Unsettling Canadian Art History 9780228013280

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Unsettling Canadian Art History

McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation Studies in Art History Martha Langford and Sandra Paikowsky, series editors Recognizing the need for a better understanding of Canada’s artistic culture both at home and abroad, the Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation, through its generous support, makes possible the publication of innovative books that advance our understanding of Canadian art and Canada’s visual and material culture. This series supports and stimulates such scholarship through the publication of original and rigorous peer-reviewed books that make significant contributions to the subject. We welcome submissions from Canadian and international scholars for book-length projects on historical and contemporary Canadian art and visual and material culture, including Native and Inuit art, architecture, photography, craft, design, and museum studies. Studies by Canadian scholars on non-Canadian themes will also be considered.

The Practice of Her Profession Florence Carlyle, Canadian Painter in the Age of Impressionism Susan Butlin

The Official Picture The National Film Board of Canada’s Still Photography Division and the Image of Canada, 1941–1971 Carol Payne

Bringing Art to Life A Biography of Alan Jarvis Andrew Horrall

Paul-Émile Borduas A Critical Biography François-Marc Gagnon Translated by Peter Feldstein

Picturing the Land Narrating Territories in Canadian Landscape Art, 1500 to 1950 Marylin J. McKay The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada Edited by Carol Payne and Andrea Kunard Newfoundland Modern Architecture in the Smallwood Years, 1949–1972 Robert Mellin The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas The Natural History of the New World, Histoire Naturelle des Indes Occidentales Edited and with an Introduction by François-Marc Gagnon, Translation by Nancy Senior, Modernization by Réal Ouellet Museum Pieces Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums Ruth B. Phillips The Allied Arts Architecture and Craft in Postwar Canada Sandra Alfoldy Rethinking Professionalism Essays on Women and Art in Canada, 1850–1970 Edited by Kristina Huneault and Janice Anderson

On Architecture Melvin Charney: A Critical Anthology Edited by Louis Martin Making Toronto Modern Architecture and Design, 1895–1975 Christopher Armstrong Negotiations in a Vacant Lot Studying the Visual in Canada Edited by Lynda Jessup, Erin Morton, and Kirsty Robertson Visibly Canadian Imaging Collective Identities in the Canadas, 1820–1910 Karen Stanworth Breaking and Entering The Contemporary House Cut, Spliced, and Haunted Edited by Bridget Elliott Family Ties Living History in Canadian House Museums Andrea Terry Picturing Toronto Photography and the Making of a Modern City Sarah Bassnett Architecture on Ice A History of the Hockey Arena Howard Shubert

For Folk’s Sake Art and Economy in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia Erin Morton

Jean Paul Riopelle and the Automatiste Movement François-Marc Gagnon Translated by Donald Winkler

Spaces and Places for Art Making Art Institutions in Western Canada, 1912–1990 Anne Whitelaw

I Can Only Paint The Story of Battlefield Artist Mary Riter Hamilton Irene Gammel

Narratives Unfolding National Art Histories in an Unfinished World Edited by Martha Langford

Object Lives and Global Histories in Northern North America Material Culture in Motion, c. 1780–1980 Edited by Beverly Lemire, Laura Peers, and Anne Whitelaw

Canadian Painters in a Modern World, 1925–1955 Writings and Reconsiderations Lora Senechal Carney Sketches from an Unquiet Country Canadian Graphic Satire, 1840–1940 Edited by Dominic Hardy, Annie Gérin, and Lora Senechal Carney I’m Not Myself at All Women, Art, and Subjectivity in Canada Kristina Huneault The Global Flows of Early Scottish Photography Encounters in Scotland, Canada, and China Anthony W. Lee Tear Gas Epiphanies Protest, Culture, Museums Kirsty Robertson What Was History Painting and What Is It Now? Edited by Mark Salber Phillips and Jordan Bear Through Post-Atomic Eyes Edited by Claudette Lauzon and John O’Brian Jean Paul Riopelle et le mouvement automatiste François-Marc Gagnon

For the Temporary Accommodation of Settlers Architecture and Immigrant Reception in Canada, 1870–1930 David Monteyne Women at the Helm How Jean Sutherland Boggs, Hsio-yen Shih, and Shirley L. Thomson Changed the National Gallery of Canada Diana Nemiroff Voluntary Detours Small-Town and Rural Museums in Alberta Lianne McTavish Photogenic Montreal Activisms and Archives in a Post-industrial City Edited by Martha Langford and Johanne Sloan Wendat Women’s Arts Annette W. de Stecher Unsettling Canadian Art History Edited by Erin Morton

Edited by

Erin Morton

Unsettling Canadian Art History

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2022 isbn 978-0-2280-1097-5 (cloth) isbn 978-0-2280-1098-2 (paper) isbn 978-0-2280-1328-0 (epdf) Legal deposit second quarter 2022 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published with the financial support of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art and the Harrison McCain Foundation Grant in Aid of Scholarly Book Publishing of the University of New Brunswick.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Unsettling Canadian art history / edited by Erin Morton. Names: Morton, Erin, 1981- editor. Series: McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation studies in art history. Description: Series statement: McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation studies in art history | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210382988 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210383046 | isbn 9780228010975 (cloth) | isbn 9780228010982 (paper) | isbn 9780228013280 (epdf) Subjects: lcsh: Art and society—Canada. | lcsh: Colonization in art. | lcsh: Art and race. | lcsh: Art—Canada—History. | lcsh: Art, Canadian. Classification: lcc n72.s6 u57 2022 | ddc 701/.030971—dc23

This book was designed and typeset by studio oneoneone in Minion 11/14

Contents

ix Preface xv Acknowledgments 3 Introduction: Unsettling Canadian Art History

erin morton Part One Unsettling Settler Methodologies, Re-centring Decolonial Knowledge 1 45 White Settler Tautologies and Pioneer Lies in Mi’kma’ki

travis wysote and erin morton 2 65 Notes to a Nation: Teachings on Land through the Art of Norval Morrisseau

carmen robertson 3 87 Embodying Decolonial Methodology: Building and Sustaining Critical Relationality in the Cultural Sector

leah decter and carla taunton 4 112 Silence as Resistance: When Silence Is the Only Weapon You Have Left

lindsay m c intyre Part Two Excavating and Creating Decolonial Archives 5 141 Truth Is No Stranger to (Para)fiction: Settlers, Arrivants, and Place in Iris Häussler’s He Named Her Amber, Camille Turner’s BlackGrange, and Robert Houle’s Garrison Creek Project

mark a. cheetham

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6 160 “Ran away from her Master … a Negroe Girl named Thursday”: Examining Evidence of Punishment, Isolation, Trauma, and Illness in Nova Scotia and Quebec Fugitive Slave Advertisements

charmaine a. nelson 7 179 “Miner with a Heart of Gold”: Native North America, Vol. 1 and the Colonial Excavation of Authenticity

henry adam svec 8 195 Excavation: Memory Work

sylvia d. hamilton Part Three Reclaiming Sexualities, Tracing Complicities 9 215 Bear Grease, Whips, Bodies, and Beads: Community Building and Refusing Trauma Porn in Dayna Danger’s Embodied 2Spirit Arts Praxis

dorian j. fraser, dayna danger, and adrienne huard 10 241 Coming Out a l’Oriental: Diasporic Art and Colonial Wounds

andrew gayed 11 270 Indian Americans Engulfing “American Indian”: Marking the “Dot Indians’” Indianness through Genocide and Casteism in Diaspora

shaista patel 293 297 327 329

Figures Bibliography Contributors Index

Preface er in morton

Unsettling Canadian Art History brings together scholars of art and culture to address visual and material culture histories of settler colonialism, enslavement, and racialized diasporas in the contested white settler state of Canada.1 There is a purpose to publishing a book of this scope in the McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation Studies in Art History Series, which makes possible “the publication of innovative books that advance our understanding of Canadian art and Canada’s visual and material culture.”2 In its very orientation to the white settler state of Canada, Canadian art history is a colonial discipline that many scholars and creative practitioners have dedicated their careers to disrupting by foregrounding Indigenous, Black, and racialized diasporic art in this part of the world.3 Canada’s complex histories under multiple European empires and their corresponding modes of settler colonial violence require scholars of Canadian art history to unsettle Canada’s past from diverse but overlapping decolonial and anti-racist perspectives. As Canadian art historian and scholar of the African diaspora Charmaine A. Nelson reminds us, “Canada’s colonial history straddles multiple empires.”4 Unsettling Canada’s genocidal colonial legacies through the study of visual and material representations and disruptions of that past therefore requires a multitude of scholarly voices and relational ways of understanding how colonial pasts inform and impact the present. The chapters in this book offer new perspectives for decolonial and anti-racist scholarship on art, archives, and creative practice by rethinking histories of Canadian colonialisms from distinct but relational Black, Indigenous, racialized diasporic, and white settler perspectives. It has been my privilege to work with a group of scholars who take such care in analyzing the violence of colonialism alongside the expansive possibilities that anti-racist art and creative practice provide for making decolonial futures a lived reality. The contributors to this volume bring multiple histories of lived experience to their critical analyses of art and culture and colonialism in Canada, which include Black (Hamilton and Nelson), Indigenous (Danger, Métis/Saulteaux; Huard, Anishinaabekwe; McIntyre, Inuit/settler-Scottish; Robertson, Scots-Lakota; Wysote, Mi’gmag), diasporic settler of colour (Gayed, Egyptian Canadian), non-Black non-Indigenous racialized (Patel, Pakistani Canadian Muslim), and white settler

