Syllabus: Land, Sovereignty, and Art (original) (raw)
Related papers
Rowman & Littlefield International, 2020
Historically, artwork has played a powerful role in shaping settler colonial subjectivity and the political imagination of Westphalian sovereignty through the canonization of particular visual artworks, aesthetic theories, and art institutions’ methods of display. Creative Presence contributes a transnational feminist intersectional analysis of visual and performance artwork by Indigenous contemporary artists who directly engage with colonialism and decolonization. This book makes the case that decolonial aesthetics is a form of labour and knowledge production that calls attention to the foundational violence of settler colonialism in the formation of the world order of sovereign states. Creative Presence analyzes how artists’ purposeful selection of materials, media forms, and place-making in the exhibitions and performances of their work reveals the limits of conventional International Relations theories, methods, and debates on sovereignty and participates in Indigenous reclamations of lands and waterways in world politics. Brian Jungen’s sculpture series Prototypes for New Understanding and Rebecca Belmore’s filmed performances Vigil and Fountain exhibit how colonial power has been imagined, visualized and institutionalized historically and in contemporary settler visual culture. These contemporary visual and performance artworks by Indigenous artists that name the political violence of settler colonial claims to exclusive territorial sovereignty introduce possibilities for decolonizing audiences’ sensibilities and political imagination of lands and waterways.
SPECIAL ISSUE: ‘THE (DE)COLONIAL PEDAGOGICAL POSSIBILITIES OF FILM AND FILM FESTIVALS’ (A TWO-PART SPECIAL ISSUE), 2019
Positioning and introduction Sonia Medel: I want to begin by welcoming you, Dorothy, and thank you for joining us for this conversation that will form part of the Postcolonial Directions in Education Special Issue on film and film festivals. I also want to acknowledge that we are engaging in this this conversation, here, in the Vancouver Latin American Film Festival (VLAFF) office, in the Woodward's building, in Vancouver, on unceded Coast Salish, Tseil-wautulth, Musqueam and Squamish lands.
Indigenous Moves Collaborative Multimedia and Decolonial Aesthetics
GeoHumanities, 2018
This article—a component of a multimedia series that includes academic papers, video documentaries,painting, poetry, dance, and song—documents and visualizes the continuities and contradictions inherent in diaspora and immigration for Indigenous Mexicans in the U.S. South. We argue for deployment of a decolonial aesthetics that calls into question long-standing colonial systems of meaning making, particularly racialized representations. We elaborate decolonial aesthetics by draw-ing on the visual language of Seed Spirits, a video documentary produced in collaboration with Otomi people. Decolonial aesthetics works through an affective register to evoke a wide range of responses tothe video including a deeper respect for ontologies of difference. A sacred element of Otomi cosmology, artisanal paper known as papel amate, further illuminates how we understand the liberatory potential of decolonial aesthetics. In conclusion, the Mexican diaspora and the cultural politics of Indigeneity it unleashed are reinscribing the narrative of Indigeneity in the Americas.Key Words: affectivity, decolonial aesthetics, Indigeneity, multimedia, Otomi.
2017
Settler colonialism in Canada has and continues to dispossess Indigenous nations of their lands and authority. Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing argues that a politics of visibility has been central to these structures of invasion and dispossession. In an effort to transform sovereign Indigenous nations into "Indians", the Canadian state has used techniques of bureaucratic documentation to naturalize the classification of Indigenous bodies as racially inferior and thus subject to a range of violent interventions. This politics of visibility fails to see Indigenous people as people who matter. Using Indigenous feminist critique, discourse analysis, and theories of aesthetics to analyze federal legislation, policy manuals, and archival documents, I theorize settler colonial ways of seeing as a nexus of techniques and epistemological investments with two aspects: one, the vision of a radically new society that drives settler colonial desires; two, the techniques of seeing used to manage the visibility of Indigenous life. To demonstrate how state techniques structure the visibility of Indigenous life, I investigate four techniques of visibility and erasure: i) classification under Indian Act racial taxonomy; ii) enumeration through the centralized Indian Register; iii) identity documentation with Certificates of Indian Status; and, iv) the numerical representation of the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women (MMIW). However, just as settler colonial statecraft operates through ways of seeing, it is also resisted by artistic and political acts that insist on and make visible Indigenous presence. Alongside examples of settler documentation, I analyze artworks by Nadia Myre, Cheryl L'Hirondelle, Christi Belcourt, and others, as practices of Indigenous resistance engaged in counter-documentation strategies that make visible and denaturalize the restrictive frames imposed upon their lives. Ultimately, this dissertation demonstrates how racial classification and documentation attempts to naturalize a way of seeing that devalues Indigenous lives and undermines Indigenous presence, but has always been resisted by the Indigenous lives it seeks to transform.
