghi, with fellow Sāmoan knowledge holders, artists, and curators, introduces the term tautuanaga ‘o fa‘āliga ata that is more culturally specific and appropriate than 'curating.'228 They further explain, It is based on Indigenous concepts of sogi, soālaupule, responsible governance, organizing for collective wellbeing and illumination, and displays of cultural practice that heal and strengthen mutually beneficial exchanges of images, 226 Stephen Gilchrist, “Indigenising Curatorial Practice,” The World is Not a Foreign Land (Melbourne: Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, 2014), 56, quoted in Eshrāghi, Taeao, 49. 227 Léuli Eshrāghi, “Curating Under Pressure in Settler Colonies,” in Discipline: Issue No. 4.5, TarraWarra Biennial 2016: Endless Circulation, edited by Helen Hughes (Melbourne: Discipline, 2017), 71. 228 Léuli Eshrāghi, “MĀTAU ‘O TAUTAUNAGA O FA‘ALINGA ATA MO O TĀTOU LUMANA‘I Considering the Service of Displays for our Futures,” in Sovereign Words: Indigenous Art, Curation and Criticism, edited by Katya Garcia-Antón (Oslo: Office for Contemporary Art, 2018), 256. 106 objects, performative states and orature. This so‘otaga229 is not a translation of curating, the curator or curatorial practice as these are understood in European languages and knowledges, with current fashionable curators working in ways that I see as unaccountable to communities and sites. Rather, the further wellbeing of communities, on and off ancestral territories, of all our non-human and human relations, is our duty. Healing is not dissociated from what is understood as art practice; cultural practice takes myriad forms in our diverse Indigenous experiences and knowledges. Tautuanaga ‘o fa‘āliga ata as a practice is based in Sāmoan cultural values and histories, and the text imprinted on bodies, lands, waters, digital files and other formats are latest manifestation of genealogical matter and imperatives that direct our actions into the times to come.230 As in tautuanaga ‘o fa‘āliga ata, Eshrāghi’s practice elevates models of care and, in doing so, frequently resists and refuses a “facile English grasp.”231 In the same vein, Sāmoan art critic and curator Lana Lopesi states, “Indigenous communities no longer need mediation; we are capable of our own naming, speaking and doing; it is our views of contemporary art norms that need to expand.”232 Of Eshrāghi’s practice, Lopesi explains, their “framework prioritises Indigenous languages, uses macrons and toponyms, stepping away from homogenising terms and refusing to sacrifice culture for mainstream consumption.”233 Herein, tautuanaga ‘o fa‘āliga ata intentionally moves away 229 Relationships, alliances (gangana Sāmoa/Sāmoan language); defined in Eshrāghi, “MĀTAU,” 258. 230 Eshrāghi, “MĀTAU,” 257-258. 231 Léuli Eshrāghi, “Tanem toktok ia | Traduction | Fa‘aliliuga,” L’Internationale Online, May 19, 2021. https://www.internationaleonline.org/research/politics_of_life_and_death/182_tanem_toktok_ia_traduction_faaliliuga/ 232 Lana Lopesi, “Frameworks: indigenous Curatorial Practice,” Runway Journal 17: Outside, 2015. http://runway.org.au/decolonisation-frameworks-indigenous-curatorial-practice 233 Ibid. 107 from the ever present western discursive grounding of curating within the Latin etymological root of care: curae (n.); cūrā (v.). Existing within an “intercultural space,” the Sāmoan term is, instead, built from “culturally relevant” language that resists misinterpretation and is sensitive to Sāmoan expressions of leadership and speaking rights.234 In dialogue with Lopesi, Eshrāghi summarizes, Lana argues that beyond developing new models of representation or interpretation, the expression of protest, sexual and spiritual difference, and diverse local and global Indigenous experiences, through writing and exhibitions are significant outcomes . . . Lana’s view of tautuanaga ʻo faʻāliga ata being relevant and important for the wider world is a sign of the globalised interconnectedness of contemporary life, and yet its emphasis on complex locality that exists today.235 What is also clear in the excerpts above is the reciprocity and care between Eshrāghi and Lopesi in the exchange across publications. Manifest as beautifully visible relationality, or “entanglements,”236 to cite Lopesi. “How do we get to know each other again?”237 she asks. ’ Further, such demonstrations of reciprocity and collective wellbeing are present in Eshrāghi’s use of refusal, through multiple languages interwoven into a single text, as in “Tanem toktok ia | Traduction | Fa‘aliliuga” (2021) within which they deliver multiple entry points and pauses to their relations. 234 Eshrāghi, in conversation with Lauren Wetmore, Season 4 Episode 4: Léuli Eshrāghi on “tagatavāsā,” Momus: The Podcast, January 29, 2021. https://momus.ca/season-4-episode-4-leuli-eshraghi-on-tagatavasa/?fbclid=IwAR0Am47OV4M-ijvG6jQMtLHSmwuJO4aQoX5Q8ZKzvFVWp_tDMsxZEXE32y8 235 Eshrāghi, Taeao, 97. 236 Lana Lopesi, “I find Myself in Entanglements,” Global Asia/Pacific Art Exchange Aotearoa: Ngā Tai o te Ao: the global tides, edited by Janine Randerson, Charlotte Huddleston, and Alexandra Chang (Auckland: St Paul St Gallery & Asia/Pacific/American Institute, NYU, 2020), 61. 237 Ibid. 108 III. 9. Ilippunga: I have Learned. Ilippunga: I Have Learned // St. Lawrence Iroquoians, Wabanaki Confederacy, and Wendake territory // Artists: Luke Airut, Manasie Akpaliapik, Abraham Anghik Ruben, Jolly Aningmiuq, George Arluk, Jimmy Inaruli Arnamissak, Barnabus Arnasungaaq, Goota Ashoona, Kiawak Ashoona, Isa Aupalukta, Simeonie Elijassiapik, Emily Pangnerk Illuitok, Jacob Irkok, Mattiusi Iyaituk, Pootoogook Jaw, Towkie Karpik, Ross Kayotak, Zacharias Kunuk, Robert Kuptana, Mattoo Moonie Michael, Peter Morgan, Joshua Nuilaalik, Maudie Rachel Okittuq, Nuna Parr, Kavavow Pee, David Ruben Piqtoukun, Uriash Puqiqnak, Silas Qayaqjuaq, Miriam Marealik Qiyuk, Toonoo Sharky, Nick Sikkuark, Lucy Tasseor Tutsweetok, Martha Tickie, Pauloosie Tukpanie, Judas Ullulaq // Curator: Heather Igloliorte // Exhibition and Publication Coordinator: Daniel Drouin, Curator of Early Art before 1900, in charge of the Inuit Art Collection, MNBAQ // Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, 179 Grande Allée Ouest, Québec City, Québec, Canada // Opened June 24, 2016 In “Curating Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit: Inuit Knowledge in the Qallunaat Art Museum,” Inuk curator and art historian Heather Igloliorte outlines the curatorial premise and process of Ilippunga: I have Learned, an exhibition she curated for la Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (MNBAQ) in Québec City with works from the museum’s Brousseau Inuit art collection.238 I taught from Igloliorte’s text in my introductory and Canadian art history courses, but had not yet had the opportunity to visit the exhibition until attending the 2019 University Art Association of Canada conference in Québec City. Wandering through the MNBAQ the day before the conference commenced, with little mind to the gallery map, exploring each space as I encountered it, I was caught off guard when I stepped into Ilippunga on the third floor of the Pierre Lassonde Pavilion at MNBAQ. The curatorial methodology was immediately palpable upon entering the exhibition. Igloliorte is decisive in the decolonial curatorial strategies she employs, shifting praxis to align with Indigenous methodologies, as well as indicating origins and locations of ideas, 238 Qallunaat translate as ‘non-Inuit.’ 109 rather than an overarching institutional authorial voice. In reference to her touring exhibition Decolonize Me239 that opened four years prior to Ilippunga, Igloliorte states, “I have also tried to encourage multi-vocality through collaboration with the artists and the public, consultation at all stages of production, and the inclusion of multi-sensory artworks and dialogic events such as the opening, the film screenings, and the lecture series.”240 Igloliorte’s approach, in effect, establishes a framework wherein knowledge can be accessed and exchanged laterally, and culturally appropriate labour and protocols are established from the outset and exercised at every stage. She continues: “Perhaps the most significant decolonizing strategy exercised in this exhibition is the privileging of Indigenous artists’ voices—meaning both their artists’ statements and translation of those statements into the Indigenous languages of their communities—through the exhibition and catalogue.”241 The parameters and opportunity to learn through the multisensory and multi-format components of the exhibition program, increases the potential for Indigenous participation through self-recognition, as well as for audiences to reflect on their own roles and responsibilities in relation to local and colonial histories.242 As in Decolonize Me, Igloliorte’s curatorial methodology in Ilippunga is culturally specific and speaks directly to dismantling the dominant status quo and to dislodging unbalanced authority. Moreover, it is a clear structure for understanding Inuit art as 239 Decolonize Me was curated by Heather Igloliorte and featured the work of Sonny Assu (Ligwilda’xw), Jordan Bennett (Mi’kmaw), Cheryl L’Hirondelle (Métis/Cree/German), Nigit’stil Norbert (Gwich’in), Barry Pottle (Inuit), and Bear Witness (Cayuga). The exhibition was organized by the Ottawa Art Gallery, opening in 2011, and toured until 2015 to Robert McLaughlin Art Gallery, Oshawa, ON; Art Gallery of Windsor, Windsor, ON; Foreman Art Gallery of Bishop’s University, Lennoxville, QC; Thunder Bay Art Gallery, Thunder Bay, ON; Vernon Public Art Gallery, Vernon, BC; The Reach Gallery and Museum, Abbottsford, BC; and the Tom Thomson Art Gallery, Owen Sound, ON. 240 Heather Igloliorte, “’No History of Colonialism’ Decolonizing Practices in Indigenous Arts,” in Decolonize Me, edited by Heather Igloliorte (Ottawa: Ottawa Art Gallery, 2012), 26. 241 Ibid. 242 Ibid, 26-27. 110 direct reflections of Inuit ways of knowing; a framework through which Inuit audiences may find themselves reflected not only in the artworks, but in the display structure and narratives, and one in which Qallunaat (non-Inuit) audiences may find new ways of learning and understanding the knowledge embedded in the artworks and the relationships throughout.243 Igloliorte explains, I proposed a new possible direction for interpreting Inuit art history from an emic perspective, taking the phrase Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit as the basis for understanding Inuit artistic productions throughout our long history and today. While the Inuktitut phrase is often simply translated as “Inuit traditional knowledge,” it can be more accurately understood to encompass the complex matrix of Inuit environmental knowledge, societal values, cosmology, worldviews, and language. The term Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit comes from the verb qaujima or “to know,” referring to “that which Inuit have always known to be true.”244 While the tenets of Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, now commonly referred to as IQ, have always existed in Inuit society, the widespread adoption of the overarching term itself is somewhat new. . . . Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit is not without relevance or application in modern Inuit life; it is a living knowledge. At the center of this philosophy is respect for relationships: the relationship with the land; the relationship with Arctic flora and fauna; and, especially, the relationship between family members and community members as to their responsibilities to each other, as well as their responsibility to 243 Heather Igloliorte, “Curating Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit: Inuit Knowledge in the Qallunaat Art Museum,” Art Journal 76, no. 2 (2017): 107. 244 Shirley Tagalik, “Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit: The Role of Indigenous Knowledge in Supporting Wellness in Inuit Communities in Nunavut,” in Child and Youth Health (Ottawa: National Collaborating Centre for Aboriginal Health, 2009–10), 1–2, quoted in Igloliorte, “Curating Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit,” 102. 111 pass on knowledge between generations. This philosophy, applied to the arts, underscores that for Inuit, the way to respect our ancestors is to maintain our living traditional knowledge and to be resourceful and creative, as they had to be. In this way, the work of Inuit artists is to constantly seek to deepen their knowledge of our longstanding creative practices while also continuously innovating to ensure that these practices thrive and participate in that living knowledge. Ingenuity is our tradition. The title of the exhibition, Ilippunga, the title which [Nunavummiut Elder] Piita Irniq gave to me, reflects this intergenerational transmission of knowledge. It means, “I have learned.”245 Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit comprises six basic principles: Pilimmasarniq (acquisition of knowledge); angiqatgiinniq (consensus-building and collective decision-making); pinasuqatigiinniq (working together for the common good); pijitsirarniq (serving; as in the common good, the community); qanurtuuqatigiinniq (resourcefulness and innovation); and avatimik kamatsianiq (environmental stewardship). The works are intentionally arranged to be understood through their many relationships to one another and to the IQ principles through the central exhibition themes: Nirjutinik Suusutsaniq, Nunami Suusutsaniq (Respect for Animals, Respect for the Land); Pijitsiraniq and Angiqatgiinniq (Caring for Each Other); Unikkaatuat (Oral Histories of the Arctic); Anaananik suusutsaniq and Ilagiinniup pimmariuninga (Importance of Family and Respect for Motherhood); Angakkuit (Shamans and Traditional Inuit Spirituality); Ukiurtatuup Asitjipaalianinga: Uppiniq, Qallunaanut tikitausimaniq, Nutaanngupalliajut (Changes in the Arctic in the Twentieth Century: Christianity, Colonialism, Modernization); and Ilurqusirmik uummatitsiniq takuminartutigut (Cultural Resurgence 245 Igloliorte, “Curating Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit,” 102-103. 112 through the Arts).246 Through this methodology, Ilippunga offers a multi-directional flow of knowledge in the overall layout and in the grouping within the exhibition cases. The relationships are revealed in each individual’s path through the space, that is purposefully not directed by exhibitions texts or timelines.247 A series of short videos are installed on the walls that encase the exhibition gallery. The videos function to centre living Inuit voices within the exhibition and relationships amongst the works encased in centre of the room; making contemporary Inuit voices available while addressing the historical lack of Inuit self-representation in Inuit art histories and in the curation of Inuit art.248 Prioritizing self-representation shifts the location of labour, and thus power, and transforms the constraints and understanding of knowledge, 249 especially given that, until recently, Inuit art has been primarily interpreted, presented, and documented by non-Inuit. Highlighting this foundational importance of self-representation, Mohawk curator and arts administrator Steven Loft claims Aboriginal curatorial practice is in a transitional space, as we see the creation and manifestation if decolonizing narratives where previously survival narratives (not to mention the work of non-Indigenous “expert” analysis and settler-dominated narratives) were predominant. This shifting of stance (at least as far as culture is concerned) can be linked to resistance methodologies and critical frameworks 246 Museum labels, Ilippunga: I Have Learned, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Québec, QC, 2016. 247 Heather Igloliorte, “Arctic Culture/Global Indigeneity,” Negotiations in a Vacant Lot: Studying Visual in Canada, edited by Lynda Jessup, Erin Morton, and Kristy Robertson (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), 151-154. 248 Ibid. 249 Gagnon, 71. 113 iterating Indigenous discursive intentionality that have been taking place over the last two decades.250 Furthering the conversation, Gilchrist asserts that the reformulation of Indigenous curation within Western institutions is predicated on the understanding that these seemingly but not entirely oppositional modes can not only coexist but can also strengthen one another. An institution informed by these kinds of Indigenous perspectives can make enormous inroads in moving beyond a one-dimensional ‘us-them’ dichotomy and create expansionary movement within the curatorial discipline.251 In view of the curatorial scaffold articulated by Loft and Gilchrist, Igloliorte reflections below clearly articulate the shifting usage and valuation of Inuit artistic production. While they might not be considered artists in the modern sense of the word, the ancestors of the Inuit always produced beautiful, elaborate and highly decorated objects. By making functional things of bone, fur and skin beautiful, these ancestors demonstrated their great respect and gratitude for the animals that provided food, warmth, light and life in the Arctic, thus ensuring that these animals would continue to care for the Inuit. Before contact with Qallunaat (non-Inuit peoples) and the outside world, Inuit carved intricate shapes and designs out of the precious walrus ivory, serving four main purposes: as tools (such as hair combs, utensils and harpoon heads), toys (for children), amusements (such as games, to pass the time during long winter nights), or for magical or spiritual purposes (including the creation of amulets and cere- monial objects). After contact with European whalers and explorers, Inuit expanded their carving 250 Steven Loft, "Who, me? Decolonization as Control,” in Decolonize Me, edited by Heather Igloliorte (Ottawa: Ottawa Art Gallery, 2012), 80. 251 Gilchrist, “Indigenising Curatorial Practice”, 56. 