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(Cheetham, Decter, Fraser, Morton, Svec, and Taunton) positionalities. Their chapters work together separately but also relationally to disrupt colonial archives of art and culture and to excavate, resurface, and recreate radical Black, Indigenous, and racialized diasporic experiences. Read together, these chapters also expose the racist frameworks that not only continue to erase histories of colonial violence and anticolonial resistance but that also hinder structural reorganizations of Canadian art institutions from decolonial and anti-racist perspectives. This book’s critical impact on the broader project of unsettling Canadian art history is the result of the myriad decolonial and anti-racist perspectives on colonial histories that these contributors offer. Originally, I envisioned Unsettling Canadian Art History as a single-authored book. However, my previous editorial experience with the McGillQueen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation Studies in Art History series, Negotiations in a Vacant Lot: Studying the Visual in Canada (co-edited with Lynda Jessup and Kirsty Robertson, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), was a lesson in why certain critiques must be collaborative ventures. Negotiations in a Vacant Lot examined the liberal capitalist underpinnings of disciplinary Canadian art history as it shows up in curatorial work, museum collections, art criticism and scholarship, and university teaching and research. While Negotiations in a Vacant Lot set out to critique the liberal individualism of colonial capitalist disciplines such as Canadian art history, histories of colonialism were not the book’s primary focus. And yet, that volume’s capacity to productively analyze Canadian art history’s colonial formations and racist exclusions was made possible through the work of contributors, who saw the possibilities of bringing critiques of liberalism and capitalism into conversation with colonialism. As a result, Negotiations in a Vacant Lot offered critically important work on Indigenous art and racialization and representation in Canadian art, specifically in chapters written by Richard William Hill, Heather Igloliorte, and Alice Ming Wai Jim. Collections of scholarly essays that centre decolonial and anti-racist, feminist, queer, trans, and Two-Spirit collaboration, in which scholars with various points of expertise in Black, Indigenous, and racialized diasporic visual and material culture productively disrupt colonial concepts of individualized expertise, are critically necessary to “unsettling” colonial fields of scholarship such as Canadian art history. The variety of perspectives offered in the chapters that follow are part of this book’s strength. These collaborations originally emerged around a sshrc Insight Grant that funded the larger project from which this volume emerged. Together, our research group shared conversations on art and archival sources in the interrelated visual histories of settler colonialism, enslavement, and racialized diaspora formations in the settler state of Canada. I am grateful in particular for the conversations that the writing of this book generated behind the scenes, especially regarding the colonial nature of Canadian art history as a discipline dependent on whiteness and on the anti-Indigeneity and anti-Blackness present in many fields that claim to be undertaking decolonial and anti-racist work, including settler colonial studies. As an editor, I am humbled by the innovative and radical work that is represented in this volume as it enters into longstanding conver-

Preface

sations on Black, Indigenous, racialized diasporic, and queer, feminist, trans, and TwoSpirit scholarship on art and culture in the contested settler state of Canada. It should go without saying, and yet it seems to need constant restating, that different positionalities in decolonial, anti-racist, and “unsettled” scholarship come with varying sets of privileges, which are always impacted by intersections of disability, caste, class, gender, and sexuality. White settler scholars in this book foreground the lived experiences of Indigenous, Black, and racialized diasporic artists and historical experiences while also examining our own responsibilities for dismantling violent and genocidal colonial legacies. Yet it remains clear that white scholars such as me must continue the difficult and disruptive work of unsettling our own positions of privilege in art institutions and universities if we are to truly participate in anti-racist and decolonial solidarity work, which means focusing on pulling apart white supremacy rather than centring our own scholarship. Unsettling Canadian Art History offers is a collaborative approach to understanding the ways in which multiple and overlapping histories of coloniality (settler colonization, enslavement, and racialized diasporic migration) show up in art and culture. This collaborative approach is also necessary to help readers come to the study of art and colonialism in Canada in multiple ways, especially beyond the lens of white settler-led methodologies and research. Contributors to Unsettling Canadian Art History have divergent and sometimes deeply personal understandings of what undertaking decolonial and anti-racist art historical and creative research means in the Canadian context, which is part of what makes this book important for readers of Canadian art who come to these topics from a range of perspectives. The perspectives of Black, Indigenous, and racialized diasporic scholars in this book offer important histories of the colonial past and also critique the impact of such histories on the colonial present. Indigenous scholars in this book continually challenge the erasure and misinterpretation of Indigenous art practice at a time when tokenistic calls to “Indigenize” institutions of art and culture and universities have become common but where deep structural change often remains to be seen. Their critical work highlights the continued need to offer close examinations of Indigenous artists and their creative practice, in order to continually reaffirm and re-centre Indigenous methodologies in art scholarship. Likewise, despite a recent uptick in centring Black Canadian histories and experiences in museums, art gallery, and universities, antiBlack racism pervades these institutions and continues to impact the radical practices of Black artists past and present. The Black authors in this volume offer critical contributions that make clear the need to continually disrupt colonial archives in ways that uncover erased histories of Canadian enslavement while likewise creating new archives of contemporary and historical Black experiences from visual and cultural fragments. Racialized diasporic scholars in this book also grapple with complex colonial histories that migrate to the settler state of Canada through historical and contemporary racialized migration and displacement. These range from examinations of relational complicity in settler colonial structures and systems, to undertaking the political work of examining what these complicities obscure and reveal across colonial

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contexts that include settler colonialism, enslavement, caste oppression, sexuality, and migration as they pervade across colonial structures. This collection of essays offers new and timely scholarship in the fields of Indigenous, Black, racialized diasporic, and feminist, queer, trans, and Two-Spirit visual and material culture in what we together challenge as “Canada,” for a readership that seeks to be part of a much longer conversation on these art matters. Unsettling Canadian Art History is an unfinished project, in that essays gathered here are intentionally disparate in their approaches to decolonial and anti-racist scholarship. This book affirms the importance of collaborative research and conversations in undertaking decolonizing methodologies, rather than attempting to locate a singular line of argument or set of questions with which to “unsettle” scholarship and research. In the now tenyear-old words of decolonial Argentinian scholar Walter Mignolo, “It may happen that, as everything else, either postcoloniality or decoloniality (as they become ‘popular’) will be used by individuals to increase personal gains at the institution or in the public sphere. I cannot speak for postcolonialists, but I can tell you that the aims of decolonial thinking and the decolonial option … join the aims of the political society for whom the decolonial is a question of survival rather than promotion.”5 While as contributors and readers we may not have equal stakes of survival in undertaking decolonial and anti-racist work, my hope is that together we can approach what this book offers from emphatic and ethical perspectives. This book acknowledges the importance of foregrounding the perspectives of scholars and artists for whom survival is a constant state of being and thinking in academic and creative spaces.

n ote s 1 As a white settler editor, I struggled to select geographical terminology that appropriately fits with the tone of this book. Leading Indigenous writers such as Unangaˆx scholar Eve Tuck have repeatedly called for the use of Indigenous place names to make visible the histories of stolen Indigenous land (for example, see her Land Relationships Super Collective collaboration with Susan Blight [Anishinaabe, Couchiching] and Hayden King’s [Anishinaabe, Gchi’mnissing] Ogima Mikana artist collective, which engages in site-specific public art interventions; one project seeks to replace street signs and landmarks in Tkaronto/Gichi Kiiwenging/Toronto with Anishinaabemowin place names, https://ogimaamikana.tumblr.com/ and http://www.land relationships.com/collaborators). The white settler states of Canada and the US encompass the northern part of North America, a geographic area that many non-Indigenous scholars commonly, though not without trouble, refer to as “Turtle Island.” While this term gets casually tossed around by white settler writers in particular, it has an Anishinaabeg etymology that spans millennia. Popular, quasi-academic white settler sources such as the Canadian Encyclopedia cite “the turtle” as a conceptualization; it “support[s] the world … by most accounts, it acts as a creation story that places emphasis on the turtle as a symbol of life and earth” (Robinson, “Turtle Island”). However, many Indigenous writers and critics from territories that encompass the land mass that settlers know as North America (typically understood as the settler states of Canada, the US, and Mexico but which can also encompass the Caribbean and Central

Preface

2 3

4 5

America) make it clear that “Turtle Island” is a specific creation story for Anishinaabeg people that should not be casually appropriated by non-Anishinaabeg people. Like many Indigenous terms, “Turtle Island” on non-Indigenous, and particularly on white settler, lips has become shorthand for what Métis scholar Chelsea Vowel regards as “cheeky settlers” seeking “to position themselves as more aware” (âpihtawikosisân [@apihtawikosisan], “I don’t use the term Turtle Island,” 23 May 2018, 8:03 p.m., https://twitter.com/apihtawikosisan/status/9994524 15844728832). Some Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars have likewise employed the term “Kanata,” taken from French colonial writings of contact with Huron–Iroquois words for villages along the Saint Lawrence waterways and made famous by a Canadian Heritage Moment (televised short films that have been shown on Canadian television since 1991) about Jacques Cartier. While neither of these terms seems completely appropriate for me to use for the complex reasons that Vowel articulates, retaining the artificial geographical boundary of the white settler state is also clearly problematic. That said, at the suggestion of a peer reviewer of this volume, I have given up on the term “Turtle Island,” and I occasionally use the white settler state term “Canada” until I find more appropriate geographical language. I do this with hesitation and with the understanding that my complicity in settler structures remains evident here. Martha Langford and Sandra Paikwosky, “McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation Studies in Art History,” page ii of this volume. See, for example, Bowen, Other Places, Igloliorte and Taunton, Continuities Between Eras; Igloliorte, Nagam, and Taunton, Indigenous Art; Hill and McCall, The Land We Are; Mathur, Dewar, and DeGagné, Cultivating Canada; Nelson, Towards an African Canadian Art History; and Jas M. Morgan’s Kinship issue of Canadian Art (Summer 2017). Nelson, “Introduction: Towards an African Canadian Art History,” 20. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity, xxvi–vii.