Land-Based Art Criticism: (Un)learning Land Through Art
Visual Arts Research, 2021
This article provides an overview of how land-based settler colonial critique can reorient art criticism and art education to expand the scope of art and art practice to critical considerations of land politics and social justice, particularly in terms of the repatriation of Indigenous lands. In particular, land-based perspectives can help to rethink place/land by offering decolonizing methods for critiquing Western works of art that address place. Art educators’ ability to understand and critique settler colonialism in art has been hindered by Eurocentric art criticism. This article seeks to reveal settler colonial imperatives and ambitions regarding land through a critical analysis of American landscape paintings and land art. This piece further examines contemporary Indigenous artists’ site-specific works through adopting decolonial, land-based inquiry. Land-based art criticism interrupts the dominant mode of art inquiry to more comprehensively analyze art associated with place/l...
Yuxweluptun, Nicolson and Assu: Land, Environment and Activist Art in British Columbia
2016
Land rights and environmental issues have long been the cause of fiercely intense and heated disputes between the Canadian government and Aboriginal communities in British Columbia. This thesis focuses on the representation of land loss and environmental issues in British Columbia through the work of contemporary Cowichan Coast Salish and Okanagan artist Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun and Kwakwaka’wakw artists Marianne Nicolson and Sonny Assu. The objective is to bring a fresh perspective to understanding the politicized artistic practice of these three artists by considering their work as a form of environmental activism. I examine the relationships between the three artists while contextualizing their work within twentieth-century developments in Northwest Coast art. This research is informed by first hand interviews with the artists themselves conducted in January 2016, as well as the work of scholars Gerald Vizenor, Philip J. Deloria and James Clifford among others.
International Journal of Education and the Arts, 2013
Beginning November 2006, and continuing through December 2007, Oklahomans were alerted to the promotions of the Oklahoma Centennial. For Indigenous Oklahomans, this was a problematic marking of a historical event. The Centennial's grand-narrative advanced a story privileging the "pioneers" who "settled the land" as the official story of Oklahoma's past. This article deconstructs the manufactured Oklahoma history advanced through the Centennial by identifying and examining, utilizing Critical Race Theory and Tribal Critical Race Theory, the counterstory put forth in the Current Realities: A Dialogue with the People art show produced by Oklahoma Native artists in the OklaDADA collective. Current Realities functioned as social justice-providing all Oklahomans with a comprehensive history of Oklahoma by telling Indigenous Oklahomans' history and reality through art.
Indigenous Art and Sovereignty Inspiring Change against Environmental Degradation
eTropic, 2020
This special issue on “Environmental Artistic Practices and Indigeneity: In(ter)ventions, Recycling, Sovereignty" constitutes a body of creative contributions and academic articles addressing numerous forms of artistic practices of the Pacific Islands, Australia, French Guiana, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia. Inspired by Indigenous artists and writers whose practices and creativity help reimagine sustainable ways to inhabit the world, this introduction and our special issue interrogate contemporary environmental issues and the legacy of colonisation. They examine how Indigenous artists and writers, and artists working with Indigenous artists and communities, have for decades raised awareness about environmental issues, and encouraged people to regain their agency to struggle against environmental degradation and further destruction of Indigenous people’s societies and health. This introduction contextualises the concepts and Indigenous terms used by artists to express their ...
Australian Aboriginal Studies, 2018
In transnational settler colonial contexts, the photograph has been a tool of suppression, playing a key role in the categorisation of race and difference, as well as furthering the logic of elimination through gestures towards whiteness, authenticity and vanishing races. For Indigenous peoples living in early-invaded, densely settled areas, such as the participants in this study — Ngarrindjeri in southeastern Australia and the Shinnecock Algonquin in the northeastern United States (US) —-the problem of visual representation has long contributed to a denial of their contemporary identity and to persistent discrimination. Administrative and anthropological photography in the early twentieth century across these settler colonial polities was inextricably connected with policies of assimilation, eugen-ics and anti-miscegenation, and to the making of racial categories. Yet at the same time that official photographers were consciously filtering out the impacts of colo-nisation — imaging perennial stereotypes of the lone plains Indian on horseback in full regalia, for example, or the northern Aboriginal man poised on one leg, spear in hand — pioneering Ngarrindjeri and Shinnecock women and men creatively seized upon the camera, experimenting with new technologies and media to counter these colonial imaginings. Producing rich archives in their own communities that assert visual sovereignty, their photographs narrate vital histories not known through other means. This paper arises from research with the Ngarrindjeri and Shinnecock communities to reveal the practice of two prolific Indigenous community based photographers from the mid-twentieth century: Charlotte Richards and Wickham Hunter. We explore the democratising ways in which they worked intentionally to undo colonial stereotypes and represent their people, shedding new light on Indigenous aesthetic traditions and technologies, identity, cultural continuity and belonging, and adding to recent transnational scholarship on visual sovereignty and the decolonising of the settler colonial archive. The photography of resistance heals our wounds, gives us strength…to visualise a new future. (Racette 2011:89)