114 practice to include the creation of items for trade – particularly for invaluable European goods like saw blades, flour and metal sewing needles – thus beginning the first ever Inuit art industry.252 It has only been approximately 70 years since Inuit art has found a place in the international art scene. During this time, Inuit art has played a significant role “in creating a [Canadian] national identity distinct from USA and Britain.”253 The Brousseau collection reflects these developments and draws parallels to “other collections of Inuit art held in public museum collections across Canada, represent[ing] the appeal of Inuit aesthetic”254 that has been framed through Modernist notions of primitivism and usurped into representations of Canadian-ness.255 Considered through Mackey, what this framing of Inuit art as uniquely Canadian has done is erroneously trace an historical through line to demonstrate a clear mode of connection to endemic culture as inherited right and entitlement thus establishing belonging to land and to the cultural legacy of that land. As a corrective, what Igloliorte does with Ilippunga is establish the framework of a unique, long-standing, living culture by using active and present language and demonstrating the continuum between historical and contemporary epistemologies rooted in Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit. 252 Heather Igloliorte, Inuit Art. The Brousseau Collection: A Guide to the Collection (Québec: Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, 2016), 6. 253 Igloliorte, “Arctic Culture,” 157-158. In her chapter, Igloliorte discusses additional case studies—the exhibition Isumavut: The Artistic Expression of Nine Cape Dorset Women (Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1994) and the feature-length film The Journals of Knut Rasmussen (Isuma Productions, 2006)—as examples that reimagine and bolster the study of Inuit art through critical historicization and theorization. 254 Igloliorte, “Arctic Culture,” 159. 255 Ibid. 115 ’ 116 Section IV: Community 117 IV. 10. Community Approaches to community. We are sitting in the old log house at the entrance to the University of British Columbia campus along Highway 97 in Kelowna—now used as the MFA studios and an occasional meeting place for Creative Studies classes and gatherings. We are killing time while watching the gauge on the pressure cooker; waiting for the salmon canning process to complete. A group endeavour of learning to clean, cut, and pack the jars, guided by Peter and undertaken by students and participants of the Summer Indigenous Art Intensive.256 I am telling Peter about my research and he tells me about Noah Purifoy’s Outdoor Museum of Assemblage and Sculpture in Joshua Tree, California (1989-ongoing). There are too many historical and contemporary examples across Turtle Island to list; still, Noah Purifoy’s Outdoor Museum prompts thinking about Woman House in Los Angeles (1972), Heidelberg Projects in Detroit (1986-ongoing), Project Row Houses in Houston (1994-ongoing), Laundromat Project in New York City (2005-ongoing), BUSH gallery (2013-ongoing), Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective in Edmonton (2015-ongoing), and even the Summer Intensive as a distinct academic option facilitated through UBCO (2013-ongoing). The continuation of art spaces operating through means and modes derived from specific communities demonstrates enduring and widespread need for arts work that flexes to the needs and desires of non-dominant and non-conventional practices and methodologies. Our conversation, passing time, learning through stories, leads me wondering further how these intentional spaces of alterity set 256 The Summer Indigenous Art Intensive is an annual educational gathering organized through the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan in Kelowna, BC. The Intensive brings together undergraduate and graduate students with artists, writers, and scholars in residence for experiential and land-based learning through in-person and online gathering, exhibitions, conversations, lectures, coursework, and activities. I worked as one of the primary coordinators alongside rotating lead faculty, Ashok Mathur, Stephen Foster, and Tania Willard, from 2016 to 2020, and as a panel convenor in 2021. 118 within specific lands and communities act as guides for reimagining within exhibition spaces. ’ The essence of modelling is not to promote replication; instead, it is to learn the critical and expanded thinking and creativity involved in developing these spaces and practices. The ability of such models to engage community differently and to offer profoundly different experiences is best understood through the vision of each initiative and through the activities, services, and/or activisms that are ever-changing and are relevant to the surrounding communities and the communities involved. As such, they are demonstrations of what is possible when one is not limited by conventions borne of colonial narratives underpinned by western art system privilege and frequently formed as singular heteropatriarchal hegemonic frameworks. Within community-focused and decolonial curatorial discourse, fundamental arguments speak to considerations of “by whom and in relation to whom”257 and join with a thorough questioning of the power dynamics involved in community-gallery relationships. The complex roles of and relationships between artists, audiences, communities, cultural workers, curators, and organizations are significant here, thinking back to Butt and discussions around curatorial hospitality in chapters six, as well as decolonial feminist methodologies that guide practices through relationality, reciprocity, equity, self-reflexivity, and accountability. 257 Marijke Steedman, ed. Gallery as Community: Art, Education, Politics (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2012), 26. 119 For analysis of community as fluid yet foundational, I turn to Khan’s book Art in Community: The Provisional Citizen, which moves away from static and universal compositions of community and identifies important avenues for reconsidering community in relation to art practice. Using the Footscray Community Arts Centre in the western suburbs of Melbourne, Australia as a case study, Khan importantly projects that the “bonds produced by these forms of community might only be provisional ones, but they can present us with ideals of togetherness that offer productive ways of negotiating difference and diversity.”258 Khan considers the ways in which official and counter narratives of community are impacted by parameters introduced through state funding, as well as social expectations that determine community membership and belonging.259 “While community art has historically sought to expand the scope of [cultural participation and communal activity], it has always been in danger of relying on nostalgic and consensual forms of community as the basis for such activity,” without attending to the “messy realities” that community work inescapably involves.260 In a similar manner, Chhangur employs a methodology of “in-reach” to draw this messy reality of the tension, conflict, learning, and joyous potentiality of interdisciplinary community work into the spaces of the curatorial, supported through allotted time and space for resolution, and as an additional layer from which negotiation and problem-solving can deepen.261 Such thinking offers new ways to consider the relationships between curation and community, and the ways in which this intermediary space is composed for working together through difference, which I will address in greater detail below. These approaches to community extended by Khan and Chhangur also find 258 Khan, 16. 259 Ibid, 16. 260 Ibid, 88. 261 Emelie Chhangur, “What Can Contemporary Art Perform? And Then Transgress?” Canadian Theatre Review 162 (Spring 2015): 82-83. 120 affinities in hooks’ learning communities, and are reminders against prescribed formulas for engagement. Instead, each approach offers inspiration and further expands the potential for innovative thinking and practice through relationality. How is community defined? British sociologist Gerald Delanty theorizes a concern with belonging as a fundamental component across conceptions of community. Resonating with Khan’s approach, Delanty insists on the social dimension of community as “expressed in communicative contexts and is the basis of social recognition of the other.”262 Nonetheless, Delanty cautions, “under the conditions of modernity, the resulting commonality that emerges from discursive communities is often a fragile kind of belonging.”263 Consequently, impermanence is inherent in the construction of identity and status as defined by community membership. Delanty further explains, “There are also the wider cognitive and creative aspects of culture in which social worlds are created, rather than simply affirmed. The symbolic construction of community is held generally to be that which is sustained in rituals and in the consciousness of boundaries.”264 Relevant to contemporary gallery and museological practices, “discursive communities,”265 as Delanty describes, are frequently set apart from one another and conveyed as target audiences, to whom exhibitions and programs are tailored. Community membership is, as indicated above, much more nuanced, both in terms of its composition, how it is enacted, and in the tensions of inclusion and exclusion that 262 Gerald Delanty, Community (London: Routledge, 2010 [2003]), xiii. 263 Ibid. 264 Ibid, 34. 265 Ibid, xiii. 121 often muddles the boundaries of membership. Back to Khan, “the provisionality of the citizen calls for close attention to the specific rationales and interests of those involved in art-making, appreciating and participating, and the practices by which they might make claims to power.”266 This close looking, Khan continues, “is also about the kinds of collectives and forms of communality that are possible in contemporary life; if communities are dispersed and unbounded formations, they involve ongoing and provisional practices of belonging where citizens acquire power in piecemeal ways. Art and culture are central to these processes.”267 Following, curatorial considerations benefit from polyvocal and multidimensional strategies and mechanisms for engaging and navigating a broad scope of communities more deeply. As evidenced in how do you carry the land? and Ilippunga, the overarching institutional voice recedes and collective and culturally specific approaches originating from the curators and artists are made clear, reflecting and speaking to and with their own communities, while simultaneously reaching out broadly by offering multiple paths into the conversations through accompanying didactic texts, videos, publications, events, and the artworks themselves. Khan sets her theory within the realm of community art in Australia, yet the framework easily transfers more globally to considerations of the relationships of communities to art museums and spaces. I am specifically interested in how Khan conceptualizes community through a lens of provisionality. In my view, adopting the provisional as an approach and opening up the ways in which communities are identified and considered is significant as it recognizes the ever-present fluidity within community dynamics that necessitates continual institutional reflection and rethinking, working against residual or 266 Khan, 92. 267 Ibid. 122 potential stagnation and supremacy of programs, ideologies, and constructs of target audiences. Likewise, Khan points to the composition of community-as-projected, through the collaborative writing of Martin Mulligan, Kim Humphrey, Paul James, Christopher Scanlon, Pia Smith, and Nicky Welch, for whom a “projected community…[is] the active establishment of a creative space in which individuals engage in an open-ended process of constructing, deconstructing, and reconstructing identities and ethics for living.”268 Within, “the salient feature of aesthetic communities is community as a creative space, where people invent new ways of living, new forms of personhood.”269 In practice, Chhangur’s methodology of “in-reach” enacts these open-ended processes expressed by Mulligan et. al., and recognizes their meaningful contributions, impacting the ethos of the art institution. In hooks, too, there are parallels within the principles of learning communities, of mutuality and openness. Without question, Chhangur’s model of curation emphasizes the durational necessity of relational work. For Chhangur, building relationships means developing new “ways different social economies, models of cultural production, and different cultural protocols could come into the institution and transform it from within,” instead of transporting pre-existing gallery programs across the art gallery’s constituency.270 This work, she explains, “distinguish[es] between a socially-engaged curatorial practice and 268 Martin Mulligan, et al. Creating Community: Celebrations, Arts and Wellbeing Within and Across Local Communities (Melbourne: Globalism Institute, RMIT University, 2006), 18 quoted in Khan, Art in Community, 31. Mulligan et. al. also explore “grounded” and “way-of-life” communities. “Grounded community, in which the salient feature of community is taken to be people coming together in particular tangible settings based upon face-to-face relations or embodied engagement; Way-of-life community, in which the salient feature of community is comes from particular attitudes and practices held in common.” Mulligan et al., 18. 269 Ibid, 21. 270 Toronto Arts Foundation, “Margo Bindhardt and Rita Davis Cultural Leadership Award: Emelie Chhangur,” 2019. https://torontoartsfoundation.org/initiatives/awards/hidden-pages/margo-bindhardt-and-rita-davies-award/recipients/2019-finalists/emelie-chhangur. 123 curatorially-engaged social and civic approach to curatorial work.”271 It also necessitates the need for the institution as a whole and individual staff to be willing to work responsively and change their practices and ways of thinking about art and exhibition-making, “towards a not-yet-fixed future.”272 Chhangur further states: Incorporating new methodologies into the institution itself in order to change it from within takes time, and trust, and the commitment of the gallery staff, granting bodies, and administration (the institution) as well as the individuals and groups we seek to engage in the process of this transformation (the community), hoping that those same individuals and groups will continue to engage the institution in the future, only now on their terms and without binary opposition to/with one another.273 Having not had the opportunity to experience much of Chhangur’s programming firsthand, I am reliant on her writing, documentation, recorded public presentations, and live online talks that I have attended. Like Khan’s concept of community as provisional, the principles of in-reach transfer across projects and institutions. I see this in the inviting-in and the subsequent elasticity of the institution—at least temporarily—to address the needs and methodologies of the artistic and curatorial collaborators in how do you carry the land? Therein, normative procedures loosened to prioritize those of the artists and curator; especially in closing the exhibition for their mothers to meet, the inclusion of the curator as one of the primary collaborative performers in this is not us while activating Bulpitt’s three portrait masks through their performance, as well as the clear articulation of the curator’s and artists’ voices in dialogue with one another. 271 Toronto Arts Foundation. 272 Chhangur, “What Can Contemporary Art Perform?” Curating Live Arts, 363. 273 Ibid, 365. 124 Elements, in their specificities, that operate outside of or on the periphery of curatorial convention. Advocating for a “radical rethinking,”274 Chhangur proposes completely re-imagin[ing] the art institution as a poly-vocal place of practice where differing principles and protocols can combine, where we have more resources to draw upon in order to innovate new cultural forms of production and display, where timelines and deadlines don’t kill relationships, where the trajectory is not a projectile (out), but something more internal and feminist (inner).275 This type of radicality that advocates for polyvocality is echoed in UK-based museum ethics scholar Janet Marstine’s museological hypothesis, drawing on Charles Esche, to posit radical hospitality within curation as supporting the equal valuation of knowledge and expertise beyond the art historical.276 There are parallels here in Chhangur’s insistence on exploring modes of community practice and creativity, rather than privileging “particular modes of working that come from the system of contemporary art but that don’t come from the public.”277 Again, I find similarities in hooks’ learning community, which also proposes the equal valuation of knowledge, shared through trusting relationships formed over time. For hooks, “a radical pedagogy must insist that everyone’s presence is acknowledged . . . There must be an ongoing recognition that everyone influences the classroom dynamic, that everyone contributes. These contributions are resources. Used constructively, they enhance the capacity of any class to create an open learning community.”278 Hooks 274 Emelie Chhangur in Borelson, “Episode 3: Emelie Chhangur,” ThisFAR Doc, Feb 20, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0fU8zXRUbg 275 Toronto Arts Foundation. 276 Janet Marstine, Critical Practice: Artists, Museums, Ethics (London: Routledge, 2017), 165. 277 Chhangur, ThisFAR Doc. 278 hooks, Teaching as Transgression, 8. 125 continues on to say, even so, there “has to be some deconstruction of the traditional notion that only the professor is responsible for classroom dynamics”279 Taken as a pedagogical methodology applied to curation, not only is each role within an institution or project equally valuable in bringing exhibitions and programming to life, but as is each contributor or collaborator. This approach additionally dispels the western convention of overarching curatorial authority in favour of polyvocality and the emphasis on relationality and visible “collective effort.”280 Hooks, like Chhangur and Khan, addresses the messiness of engaged collective practices, and the necessary recognition of the fear and “pain involved in giving up old ways of thinking and knowing and learning new approaches”281 Additionally, hooks draws on Paulo Freire and Thich Nhat Hanh to bring the importance of “critical awareness and engagement”282 into view and to underscore pedagogical methodologies that are enacted through “wholeness, a union of mind, body, and spirit.”283 (Recall: breath ’ ). In dialogue, these three formations of community—provisionality, in-reach, and learning communities—offer a methodological matrix of support for the curatorial beyond the status quo, while operating from within the institution. Their overlap and significance within this research are in the ways in which relationality, wellbeing, and polyvocality is emphatically valued through acceptance, negotiating difference, along with individual and institutional reflexivity and flexibility. In this methodological matrix, there is increasingly more room for decolonial feminist curatorial futures. 