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Acknowledgments er in morton

This book was made financially possible through the generous funding of multiple sources. At the University of New Brunswick (unb), support for the research and publishing of this book came from the Department of History Research Fund; the Harrison McCain Grant in Aid of Scholarly Book Publishing; the Harrison McCain Foundation Young Scholars Award; and the University Research Fund. The larger project that produced this book, “Unsettling the Settler Artist, Reframing the Canadian Visual Art,” was funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Grant. I am thankful to my former department chair Gary Waite for his dedicated support of this project in terms of navigating financial resources and fielding near constant paperwork, especially when I myself missed deadlines. Special thanks to my colleague, Elizabeth Mancke, who read countless drafts of my sshrc grant application in ways that ensured its success, for which I remain extremely grateful. Student researchers always make or break projects, and I am a firm believer that they spend as much of their time advising the professor who hires them (in this case, me) as they do receiving advice on research tasks. Thank you, Perry Dykens and Josh Sheppard at unb, my two original RAs on this project, for your dedication and creativity in research that helped me understand this work in new and exciting ways. To Annie Dy Xu at the University of Toronto, thank you for your critical skills in conceptualizing our research for the project website and for patiently walking me through unfamiliar technology as you set it up. To Danielle Hogan, Leanna Thomas, and Richard Yeomans at unb, thank you for building the website into what it is now and in particular for your work on the project gallery and archive. To Ellyn Walker at Queen’s University, thank you for your scholarly dedication to this project and for providing a literature review at a critical juncture in the editorial work. To Ian Baird and Stefanie Slaunwhite at unb, thank you for working through image permissions and editorial checks for both the project website and the book; it can be tedious work, but you handled it with humour and grace. This book was also made possible through the intellectual generosity of the sshrc project co-applicants, collaborators, and book contributors. I am forever grateful for

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conversations with and careful readings of work by Susan Cahill, Mark A. Cheetham, Dayna Danger, Leah Decter, Mireille Eagan, D.J. Fraser, Andrew Gayed, Mimi Gellman, Sylvia D. Hamilton, Dominic Hardy, Kristy A. Holmes, Adrienne Huard, Heather Igloliorte, Alice Ming Wai Jim, Lindsay McIntyre, Charmaine A. Nelson, Kirk Niergarth, Shaista Patel, Carmen Robertson, Henry Adam Svec, Carla Taunton, and Travis Wysote. Thank you for your patience with me as I was learning, for sticking through the peer review process, and for trusting me with the shifting timelines deeply impacted by births, deaths, love, grief, and the latest global pandemic. Love and grief define so much of this project for me, and I cherish the love behind the work we did together. I am beyond appreciative of the peer reviewers of the book who sat with this work thoughtfully. Three rounds of revisions were needed and necessary for me as an editor because I had to learn to slow down and think carefully with the comments on my own contributions to this book. I needed help to situate the brilliant work of the contributors to this volume in ways that spoke to the importance of gathering it together in one place. The readers saw the possibilities of this book in ways that I often didn’t see myself. This is what generous and generative peer review should be; it should improve the work with care and consideration. I am especially appreciative of the readers for tackling this work under the trauma and stress of covid-19. Thank you to the journals and book publishers for allowing us to reproduce parts of previously published materials by me, Charmaine A. Nelson, Shaista Patel, and Travis Wysote: Routledge, Settler Colonial Studies, Theory & Event. Thank you to these authors for revising and rewriting their work significantly for this book. I am always indebted to freelance editor Tim Pearson. This is my third book with Tim, and this time he took on the role of managing editor while I was on maternity leave with my third child. Even in my cloud of postpartum confusion, I knew that this manuscript was in excellent hands with Tim, who always fixes my mistakes and helps me make my writing better. This is also my third book with McGill-Queen’s University Press, and I am once again grateful for the dedication and hard work of the editorial staff at the press. In particular, I thank Elli Stylianou for her quick and professional editorial assistance with the penultimate draft. Special thanks to Jonathan Crago for supporting this book from the very beginning, as he did my last one. This time, I am particularly grateful for Jonathan’s selection of peer reviewers who understood this book, for his guidance in getting image permissions and approaching copyright holders, and for helping me apply for funding to get it to press – sometimes at the eleventh hour. Thank you for seeing through this project, Jonathan, and especially for your patience with me. Thank you to Shelagh Plunkett for professional and quick copyediting to meet our various contributor timelines and schedules. Thank you to Martha Langford and Sandra Paikowsky of Concordia University for accepting this book into the McGill-Queen’s/ Beaverbook Canadian Foundation Studies in Art History series. It is my third book with the series, and I remain so appreciative of your editorial guidance.

Acknowledgments

In the Department of History at unb, I am extremely appreciative of the work that administrative assistants Elizabeth Arnold and Misty Sullivan did in hiring research assistants, helping me with image permissions, and generally keeping so many parts of this complicated project organized. Thank you to all of my colleagues in the department for their support of this work personally and professionally, especially through the contribution of financial assistance from our shared departmental research fund. It means so much to me to have the support of generous people to work with every day. I must single out a few friends and colleagues here who have helped me to think about my work in this book specifically and who have supported me during its completion. Dia and Alex Da Costa, thank you for teaching me what sitting with difficult questions and caretaking relationships looks like. Funké Aladejebi, thank you for coming into my life as a colleague and for leaving our shared workplace a friend and for all of the loving conversations along the way. Carla Taunton, thank you for listening to some hard conversations that needed new perspectives and for supporting me through them, often through tears. Shaista Patel, thank you for turning the ignorant emails of a stranger into a friendship, for trusting me, and for teaching me more than I can ever express. Rachel Bryant, Darryl Leroux, and Angela Tozer, thank you for patience and generosity in talking to me about settler colonialism over the last few years and in ways that still help make my scholarship better. Travis Wysote, thank you for challenging me to be a better scholar and human with your intellectual care and kindness. Mél Hogan, thank you for giving me good advice for a tough situation that nearly flattened me during the editing of this book. Angela Wickett, thanks for hating grapefruit with me and for having your Gagetown ready at a moment’s notice. Natalie Grynpas, thank you for the constant generous care of your friendship and for seeing the best of my intentions even when I make mistakes. To both Susan Cahill and Wendy Churchill, thank you for your unconditional love and sometimes near daily (separate) phone calls when I needed them; I now think conference calls together on the same problem probably would have been quicker, but clearly, I needed to figure out some things twice. AJ Ripley and Triny Finlay, our pandemic friendship is the only poetry I understand, and no one makes me laugh like you two; thanks for the cackling and for showing me that academic friendships can be reciprocally loving. I miss and love Corey Lynam, Allison Sherman, and Lisa Visser. For some reason this trio of loss that overlaps in Kingston still hung together for me during the editing of this book, maybe because the grief of friendship loss is long, ongoing, constant, and surprising. To Bri Howard, Kristy Holmes, Sally Hickson, Angela Roberts, Kristin Campbell, and Jeff Barbeau, thank you for keeping loving memories of shared friendships close to me. My family lost our matriarch, my grandmother, Vivian Williams, three years ago, at the midpoint of this project, but it still feels like yesterday. What does work matter when you lose your whole heart? I miss you every day. Thank you to my mom for helping me with photographing our family memories for this book, even as she grieved

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her own mom. Thank you to my dad, sister, brother-in-law, nephew, and nieces, for your love. Thank you to my in-laws and sister-in-law for being so good to me and to our children. My rainbow baby, Goldie, brought sunshine back into my life during the chokehold of deep and overlapping grief. Gus and Gladys, you held me when I couldn’t hold myself. Ryan, you always hold me the closest while saying the fewest words and it is always exactly what I need. Sometimes a person of few words and a person with far too many find each other.