279 hooks, Teaching as Transgression, 8. 280 Ibid 281 Ibid, 36 & 43. 282 Ibid, 14. 283 Ibid. 126 IV. 11. Project Row Houses Project Row Houses // Traditional territory of the Karankawa, Coahuiltecan, Atakapa-Ishak, and Sana peoples // 2521 Holman St., Houston, Texas, USA // Established 1994 Round 44. I was introduced to Project Row Houses in May of 2016. I was one of thirty or so curators led through the sun-drenched streets of Houston’s Third Ward by Eureka Gilkey, Project Row Houses Executive Director. Our tour of the Project Row Houses campus was organized as part of the annual Association of Art Museum Curators conference with nearly 600 curators from across the USA and a handful from Canada converging in Houston, Texas for five days. During a talk on the history of the project given by co-founder and artist Rick Lowe, I was drawn to the parallel yet interwoven functionalities of the organization—at once art residency and community service, each without the need to serve the other, while equally offering services and critical creative outlets for the community both immediate and at large. Like BUSH gallery, Project Row Houses stands as a foundational example of reimagined practice growing from community need and locational specificity. The organization is located in the traditional territory of the Karankawa, Coahuiltecan, Atakapa-Ishak, and Sana peoples, transformed into a historically Black community in southeast Houston. Project Row Houses defines itself in relation to communities that inhabit and pass through the district within which it presently sits. During my visit in 2016, the complexities and politics of land and community were illuminated through the collaborative visual and sound installation Nuria Montiel of Mexico City and Houston-based white settler John Pluecker, KARANKAWA CARANCAHUA CARANCAGUA KARANKAWAY, part of Round 44 | Shattering the Concrete: Artists, Activists and 127 Instigators, guest curated by Raquel De Anda. Supporting the context of the project and stated on Pluecker’s website, The dominant historical narrative in Texas contends that the Karankawa people were driven to extinction; however, through research and conversations, it became clear that members of the Texas Carrizo-Comecrudo tribe along with other Native Texans refute these accounts as they reclaim their own Karankawa ancestors, sometimes grounding themselves in the stories and lifeways of their own families.284 The collaboration between Montiel and Pluecker, and Pluecker’s personal ties to Indigenous communities through pre-existing friendships, brought them into conversation with individuals identifying as Karankawa in order to come to the final installation and an important demonstration of the Karankawa language within Project Row Houses.285 De Anda further explains, The work of Montiel, Pluecker and their diverse team serves to make the invisible visible by re-asserting the presence of an erased history. Their artistic process is one of learning how to see anew, of asking how culture is shaped by colonial structures that validate, erase and distort histories. Together the group asks how culture survives and morphs amid the pressure of modern capitalist structures. They ask what the resonance of First Nations is within contemporary identities and remind us to look again at the culture that surrounds us, as it is certainly shaped by structures we are unaware of.286 284 John Pluecker, “Karankawa Carancahua Carancagua Karankaway,” Project Description, 2016. https://jdpluecker.com/kcck-w-nuria-montiel-2016 285 John Pluecker, “KARANKAWA CARANCAHUA CARANCAGUA KARANKAWAY: Centering Indigenous Presence in Southeast Texas,” in Geopoetics in Practice edited by Eric Magrane, Linda Russo, Sarah de Leeuw, and Craig Santos Perez (London: Routledge, 2019), 74-87. 286 Raquel De Anda, Round 44 | Shattering the Concrete: Artists, Activists and Instigators (Houston: Project Row Houses, 2016), 4. 128 Positioned across the floor of the shotgun house at 2509 Holman Street within the Project Row Houses complex, Karankawa words formed through letters, carefully built from soil and sand using a laser-cut stencil and fix with nopal cactus mucilage, were accompanied by audio of the Karankawa language being spoken aloud. This audio component was produced by Lucas Gorham, a sound artist and musician of Karankawa ancestry, and long-time family friend of Pluecker. I recall that with each step I took across the wooden floor, the sand-built letters frayed minutely, losing form over time and activating another conceptual layer of the installation. As is the case across Turtle Island, many linguistic histories are taught as shaped through assimilation and extinction. The poetic layering of the installation intentionally “honors the legacy and language of the Karankawa people of Southeast Texas.”287 Taking into account the process that led to the installation, Pluecker reiterates, “a poem is not a container or a collection of words. Poetry is, instead, a process of “being in relation” to the earth and all its inhabitants.”288 In the absence of Montiel and Pluecker’s installation, prior and following, Project Row Houses does not visibly address the widespread historical and continual erasure of the Indigenous inhabitants that has been explicitly articulated through KARANKAWA CARANCAHUA CARANCAGUA KARANKAWAY.289 In part, my intention for including this installation in my discussion is to identify the demonstrated position of organizational acknowledgement in relation to Indigenous lands. Even still, the social design of Project Row Houses is relevant to my decolonial feminist impulse in that it has instituted a system of support from within its community. 287 De Anda, 3. 288 Pluecker, “Centering Indigenous Presence,” 76. 289 To the extent of my current research. 129 Bound up. Project Row Houses borrows philosophical principles from the late German artist Joseph Beuys, wherein location and community become the material for organizational practice, a view similarly held by Chhangur. As such, Project Row Houses maintains “a specific commitment to flagrantly breaking the rules of the art world by subscribing to a new line of thinking—the neighbourhood was the studio, the studio operated as a school, a school is made up of community, the community was the people, and the people was where what mattered resided.”290 To note, concern for community and community involvement are not always one in the same. They do not always seek or produce the same result. Nonetheless, the centralization of community as uniquely defined by Project Row Houses matches principles foundational to hooks’ learning communities, wherein it is understood that if members of the community (equating hooks’ students) “see themselves as mutually responsible for the development of a learning community, they offer constructive input,”291 and likewise, as outlined within Chhangur’s principles of in-reach around ownership and institutional value. Likewise, the operational philosophy of “‘bound up’ or closely involved with,” as put by Ryan Dennis former Project Row Houses Curator and Programs Director, “radically shifts the gaze from an overseer (artist) of subject (community) vantage point to a proximity discourse shaped by realities, resources, and relationships.”44 Dennis explains, Noted activist, academic, and artist Lilla Watson’s often-quoted statement says, “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come here because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”292 290 Ryan H. Dennis, ed. Collective Creative Actions: Project Row Houses at 25 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 22. 291 hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 206. 44 Dennis, 22. 292 Footnote (truncated) included in quote: “Lilla Watson, in a speech during the 1985 United Nations Decade for Women conference in Nairobi. The quote’s original source is unconfirmed, but multiple 130 This notion of “bound up” is at the center of PRH’s creative practice generally, and its education pedagogy more specifically. It is the reason why the organization would not only make work inside the shotgun style houses for the community to experience, but moreover it would have to contribute to the community’s ecosystem therefore operating as a vested member—making it, at once, in the community and of the community. This vibrant new operating system would only see success if it was of significant consequence to all involved.293 Without the ability to return to Houston during the global Covid-19 pandemic period that coincided with writing this dissertation, my focus has turned to the high-level conceptual and functional structure of Project Row Houses as a model from which new and nuanced possibilities can be drawn to fit specific community demands. Project Row Houses took the needs expressed by the community of Houston’s Third Ward and “melded life’s important everyday needs, like childcare, [free weekly] homework help [through Third Ward Tutoring], and social activities, with traditional art-world practices such as [exhibitions, artist residencies, performances], artist talks and studio art-making sessions.”294 Since its founding in 1994, the Project Row Houses campus has grown both geographically and financially with the ability to host a number of community programs, initiatives, and facilities, like the Eldorado Ballroom as a gathering and event space and the Incubator Program that supports the development of small business and community enterprises. The Financial Opportunity Centre Program is centred on job skills training through financial and career coaching, public benefits support, facilitated scholarly texts cite this conference as its origin. However, Watson stated that she prefers the citation to be, “Aboriginal activists group, Queensland, 1970s,” because she does not want to take credit for collective-based work.” Dennis, 21-22. 293 Dennis, 21-22. 294 Ibid, 22. 131 programs such as the Virtual Financial Literary series, as well as sessions with an Art Therapist. Importantly, Project Row Houses has also established a complex of affordable housing “for low-to-moderate income residents, public spaces, and facilities to preserve and protect the historic character of the Third Ward,”295 as well as the Young Mothers Residential Program. Its present formation works to address the current needs of the community, developed through partnerships with other community organizers and stakeholders. Therein, elements of community formation and engagement as expressed by hooks, Chhangur, and Khan are present throughout the organization, taking programs to where the community is at, learning form one another, and shifting and developing new programs to accommodate the provisionality of the Third Ward community. In principle, the many programs and services offered by Project Row Houses contribute to the health and wellbeing of the Third Ward community. “This fusion,” as Dennis explains, “was deliberate in an effort to yield intended consequences. It became a hub where folks from various walks of life could get what they needed to be whole, it simultaneously explored and expanded the job description for cultural institutions and artist societies.”296 Although it has been six years since my visit to Project Row Houses, an encounter with Project Row Houses and the arts ecology of Houston through the Association of Art Museum Curators tour such as mine invites nuanced thinking and proposals around where and how to push the boundaries of western convention. I have included Project Row Houses in this study as a key example because of the ways in which community contributions are imbedded into the organizational infrastructure 295 “About Us,” Row Houses CDC, accessed October 10, 2021. https://www.rowhousecdc.org/about-us 296 Dennis, 22. 132 and philosophy. Further, seeing firsthand the simultaneous support of art in its own right and community services within a single organization completely transformed my view of curation and my role as a curator. Khan’s analysis of community is significant here in considering the multifaceted relationships between curators and communities, as she is critical of the universalizing idea of community frequently constructed by art organizations and organizers. 297 Through Khan’s notion of community as affirmative, yet provisional, Project Row Houses illustrates the inherent fluidity of membership and need for continual adaptability in terms of audience and community needs. Finally, and most importantly in relation to this study, I see the potentiality of Project Row Houses not simply as a template, but as a model that sparks thinking around what other organizational structures are possible. 297 Khan. 133 IV. 12. Tahltan Song Cycle Tahltan Song Cycle // Lekwungen territory // Artist/curator: Peter Morin // Open Space, 510 Fort St., Victoria, British Columbia, Canada // June 19 – July 25, 2015 Protocols—Song Cycle. Friday evening, June 19, 2015. Open Space welcomed a sizeable crowd. Morin opened Tahltan Song Cycle with a performance to activate the songs of his nation within the context of the gallery. Due to a death in his home community, Tahltan protocol requires that no songs be sung, Morin explained. Nonetheless, Morin remained focused on the power of the songs as he conversed with his cousin Carmen McPhee in Terrace, BC, over speakerphone, and, instead, read aloud the English translations of Tahltan song titles recorded by ethnographer James Teit in the early 1910s, a recurring figure in the colonial documentation and interpretation of Indigenous histories throughout the interior of British Columbia.298 At the opening of Tahltan Song Cycle, the speaking of rather than performing the songs was augmented by personal and family anecdotes, humour, and the sweetness of a conversation between cousins. I leaned against the wall near the reading room and listened alongside fifty or so attendees sitting on the floor or standing amongst the artworks, all witnesses to Tahltan protocols taking place in the gallery. How to disrupt the conventions of display. On Wed, Jun 10, 2015 at 9:52 PM, peter wrote: hi Doug, Helen okay. i am not at the office and up late. here is a list of items for the exhibition. 298 Teit was the scribe for the Memorial to Sir Wilfred Laurier, Premier of the Dominion of Canada from the Chiefs of the Shuswap, Okanagan, and Couteau Tribes of British Columbia, presented at Kamloops August 25, 1910, see Appendix. 134 1. Tahltan Land Button Blanket 2. Button Blanket Tent 3. Record player/intervention 4. a tahltan indian declares war on the british monarch 5. tahltan song performance documentations 5. 500 folded paper canoes 6. 15 Land Song Cuts 7. 6 portraits of Tahltan Recording Artists Singers 9. hide boxes aka the machines that return the songs to the land 10. audio drum 11. water song video #1 (on the wall)(i was thinking of tom thompson paintings) 12. water song video #2 (for the floor) 18. blue drum 19. blue rattle 21. Tahltan Art AKA ceramic beak. . . hanging from the ceiling in the gallery: 1. the tahltan territory button blanket - we will need some doweling for this 2. the button blanket tent - also will need some doweling for this *potentially hanging from the ceiling 1. shovel, 2. stone tool, ***this is a weird list. PM 299 The gallery’s longest wall was occupied by a series of photographs documenting Morin, cloaked in a button blanket and black mask with abalone shell buttons, singing Tahltan songs to monuments in public spaces in and around London, England, including Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, Houses of Parliament, the totem pole (1958) in Windsor Great Park by Kwakwaka'wakw artist Mungo Martin, the Diana Princess of Wales Memorial 299 Email correspondence between Morin and Doug Jarvis, then Open Space Guest Curator, and Helen Marzolf, then Open Space Director, published in Peter Morin, Tahltan Song Cycle, exhibition brochure (Victoria: Open Space, 2015), 2. 135 Fountain in Hyde Park, and the statue of Pocahontas at St. George Church, Gravesend. Helen Gilbert writes: “Using his voice to ‘tag’ colonial monuments, Morin’s songs took the form of ‘cultural graffiti’.”300 This work, Cultural Graffiti in London (2013), was performed as part of Indigeneity in the Contemporary World: Performance, Politics, Belonging, an interdisciplinary project led by Gilbert, Professor of Theatre at Royal Holloway University in London. buckingham palace. thousands of people. set up the blanket. put on your armor. sing the song. the song that is a tahltan river rushing inside of me. the drum speaks. it says 'this drum supports indigenous voice.' the drum beats are bullets. does anyone know this? (only me). sing the song. fall down and sing the song into the land. drum and sing around the monument. overheard conversations: 1. i think he thinks he's an indian. 2. shhh. this is an indigenous performance. i also hear applause. walk up to the gate. wearing the armour. use your voice to write on the gate. the words ‘we are still here. we remain. we are still vibrant. you did not fucking win anything. today. you lose everything.’ don’t notice the guy with the big gun. walk toward the cross walk. get stopped by british police before crossing. questioned. questioning. questioned ‘this could be a protest.’ i am silent. My ally speaks for me. Dani says, ‘this is a performance to understand colonization.’ 300 Helen Gilbert, J.D. Phillipson, and Peter Morin, “Cultural Graffiti in London: Singing Life into Exhibitions and Embodying the Digital Document,” UNESCO Observatory Multi-Disciplinary Journal in the Arts 5 (2015): 10. 136 police says, we get uncomfortable with masks.’ i offer to take the mask off. police says ‘how much more do you have to do.’ to which i respond, ‘oh. just one more song.’ 301 At Open Space, the Cultural Graffiti in London photographs are supported by a red through-line tracing the length of the wall paired with black geometric line work linking them with photographs of Tahltan singers and Tahltan bags, snowshoes, moccasins, and beadwork from the early 20th century, held in the collection of the Canadian Museum of History (previously the Museum of Civilization) in Ottawa, Ontario. These linkages clearly signal the relationality of knowledge and presence of Morin’s Tahltan ancestors not only attended to in Cultural Graffiti in London— singing a song from our community, but also embodying a way of being; a way of being in relation to people, a way of being in relation to the land here, and then leaving the song in the land performing the cultural graffiti exactly where the monument meets the ground 302 —but throughout the entire exhibition. “What does it mean to sing these songs in many settings?”303 Morin asks. As in how do you carry the land?, Morin “collu[des] with these ancestor beings,” sings the ancestors into these spaces, “perform[s] Tahltan Nation knowledge,” and confronts colonial power.304 Occupying the central floor space in a grid 301 Museum label for Peter Morin, a tahltan indian declares war on the british monarchy (from the Cultural Graffiti in London series), Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, July 14 to October 28, 2018. 