Unsettling Canadian Art History

0.1 My mother’s album of photographs from the World’s Tall Ships Festival, Halifax, 2000.

Introduction Unsettling Canadian Art History er in morton I might change the wording of this old sentence “Critical whiteness is no less occupying of space as uncritical whiteness” to “Decolonial whiteness is no less occupying of space as colonial whiteness.” sara ahmed, Twitter (@SaraNAhmed), 23 June 2020 This work is not for you. dayna danger, adapted quote by Jas M. Morgan in Canadian Art

Shutter Stories

Anyone looking for a concrete example of what queer theorist and critical race scholar Sara Ahmed calls “the occupying space” of whiteness need look no further than the family stories of white settlers like me. In 2000, the year after I graduated from high school, I took a trip with my mother’s extended family to Kjipuktuk|Halifax. My family gathered together in the provincial capital from the more rural parts of Mi’kma’ki| Nova Scotia we called home to attend the World’s Tall Ships Festival. The event brought together large historical and replica sailing vessels, including reconstructions of Christopher Columbus’s 1492 Santa María and John (Giovanni) Cabot’s (Caboto) 1497 Matthew. I remember seeing the visual cacophony of sailing ships such as the Matthew parading through Halifax harbour outside of our hotel window. My mother took photographs of this spectacle and later printed them to save in a family album (fig. 0.1). The Matthew had visited my hometown of Kespoowuit/Keespongwitk|Yarmouth three years earlier, in 1997, to mark the 500th anniversary of Cabot’s colonial voyage of the Northeastern Atlantic. This was part of a widespread provincial celebration in Ktaqmkuk|Newfoundland and Nitassinan/Nunatsiavut/NunatuKavut|Labrador, where Cabot may have first invaded. I have a photo of this visit showing my younger cousins in front of the replica Matthew, one of them wearing what I have always remembered to be a pirate hat. Closer inspection reveals it was actually a sailor’s cap with the name “Cabot” stitched on the front, produced as part of the material paraphernalia of Newfoundland’s “Cabot 500” celebration. A memory now twenty years old, what stood out to me then as a visual spectacle of historical sailing ships and family memories captured in photographs occurs to me much differently now. My participation in a public celebration of colonial invasion of Indigenous lands in the Americas

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and the violence of transatlantic enslavement of Black people of African descent provides a way to understand how settler states like Canada can hide and reconfigure their colonial violence while simultaneously celebrating it for all to see, usually with the full participation of white citizens like me. This celebration of colonial invasion is not significant because of the way I remember a particular event, or because of how I think about it now, but because this memory goes beyond my individual family story and photo album. As white Canadian settler scholar Sheelah McLean persuasively argues, the memories of European descendant families like mine become the “national texts” of white settler states that erase “the colonial policies that enforced differential access to resources, such as land.”1 Our stories obscure and actively conceal reality, in which “the same historical moment that [our families] benefitted from their position as white citizens, Indigenous people [and enslaved people of African descent] faced policies of genocide.”2 One story about “Cabot 500” that stands out to me still is that of a St John’s hairdresser who cut and sculpted her hair into the shape of the Matthew ship, which local media covered at the time. This bizarre example of the Matthew hairstyle, combined with the fact that settler governments openly called this commemoration of colonial invasion “the party of the century,” speaks to the level of individual and collective investment in narrating genocidal colonial invasion as a foundational national text that is something to be celebrated. As elementary classrooms across the settler province of Newfoundland and Labrador that year quickly set up lessons and student materials “like a shrine to John Cabot,” Memorial University folklorist Gerald Pocius asked the press, “how do you celebrate something you know nothing about?”3 The answer to Pocius’s rhetorical question is that you repeat the colonial story as a national text in the way that dominant white settler society wants to hear it, and you teach the next generation to think and see things this way too. These celebrations quickly become what Black abolitionist scholar Tiffany Lethabo King calls “North American quotidian circulations of colonialist common sense.”4 This level of investment in maintaining the colonial “common sense” of white settler national texts means that unraveling these narratives requires a multitude of tactics drawn from anti-racist, decolonial, feminist, and queer, trans, and Two-Spirit methodologies for unsettling dominant ways of seeing and knowing the world. The national texts of colonialism become so powerful because settler states and their white citizens are not only successful in concealing colonial violence but also in turning invasion and genocide into the “party of the century” in visual and material representations and historical reconstructions that frame colonialism for a normative white audience. Algerian Israeli visual culture theorist Ariella Aïsha Azoulay usefully describes the process of photographing such colonial moments as a “shutter story” of imperial violence – the camera shutter captures only what the photographer wants to frame.5 Using Azoulay’s concept of the “shutter story” to contextualize white settler narratives turned national texts places these historical recreations of colonialism in a larger frame. Looking outside what the imperial shutter story captures reveals how

Introduction

the seemingly placid photographs that my mother gathered into a family album provide ways to see colonial violence repeating itself in the positional experiences of white settlers. Azoulay usefully carries forward the metaphor of family photographs as framing colonial invasion, writing that to think about imperial violence in terms of a camera shutter means grasping its particular brevity and the spectrum of its rapidity. It means understanding how this brief operation can transform an individual rooted in her life-world into a refugee, a looted object into a work of art, a whole shared world into a thing of the past, and the past itself into a separate time zone, a tense that lies apart from both present and future … Unlearning imperialism aims at unlearning its origins, found in the repetitive moments of the operation of imperial shutters. Unlearning imperialism refuses the stories the shutter tells.6 Unlearning imperialism, then, is less about centralizing my individual family stories, and more about using these examples to understand how forcefully Black, Indigenous, and racialized diasporic scholars, artists, and activists have worked and must continue to work to disrupt such collective colonial–national texts of the white settler state; these texts are, of course, not just passive shutter story “representations” but actively genocidal moves in ongoing violence and dispossession. Disrupting imperial shutter stories such as “Cabot 500” illustrates the vectors of “colonial unknowing” that present the violence of invasion, genocide, and enslavement as innocuous in the settler state of Canada and the extent to which those of us who have benefitted from these histories ignore violent representations of the past in the contemporary moment.7 Colonial histories show up as concrete material legacies of the present because colonial violence and genocide continue. Put another way, it remains easy for white settlers to see things the way that we want to see them: if we don’t want to see and understand colonialism, we can ignore it without consequence. We can take a family photograph that tells the shutter story we want to see. Unsettling Canadian Art History is concerned with confronting such moments of “colonial unknowing” through the study of visual and material culture and also with refusing the colonial stories the imperial shutter tells through multiple decolonial and anti-racist positionalities. I use the term “positionalities” purposefully here to describe the embodied perspectives on the past with which this book grapples in the study of art and culture. Historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s now widely cited book, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, makes clear that one’s positionality in the study of the past is a deeply meaningful and critical orientation: “Indeed, the past is only past because there is a present, just as I can point to something over there only because I am here. But nothing is inherently over there or here. In that sense, the past has no content. The past – or more accurately, pastness – is a position.”8 Although this critique from Trouillot is about unravelling concepts of linearity between past and present, I extend it here to argue that one’s position on the past informs the way in which we

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move ourselves towards – or away from – particular interpretations of pastness in order to tell the stories that matter to us. This book’s orientating framework – studying the past through positionality – borrows from feminist standpoint theory in this regard and specifically Donna Haraway’s well-known concept of “situated knowledges,” which she understands as a particularly visual set of practices. As Haraway writes, “The eyes have been used to signify a perverse capacity – honed to perfection in the history of science tied to militarism, capitalism, colonialism, and male supremacy – to distance the knowing subject from everybody and everything in the interests of unfettered power.”9 Haraway’s concept of situated knowledges suggests that in order to undertake research and writing “we need to learn in our bodies.”10 It is clear that, as individual authors in this book, our bodies position us each differently in the world, which means that we have various situated knowledges to draw upon in writing about colonial histories. By starting with Haraway’s method of situated knowledges in a collection of essays about visual and material culture, the goal of this book is to offer anti-racist, decolonial, feminist, and queer, trans, and TwoSpirit standpoints on histories of colonialism that violently formed the white settler state of Canada. In gathering chapters together that approach these histories from such overlapping standpoints, we take up Haraway’s vision to build on “translations and specific ways of seeing, that is ways of life … All these pictures of the world should not be allegories of infinite mobility and interchangeability but of elaborate specificity and difference and the loving care people might take to learn how to see faithfully from another’s point of view, even when the other is our own machine. That’s not alienating distance; that’s a possible allegory for feminist versions of objectivity.”11 Following Haraway, this book suggests that embodied knowledges are crucial modes of inquiry on the past and for art and culture because they are “knowledgeable of modes of denial through repression, forgetting, and disappearing acts … ‘Subjugated’ standpoints are preferred because they seem to promise more adequate, sustained, objective, transforming accounts of the world.”12 Unsettling Canadian Art History draws together various situated knowledges to offer a range of standpoints on colonial histories, each of which offers critical perspectives on how to understand positions on the past. Following feminist standpoint theorists who argue that standpoints are “achieved, not given,” this work suggests that knowledge is situational to how we show up in the world and where we come from.13 Put another way, Black diaspora literary scholar Rinaldo Walcott conceptualizes his own situated knowledge and standpoint on the past through a poetic declaration, “I am here because you were there.” Walcott’s axiom is a reflection on what scholar of the African diaspora Saidiya Hartman has theorized as the “long aftermath” of transatlantic enslavement, which situates Black positionality through the violent colonial displacement of the Middle Passage and the tropical and temperate exchange of human captives within the Americas: in Walcott’s words, “I am here because you were there. I am here, in Canada, as someone who was born in the Caribbean, not because I even

Introduction

chose to be in the Caribbean, but because of a legacy of transatlantic slavery that moved people from the African continent around the Americas.”14 If the past is a position, then positional standpoints on that pastness are a relational orientation. To draw on Sara Ahmed’s reanimation of feminist standpoint theory to critical race studies and queer theory and the question of “orientations,” this book asks, “what does it mean to be oriented” to a particular past or to develop research questions that help us to narrate our positionalities to time and place? How, as Ahmed asks, do “we come to find our way in a world that acquires new shapes, depending on which way we turn … What difference does it make ‘what’ we are orientated toward?”15 As artists and scholars who have come together in this volume to write about anti-racist, decolonial, feminist, and queer, trans, and Two-Spirit art and cultural practices in the settler state of Canada, how can we think together from divergent standpoints and positionalities that necessitate us seeing histories of colonialism differently and in ways that together reject and dismantle the shutter stories of white settler national texts? And for those of us who occupy settler positionalities, what are the implications of falling back on what Muslim feminist scholar Shaista Aziz Patel has described as “settler-centrism” in our attempts to write scholarship oriented in relation to a white settler state?16 And how do settlers move away from what Eve Tuck (Unangaxˆ) and K. Wayne Yang have famously termed “settler moves to innocence”?17 Such moves, they note, “are those strategies or positionings that attempt to relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility without giving up land or power or privilege, without having to change much at all. In fact, settler scholars may gain professional kudos or a boost in their reputations for being so sensitive or self-aware. Yet settler moves to innocence are hollow, they only serve the settler.”18 Moves to settler innocence bring easy accolades. And yet, as Tuck and Yang point out, settler harm reduction remains a crucially necessary project even if it is but a stopgap in a longer process of decolonization.19 What this means is that it remains necessary to critically identify settler moves to innocence in collaborative work on anti-racist and decolonial scholarship but also to work on settler harm reduction models that expose histories of settler violence and help confront white supremacy in the present. As many critical scholars of racialization and whiteness have pointed out, settler moves to innocence often show up in the form of white “confessional” writings, which can often be pleasurable, “both textual and libidinal,” to show how far I’ve/we’ve come in our anti-racist and decolonial knowledge.20 It is easy to feel good in a move to settler innocence or to take on a more critical positionality on whiteness than the white person next to you. Yet, as one white scholar, Robyn Westcott, puts it in her contribution to a special issue on critical whiteness studies, “confessional writing frightens me, makes my stomach clench and the membranes of my nostrils burn … This is the danger that I intuit in the act of confession – that the white subject will achieve not only spiritual restitution after a fashion, but then appoint herself to enact the pleasurable closure of narrative resolution. The subject who has always spoken now closes the play

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of signification, whatever its terror and violence, and walks away a saint.”21 Sara Ahmed, in this same special issue, elaborates succinctly on the problems with declarations of whiteness that show up in the form of “I didn’t see before, but I do now.” As Ahmed critiques this visual reckoning of whiteness, “whiteness is only invisible for those who inhabit it. For those who don’t, it is hard not to see whiteness; it even seems everywhere.”22 Whiteness, Ahmed suggests elsewhere, “is a world; a way of gathering around. That gathering seems neutral, kind even, warm, at least to some; but it depends on the erasure of violence.”23 Moves to settler innocence, and in my case the white confessional family story that introduces this book to critique national settler texts, must always be approached with a clear intent. This purpose, following the brilliant words of Shaista Patel, must centre “the analytic of complicity” and critique our individual failures as white and settler scholars “that are both personal and structural.”24 This book brings together scholars and artists who study and produce feminist, decolonial and anti-racist, and queer, trans, and Two-Spirit art and culture in what we together contest as “Canada,” to broadly consider what it means to “see” colonial encounter and resist colonialism through divergent standpoints yet interrelated positional lenses on the past. The volume takes an expansive view of what it means to “see” things that Canadian colonial shutter stories would rather obscure and, moreover, what it means to have different orientations towards and standpoints on the study of art and culture. I draw on this critical concept of “seeing” as theorized by disability art scholar Georgina Kleege, who works from her positionality as a blind academic raised by visual artists to think about sightedness and visual culture. If seeing something can have more than one meaning and can also mean putting “visual experiences into words” in the form of a historical narrative or personal story, then likewise prioritizing particular lenses on the past can indicate one’s standpoint and situated knowledges through lived and learned experiences.25 If, in Kleege’s words, “people learn to interpret through their lived experience,” then one’s positionality on the past can reorient a range of readers and viewers towards certain standpoints on history as they inform the present.26 Sometimes such “seeing” and reorientation necessitates adopting perspectives on the past that makes certain histories observable for those who see things differently or for those who would rather not see what the imperial shutter actively erases with a snapshot. Unsettling Canadian Art History works from the assumption that seeing the past in “Canada” outside of historical representations that orient towards the white settler state’s shutter stories is in and of itself a radically necessary standpoint. To reveal divergent but interconnected histories that museum collections, university curriculum, and colonial disciplines such as Canadian art history actively silence is to challenge “the occupying space of whiteness” (anti-racist, decolonial, feminist, queer, or otherwise) that continues to narrate the past in innocuously violent ways. Drawing out the critical tools of disability art, Kleege observes that “while a picture may be worth a thousand words, the assumption seems to be that those thousand words –

Introduction

or even a million words – will not do justice to the picture.”27 Kleege’s disabilityfocused understanding of what it means to “see” things differently also helps to illustrate that what it means to see colonialism – or not – when it is in front of us is very much dependent on embodied forms of positional perspective. What evidence, we might ask, remains necessary to show that the ferocity of an imperial shutter’s capture requires continued disruption from multiple Black, Indigenous, and racialized diasporic standpoints? Working from a perspective such as Kleege’s, for instance, what does it mean to “see” colonialism differently if the shared goal is to disrupt its violence alongside each other from a standpoint of shared care and solidarity? And how do we move into a concept of care in intellectual practice that helps us think together about what Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate scholar Kim TallBear calls “the ethics of accountability in research (whose lives, lands and bodies are inquired into and what do they get out of it?) … [W]hat counts as risk (ontological harms) and rightful benefit (institutional building and community development?) in the course of building knowledge?”28 For TallBear, this has meant a practice of “studying across” cultures of power and caring for the research subjects and their stories outside of extractive intellectual frameworks.29 The chapters in this volume offer different anti-racist, decolonial, feminist, and queer, trans, and Two-Spirit standpoints from which to approach colonial histories in the settler state of Canada through visual and material culture. This book also acknowledges that while Black, Indigenous, and racialized diasporic artists and scholars of art and culture who write and research in the “Canadian” context might have particular reasons for orienting away from – or rejecting altogether – a project framed as Unsettling Canadian Art History, their work must still be centralized in this undertaking. Together, the chapters show that it remains simultaneously necessary to unpack what the imperial shutter story erases in the narration of white settler national texts and to look beyond this colonial frame in order to layer anti-racist, decolonial, feminist, and queer, trans, and Two-Spirit evidence together and expose moments of “colonial unknowing” for the violence that such not-knowing enacts. Ahmed has long observed, for example, that “no matter how much evidence you have of racism and sexism, no matter how many documents, communications, encounters, no matter how much research you can refer to, or words you can defer to, words that might carry a history as an insult, what you have is deemed as insufficient. The more you show the more eyes seem to roll.”30 This book is about these moments of exposure, where multiple histories of colonialism in the settler state of Canada get brought to the surface through the careful work – and care work – of uncovering evidence in archival collections, by renarrating the past through the analyzing of visual and material culture produced by Black, Indigenous, and racialized diasporic artists, and in the production of anti-racist, decolonial, feminist, and queer, trans, and Two-Spirit creative practice. What the chapters “show” as evidence in disrupting imperial shutter stories and white settler national texts might diverge between authors, and yet each individual chapter

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brings a positionality on the past that is crucial to think about relationally within the volume as a whole. The contributors’ telling of Black, Indigenous, and racialized diasporic histories using art and culture speak on their own terms but also show points of intersection in the shared work of “studying across” these situated knowledges.

Disciplinary Erasures, Decolonial Excavation

It remains clear that the well-known activist adage, “nothing about us without us,” still does not always permeate the scholarship of colonial disciplines such as Canadian art history.31 This book’s focus on anti-racist, decolonial, feminist, queer, trans, and Two-Spirit scholarship in art and culture brings together Black, Indigenous, racialized diasporic, and white settler scholars in an attempt to disrupt and unsettle Canadian art history’s disciplinary orientation towards whiteness. In doing so, this book suggests that while one’s situated knowledge on the past matters, so does the way we show up in the present world we seek to make and unmake. As Kim TallBear has argued in her work in critical Indigenous studies, the “language of identity is necessary to address inequity,” even if she believes Indigenous scholars must also strive to shift their lens “to consider what it means to live in good relationship” with each other and with the other-than-human relatives around them. TallBear further writes that thinking “beyond identity” is also necessary: “If we want to talk about decolonizing our lives, we need to think about being in good relation instead of seeking inclusion in the settler state.”32 Likewise, this volume does not reposition Canadian art history as a discipline that simply needs more Black, Indigenous, and racialized diasporic scholarship included in order to “fix” its erasures and account for its violence; instead, Unsettling Canadian Art History starts from the critical perspective that colonial and white-centric disciplines reorient towards whiteness and Eurocentric ways of undertaking and understanding scholarship by their very nature. To foreground anti-racist, decolonial, feminist, queer, trans, and Two-Spirit scholarship outside of Canadian art history’s imperial frame therefore requires those of us who occupy white settler positionalities to critically assess the ways in which this discipline reorients itself to whiteness through our work. The broader project of unsettling Canadian art history also requires a varied positional excavation of the past in ways that speak to Black, Indigenous, and racialized diasporic histories of art and culture on their own terms, which means looking beyond methodologies, categories, and spaces for art and culture research, writing, and praxis that reinforce Canadian art history as a disciplinary project.33 Colonial erasures are part of Canadian art history’s origin story. This is unsurprising, given the nature of what Mohawk anthropologist Audra Simpson terms “settler statecraft” in the making of the white settler state of Canada. As she puts it, in spite of the innocence of the story that Canada likes to tell about itself, that it is a place of immigrant and settler founding, that in this, it is a place that