302 Peter Morin, in Dani Phillipson and Sergio Miguel Huarcaya, dirs., “The Artist Sings: Peter Morin in Conversation,” 2013, https://vimeo.com/119944337 303 Morin, “The Artist Sings.” 304 Ibid. 137 formation, books with racist interpretations of Indigenous art and histories and problematic historical narratives are bound in twine and red, yellow, black, and white fabric—the colours of the four directions in many Indigenous traditions. The treatment of these texts returns control of knowledge to Indigenous hands, both in the binding by Morin and engagement by the participants of the Indigenous Youth Arts Program that took place in conjunction with the exhibition, as well as their future life buried in the earth of Secwepemcúĺecw, at BUSH gallery. The layering and fluidity of exhibition components reinforce the relationality between land, language, and community—extended through video projections of land and waterways that overlaying and activating Teit’s version of the song titles painted on the gallery wall and pooling over the three moose hide boxes on the floor sounding out Tahltan music: the machines that return the songs to the land.305 ’ 305 Peter Morin, Work Plan, Open Space archive, Victoria, 2015. 138 The inclusion of the audio and textural recordings of Tahltan voices and songs exemplify acts of capture and extraction, signified by the recurring presences of the Anglicized song titles and a gramophone in the centre of the room. Morin views the gramophone as an apparatus, like a canon projecting the colonial voice, used to steal the songs of the Tahltan people. In the course of the exhibition, moose hide was draped over the gramophone—to silence the assault.306 Tahltan Song Cycle is not just an exhibition in the sense of simply placing objects for display, as in the articulation of “curating” by Martinon and Rogoff and Ndikung, discussed in chapter one. More accurately, the evolving elements of this project operate within the curatorial as an “event of knowledge,”307 termed by Martinon and Rogoff, while equally reflecting Ndikung proposal of, “employing other strategies that open up cracks and caveats of care that we might not have explored until now, and that constantly adapt themselves to the needs of the artists, art, and audience, as well as times and spaces—and most especially over extended periods of time before and beyond the exhibition itself.”308 To this end, Tahltan Song Cycle not only attends to the histories and impact of colonization, the potlatch ban, and the simultaneous criminalization paired with extraction of Indigenous cultural practices, it is intrinsically tied to a community and grounded in specific relationships between song and land, which hold key protocols and practices of accountability for the Tahltan people—past, present, and future. 306 Peter Morin, in conversation with author, July 2015. An earlier, much shorter version of the above segment of chapter 9 was originally published as “Open Space for Conversations, and for Songs,” analogue (Aug/Sep 2015). 38 Martinon and Rogoff, ix. 39 Ndikung, 50. 139 A song has a life. It lives. And colonization has gotten in the way of that living. For example, there were many machines to remove the songs from the land. The Tahltan Song Cycle is about building a Tahltan Machine to return the songs to the land (and the steps that got us to the place of building). Anthropologist James Teit recorded 78 of our Tahltan Nation songs and removed them from our land. This compliment of songs, recorded from the dates 1912 to 1915, live at the Museum of Civilization in Ottawa. There is a lot of distance between Ottawa and Northern BC. These songs still live in the museum of our Tahltan Nation hearts. The songs are a record of Tahltan Nation performance arts. These songs are also a record of significant Tahltan Nation singer/song writers.309 Locations of care. I am thinking about Ndikung’s proposal of strategic care within the curatorial in relation to Tahltan Song Cycle, encompassing the gamut of relational “epistemic, moral, and legal considerations.”310 Where is care located in this work? This question brings my focus both backward and forward to discussions of land and to the labour of Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, tautuanaga ‘o fa‘āliga ata, and Indigenous littoral curation, to Tahltan art histories, and other methodologies located in endemic epistemologies. It bounces back to Reckitt’s question of who is or isn’t cared for and weaves through community 40 Peter Morin, Work Plan, Open Space archive, Victoria, 2015. 310 Ndikung, 47. 140 relationships. Exemplifying Michif curator and educator Cathy Mattes’ conception of Indigenous littoral curation (see chapter thirteen), care is centrally located in Morin’s methodology, also akin to decolonial feminist curation, although it may not be explicitly so in its enunciation and application. Morin demonstrates careful and intentional accountability through the omnipresence of Tahltan ancestors and living community, through the manner histories are told, across intergenerational collaboration and mentorship, and in the flexibility to change course and enact protocols as needed. These structural choices counter coloniality by privileging Indigenous voice and praxes in the face of external interpretation and by reimagining what is possible within the curatorial and—as a gardener would to the soil and the crop—tending to production and pedagogy. The insistence on a need for knowledges and cultural belongings to be cared for just as you or I do, as suggested by Hopkins, offers a profoundly different experience with art.311 Displayed on Tahltan terms, the social life of knowledge and cultural belongings is embodied in each component of Tahltan Song Cycle. In letting Tahltan protocols and knowledge take centre stage. In who is involved and how involvement takes place. In bringing the land into the gallery, overlaying Tahltan songs with video, sound, action. In honouring Tahltan singers. In pulling prints as songs. In binding books, ceasing the violence of words. In covering the gramophone, silencing the assault. 311 Candice Hopkins, “On Indigeneity, Curatorial Methodologies and Sound,” Independent Curators International Events, August 19, 2020. https://curatorsintl.org/events/on-indigeneity-curatorial-methodologies-and-sound 141 In taking the stories of the land to the crown. In returning the songs to the land. In sharing space. In the unfixity. In mentorship. In relation. ’ 142 Lineage . . . Furthering Tahltan Song Cycle as an event of knowledge, Morin’s role at Open Space was multifaceted, blurring the line between artist and curator, while holding the role of mentor for Open Space’s Indigenous Youth Arts Program (IYAP), now the Indigenous Emerging Artists Program (IEAP). Morin’s work with IYAP in 2015 continued the development of a still ongoing framework for mentorship within Open Space that began in 2013 through the imaginings of Sarah Hunt of the Kwakwaka’wakw Nation and as the Indigenous Youth Arts Showcase, “opening up opportunities to nurture greater collaboration with Indigenous youth.”312 Working within Tahltan Song Cycle, the 2015 IYAP group activated and added to the exhibition, a bold and care-filled gesture of shared and collaborative space, that is more often seen as tangential to an exhibition, rather than within the exhibition and artworks themselves. The IYAP group contributed by pulling prints directly from the woodcuts installed on walls throughout the exhibition; by speaking and sealing messages inside envelopes with red salmon prints pulled from woodcuts, then placing them in rows on the floor next the moose hide boxes; by learning and filling the exhibition space with songs; by engaging in individual and collective poetry writing; and by working across mediums with the mentor artists. Such practices speak to feminist theories of the interrelationship of self and other, alongside collaboration that thrives on diversity of perspective and on constructive dialogue to “acquire new skills, and develop unknown aspect of the self.”313 The invitation to the IYAP participants to contribute to the exhibition and the collective learning facilitated the building of relationships, both provisional and sustainable, to ideals, possibilities, and with other participants. 312 Sarah Hunt, Gifts from Our Ancestors, exhibition brochure (Victoria: Open Space, 2014), 2. 313 John-Steiner, Creative Collaboration, 187. 143 . . . Legacy. LAND BACK // Lekwungen territory // Artist: Lacie Burning, Whess Harman, Chandra Melting Tallow, Nicole Neidhardt // Curator: Eli Hirtle // Open Space, 510 Fort St., Victoria, British Columbia, Canada // October 9, 2020 – January 16, 2021 The legacy of Morin’s work with Open Space and the methodologies in Tahltan Song Cycle are present in the current (2021) developing policies and practices of Open Space, where I currently work as a curator. I also see this legacy in the 2020 exhibition LAND BACK curated by Eli Hirtle, a Nêhiyaw/British/German filmmaker and Open Space Curator, Indigenous and Contemporary Art. Traversing the intersections of land, labour, and community, LAND BACK is many things to many people, but at the root of this project are our responsibilities to and relationships with the land, and our work to (re)connect with our territories and waterways in meaningful ways. We come from the land. Our teachings, laws, and stories come from the land. We are the land. The land is our home, our mother, our caregiver . . . LAND BACK is a demand for the return of jurisdiction over our lands and waters, and an assertion of this responsibility. It is not theoretical or metaphorical. It is a rallying cry to protect the lands and waters that took care of our ancestors, sustain us today, and that will nurture the generations to come.314 Hirtle and I speak often about the influence Tahltan Song Cycle has had on our curatorial practices, and in particular shifting what is possible in curating. Reaffirming a lineage, elements of LAND BACK echo Tahltan Song Cycle through the iterative process Hirtle developed with artists Lacie Burning (Kanien'kehá:ka), Whess Harman (Carrier Wit’at), Chandra Melting Tallow (Siksika Nation), and Nicole Neidhardt (Diné), installing onsite in 314 Eli Hirtle, LAND BACK, exhibition brochure (Victoria: Open Space, 2020), 1. 144 two-week intervals, and responding to other works in the exhibition. Again, relationality and reciprocity are prominent methodologies exercised across the exhibition’s contributors, as they worked with land and community, and relationships within the exhibition were seeded during the 2019 Summer Indigenous Art Intensive in Kelowna, at which Hirtle, Burning, and Harman were artists in residence. As the project unfolded, flexibility for ever-changing Covid-19 public health orders and protocols continued to shift how things would take place. Additional time to ready logistics and accommodate the fluid circumstances of the contributing artists and their communities. Even with the restrictions that prohibited gathering, space was still made for activist gestures and for work to be produced through collaboration and youth mentorship through the Unity Mural (2020), painted onto removable panels affixed to the gallery walls. Led by Neidhardt in collaboration with Brianna Bear, this work was intentionally constructed to be rehoused within Bear’s home community, the Songhees First Nation, following the close of the exhibition. In the exhibition text, Hirtle explains: Over the month of September 2020, Open Space worked with Kinship Rising and artists Brianna Bear and Nicole Neidhardt on a mural project with Lekwungen youth. As a result of the limitations regarding in-person meetings and prioritizing the safety of community members during Covid-19, we decided that a face-to-face mural design workshop with local youth was not possible. 20 care packages were dropped off to youth in the Lekwungen communities of Esquimalt and Songhees with items for self-care and creativity, and a process for contributing to the mural design with the theme of the shoreline; the place where the land and 145 water meet. These artistic contributions from the youth were transformed into the design composition created by Brianna Bear and Nicole Neidhardt.315 In addition, Burning, Harman, Melting Tallow, and Neidhardt each designed individual LAND BACK risograph prints, printed by the Victoria-based RISO Collective and sold with proceed to land defence organizations selected by the artists. Harman’s LAND BACK patches were also sold through the Open Space online shop with proceeds donated directly to the Unist’ot’en Camp set up to stop the building of Coastal GasLink pipelines in Wet’suwet’en Territories (in central British Columbia).316 I have witnessed this continuity of relationality and reciprocal mentorship and accountability through action throughout Open Space’s programming (of course, not without the messiness of interrelationships, signalling Chhangur). These approaches are lasting across the learning communities that they nurture and inspire and the collective work towards greater institutional-reflexivity through the in-progress revisioning of what Open Space can be. Once again this has been made tangible in the continuation of the IYAP/IEAP program, with the 2021-2022 iteration developed by Hirtle in collaboration with Jesse Campbell (Cree/Métis/Scottish/ English), a participant in the first IYAP with Hunt and Morin, and in partnership with the Tah’lum Indigenous Artists Collective. Such continuity is equally indicative of the philosophical impact of Morin’s work on Open Space, leading the artist-run-centre to instate the Elder in Residence and Elder Support positions in 2019, inaugurally held by Namgis Elder Gerry Ambers and Tyrone Elliott of Snuneymuxw and Quw’utsun ancestry. Further demonstrating measurable moves 315 Hirtle, 3. 316 For Harman: “Land Back means Indigenous sovereignty. / Land Back does not acknowledge or uphold colonial borders. / Which means that we do not uphold white supremacy. / Which means that we hold state violence accountable. / Which means we will not allow people to be swallowed by prisons. / Which means that we support our allies.” https://www.openspacestore.ca/product/land-back-patch-whess-harman/59?cp=true&sa=true&sbp= false&q=false 146 towards action over rhetoric, the gallery was made available, through the initiative of Open Space’s late director Raj Sen, to racialized artists and organizers as a place to converge safely following the commencement of the Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis police, and more recently, a donation was made by Open Space to the Indian Residential School Survivors Society upon the finding of unmarked children’s graves on the grounds of the Kamloops Indian Residential School in June 2021. It is important to note that the decolonial legacy of Open Space does not begin and end with the contributors mentioned here. As Open Space continues to broaden its understanding of who its communities are and who the communities are that each of the staff and contributors brings with them, I have experienced, much more in recent months as we collectively find our footing through Covid-19 and the grief of Sen’s passing, the result of Sen’s push for horizontality and the space he made for open, non-judgemental conversation. For Raj. ’ 147 ’ 148 Section V: Constellations If every molecule in our body is made of dying stars, new constellations are in constant formation. – Emelie Chhangur317 We cannot just think, write or imagine our way to a decolonized future. – Leanne Betasamosake Simpson318 317 Chhangur, “What Can Contemporary Art Perform? And The Transgress?” Curating Live Arts, 363. 318 Simpson, 16. 149 V. 13. A Conclusion, a Love Letter, or a Second Opening Isn’t it always a storied praxis? Returning frequently to Victoria—the place I consider my hometown, although admittedly with some hesitation, having spent twenty years there through my youth and early adulthood—I am reminded of conversations with my father as I drive through the streets. Passing through intersections, memories arise; another story. The land itself has its own stories, once again so often paved over. The expansive shoreline and urban visual cues function as mnemonic devices, often unrelated, for knowledge that has informed my worldview. In the Fall of 2019, I visited with my father’s cousin in Toronto whom I had not seen since I was very small, but whom was in continuous conversation with my father throughout his life, having been born only six months apart. She told many stories about my father and her uncle, my grandfather. I was struck by the mirrored ideation I was witnessing, clearly formed between her and my father for nearly eight decades. I have always known of this relationship, still I only fully understood its significance and depth through that visit. Segments of my personal story, that bookend and weave throughout these pages, reveal and gesture towards a process of understanding my familial histories and my relationships to place and to various communities in order to better understand my responsibility to the sites and praxes that I inhabit and through which I carry out my work. It supports an approach to curatorial thinking and action grounded in decolonial feminist methodologies that continually and critically questions who is present and how. In a sincere effort to not centre whiteness, I must recognize where whiteness is at play within my own positionality as I gain greater awareness of how and where my worldview shapes my understanding and interpretation. I have learned to recognize harmful 150 thoughts and normalized behaviour and to pause as they pass by in order to keep moving beyond them. Through this practice, I acknowledge the limitations of my personal knowledge and commit to ongoing learning, as an informed witness and participant in practices that open up the boundaries of western institutions. To know one another, as Wilson allows his readers to get to know him, is to better understand our work, how we work, and our differences.319 As Wilson anchors his methodology through relationships, he explains: “Rather than viewing ourselves as being in relationship with other people or things, we are the relationships that we hold and are part of.”320 To qualify, the work of relationship-building within the context of art and curation does not necessarily need to be made public, only with consent and when it is appropriate to do so. For non-Indigenous curators working with Indigenous artists, communities, and objects, Mattes generously emphasized, while responding to an audience question during a public talk for Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art (MAWA), working relationally by building relationships and collaborating with other Indigenous curators, and that care extends beyond the exhibition, both spatially and durationally.321 Curation modeled through relationality, as Mattes proposes (alongside Eshrāghi, Gilchrist, Hogue, Igloliorte, Willard, and others), changes the ways in which labour and power are dispersed and knowledge is shaped. It refuses assumptions and renegotiates what Reckitt expresses as “the volatility of the contemporary curator’s position [that] differs from that of traditional museum curators who accrue specialist knowledge of particular movements, genres or periods.”322 In part, relational accountability establishes 319 Here, I’m specifically referencing Wilson’s framework in Research is Ceremony (2008) which alternates between personal narrative and methodological explication. 320 Wilson, 80. 321 Cathy Mattes, “Strategies for Indigenous Curating as Care” (First Friday Lectures, MAWA Programs, February 5, 2021). https://vimeo.com/510897080 322 Reckitt, 9. 151 the locations of power and responsibility beyond the maintenance of the art object to account for the relationships that resonate from the object or that draw in other objects, ideas, communities, and companions. I want to return for a moment to chapter six and the interplay between the languaging of ham-dam, the Farsi term for companion meaning ‘one you breath with,’ and Butt’s proposal of “learning to live other models of hospitality”323 to consider how these intertwining concepts perhaps offer yet another point of departure. One in which it is already understood that settlers, or more specifically white settlers, cannot fully know the internal lives of racialized individuals and communities; and, returning to Bell, occupy “a stance of settler uncertainty and openness, as a starting point to imagine and practice otherwise.”324 To know one another. ’ To breath together. ’ For folks like myself, coming to decolonial feminist curatorial work without Indigenous lineage, from lengthy settler familial histories, and educated in a public-school curriculum that had not yet moved away from Indigenous peoples as past tense, there needs to be an extensive process of unlearning—as signalled by the Sara Ahmed quote at the opening of this dissertation—paired with a relearning. But there is no formula. For Utrecht-based curators Binna Choi and Annette Krauss, “unlearning denotes an active critical investigation of normative structures and practices in order to become aware, and getting rid of taken-for-granted ‘truths’ of theory and practice.”325 I am in agreement here, and in conjunction with decolonial feminist principles, individual and institutional unlearning within the western context can open up space and expand praxes to support 323 Butt. 324 Mackey, 126. 325 Binna Choi and Annette Krauss, “Unlearning Institutions. Do as You Present (Or Preach),” in How Institutions Think: Between Contemporary Art and Curatorial Discourse, eds. Paul O’Neill, Lucy Steeds and Mick Wilson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017), 68. 152 something else. In an individual sense, I try to work from place and from community, which are often the sites artists and contributors are attached to and bring with them. I look at where and how that work relates to where the project is located. I aim to establish relationships that enable me to understand how each artist works and what their needs are, transpiring as logistical conversations articulating the artist and institutional expectations, compensation for a project, and questioning which modes of communication work best (for example, can we work remotely, or do I need to travel to meet with them?). What are the artists’ stories? The community’s stories? And most importantly, what do they need? Mindfully establishing how to work together—how to be in relation—is undertaken with openness and awareness to what may or may not be said through direct communication, requiring some intuitive work, yet essentially in moving towards a greater foundation of care. Looking closer at the institutionalized labour involved in unlearning, Choi and Krass offer salient suggestions that I am continually in process of applying. In this unlearning, paying attention to habits is crucial, which raises the question whether it is possible ever to get rid of habits, and form new habits actively . . . Sara Ahmed connects institutions with unconscious routines. She argues that “when things become institutional, they recede from consciousness. To institutionalize is [. . .] to become routine or ordinary.”326 This indicates that institutional habits address at once the structural perspective of fixed, regular, and stable institutions, and the personal, embodied involvement that allows institutions to institute over time.327 326 Ahmed, On Being Included, 12, quoted in Choi and Krass, 68. 327 Choi and Krauss, 68. 153 Choi and Krauss’ invocation of Ahmed’s argument circles back to Hogue’s attention to what is valued, also drawing on Ahmed, as discussed in chapter one and in relation to how do you carry the land? To break “institutional habits,”328 as proposed by Choi and Krauss, means equally to renegotiate and re-establish systems of valuation across western paradigms of art, which requires a proliferation of new and underrepresented modes of presentation, opportunities to centre racialized voices, institutional openness—and curatorial imagination! The essence of modelling. Recalling her first encounter with starfish, Robin Wall Kimmerer explains the process of understanding new forms: I knew from pouring over field guides in anticipation of the trip that we “should” see starfish in the tidepools, and this would be my first . . . Picking my way over the rocks, I pocketed fragments of mussel shells the color of the moon, and tiny sculpted pieces of driftwood, looking continuously. No starfish. Disappointed, I straightened up from the pools to relieve the growing stiffness in my back, and suddenly—I saw one. Bright orange and clinging to a rock right before my eyes. And then it was as if a curtain had been pulled away and I saw them everywhere. Like stars revealing themselves one by one in a darkening summer night. Orange stars in the crevices of a black rock, speckled burgundy stars with outstretched arms, purple stars nestled together like a family huddled against the cold. In a cascade of discovery, the invisible was suddenly made visible . . . The sensation of sudden visual awareness is produced in part by the formation of a “search image” in the brain. In a complex visual landscape, the brain initially 328 Choi and Krauss, 68. 154 registers all the incoming data, without critical evaluation . . . All this is input, but the brain does not immediately interpret the data and convey their meaning to the conscious mind. Not until the pattern is repeated, with feedback from the conscious mind, do we know what we are seeing.329 In relation to creativity, Vera John-Steiner illuminates the following: In the course of creative endeavors, artists and scientists join fragments of knowledge into a new unity of understanding. This process is demanding; it calls upon all the inner resources of the individual—active memory, openness to experience, creative intensity, and emotional courage. It demands self-knowledge in the use of expansion of one’s talents.330 Together, Kimmerer and John-Steiner illustrate internal modes of accessing and building sensorial languages specific to place—or time, emotion, being, etc.—that enable seeing, or, perhaps, not seeing. Through this process, we draw together things known to imagine unknown possibilities. In more scientific terms, cognitive scientist Jim Davis explains, The imagination usually starts with some kind of command from the executive areas of your brain, the prefrontal cortex. And then what it does is it uses whatever task it has in mind to retrieve certain memories, recombine them, put them in different places, and eventually come up with some kind of hypothetical situation. And then that might be turned into some kind of an image, like an auditory-like sound or a visual-like impression in your mind's eye . . . So, when you're trying to design [something new], you're having to rely on imaginative processes, your world understanding, and what we call "mental simulation," which is trying to 329 Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2003), 8-9. 330 Vera John-Steiner, Notebooks of the Mind: Explorations of Thinking (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 73. 155 think through how something might work. A lot of it is just generating things in your head and accepting or rejecting them based on a very fast pass simulation of how it might work. All imagination, in that form, are recombination of memories. Memories are the fuel of imagination and in some sense, the more kinds of different things you experience, the more energy you're giving to the complexity of your imaginations.331 As stated in chapter eight, the essence of modelling is not simply to template new forms of curatorial practice; instead, models provide opportunities to learn the critical and expanded thinking and involved creativity to uniquely imagine, or reimagine, nuanced curation relevant to the surrounding communities and the communities involved. The importance of establishing diverse precedence for curatorial practice and the impact it can have on the ethos and policies of an institution cannot be overstated—for those who are unwilling to support projects and practices without precedence; for those who cannot imagine otherwise. In the uncertainty of testing strategies that have not previously been the norm within western paradigms of art, it is “necessary to practice compassion in these new learning settings,”332 as hooks reminds us, and to take on responsibility together.333 ’ As I write this final section, I am re-watching video documentation of Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory and Tanya Tagaq’s performance for #callresponse at the Native 331 Jim Davis, in conversation with Bob MacDonald, “Exploring the Science of Imagination, So We Can Build a Creative Computer,” Quirks and Quarks, CBC Radio (January 17, 2020) https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/jan-18-ancient-gum-preserves-genome-a-living-robot-wolf-puppies-play-fetch-and-more-1.5429990/exploring-the-science-of-imagination-so-we-can-build-a-creative-computer-1.5430007 332 hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 42. 333 Ibid, 206. 156 Education Centre in Vancouver.334 I hear Tarah’s laugh in the background and my mind floods with previous conversations and gatherings and the opportunities I was afforded through this PhD process. Through the care that was bestowed on me by my doctoral supervisors, Ashok Mathur and Tania Willard, amidst the circumstances of academia that, for me, always fit “somewhat uncomfortably,”335 I was brought into experiences that would not have been possible otherwise. Herein, I have been witness to and participant in feminist decolonial and relational modalities bolstering the processes of curation as care—care for praxis through which to better care for others. There can be no definitive conclusion when considering this research and textual compilation as a response to what was the current arts climate when I began and what is current now five years later. This responsive work is always ongoing, bringing together different elements, “recombination[s] of memories,”336 into relation to engage in a “constant formation”337 of something new, as evidenced in the focused examples throughout this text. The story you will encounter in the final pages locates us (author and reader) once again in relation, as you overlay your memories onto mine. It asks for attention to the details and openness to where memories, histories, and legacies are held. Recognizing who and what we care for, both in life and in curation, brings the conversation full circle, to kinship and friendship, and to what shapes us. Circling around once again, there is responsibility and accountability to land and community, actioned through location and labour, however this may be formed. 334 grunt gallery, #callresponse – Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory and Tanya Tagaq (performance, Native Education Centre, Vancouver, BC, October 28, 2016). https://vimeo.com/193610785?fbclid=IwAR26xFNEC6HahNG2zqSmT8N2wvq6U57BkR4mpGmmiMJxQR4O1WHF6cOBD1o 335 Jacques and Lawrence, 58. 336 Davis. 337 Chhangur, “What Can Contemporary Art Perform? And The Transgress?” Curating Live Arts, 363. 157 V. 14. Plant stories are love stories too. I cohabit my home office with three plants that came to me when my father passed away. These plants lived history with my ancestors and they come to me with stories told to me by my father, and held and retold to me by my mother when I can’t seem to recall them. My father found the snake plant (also known as mother-in-law’s tongue) growing in an upstairs sink when he moved into a big, old shared house in Toronto in the 1970s. He cared for it for nearly 50 years, moving it across the country from Toronto to the West Coast at least twice, along with our countless other moves throughout British Columbia and once to Orillia, Ontario, in the 1980s and 1990s. Fittingly, while taking a break between podcast recordings for a project I was working on in 2021, a colleague told a story about their relatives in the Philippines following a tradition of bequeathing snake plants. At least three of us at the gathering that day had inherited a snake plant. Accompanying my father’s snake plant is a hoya, whose lifespan, I am certain, is equally as storied, exerting its sensational presence for a brief moment every few years when it blooms; and, finally, there is a string of hearts. The most senior of the three, the string of hearts is a cutting from his mother’s plant that she cared for throughout his youth. Appropriately sophisticated, the string of hearts, in my mind, stands in for her necklaces strung with plastic bobbles in 1970s vogue and my mind’s eye images of her meticulously kept home that I have built from stories and photographs. I never met my father’s parents. They died before I was born. Now, they exist as likenesses of me in black and white photographs, in the stories told to me by my father and his cousin, through small heirlooms and costume jewellery, informatic documentation on microfilm at the Archives of Ontario, and a surprisingly plentiful family tree on an ancestry website compiled by a handful of strangers. Nevertheless, in 158 these acts of moving with, caring for, and holding stories, I come to know my ancestors by learning about the lives of their plants. 159 ’ 160 Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. “White Men: When we walk of ‘white men’ we are describing an institution. ‘White men’ is an institution. By saying this, what am I saying?” Common Place (December 7, 2020). https://commonplace.knowledgefutures.org/pub/white-men/release/1?fbclid=IwAR0V-qGFOI3hS5KeNo1wlRHE6cWadNTZex0DRRK iipA00dwWrGAVLD7Y8Kg – – –. Living A Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. – – –. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. – – –. Differences that Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism. Cambridge University Press, 1998. Aikau, Hokulani K., Maile Arvin, Mishuana Goeman, and Scott Morgensen. "Indigenous Feminisms Roundtable." Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 35:3 (2015): 84-96. Akbar, Kaveh. “The Palace.” Poems, The New Yorker, April 18, 2019. https://www.newyorker.com/books/poems/kaveh-akbar-the-palace. Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992. Anderson, Kim. “Affirmations of an Indigenous Feminist.” In Indigenous Women and Feminism: Politics, Activism, Culture, edited by Cheryl Suzack, et al., 81-91. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010. Antwi, Phanuel. “On Labor, Embodiment, and Debt in the Academy.” Auto/Biography Studies 33, no. 2 (2018): 301-326. Arias, Krista. “The Earth is My Elder,” PhD diss., The University of British Columbia Okanagan, 2021. Arvin, Maile, Eve Tuck, and Angie Morrill. “Decolonizing Feminism: Challenging Connections between Settler Colonialism and Heteropatriarchy.” Feminist Formations 25:1 (2012): 8-34. Assembly of First Nations. Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery. January 2018. Augaitis, Daina, Lorne Falk, Sylvie Gilbert, and Mary Anne Moser, eds. Questions of Community: Artists, Audiences, Coalitions. Banff: Banff Centre Press, 1995. Bal, Mieke. "The Discourse of the Museum." Thinking about Exhibitions. Eds. Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson and Sandy Nairne, 201-218. New York: Routledge, 1996. Barbour, Karen, et. al. “Researching Collaborative Artistic Practice.” Waikato Journal of Education 13 (2007): 49-76. 161 Beckwith, Naomi. “The Sharp, White Background: Thoughts on Race and Art in the 21st Century,” Frieze 167, December 16, 2014. https://www.frieze.com/article/sharp-white-background Belcourt, Billy-Ray. A History of My Brief Body. Toronto: Penguin Random House Canada, 2020. – – – and Maura Roberts. “Making Friends for the End of the World.” GUTS: Futures 6 (May 23, 2016). http://gutsmagazine.ca/making-friends/ Bell, Avril. Relating Indigenous and Settler Identities: Beyond Dominations. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Ltd., 2014. Bell, Sdaahl K’awaas Lucy, 方靜怡 Denise Fong, and Armando Perla, facilitated by Sharanjit Kaur Sandhra. “Beyond the Black Squares: A Meaningful Conversation on Museums and Allyship.” BC Museums Association Conference, October 9, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6nn_11DT4c&list=PLdKYeYPzhfsdqrQ-R-qHq53kafNeOUw9J&index=5& fbclid=IwAR1DwI7aNyZVRYXvvN6Oz0jgxJYnhb6 xTnKv6Pcu1BuPUvCV2ShSfk3ohmI Best, Susan. “What is a Feminist Exhibition? Considering Contemporary Australia: Women.” Journal of Australian Studies 40:2 (2016): 190-202. Bélidor, Eunice, et. al. “A Letter from the Black Curators Forum to Contemporary Art Institutions and Organizations across This Land Called Canada.” Canadian Art. Online (Fall 2020). https://canadianart.ca/features/a-letter-from-the-black-curators-forum-to-contemporary-art-institutions-and-organizations-across-this-land-called-canada/ ` Billing, Johanna, Maria Lind, and Lars Nilsson, eds. Taking the Matter into Common Hands: On Contemporary Art and Collaborative Practices. London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007. Bishop, Claire. Radical Museology: or, What’s ‘Contemporary’ in Museums of Contemporary Art? London: Koenig Books, 2013. – – –. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso, 2012. – – –. “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics.” October 110 (Fall 2004), referenced in Rimi Khan. Art in Community: The Provisional Citizen. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Blackwood Gallery. “Mandate,” Blackwood Gallery. Last accessed October 25, 2021. https://www.blackwoodgallery.ca/about#mandate Borelson. “Episode 3: Emelie Chhangur,” ThisFAR Doc, Feb 20, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0fU8zXRUbg 162 Bradley, Will and Charles Esche, eds. Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader. London: Tate Publishing, 2007. Burton, Johanna, Shannon Jackson, and Dominic Willsdon. Public Servants: Art and the Crisis of the Common Good. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016. Butler, Cornelia and Lisa Gabrielle Mark, eds. Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007. Butler, Cornelia and Alexandra Schwartz, eds. Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art. New York: MoMA, 2010. Butt, Danny and Local Time. “Colonial Hospitality: Rethinking Curatorial and Artistic Responsibility.” Last accessed November 22, 2021. https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/228399/264279 Byrd, Jodi. Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Cartiere, Cameron and Martin Zebracki eds., The Everyday Practice of Public Art: Art, Space, and Social Inclusion. New York: Routledge, 2015. Chiefs of the Shuswap, Okanagan, and Couteau Tribes. Memorial to Sir Wilfred Laurier, Premier of the Dominion of Canada from the Chiefs of the Shuswap, Okanagan and Couteau Tribes of British Columbia. Kamloops, BC, August 25, 1910. Chhangur, Emelie. “What Can Contemporary Art Perform? And Then Transgress?” Curating Live Arts: Critical Perspectives, Essays, and Conversations on Theory and Practice, eds. Dena Davida, Marc Pronvost, Véronique Hudon, and Jane Gabriels, 363-371. New York: Berghahn, 2018. – – –. “What Can Contemporary Art Perform? And Then Transgress?” Canadian Theatre Review 162 (Spring 2015): 82-83. Choi, Binna and Annette Krauss. “Unlearning Institutions. Do as You Present (Or Preach).” In How Institutions Think: Between Contemporary Art and Curatorial Discourse, eds. Paul O’Neill, Lucy Steeds, and Mick Wilson, 66-78. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017. Ćirić, Maja. “The (Un)spoken Abuse: Curatorial Hospitality through the Lens of Criticality.” In Cultures of the Curatorial: Hospitality: Hosting Relations in Exhibitions, edited by Beatrice von Bismarck and Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer, 203-212. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016. Combahee River Collective. “A Black Feminist Statement.” In This Bridge Called My Back, edited by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, 210-218. New York: Kitchen Table Women of Colour Press, 1983 [1977]. Condorelli, Céline. “In Support: A Theoretical and Practical Investigation into Forms of Display.” PhD diss. Goldsmiths, University of London, 2014. 163 – – –. “Notes on Friendship.” Mousse 32 (February 2012): 222-227. Conley, Christine, Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue. “Making Space for Utopia: FAG and the Aesthetics of Activism.” n. paradoxa 30 (2012). Conrad, Diane and Anita Sinner, eds. Creating Together: Participatory, Community-Based, and Collaborative Arts Practices across Canada. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color." Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (July 1991): 1241-1299. Davis, Angela. Woman, Race, and Class. New York: Vintage, 1983. Davis, Heather, ed. Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2017. Davis, Jim, in conversation with Bob MacDonald. “Exploring the Science of Imagination, So We Can Build a Creative Computer,” Quirks and Quarks, CBC Radio, January 17, 2020. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/jan-18-ancient-gum-preserves-genome-a-living-robot-wolf-puppies-play-fetch-and-more-1.5429990/exploring-the-science-of-imagination-so-we-can-build-a-creative-computer-1.5430007 Day, Pip. “When the Colonizer Comes to Stay.” In How Institutions Think Between Contemporary Art and Curatorial Discourse, edited by O'Neill, Paul, Lucy Steeds and Mick Wilson, 86-101. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017. De Anda, Raquel. Round 44 | Shattering the Concrete: Artists, Activists and Instigators. Houston: Project Row Houses, 2016. Decter, Leah and Carla Taunton. “Addressing the Settler Problem.” Fuse Magazine 36, no. 4 (2013): 32-39. Deepwell, Katy. “Feminist Curatorial Strategies and Practices Since the 1970s.” In New Museum Theory and Practice: An Introduction, edited by Janet Marstine, 64-84. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2008. Delanty, Gerald. Community. London: Routledge, 2010 (2003). Dennis, Ryan H., eds. Collective Creative Actions: Project Row Houses at 25. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. Derrida, Jacques and Anne Dufourmantelle. Of Hospitality, trans. by Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Devine, Bonnie and Richael Laking. “Tkarón:to and Turtle Island: The Remarkable Indigenous Trade Networks,” Myseum of Toronto, November 22, 2018. http://www.myseumoftoronto.com/programming/tkaronto-turtle-island/ 164 de Zegher, Catherine, ed. Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of 20th Century Art In, of and From the Feminine. Boston & Cambridge: Institute of Contemporary Art and MIT Press, 1996. Dhillon, Jaskiran. “Notes on Becoming a Comrade: Indigenous Women, Leadership, and Movement(s) for Decolonization.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 43, no. 3 (2019): 41-54. Dhillon, Kim. “What Else Might Be Possible? Towards a Decolonial Criticism.” C Magazine 45 (Spring 2020). https://cmagazine.com/issues/145/what-else-might-be-possible-towards-a-decolonial-criticism Dimitrakaki, Angela and Lara Perry, eds. Politics in a Glass Case. Feminism, Exhibition Cultures and Curatorial Transgressions. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013. Dua, Enakshi and Angela Robertson, eds. Scratching the Surface: Canadian Anti-Racist Feminist Thought. Toronto: Women’s Press, 1999. Dunnill, Ginger. “Episode 43: Introduction to #callresponse: Interviews with artist/curators Tania Willard, Maria Hupfield, and Tarah Hogue.” Broken Boxes podcast, February 21, 2016. – – –. “Episode 54: Interview with Tarah Hogue,” Broken Boxes podcast, October 20, 2016. El-Hadi, Nehal. “Radical Curation: Taking Care of Black Women’s Narratives.” Model View Culture 21 (2015). https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/radical-curation-taking-care-of-black-womens-narratives English, Darby. To Describe a Life: Notes from the Intersections of Art and Race Terror. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. Eshrāghi, Léuli. “Tanem toktok ia | Traduction | Fa‘aliliuga.” L’Internationale Online, May 19, 2021. https://www.internationaleonline.org/research/politics_of_life_and_ death/182_tanem_toktok_ia_traduction_faaliliuga/ – – – in conversation with Lauren Wetmore, Momus: The Podcast, Season 4 Episode 4: Léuli Eshrāghi on “tagatavāsā,” January 29, 2021. https://momus.ca/season-4-episode-4-leuli-eshraghi-on-tagatavasa/?fbclid=IwAR0Am47OV4M-ijvG6jQMtLHSmwuJO4aQoX5Q8ZKzvFVWp_tDMsxZEXE32y8 – – –. Taeao:’O Māfaufauga O Fa’āliga Ata: Ma O Sāuniga Mo O Tātou Lumana’I. PhD diss., Monash University, 2018. – – –. “Curating Under Pressure in Settler Colonies.” In Discipline: Issue No. 4.5, TarraWarra Biennial 2016: Endless Circulation, edited by Helen Hughes, 70-90. Discipline: Melbourne, 2017. Fatona, Andrea. “In the Presence of Absence: Invisibility, Black Canadian History, and Melinda Mollineaux’s Pinhole Photography.” Canadian Journal of Communication 31 (2006): 227-238. 165 Farardo-Hill, Cecilia, et. al. Radical Women Latin American Art, 1960-1985. Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2017. Fellows, Mary Louise and Sherene Razack. “The Race to Innocence: Confronting Hierarchical Relations among Women.” Journal of Gender Race & Justice 1 (1998): 335-352. Fields, Jill, ed. Entering the Picture: Judy Chicago, the Fresno Feminist Art Program, and the Collective Vision of Women Artists. New York: Routledge, 2012. Finkelpearl, Tom. What We Made: Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. Firth-Eagland, Alissa and Candice Hopkins, et al. The F Word. Vancouver: Western Front, 2012. Fotiadi, Eva. “The Canon of the Author: On Individual and Collective Authorship in Exhibition Curating.” Journal of Art Historiography 11 (2014): 1-12. Frances, Cierra. “Creating Learning Communities: An Analysis of Public events at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Toronto Biennial of Art.” MA Thes., OCAD University, 2020. Fraser, Andrea. “‘As If’ We Came Together to Care.” In Cultures of Curatorial: Hospitality: Hosting Relations in Exhibitions, edited by Beatrice von Bismarck and Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer, 37-50. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, translated by Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2005 [1970]. Gagnon, Monika Kin. Other Conundrums: Race, Culture, and Canadian Art. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2000. – – –. “Rethinking Expo 67.” In Summer Indigenous Art Intensive 2017, Keynote Presentations. Kelowna: CiCAC Press, 2018. – – – and Richard Fung. 13 Conversations About Art and Cultural Race Politics. Montreal: Artextes Editions, 2002. Garcia-Antón, Katya, ed. Sovereign Words: Indigenous Art, Curation and Criticism. Oslo: Office for Contemporary Art, 2018. Garneau, David. “Imaginary Spaces of Conciliation and Reconciliation: Art, Curation, and Healing.” In Arts of Engagement Taking Aesthetic Action In and Beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, edited by Dylan Robinson and Keavy Martin, 21-42. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016. Gilbert, Helen, J.D. Phillipson, and Peter Morin. “Cultural Graffiti in London: Singing Life into Exhibitions and Embodying the Digital Document.” UNESCO Observatory Multi-Disciplinary Journal in the Arts 5 (2015). 166 Gilchrist, Stephen. “Indigenous Curatorial Interpellations: Insistence and Refusal.” In The Australian Field: Practices, Policies, Institutions, edited by Tony Bennett, Deborah Stevenson, Fred Myers, and Tamara Winikoff, 250-263. New York: Routledge, 2020. – – –. “Indigenising Curatorial Practice.” In The World is Not a Foreign Land, edited by Quentin Sprague, 55-59. Parville: Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, 2014. Golding, Viv and Wayne Modest, eds. Museums and Communities: Curators, Collections and Collaboration. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013. Goodden, Sky. “A Rebuttal, Not a Conversation: Discussing Ombaasin’s AGO Intervention, “Land Rights Now,” Momus, June 23, 2015. http://momus.ca/a-rebuttal-not-a-conversation-discussing-ombaasins-ago-intervention-land-rights-now/ Gordon, Lewis R. “Decolonization and Black Aesthetics.” Keynote Presentation, Arte e descolonização conferência, Museu de Arte de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil, October 18, 2018. https://masp.org.br/seminarios/arte-e-descolonizacao Goto, Ayumi. “‘Good Willed Inertia’: Radicalizing the Lazy Academy.” RACAR 45 (2019): 60-82. --- and Peter Morin. “Hair.” In The Land We Are: Artists & Writers Unsettle the Politics of Reconciliation, eds. Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill & Sophie McCall, 174-184. Winnipeg: ARP Books, 2015. Grande, Sandy. "Whitestream Feminism and the Colonialist Project: A Review of Contemporary Feminist Pedagogy and Praxis." Educational Theory 5, no. 3 (Summer 2003): 329-346. Green, Joyce, ed. Making Space for Indigenous Feminism. Black Point: Fernwood, 2007. grunt gallery. #callresponse – Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory and Tanya Tagaq. Performance, Native Education Centre, Vancouver, BC, October 28, 2016. https://vimeo.com/193610785?fbclid=IwAR26xFNEC6HahNG2zqSmT8N2wvq6U57BkR4mpGmmiMJxQR4O1WHF6cOBD1o Hargreaves, Allison and David Jefferess. “Always Beginning: Imagining Reconciliation Beyond Inclusion or Loss.” In The Land We Are: Artists & Writers the Politics of Reconciliation, edited by Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill and Sophie McCall, 200-210. Winnipeg: ARP Books, 2015. Hamington, Maurice. “Toward a Theory of Feminist Hospitality.” Feminist Formations 22, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 21-38. Hayden, Malin Hedlin and Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe, eds. Feminism is Still Our Name: Seven Essays on Historiography and Curatorial Practices. New Castle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010. 167 Hein, Hilda. “Looking at Museums from a Feminist Perspective.” In Gender, Sexuality and Museums, edited by Amy K. Levin, 53-64. London: Routledge, 2010. Helguera, Pablo. Education for Socially Engaged Art: A Materials and Techniques Handbook. New York: Jorge Pinto Books, 2011. Henderson, Jennifer and Pauline Wakeham. “Colonial Reckoning, National Reconciliation?: Aboriginal Peoples and the Culture of Redress in Canada.” English Studies in Canada 35, no.1 (2009): 1-26. Hirtle, Eli. LAND BACK. Exhibition brochure. Victoria: Open Space, 2020. Hill, Gabrielle L’Hirondelle, Amy Kazymerchyk, Chandra Melting Tallow, and Jeneen Frei Njootli. “Coney Island Baby.” C Magazine 136 (Winter 2018): 18-23. Hogue, Tarah, ed. Ayumi Goto and Peter Morin: how do you carry the land? Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 2018. – – –, et. al. #callresponse. Vancouver: grunt gallery, 2016. – – –. “#callresponse: presence across platforms,” MICE 02, edited by Radiodress (Fall 2016). http://micemagazine.ca/issue-two/callresponse. – – –. Assemblage Activation, Performance Description, 2018. http://www.tarahhogue.com/ayumi-goto-and-peter-morin-how-do-you-carry-the-land – – –. this is us, Performance Description, 2018. http://www.tarahhogue.com/ayumi-goto-and-peter-morin-how-do-you-carry-the-land – – –. edlā moeder 母親, Performance Description, 2018. http://www.tarahhogue.com/ayumi-goto-and-peter-morin-how-do-you-carry-the-land – – –, Ayumi Goto, and Peter Morin. “the all of usness in the room,” Artist Talk and Book Launch, Vancouver Art Gallery, September 29, 2018. http://www.tarahhogue.com/ayumi-goto-and-peter-morin-how-do-you-carry-the-land – – – and Maria Hupfield. “Radical Signals in (Re)conciliation.” In #callresponse, edited by Tarah Hogue, 14-43. Vancouver: grunt gallery, 2016. Holder, Jo and Catriona Moore. “A Feminist Curator Walks into a Gallery . . .” In Feminist Perspectives on Art: Contemporary Outtakes, edited by Jacqueline Millner and Catriona Moore. New York: Routledge, 2018. hooks, bell. “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators.” In The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, edited by Amelia Jones, 94-104. London: Routledge, 2002. – – –. Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics. Cambridge: South End Press, 2000. 168 – – –. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994. Hopkins, Candice. “On Indigeneity, Curatorial Methodologies and Sound,” Independent Curators International Events, August 19, 2020. https://curatorsintl.org/events/on-indigeneity-curatorial-methodologies-and-sound – – –. “Beyond the Guest Appearance: Continuity, Self-Determination, and Commitment to Contemporary Native Art.” Panel featuring artists Nicholas Galanin, Ashley Holland, Candice Hopkins, and Steven Loft Moderated by Dyani White Hawk, Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, MN, February 27, 2018. – – –. “We Are Always Turning Around on Purpose: Reflecting on Three Decades of Indigenous Curatorial Practice.” Art Journal 76, no. 2 (2017): 39-47. Horne, Victoria, Kirsten Lloyd, Jenny Richards, and Catherine Spencer. “Taking Care: Feminist Curatorial Pasts, Presents and Futures.” OnCurating: Curating in Feminist Thought 29 (May 2016): 116-129. – – – and Amy Tobin. “An Unfinished Revolution in Art Historiography, or How to Write a Feminist Art History.” Feminist Review 107 (2014): 75-83. Huneault, Kristina and Janice Anderson, eds. Rethinking Professionalism: Women and Art in Canada, 1850-1970. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2012. Hunt, Sarah. Gifts from Our Ancestors, exhibition brochure. Victoria: Open Space, 2014. – – – and Cindy Holmes. “Everyday Decolonization: Living a Decolonizing Queer Politics.” In Journal of Lesbian Studies, 19:2 (2015): 154-172. Igloliorte, Heather. “Curating Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit: Inuit Knowledge in the Qallunaat Art Museum.” Art Journal 76, no. 2 (2017): 100-113. – – –. Inuit Art. The Brousseau Collection: A Guide to the Collection. Québec: Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, 2016. – – –. “Arctic Culture/Global Indigeneity.” In Negotiations in a Vacant Lot: Studying Visual in Canada, edited by Lynda Jessup, Erin Morton, and Kristy Robertson, 150-170. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014. – – –. “’No History of Colonialism’ Decolonizing Practices in Indigenous Arts.” In Decolonize Me, edited by Heather Igloliorte, 19-27. Ottawa: Ottawa Art Gallery, 2012. – – –, Brenda Croft, and Steven Loft. Decolonize Me. Ottawa: Ottawa Art Gallery, 2012. Ignace, Marianne and Ronald E. Ignace, Secwépemc People, Land, and Laws: Yerí7 Re Stsq'ey's-Kucw. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2017. 169 – – –, – – –, and Gerald Etienne. “An Essay on Secwepemc Photography, Then and Now,” in Re tsúwet.s re Secwepemc: The Things We Do, exhibition catalogue, 6-7. Kamloops: Kamloops Art Gallery, 1999. Jessup, Lynda and Shannon Bagg, eds. On Aboriginal Representation in The Gallery. Hull: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 2002. Joachim, Joana. “Embodiment and Subjectivity: Intersectional Black Feminist Curatorial Practices in Canada.” RACAR 43, no. 2 (2018): 34-47. John-Steiner, Vera. Creative Collaboration. Oxford University Press, 2000. – – –. Notebooks of the Mind: Explorations of Thinking. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Jones, Amelia. “Feminist Subjects versus Feminist Effects: The Curating of Feminist Art (or is it the Feminist Curating of Art?).” OnCurating: Curating in Feminist Thought 29 (May 2016): 5-21. – – – and Erin Silver, eds. Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016. Kester, Grant H. ed. The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Khan, Rimi. Art in Community: The Provisional Citizen. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. – – –. “Why We Need to Talk About Race in the Arts, or the Limits of Aspirational Diversity.” In Australian Art Field: Practices, Policies, Institutions, edited by Tony Bennett, Deborah Stevenson, Fred Myers, and Tamara Winikoff, 158-169. New York: Routledge, 2020) Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2004. Kristensen, Annika, et. al. Greater Together. Melbourne: Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 2017. Kisin, Eugenia “Unsettling the Contemporary: Critical Indigeneity and Resources in Art.” Settler Colonial Studies 3 no. 2 (2013): 141-156, DOI: 10.1080/2201473X.2013.781927 Kwon, Miwon. One Place After Another: Site Specific Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge: MIT press, 2004. Lawrence, Bonita and Enakshi Dua. “Decolonizing Anti-Racism” In Cultivating Canada: Reconciliation through the Lens of Cultural Diversity, edited by Ashok Mathur, Jonathan Dewar and Mike DeGagné, 235-262. Ottawa: Aboriginal Healing Series, 2011. 170 Lawrence, Toby Katrine. “Its Roots and Its Innovative Departures: Considering Curatorial Hospitality.” In Creative Conciliations: Reflections, Responses, and Refusals, edited by Jonathan Dewar, Tarah Hogue, and Jennifer Robinson. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, forthcoming. – – –. “Curatorial Insiders/Outsiders: Speaking Outside and Collaboration as Strategic Intervention.” Insiders/Outsiders: The Cultural Politics and Ethics of Indigenous Representation and Participation in Canada’s Media Arts, edited by Dana Claxton & ezra winton. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, forthcoming. – – –. “Artefacts: Architecture of the Bush.” C Magazine Art 136 (Winter 2018): 72. – – –. “Open Space for Conversations, and for Songs,” analogue (Aug/Sep 2015). – – – and Michelle Jacques, “Plant Stories are Love Stories Too: Moss + Curation,” PUBLIC 64 (2022): 54-61. Lind, Maria. “The Collaborative Turn.” In Taking the Matter into Common Hands: On Contemporary Art and Collaborative Practices, edited by Billing, Johanna, Maria Lind and Lars Nilsson, 15-31. London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007. Linklater, Tanya Lukin. Keynote Presentation, Summer Indigenous Art Intensive, The University of British Columbia, Okanagan, Kelowna, BC, July 17, 2019. Lippard, Lucy R. From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women's Art. New York: Dutton, 1976. Loft, Steven. "Who, me? Decolonization as Control,” in Decolonize Me, edited by Heather Igloliorte, 74-84. Ottawa: Ottawa Art Gallery, 2012. Lonetree, Amy. Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums. Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Lopesi, Lana. “I find Myself in Entanglements.” Global Asia/Pacific Art Exchange Aotearoa: Ngā Tai o te Ao: the global tides, edited by Janine Randerson, Charlotte Huddleston, and Alexandra Chang, 58-61. Auckland: St Paul St Gallery & Asia/Pacific/American Institute, NYU, 2020. https://stpaulst.aut.ac.nz/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/494166/GAX2020_NgaTaioteAo_theglobaltides_FINAL.pdf – – –. “Frameworks: indigenous Curatorial Practice.” Runway Journal, Issue 17: Outside, 2015. http://runway.org.au/decolonisation-frameworks-indigenous-curatorial-practice MacKay, Nancy. Curating Oral Histories: From Interview to Archive. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2007. Mackey, Eva. Unsettled Expectations: Uncertainty, Land and Settler Decolonization. Halifax & Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2016. 171 – – –. The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada. London: Routledge, 1999. Malm, Magdalena and Annika Wik, eds. Imagining the Audience: Viewing Positions in Curatorial and Artistic Practice. Stockholm: Art and Theory Publishing: Swedish Exhibition Agency, 2012. Manning, Erin. Ephemeral Territories: Representing Nation, Home, and Identity in Canada. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Manson, Elder Gary. “Reconciliation & Decolonization: Advancing Ethical Change in the Cultural Sector,” Focus Group Session for REIMAGINE NANAIMO, City of Nanaimo Culture and Events, November 3, 2020. Manuel, Arthur and Grand Chief Roland M. Derrickson. Unsettling Canada: A National Wake-Up Call. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2015. Maracle, Lee. I Am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism. Vancouver: Press Gang Publishers, 1996. Martin, Lee-Ann, ed. Making Noise! Aboriginal Perspectives on Art, Art History, Critical Writing and Community. Banff: Banff Centre Press, 2004. – – –. “An/Other One: Aboriginal Art, Curators and Art Museums.” In The Edge of Everything: Reflections on Curatorial Practice, edited by Catherine Thomas, 49-56. Banff: Banff Centre Press, 2002. Mars, Tanya and Johanna Householder, eds. Caught in the Act: An Anthology of Performance Art by Canadian Women. Toronto: YYZ Books, 2004. – – –, eds. More Caught in the Act: An Anthology of Performance Art by Canadian Women. Montreal & Toronto: Artexte Editions & YYZ Books, 2016. Marstine, Janet. Critical Practice: Artists, Museums, Ethics. London: Routledge, 2017. Martinon, Jean-Paul and Irit Rogoff. The Curatorial – A Philosophy of Curating. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Mathur, Ashok. “Complicating Non-Indigeneities and Other Considerations around Race.” RACAR 44 (2019): 54-63. – – –. “Refracting Bush.” C Magazine 136 (Winter 2018): 14-17. – – –, Jonathan Dewar and Mike DeGagné, eds. Cultivating Canada: Reconciliation through the Lens of Cultural Diversity. Ottawa: Aboriginal Healing Series, 2011. Mattes, Cathy. “Strategies for Indigenous Curating as Care.” First Friday Lectures, MAWA Programs, February 5, 2021. https://vimeo.com/510897080 172 McClintock, Ann. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge, 1995. McGeough, Michelle. “Indigenous Curatorial Practices and Methodologies.” Wicazo Sa Review 27:1 (2012): 13-20. Mignolo, Walter D. “Coloniality Is Far from Over, So Must Be Decoloniality.” MASP Afterall 43 (2019): 38-45. – – – and Rolando Vázquez. “Decolonial AestheSis: Colonial Wounds/Decolonial Healings.” SocialText Online, July 15, 2013. https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/decolonial-aesthesis-colonial-woundsdecolonial-healings/ – – – and Catherine E. Walsh. On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Mihesuah, Devon Abbott. Indigenous American Women: Decolonization, Empowerment, Activism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. Miller, Robert J. “The Doctrine of Discovery: The International Law of Colonialism,” The Indigenous Peoples’ Journal of Law, Culture & Resistance 5, no. 1 (2019): 35-42. – – –, et. al. “Discovering Indigenous Lands: The Doctrine of Discovery in the English Colonies.” Oxford Scholarship Online, 2010. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199579815. 001.0001 Mills, Charles W. The Radical Contract. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997, quoted in Byrd, Jodi. Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Minh-ha, Trinh T. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Miner, Dylan A. T. “Mawadisidiwag miinawaa Wiidanokiindiwag // They Visit and Work Together.” In Makers, Crafters, Educators: Working for Cultural Change, edited by Elizabeth Garber, Lisa Hochtritt, and Manisha Sharma, 131-134. New York: Routledge, 2018. Mithlo, Nancy. “A Real Feminine Journey: Locating Indigenous Feminisms in the Arts.” Meridians 9, no. 2 (2009): 1-30. – – –. “Red man’s burden”: The Politics of Inclusion in Museum Settings.” American Indian Quarterly 28 (2004): 743-763. Mohanty, Chandra Talpede. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. 173 Molesworth, Helen. “How to Install Art as a Feminist.” In Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art, edited by Cornelia Butler and Alexandra Schwartz, 498-513. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2010. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Morin, Peter, Assemblage Activation, performance, Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC, July 13, 2018. – – –. Tahltan Song Cycle, Exhibition brochure. Victoria: Open Space, 2015. – – –. Work Plan, Open Space archive, Victoria, 2015. – – – and Tania Willard. “BUSH Manifesto.” C Magazine 136 (Winter 2018): 6-7. Morrissette, Suzanne. “Practices of Learning.” The Capilano Review (Spring 2019): 43-48. Moser, Gabrielle and Helena Reckitt. “Feminist Tactics of Citation, Annotation, and Translation: Curatorial Reflections on the Now You Can Go programme.” OnCurating: Curating in Feminist Thought 29 (May 2016): 42-48. Mott, Carrie and Daniel Cockayne. “Citation Matters: Mobilizing the Politics of Citation Toward a Practice of ‘Conscientious Engagement’.” Gender, Place & Culture 24, no. 7 (2017): 954-973. Morris, Catherine, eds. We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85. Brooklyn: Brooklyn Museum, 2017. Mulligan, Martin, et al. Creating Community: Celebrations, Arts and Wellbeing Within and Across Local Communities. Melbourne: Globalism Institute, RMIT University, 2006. Muñiz-Reed, Ivan. “Thoughts on Curatorial Practice in the Decolonial Turn.” OnCurating: Decolonizing Art Institutions 35 (December 2017): 99-105. Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. Wall text, Ilippunga: I Have Learned, Québec, QC, 2016 to ongoing. Curated by Heather Igloliorte. Nagam, Julie. “Transforming and Grappling with Concepts of Activism and Feminism with Indigenous Women Artists.” Atlantis 33, no.1 (2008): 73-79. Ndikung, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng. The Delusion of Care. Berlin: Archive Books, 2021. Nelson, Camille A. and Charmaine A. Nelson, eds. Racism, Eh? A Critical Inter- Disciplinary Anthology of Race and Racism in Canada. Concord: Cactus Press, 2004. Nelson, Charmaine, ed. Ebony Roots, Northern Soil: Perspectives on Blackness in Canada. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010. 174 Newell, Jennifer, Libby Robin, and Kirsten Wehner, eds. Curating the Future: Museums, Communities and Climate Change. London: Routledge, 2016. Nixon, Lindsay. “Eco-Feminist Appropriations of Indigenous Feminisms and Environmental Violence.” The Feminist Wire, April 25, 2015. https://thefeministwire.com/2015/04/eco-feminist-appropriations-of-indigenous-feminisms-and-environmental-violence/ Nochlin, Linda. “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” In The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, edited by Amelia Jones, 229-233. London: Routledge, 2002. – – –. “’Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ Thirty Years After.” In Women Artists and the Millennium, edited by Carol Armstrong and Catherine de Zegher, 21-34. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. Onciul, Bryony. Museums, Heritage and Indigenous Voices: Decolonizing Engagement. New York: Routledge, 2015. O’Neill, Paul. The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s). Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012. paggett, taisha. “In Unison: Writings from the Catalog for The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People.” Contact Quarterly 42:1 (Winter 2017): 18-20. Peters, Sarah and Sarah Schultz, ed. Open Field Conversations on the Commons. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2012. Phillips, Ruth. Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Museums. Montreal & Ithaca: McGill & Queen’s University Press, 2011. Phillipson, Dani and Sergio Miguel Huarcaya, dirs. “The Artist Sings: Peter Morin in Conversation,” 2013. https://vimeo.com/119944337 Piper, Adrian. “The Triple Negation of Colored Women Artists.” In The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, edited by Amelia Jones, 239-248. London: Routledge, 2002. Pluecker, John. “KARANKAWA CARANCAHUA CARANCAGUA KARANKAWAY: Centering Indigenous Presence in Southeast Texas.” In Geopoetics in Practice, edited by Eric Magrane, Linda Russo, Sarah de Leeuw, and Craig Santos Perez, 74-87. London: Routledge, 2019. – – –. “Karankawa Carancahua Carancagua Karankaway.” Project Description, 2016. https://jdpluecker.com/kcck-w-nuria-montiel-2016 Pollock, Griselda. “Rethinking the Artist in the Woman, the Woman in the Artist and that Old Chestnut, the Gaze.” In Women Artists and the Millennium, edited by Carol Armstrong and Catherine de Zegher, 35-84. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. – – – and Joyce Zemans, eds. Museums After Modernism: Strategies of Engagement. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007. 175 Razack, Sherene. Race, Space, and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2002. – – –, Malinda Smith and Sunera Thobani, eds. States of Race: Critical Race Feminism for the 21st Century. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2010. Regan, Paulette. Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential School, Truth Telling, and Reconciliation Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011. Reckitt, Helena. “Support Acts: Curating, Caring and Social Reproduction.” In Journal of Curatorial Studies 5, no. 1 (2016): 6-30. Reilly, Maura. Curatorial Activism: Toward an Ethics of Curating. London: Thames & Hudson, 2016. – – –. “Curating Transnational Feminisms.” Feminist Studies 36, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 156-173. – – –, eds. Global Feminism: New Directions in Contemporary Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 2007. Richter, Dorothee. “Feminist Perspective on Curating.” OnCurating: Curating in Feminist Thought 29 (May 2016): 64-76. Rickard, Jolene. “Diversifying Sovereignty and the Reception of Indigenous Art.” Art Journal, 76:2 (2017): 81-84, DOI: 10.1080/00043249.2017.1367194 Robertson, Clive. Policy Matters: Administrations of Art and Culture, 26-43. Toronto: YYZBooks, 2006. Robinson, Hilary. “Feminism Meets the Big Exhibition: Museum Survey Shows since 2005.” OnCurating: Curating in Feminist Thought 29 (May 2016): 29-41. Schade, Sigrid. “The Biographical Exhibition as a Problem of Feminist Critique and the Case of the Exhibition Marlene Dumas – Female, 2005.” OnCurating: Curating in Feminist Thought 29 (May 2016): 54-63. Scott, Kitty, ed. Raising Frankenstein: Curatorial Education and its Discontents. Koening: London, 2011. Skrubbe, Jessica Sjöholm, ed. Curating Differently: Feminisms, Exhibitions and Curatorial Spaces. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016. Shrewsbury, Carolyn M. “What Is Feminist Pedagogy?” In Women’s Studies Quarterly 25, no. 1 (Fall/Winter 1997): 166-173. Sholette, Gregory, Chloë Bass, and Social Practice Queens, eds. Art as Social Action: An Introduction to the Principles and Practices of Teaching Social Practice Art. New York: Allworth Press, 2018. 176 Simon, Roger I. A Pedagogy of Witnessing: Curatorial Practice and the Pursuit of Social Justice. Albany: SNYU Press, 2015. Simpson, Audra. “The Ruse of Consent and the Anatomy of ‘Refusal’: Cases from Indigenous North America and Australia.” Postcolonial Studies 20 (2017): 1-16. Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. “Indigenous Resurgence and Co-resistance.” Critical Ethnic Studies 2:2 (Fall 2016): 19-34. – – –. “Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious Transformation.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3, no.3 (2014): 1-25. – – –. Wanda Nanibush, and Carl Williams. “The Resurgence of Indigenous Women's Knowledge and Resistance in Relation to Land and Territoriality: Transnational and Interdisciplinary Perspectives.” InTensions Journal 6 (Fall 2012). Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. “The Intellectual Project of Decolonising and Kaupapa Māori Methodologies: Reporting from New Research.” Keynote Presentation, Summer Indigenous Art Intensive, The University of British Columbia Okanagan, Kelowna, BC, July 26, 2017. – – –. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous People. London: Zed Books Ltd., 2012 (1999). Smith, Stephanie Paige. “The Art of Place and the Place of Art at Project Row Houses.” MA Thes. Houston: Rice University, 1998. Steedman, Marijke, ed. Gallery as Community: Art, Education, Politics. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2012. Steorn, Patrik. “Curating Queer Heritage: Queer Knowledge and Museum Practice.” Curator: The Museum Journal 55:3 (2012): 355-365. Stimson, Blake and Gregory Sholette, eds. Collectivism After Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Suleman, Zool, in conversation with Ayumi Goto, Tarah Hogue, and Peter Morin. “Passing ‘through the land:’ Knowledges, Introductions and Labour in Institutional Shapeshifting.” Rungh, 2018. https://rungh.org/passing-through-the-land/ Suzack, Cheryl. “Indigenous Feminisms in Canada.” NORA—Nordic Journal of Feminism and Gender Research 23, no. 4 (2015): 261-274. Tagalik, Shirley. “Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit: The Role of Indigenous Knowledge in Supporting Wellness in Inuit Communities in Nunavut.” In Child and Youth Health Ottawa: National Collaborating Centre for Aboriginal Health, 2009–10, 1–2, quoted in Igloliorte, “Curating Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit,” 102. Tanaka, Maiko. “Feminist Approaches to Citation.” C Magazine 26 (Summer 2015). https://cmagazine.com/issues/126/feminist-approaches-to-citation 177 Thomas, Catherine, ed. The Edge of Everything: Reflections on Curatorial Practice. Banff: Banff Centre Press, 2002. Toronto Arts Foundation. “Margo Bindhardt and Rita Davis Cultural Leadership Award: Emelie Chhangur,” 2019. https://torontoartsfoundation.org/initiatives/awards/hidden-pages/margo-bindhardt-and-rita-davies-award/recipients/2019-finalists/emelie-chhangur. Townsend, Melanie, ed., Beyond the Box: Divergent Curatorial Practices. Banff: Banff Centre Press, 2003. Trépanier, France and Chris Creighton-Kelly. Understanding Aboriginal Arts in Canada Today: A Review of Knowledge and Literature. Ottawa: Canada Council for the Arts, 2012. Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1-40. Vandier, Rebecca K. “Off the Wall, into the Archive: Black Feminist Curatorial Practices of the 1970s.” Archives of American Art Journal 55, no. 2 (Fall 2016): 26-45. Vancouver Art Gallery. Wall text, Lineages and Land Bases, Vancouver, February 22 to August 30, 2020, organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery and curated by Tarah Hogue, Senior Curatorial Fellow, Indigenous Art, with Sḵwx̱wú7mesh advisors Chief Bill Williams and Tracy Williams. – – –. Wall text, Ayumi Goto and Peter Morin: how do you carry the land? Vancouver, July 14 to October 28, 2018. Curated by Tarah Hogue. – – –. Museum label for Ayumi Goto, in sonorous shadows of Nishiyuu, Vancouver, July 14 to October 28, 2018. Ayumi Goto and Peter Morin: how do you carry the land? Curated by Tarah Hogue. – – –. Museum label for Peter Morin, a tahltan indian declares war on the british monarchy (from the Cultural Graffiti in London series), Vancouver, July 14 to October 28, 2018. Ayumi Goto and Peter Morin: how do you carry the land? Curated by Tarah Hogue. – – –. Museum label for Haruko Okano, Intersistere, Vancouver, July 14 to October 28, 2018. Ayumi Goto and Peter Morin: how do you carry the land? Curated by Tarah Hogue. Vest Hansen, Malene, Anne Folke Henningsen, and Anne Gregersen, eds. Curatorial Challenges: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Contemporary Curating. London: Routledge, 2019. Uchill, Rebecca. “Hanging Out, Crowding Out, or Talking Things Out: Curating the Limits of Discursive Space.” In Journal of Curatorial Studies 1, no. 1 (2012): 27-43. 178 Untitled Arts Society. Facebook post, June 4, 2020. https://www.facebook.com/TheBowsYYC/?ref=page_internal. Walia, Harsha. “Decolonizing Together: Moving Beyond a Politics of Solidarity Toward a Practice of Decolonization.” In The Winter We Danced: Voices from the Past, the Future, and the Idle No More Movement, edited by The Kino-nda-niimi Collective, 44-51. Winnipeg: ARP Books, 2014. Wark, Jayne. Radical Gestures: Feminism and Performance Art in North America. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2006. White, Peter, ed. Naming A Practice: Curatorial Strategies for The Future. Banff: Banff Centre Press, 1996. Whitelaw, Anne. Spaces and Places for Art: Making Art Institutions in Western Canada, 1912-1990. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017. Whitelaw, Anne, Brian Foss, and Sandra Paikowsky, eds. The Visual Arts in Canada: The Twentieth Century. Don Mills: Oxford University Press, 2010. Willard, Tania. “Re-centering Knowledge: An Interview with Artist and Curator Anique Jordan.” C Magazine 136 (Winter 2018): 34-39. – – – and Peter Morin. “BUSH gallery Project Statement.” Summer Institute Session II: Site/action with BUSH gallery, Plug In ICA, accessed July 13, 2020. https://plugin.org/exhibitions/bush-gallery/ – – –, ed. Access All Areas: Conversations of Engaged Arts. Vancouver: grunt gallery, 2008. Wilson, Shawn. Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods. Halifax & Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2008. Zepeda, Susy. “Queer Xicana Indígena Cultural Production: Remembering through Oral and Visual Storytelling,” Decolonization: Indgeneity, Education & Society 3, no. 1 (2014): 119-141. 179 Appendix MEMORIAL TO SIR WILFRED LAURIER, PREMIER OF THE DOMINION OF CANADA From the Chiefs of the Shuswap, Okanagan and Couteau Tribes of British Columbia. Presented at Kamloops, August 25, 1910 "Dear Sir and Father, We take this opportunity of your visiting Kamloops to speak a few words to you. We welcome you here, and we are glad we have met you in our country. We want you to be interested in us, and to understand more fully the conditions under which we live. We expect much of you as the head of this great Canadian Nation, and feel confident you will see that we receive fair and honorable treatment. Our confidence in you has increased since we noted of late the attitude of your government towards the Indian rights movement of this country and we hope with your help our wrongs may at last be righted. We speak to you more freely because you are a member of the white race with whom we first became acquainted, and which we call in our tongue "real whites." One hundred years next year they came among us here at Kamloops and erected a trading post. After the other whites came to this country in 1858 we differentiate them from the first whites as manners were so different, and we applied the term “real whites” to the latter (viz., the fur-traders of the Northwest and Hudson's Bay companies. As the great majority of the companies employees were French speaking, the term latterly became applied by us as a designation for the whole French race.) The "real whites" we found were good people. We could depend on their word, and we trusted and respected them. They did not interfere with us nor attempt to break up our tribal organizations, laws, customs. They did not try to force their conceptions of things to us to our harm. Nor did they stop us from catching fish, hunting, etc. They never tried to steal or appropriate our country, nor take our food and life from us. They acknowledged our ownership of the 180 country, and treated our chiefs as men. They were the first to find us in this country. We never asked them to come here, nevertheless we treated them kindly and hospitably and helped them all we could. They had made themselves (as it were) our guests. We treated them as such, and then waited to see what they would do. As we found they did us no harm our friendship with them became lasting. Because of this we have a warm heart to the French at the present day. We expect good from Canada. When they first came amongst us there were only Indians here. They found the people of each tribe supreme in their own territory, and having tribal boundaries known and recognized by all. The country of each tribe was just the same as a very large farm or ranch (belonging to all the people of the tribe) from which they gathered their food and clothing, etc., fish which they got in plenty for food, grass and vegetation on which their horses grazed and the game lived, and much of which furnished materials for manufacture, etc., stone which furnished pipes, utensils and tools, etc., trees which furnished firewood, materials for houses and utensils, plants, roots, seeds, nuts and berries which grew abundantly and were gathered in their season just same as the crops on a ranch, and used for food; minerals, shells, etc., which were used for ornament and for plants, etc, water which was free to all. Thus, fire, water, food, clothing and all the necessaries of life were obtained in abundance from the lands of each tribe, and all the people had equal rights of access to everything they required. You will see the ranch of each tribe was the same as its life, and without it the people could not have lived. 181 Just 52 years ago the other whites came to this country. They found us the same as the first or "real whites" had found us, only we had larger bands of horses, had some cattle, and in many places we cultivated the land. They found us happy, healthy, strong and numerous. Each tribe was still living in its own "house" or in other words on its own "ranch". No one interfered with our rights or disputed our possession of our own "houses" and "ranches", viz., our homes and lives. We were friendly and helped these whites also, for had we not learned the first whites had done us no harm? Only when some of them killed us we revenged on them. Then we thought there are some bad ones among them, but surely on the whole they must be good. Besides they are the queen's people. And we had already heard great things about the queen from the "real whites." We expected her subjects would do us no harm, but rather improve us by giving us knowledge, and enabling us to do some of the wonderful things they could do. At first they looked only for gold. We knew the latter was our property, but as we did not use it much, nor need it to live by, we did not object to their searching for it. They told us, "Your country is rich and you will be made wealthy by our coming. We wish just to pass over your lands in quest of gold." Soon they saw the country was good, and some made up their mind to settle it. They took up pieces of land here and there. They told us they wanted only the use of these pieces land for a few years, and then would hand them back to us in an improved condition; meanwhile they would give us some of the products they raised for the loan of our land. Thus they commenced to enter our "houses," or live on our "ranches." With us when a person enters our house he becomes our guest and we must treat him hospitably as long as he shows no hostile intentions. At the same time we expect him to return to us equal treatment for what he receives. Some of our Chiefs said, "These people wish to be partners with us in our country. We must, therefore, be the same as brothers to them and live as one family. We will share equally in everything half 182 and half in land, water and timber, etc. What is ours will be theirs and what is theirs will be ours. We will help each other to be great and good." The whites made a government in Victoria perhaps the queen made it. We heard it stated both ways. Their chiefs dwelt there. At this time they did not deny the Indian tribes owned the whole country and everything in it. They told us we did. We Indians were hopeful. We trusted the whites and waited patiently for their chiefs to declare their intentions toward us and our lands. We knew what had been done in the neighboring states, and we remembered what we heard about the queen being so good to the Indians and that her laws carried out by her chiefs were always just and better than the American laws. Presently chiefs (government officials, etc.) commenced to visit us, and had talks with some of our chiefs. They told us to have no fear, the queen's laws would prevail in this country, and everything would be well for the Indians. They said a very large reservation would be staked off for us (southern interior tribes) and the tribal lands outside of this reservation the government would buy from us for white settlement. They let us think this would be done soon, and meanwhile until this reserve was set apart, and our lands settled for, they assured us we would have perfect freedom of traveling and camping and the same liberties as from time immemorial to hunt, fish, graze and gather our food supplies where we desired; also that all trails, land, water, timber, etc., would be as free of access as formerly. Our chiefs were agreeable to these propositions, so we waited for treaties to be made, and everything settled. We had never known white chiefs to break their word so we trusted. In the meanwhile white settlement progressed. Our chiefs held us in check. They said, "Do nothing against the whites. Something we did not understand retards them from keeping their promise. They will do the square thing by us in the end." 183 What have we received for our good faith, friendliness and patience? Gradually as the whites of this country became more and more powerful and we less and less powerful, they little by little changed their policy towards us and commenced to put restrictions on us. Their governments or chiefs have taken every advantage of our friendliness, weakness and ignorance to impose on us in every way. They treat us as subjects without any agreement to that effect, and force their laws on us without our consent and irrespective of whether they are good for us or not. They say they have authority over us. They have broken down our old laws and customs (no matter how good) by which we regulated ourselves. They laugh at our chiefs and brush them aside. Minor affairs amongst ourselves, which do not affect them in the least, and which we can easily settle better than they can, they drag into their courts. They enforce their own laws one way for the rich white man, one way for the poor white, and yet another for the Indian. They knocked down (the same as) the posts of all the Indian tribes. They say there are no lines except what they make. They took possession of all the Indian country and claim it as their own. Just the same as taking the "house" or "ranch" and, therefore, the life of every Indian tribe into their possession. They have never consulted us in any of these matters, nor made any agreement, "nor" signed "any" papers with us. They have stolen our lands and everything on them and continue to use same for their own purposes. They treat us as less than children and allow us no say in anything. They say the Indians know nothing, and own nothing, yet their power and wealth has come from our belongings. The queen's law which we believe guaranteed us our rights, the B.C. government has trampled underfoot. This is how our guests have treated us – the brothers we received hospitably in our house. 184 After a time when they saw that our patience might get exhausted and that we might cause trouble if we thought all the land was to be occupied by whites, they set aside many small reservations for us here and there over the country. This was their proposal not ours, and we never accepted these reservations as settlement for anything, nor did we sign any papers or make any treaties about same. They thought we would be satisfied with this, but we never have been satisfied and never will be until we get our rights. We thought the setting apart of these reservations was the start of some scheme they had evolved for our benefit, and that they would now continue until they had more than fulfilled their promises but although we have waited long, we have been disappointed. We have always felt the injustice done to us but we did not know how to obtain redress. We knew it was useless to go to war. What could we do? Even your government at Ottawa, into whose charge we have been handed by the B.C. government, gave us no enlightenment. We had no powerful friends. The Indian agents and the Indian office at Victoria appeared to neglect us. Some offers of help in the way of agricultural implements, schools, medical attendance, aid to the aged, etc., from the Indian department were at first refused by many of our chiefs or were never petitioned for, because for a time we thought the Ottawa and Victoria governments were the same as one, and these things would be charged against us and rated as payment for our land, etc. Thus we got along the best way we could and asked for nothing. For a time we did not feel the stealing of our lands, etc., very heavily. As the country was sparsely settled we still had considerable liberty in the way of hunting, fishing, grazing, etc., over by far the most of it. However, owing to increased settlement, etc., in late years this has become changed, and we are being more and more restricted to our reservations which in most places are unfit or inadequate to maintain us. Except we can get fair play we can see we will go to the wall and most of us be reduced to beggary or to continuous wage slavery. 185 We have also learned lately the British Columbia government claims absolute ownership of our reservations, which means that we are practically landless. We only have loan of those reserves in life rent, or at the option of the B.C. government. Thus we find ourselves without any real home in this our own country. In a petition signed by fourteen of our chiefs and sent to your Indian department, July, 1908, we pointed out the disabilities under which we labor owing to the inadequacy of most of our reservations, some having hardly any good land, others no irrigation water, etc., our limitations regarding pasture lands for stock owing to fencing of so-called government lands by whites; the severe restrictions put on us lately by the government regarding hunting and fishing; the depletion of salmon by over-fishing of the whites, and other matters affecting us. In many places we are debarred from camping, travelling, gathering roots and obtaining wood and water as heretofore. Our people are fined and imprisoned for breaking the game and fish laws and using the same game and fish which we were told would always be ours for food. Gradually we are becoming regarded as trespassers over a large portion of this our country. Our old people say, "How are we to live? If the government takes our food from us they must give us other food in its place." Conditions of living have been thrust on us which we did not expect, and which we consider in great measure unnecessary and injurious. We have no grudge against the white race as a whole nor against the settlers, but we want to have an equal chance with them of making a living. We welcome them to this country. It is not in most cases their fault. They have taken up and improved and paid for their lands in good faith. It is their government which is to blame by heaping injustice on us. But it is also their duty to see their government does right by us, and gives us a square deal. We condemn the whole policy of the B.C. government towards the Indian tribes of this country as utterly unjust, 186 shameful and blundering in every way. We denounce same as being the main cause of the unsatisfactory condition of Indian affairs in this country and the animosity and friction with the whites. So long as what we consider justice is withheld from us, so long will dissatisfaction and unrest exist among us and we will continue to struggle to better ourselves. For the accomplishment of this end we and other Indian tribes of this country are now uniting and we ask the help of yourself and government in this fight for our rights. We believe it is not the desire nor policy of your government that these conditions should exist. We demanded that our land question be settled, and ask that treaties be made between the government and each of our tribes, in the same manner as accomplished with the Indian tribes of the other provinces of Canada, and in the neighboring parts of the United States. We desire that every matter of importance to each tribe be a subject of treaty, so we may have a definite understanding with the government on all questions to date between us and them. In a declaration made last month and signed by twenty-four of our chiefs (a copy of which has been sent to your Indian department) we have stated our position on these matters. Now we sincerely hope you will carefully consider everything we have herewith brought before you and that you will recognize the disadvantages we labor under, and the darkness of the outlook for us if these questions are not speedily settled. Hoping you have had a pleasant sojourn in this country, and wishing you a good journey home, we remain. Yours very sincerely, The Chiefs of the Shuswap, Okanagan and Couteau or Thompson tribes -Per their secretary, J.A. Teit
Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Interdisciplinary Studies
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Mathur, Ashok, 1961-
Willard, Tania
Reimagined curatorial practice : land, labour, and community
Text