Introduction

somehow escapes the ugliness of history, that it is a place that is not like the place below it, across that border. Canada is not like that place for many reasons but it is especially exceptional now, because it apologized, it stood in the face of its history, it “reconciles” the violence of the past with its present and so, presumably, with this acknowledgment of wrongdoing, may move on.34 The “ugliness of history” is both a reflection here on material and embodied reality of Indigenous, Black, and racialized diasporic people at the hands of the violent white settler state and its origins in European genocidal imperial invasion and expansion and of the ways in which this story continually gets retold as the “party of the century” in order to erase this violence. These interconnected logics of coloniality in settler statecraft rely on what Black historian of the US Justin Leroy has usefully framed as “anti-blackness and a logic of settlement,” as a particular colonial formation in the Americas where statecraft violently enacts enslavement and settler colonialism together. For Leroy, what matters in this regard in terms of historical narration is that “the violence of these processes is enduring and ongoing, and the hinge of inclusion/ exclusion both misnames that violence and narrows any sense of possibility for how it can be redressed.”35 Colonial disciplines such as Canadian art history also rely on these methods of inclusion and exclusion to reinforce their imperial frames and strengthen their Eurocentric methodologies and knowledge, and moving outside of these ways of knowing necessitates naming the violence of these disciplines for what it is. More broadly, the process of settler state formation in Canada relies on the colonial capital exploitation of enslaved Africans as “property” and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from land turned into property as well.36 This dehumanizing coloniality of settler statecraft that requires the “elimination” and “erasure” of Indigenous peoples and the imperial expansion of human chattel is the relational foundational violence of Canada.37 As Leroy summarizes, “For all their differences, settler colonialism and slavery are violent justifications for extermination – of bodies, of sovereignty, of self-possession.”38 Related to this colonial formulation of extermination are questions of positionality in white settler states around the Indigenous/settler binary (from white settler colonial studies scholars such as Lorenzo Veracini and Patrick Wolfe) or the Indigenous/settler/ “slave” triad, advanced and critiqued by Indigenous, Black, white Latinx, and racialized diasporic scholars such as Kamau Brathwaite, Jodi Byrd, Dia Da Costa, Alexandre Emboaba Da Costa, Enakshi Dua, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Tiffany Lethabo King, Bonita Lawrence, Mamhood Mandani, Ghiada Moussa, Shaista Patel, Eve Tuck, Nishant Upadhyay, and K. Wayne Yang. While Veracini argues that settler colonial formations are distinct “modes of empire” under European invasion, the late white Australian settler scholar Patrick Wolfe famously “recuperated” the binarism of the “settler-Native” dyad.39 For Wolfe, critically naming the formation of settler subjecthood under settler colonialism advanced a theorization of settler colonialism’s “logic of elimination.”40 However, this binary tendency in white settler colonial studies often resulted in ignoring

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“that indigenous peoples exist, resist, and persist,” to use Kanaka Maoli scholar J. Kēhaulani Kauanui’s phrasing.41 Moreover, reorienting towards whiteness in the critical field of settler colonial studies has spurred many debates about the relational standpoints of Indigenous and Black peoples and racialized diasporic migrants to white settler states, including what Shaista Patel, Ghiada Moussa, and Nishant Upadhyay describe as “questions of the anti-colonial and/or decolonial and anti-racist scholarship of diasporic people of colour living in white settler-colonial nation-states.”42 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s influential arguments in their 2012 article, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” discussed above, also advanced a relational understanding of settler colonial spatiality, which positions Indigenous land, enslaved “labour,” and migrant “invasion” in terms of an Indigenous/enslaved/white-and-racialized diasporic settler triad to refuse settler futurity and begin conversations about settler complicity in ongoing occupation in the US and Canada. In the eastern (Uganda) and southern (South Africa) African context, Mahmood Mamdani has long theorized “settler” as a category that differentiates between European “conqueror” and racialized “migrant,” therefore disaggregating such binary and triad positionalities more associated with the Americas and Australia and Aotearoa|New Zealand.43 Critiquing dyad and triad models only reinforces the critical necessity in the context of the Americas to think about settler colonialism and European invasion alongside transatlantic enslavement and what Dia Da Costa and Alexandre Emboaba Da Costa together refer to as “multiple colonialisms” to account for “the complex relationalities of multiple and converging colonial relations” in the Americas and Asia.44 As part of her expansive work on Black and Indigenous relationality in the Americas, which rejects settler occupation as permanent and re-establishes it as genocidal invasion, Tiffany Lethabo King suggests that colonial capitalist Marxian categories of “labour” do not account for the dehumanizing process of turning humans into property under the chattel slavery that helped settler statecraft in the Americas. She argues that overreliance on the work of white settler colonial studies scholars such as Wolfe and Veracini brings a focus to “settlement” that denies white violence and moves focus away from invasion and that “Black discourses of conquest fill in the conceptual gaps of Blackness that currently vex and confound” this field.45 Likewise, Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd’s use of Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite’s term “arrivant” to position racialized diasporic migration to the Indigenous Americas as a process rather than an identity formation helps to move outside of these dyad/triad relationalities, much in the same way that Wolfe understood invasion as a “structure,” not an “event.”46 As Byrd explains, “I resisted naming the cacophonies of new-world colonialism settler colonialism and instead theorized arrivant colonialism as a way to account for the global counters of racialized gendered capitalism that deploys uneven and enforced precarity to interpellate voluntary and conscript involuntary participation into the structures predicated upon Indigenous dispossession and transatlantic slavery.”47 There is something about this primacy of the “settler colonial turn,” for both King and Byrd, that means that, in Byrd’s framing, “Indigeneity can often be lost, or incom-

Introduction

pletely apprehended, even within the emphases on structures or other events that capture all subject positions within empire. At the same time, Blackness, too, is lost.”48 To write about these violent historical foundations of the white settler state of Canada is to try and understand what Byrd in the context of the US calls “the impasses of settlement and slavery,” by reorienting to “the onset of conquest with European arrival” in relation to “the global contours of racialized gendered capitalism.”49 However, for Byrd this orientation towards Indigeneity, Blackness, and racialized arrivant migration is not about returning to dyad/triad model, or what she calls “an attempt to create an identificatory category to claim alongside settler, native, slave, savage or settler ally.”50 Here, Byrd summarizes long-established theoretical debates across Black, Indigenous, critical race studies, and settler colonial studies, which ultimately attempt to distinguish between anti-racist scholarship and anticolonial and decolonizing scholarship, both of which risk ignoring, on the one hand, what Bonita Lawrence and Enakshi Dua reaffirm as “contemporary Indigenous presence” and, on the other, antiracism work that is specific to particular settler states such as Canada.51 Byrd names this web – or, in her words, “cacophony” – of entangled colonial processes that white supremacist nation building makes “messy” as relegating “Indigenous peoples to elimination, refugees to settlers, and descendants of slaves to settler adjacents,” none of which grapples with the “cacophonous tension” in the “afterlives of slavery and colonialism.”52 For Byrd, what matters in these established debates now is “grounding” relationality “to the physical ruptures of land beyond possession and dispossession and to help us hold and nuance the specificities between Indigeneity and race, slavery and colonialism, that resulted when 1492 brought the globe to the Americas.”53 Byrd’s work demonstrates that settler statecraft interrelates to positional experiences and disciplinary formations of settler colonial studies and is important to understand that generations of Black, Indigenous, and diasporic racialized scholars have grappled – and continue to grapple – with these conceptual and methodological problems as they pertain to taking on anti-racist and decolonial research. The terminological and conceptual terrain remains messy out of ethical necessity. Complicating this messiness further is what Shaista Patel sees as the need to centre caste in conversations with concepts such as Byrd’s arrivant colonialism and to “write against homogenizing power of categories such as people of colour and South Asians.”54 As Patel puts it, I have struggled with ways of finding a place for examining the complicity of descendants of indentured labourers … Indian labourers survived under brutal sub-humane conditions during the period of indentureship [in the Caribbean]. Without this history in my family or my larger Shi’i Ismaili Muslim community, writing about descendants of these labourers as the (new) colonial and anti-Black people has been difficult because of questions that can be asked about cleaning my own proverbial backyard first. While I have written about my own complicity, I have tried to find a rationale … by holding

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onto the intimate connections between seemingly disparate places such as the Caribbean, Bengal, South Carolina and all other places where Europeans and later Americans went under the tutelage of expanding empires.55 The messiness of writing against what Patel describes as “horizontal violence” means “reading for relations” across empires, across colonial divisions of time and space, and outside of the normative organizational structures of complexly dispossessing empires that sought to neatly categorize humans and their relationships in ways that made sense to colonizers. To use the powerful words of Chinese American scholar Lisa Lowe, any given imperial order that founds a settler state has capacity that “at once denies colonial slavery, erases the seizure of lands from native peoples, displaces migrations and connections across continents, and internalizes these processes in a national struggle of history and consciousness.”56 Caste, for instance, is a crucial point of consideration for Patel because it allows for a deeper understanding of how “colonialism and anti-Blackness of South Asians, for example, cannot be read outside of caste relations.”57 These are precisely the specificities worth striving for despite the messiness of our archives and the limits of our relational understandings as individual scholars working across positionalities.

Unsettling Canadian Art History

The need to continually grapple with the messiness of colonial “afterlives” is most evidently true for the scholars concerned with broader questions of positionality and coloniality in white settler states, but it is no less important for researchers who locate their scholarship in colonially derived fields such as Canadian art history.58 There are positional intersections between this broader decolonial and anti-racist work described in the previous section and the unsettling of Canadian art history as a discipline, and yet there are also important moments of divergence that decentre “Canadian art” as a national text for historicizing culture. Decolonial and anti-racist scholars of Canadian art have long understood that a Canadian white settler imagination that frames violent invasion and genocide as the “party of the century” requires a laborious excavation of art and culture evidence that demonstrates what Charmaine A. Nelson summarizes as “Canada’s colonial origins and nation-building project, by both British and French colonizers.”59 These colonial origins include the first European colonial attempts at violent elimination of Indigenous peoples, which as Wəlastəkokew historian Andrea Bear Nicholas argues, required the tactical and militarized colonial displacement and dispossession of Indigenous peoples beginning in the eastern Passamaquoddy, Mi’kmaq, and Wəlastəkwey territories “immediately after the British capture of the French fort at Louisbourg in 1758 … The justification for these erasures was found in John Locke’s labour theory of property and in the legal fictions of terra nullius and the doctrine of discovery.”60 Bear Nicholas positions these key moments

Introduction

of eastern settler invasion and Indigenous dispossession for Peskotomuhkati (Passamaquoddy), Mi’kmaq, and Wəlastəkokewiyik in 1758 that grew from two centuries of European contact in these territories beginning with the French in 1598, as the foundation of settler Canadian art and literature in the late eighteenth and the midnineteenth century. Crucially, she further notes that nearly all settler visual artists of this later period “had been trained in England, and their work was decidedly Romantic in its interest in natural settings, unusual or exotic scenery, and occasional tumultuous scenes … This was in keeping with the colonial project of clearing the wilderness, settling the land, and establishing a new civil authority.”61 The importance of Bear Nicholas’s argument is that it demonstrates the legacy of violent colonial erasures in Canadian art, which have always been part of what she calls “the usual contradictions of imperialism.”62 While British-settler colonizers invaded and cleared lands along the Wəlastəkw river, British-settler colonizer artists of this period simultaneously erased from their canvasses “all the ugly realities of suffering and hardship experienced by Indigenous peoples at the hands of settler societies. By ignoring these realities, artists kept their audiences, especially potential immigrants oblivious to Indigenous suffering, and effectively assisted, either wittingly or not, in the ongoing dispossession and displacement of Maliseets [Wəlastəkokewiyik].”63 This foundation of artistic erasure in Canadian settler art tied to the imperial metropoles of England and France is part of the origin story of Canadian art history. And Bear Nicholas’s example shows the extent to which European settler colonizer art has acted as neither a neutral nor an innocent category of cultural production but rather as a direct vector of violent and genocidal imperial expansion for French and British empires and, later, for the Canadian settler state. British colonizers clearing lands and British colonizer artists clearing canvasses were one and the same, and both processes derived from tactical military colonial violence. Eighteenth-century British artists in Wəlastəkwey territory, for example, were almost always military trained, having migrated there after the American Revolutionary War in 1783, where they became part of an overwhelming number of men in uniform who “would terrorize the Maliseets [Wəlastəkokewiyik], and serve as the first and most effective strategy to begin displacing them.”64 From the colonial archives, Bear Nicholas excavates records that demonstrate this tactical reign of genocidal terror led by male British military officer-artists against Wəlastəkokewiyik, whom the British attempted to drive away from “the heart of their homeland” on the Wəlastəkokewiyik: “As one chronicler would later admit, ‘They [Wəlastəkokewiyik] are not favourably disposed towards us [the British Loyalists], and have been only kept in order by terror.’”65 It is no exaggeration from the present to describe British military artists as terrorists in this context, since Bear Nicholas’s excavated archival record speaks in these precise terms. If the first colonial artists who painted in the eastern Indigenous territories that they would later claim as Canada kept Wəlastəkokewiyik “in order by terror,” the foundations of Canadian art history in the work of these European-trained painters are also violent gestures of imperial erasure. As Leroy’s work on historical narration in

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the interrelated histories of enslavement and settler colonialism in North America demonstrates, most disciplines have not “fully reckoned with the historical intimacy between colonialism and slavery” or the vectors of violence of imperial life.66 Further, the white settler celebration of violent genocidal invasion did not emerge in the contemporary moment with commemorations such as “Cabot 500” but rather connects back to these originary moments of European colonization of the eastern North Atlantic. And just as colonial artists were violent military actors in these histories, so too were Indigenous artists resistors of various incarnations of colonial violence – religious, economic, military, medical, or otherwise. Just north of the territories that Bear Nicholas writes of, Nunastsiavummiut (Labrador Inuit from Nunatsiavut) experienced what Inuk art historian Heather Igloliorte describes as “four hundred years of prolonged contact with Kallunât [European colonizers]. Whalers, fishermen, explorers, Moravian missionaries, and a succession of French and British colonialist exposed [Nunastsiavummiut] to periods of exploitation, evangelization, colonization, and confederation.”67 Writing against the standard narratives of Canadian art history, which position Inuit art as developing in isolation from settler culture in Nunavut and Nunavik from 1900–50, “unlike most other Inuit peoples who were geographically isolated until the early twentieth century,” in Nunatsiavut European contact spanned centuries.68 The visual and material artistry of Labrador Inuit, she writes, “is evident throughout the entire historical record of this region, including many centuries before European contact; contemporary visual arts are rooted in this rich and complex history.”69 Here, community excavation of Nunastsiavummiut histories works against both settler colonial narratives of erasure and Canadian art history’s tendency to tokenize Inuit art only as it fits in to its disciplinary vision. Despite the plethora of artistic production in Nunatsiavut over centuries, Igloliorte’s work shows that Labrador Inuit art is one of the greatest erasures of Canadian art scholarship, with most texts on Inuit art ignoring it altogether, and only “a handful of journal articles and catalogues [treating] Nunastsiavummiut art in any depth or breadth.”70 As Igloliorte argues, “somewhat ironically, the main factor that led to the exclusion of Labrador Inuit art from the canon of Inuit and Canadian art history had little to do with the arts.”71 As she outlines, by 1949, elsewhere in Canada, art institutions and major museums began actively brokering Inuit art from Nunavut and Nunavik on the international art market and gallery scene. As the former British Newfoundland Colony (colonized by the British in 1610, turned Crown colony in 1854, and a British Dominion in 1907) joined Canadian confederation only that same year, in 1949, Canadian federal and provincial arguments over jurisdictions of responsibility toward Inuit and “Indian” populations in the region remained in stalemate. Unlike in the eastern territories of the Peskotomuhkati, Mi’kmaq, and Wəlastəkokewiyik governed by the Peace and Friendship Treaties of 1725–79 in Canada (and Abenaki and Panawahpskek/Penobscot in Maine) or the numbered treaty system in what became central and western Canadian provinces between 1871 and 1921, Indigenous populations in Newfoundland (Innu, Mi’kmaw, and Inuit of Nunatsiavut and NunatuKavut)

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0.2 James Andersen, Sliding on a Seal Skin, 1954. Slide transparency.

were violently denied the extension of federal fiduciary responsibilities in the final version of the Terms of Union in confederation in 1949.72 While this modern colonial brokering between settler federal and dominion governments resulted in widespread dispossession for Indigenous peoples of these territories, for Labrador Inuit artists, the direct result was that they became “ineligible to participate in any of the developments that emerged from the federally funded Inuit art initiatives advanced throughout what is now Nunavut and Nunavik.”73 Notwithstanding the political economic settler colonial impediments to accessing arts training and funding, Nunatsiavut Inuk cultural educator and throat singer Jenna Joyce Bloomfield writes that “our art also serves as our historical survival. As Nunatsiavummit, we have not always been acknowledged in participating in the art world. Most of the presentations of our work have been done from the perspectives of nonInuit.”74 In the exhibition catalogue for Igloliorte’s innovative survey SakKijâjuk: Art and Craft from Nunatsiavut, which contains the above quoted writing by Igloliorte and Bloomfield, a 1954 photograph by Makkovik-based Inuk artist James Andersen shows a snapshot of a toddler sliding down a snowy hill on sealskin (fig. 0.2). The child

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sits on an adult’s lap, wrapped in a colourful head kerchief, as the grownup grips the top of the skin like a toboggan while holding onto the youngster. The adult’s head is cut out of the frame, giving the viewer a sensation of quick movement over the snow through the shutter capture. The decolonial shutter story of this photograph is the joyous result of an Inuk photographer, Andersen, capturing Nunatsiavummit life on his own terms – beyond the imperial frame of the European invasion and imperialism, Newfoundland and Labradorian dominion, and Canadian settler state making. This visual history of Nunatsiavummit artists’ resilience and struggle through Bloomfield’s and Igloliorte’s writing, contrasted with Bear Nicholas’s archival excavation that demonstrates the complicity and military origins of Canada’s first settler artists, usefully demonstrates two of the primary approaches to decolonial and anti-racist art historical research undertaken in this volume: from Bear Nicholas, we learn the importance of excavating imperial shutters in order to capture what lies beyond the frame for Wəlastəkokewiyik, who were amongst the first to resist the settler colonial violence of land seizure in what became claimed as Canada in 1867, and, from Bloomfield and Igloliorte, we learn that Nunatsiavummit historians facilitating Nunatsiavummit artists framing their own shutter stories helps resist the easy categorizations that Canadian art history has provided to include and “capture” visual and creative expression that fits its own disciplinary narrative. If, as both of these methodological approaches show, Canadian art history was founded in the imperial violence of the first European military settlers, then decolonial and anti-racist engagements with this violent disciplinary history must create space to engage with complexly overlapping yet distinct colonial experiences though art and culture. And these engagements must be led by Black, Indigenous, and racialized diasporic scholars whose positionalities help them see the past beyond the imperial frame, and whose methods work against the methodological barriers of violent colonial disciplines that were, to be absolutely clear about this point, founded in violence, genocide, and terror. Methodological barriers exist in art historical scholarship not only because of the dominant colonial ways of analyzing visual art and material culture but also because of the ways university departments train students and hire faculty and how institutions of art and culture such as museums work towards decolonizing their collections in uneven ways.75 Again, a “methodology” is a not a passive barrier but a material continuation of dispossession that often relies on rhetorical language that speaks inclusivity or reconciliation while actually “breathing coloniality” (in Patel’s words).76 Scholar of African diasporic art and slavery Charmaine A. Nelson has written extensively about what she calls the unsuitability of dominant methodologies and practices of Art History to accommodate questions of race, colonialism, and imperialism as well as obvious racial exclusivity to the discipline itself which, compared to other fields in the Humanities, does not have a good track record in attracting, recruiting, and

Introduction

retaining blacks or people of colour faculty and scholars. To the extent that it is people of colour who have been at the forefront of critiquing the racism of western academic practice and rethinking practice through the discourse of race, then the absence of postcolonial Art Histories is fundamentally connected to the absence of people of colour scholars in the discipline.77 The importance of Nelson’s statement here is that there is a combined problem in art history generally and Canadian art history more specifically of not attracting enough Black, Indigenous, and racialized diasporic scholars to the field. Those who are undertaking this work in art history therefore face “whiteness that has been largely left un-dissected” and a colonial framework for understanding art and culture that is largely untouched.78 Leaving whiteness undissected in art historical scholarship means that it remains difficult to disrupt the imperial shutter story and the dominance of white settler national texts in the study of art and culture in “Canada.” Put simply, Canadian art history tends to reinforce the violent operatives of the white settler state, even when scholars in this field mean to be critical of these frameworks. The fact that, for example, Bear Nicholas is the first scholar to name British military-trained settler artists as engaging in the militarized terror of imperial and settler colonial dispossession speaks to the layered histories of violent erasure through which Canadian art history has unfolded as a modern discipline. For example, Canadian art history survey textbooks that grapple with relational settler–Indigenous positional histories (reinforcing the binarism outlined in white settler colonial studies as summarized in the previous section) also tend to operate from the inclusivity model that stops short of challenging the imperial frame. This means that most survey books on Canadian art history primarily reproduce European-derived categories for art and culture and art movements, while “including” chapters on racialized visual and material culture that do not disrupt the imperial frame that centres white settler knowledge systems – for example, as Igloliorte’s work shows, Inuit art as it is understood in relation to the larger settler art world that seeks out colonially “pure” categories of art free from the traces of European contact, which ignore the political economic reach of settler colonial capitalism and state making. The disciplinary tendency of Canadian art history to reproduce itself through a tactic of inclusion rather than disruption means that survey texts in this field rely on tidy linear narratives that outline European-descendent ideologies, ontologies, and epistemologies. For example, Brian Foss, Sandra Paikowsky, and Anne Whitelaw’s 2010 book The Visual Arts in Canada: The Twentieth Century offers critical perspectives on the modern history of art institutions, canonical white settler artists such as Emily Carr and the Group of Seven and their Indigenous influences, art categories such as sculpture and art movements such as pop art as they pertain to Canadian art history, and Inuit art and First Nations art. Stories of Black and racialized diasporic artistic expression appear in terms of how these artists fit into the movements, institutions, and art

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categories that remain derived from European art historical methods. Published by Oxford University Press, this book operates as an important survey of Canadian art history for a transnational readership and generates a way of organizing knowledge that reinforces the European origins of art historical modes in settler states, which the editors also remain highly critical of in their introduction. My naming of Canadian art history’s inclusivity model as an imperial frame is not to unnecessarily critique this singular book that has the goal of surveying this discipline in its dominant formations for a transnational audience. Rather, it is to suggest two things that are up for consideration in the larger project of unsettling Canadian art history, which white settler scholars in this field must contend with: first, colonial disciplines such as Canadian art history require “unsettling” in ways that do not reorient towards their imperial white European frames through inclusivity models or the reductive positionality of an Indigenous-settler relationality that denies Canada’s history of enslavement and erases racialized diasporic postcolonial formations that intersect in occupied Indigenous territories; and, second, it is not the responsibility of those scholars, artists, and activists who experience racist discrimination and violence in teaching, museum work, and scholarship to disrupt a particular disciplinary formation from a common set of decolonial and anti-racist research questions that primarily serves white readers and viewers. These conversations cannot be neat, tidy, linear; they must be embraced as “messy” (as Byrd notes), and these discussions remain unfinished because the violence of European-descendant colonial disciplines and their institutions remains unchecked.79 I used the term “unchecked” not to suggest that there is no anti-racist and decolonial resistance in encounters of the art world for Black, Indigenous, and racialized diasporic artists, researchers, and scholars but to show that very real exclusions remain and often take the form of concrete violence and surveillance. Former Indigenous editor-atlarge of Canadian Art magazine Jas M. Morgan (Cree-Saulteaux-Métis) has extensively theorized the protective necessity of kinship, gossip, and community in the face of such settler art world violence. Morgan writes in particular of one encounter from the 2019 Whitney Biennial, which they attended with artist Kite (Oglála Lakȟóta), artist Dayna Danger (Métis-Saulteaux-Polish), curator and art historian Adrienne Huard (Anishinaabekwe), and artist and poet Arielle Twist (Cree), in a Canadian Art essay entitled “You Want Our Art but Not Our People.”80 As Morgan details the Whitney encounter, “Danger and Kite laid down a sweetgrass braid for the recently deceased James Luna, in front of didactics bearing his name. Almost immediately the pair was surrounded by security guards who interrupted Danger whenever they attempted to explain what the sweetgrass was. He frantically spoke into his walkie-talkie for backup, as if we five Native femmes were the scariest security risk he had encountered in all his years on the job. We scuttled away, fearful of being kicked out and unsure of what had happened to the sweetgrass we had laid down for Luna.”81 The vectors of militarized colonial violence that span from Bear Nicholas’s analysis of the terrorism of British colonial military artists to the surveillance terror of security guards at the Whit-

Introduction

ney Biennial demonstrate the centuries-long tactics that colonizers use in art and institutions to police disciplines alongside Black, Indigenous, racialized, queer, trans, and Two-Spirit peoples who have struggled and resisted alongside each other in the Americas since the fifteenth century: as Morgan notes, the art world seems “to have forgotten that Indigenous peoples have had their communities non-consensually militarized as a result of extractive legacies on their lands, and know well the subtlety of policing techniques.”82 Despite the Whitney Biennial’s curation of “thoughtfully arranged objects” that stood in for the real-life intimacies, relationships, and solidarities of Indigenous and Black people under settler colonialism and transatlantic enslavement, Morgan writes, “I wondered where the actual people were that these objects referenced … [A]udiences want artistic metaphors that are vaguely politicized. But who is overturing the violent cultures of the spaces and industries that house this apparently political art?”83 Morgan’s example points to the need to situate positionalities across colonial encounters that can speak to one another, to fill what Nelson in conversation with Morgan elsewhere has referred to as “a gap – a hole in the middle, where we’re overlapping. That’s a fruitful area for research [in Black Canadian and Indigenous art histories].”84 While Canada’s colonial origins include the kidnapping and transportation of captive Africans, the interrelation between enslavement and settler colonialism in Canada has not yet punctured the mainstream settler art world that Morgan so violently confronted at the Whitney. Yet the enslavement of Africans into what Tiffany Lethabo King calls “a constitutive element of settler colonialism’s conceptual order” marks Blackness as “a fungible form of property, not just a form of labour.”85 The history of enslavement and the fungible construction of Blackness greatly impacts the Canadian historical erasure of slavery, which Black Canadian historian Afua Cooper has long referred to as “Canada’s best-kept secret.” As Cooper notes, “In the story of North American slavery, we associate Canada with ‘freedom’ or ‘refuge,’ because during the nineteenth century, especially between 1830 and 1860, the period known as the Underground Railroad era, thousands of American runaway slaves escaped to and found refuge in the British territories to the north … One result is the assumption that Canada is different from and morally superior to that ‘slave-holding republic,’ the United States.”86 This is an epistemological problem for historical disciplines such as Canadian history and Canadian art history, as scholars Boulou Ebanda de B’Béri, Nina Reid-Maroney, and Handel Kashope Wright argue, which means that “mainstream history in Canada is in fact raced (White) rather than racially neutral so that the articulation of Black history results in competing truths.”87 Canadian art history, as a colonial disciplinary formation, therefore advances itself nearly “racelessly,” as if whiteness needs no confrontation, as if naming the category of “settler artists” is enough to assuage colonial violence.88 The extent of the violent colonial erasure and unknowing when it comes to histories of enslavement in Canada determines the size of the knowledge gap to fill. And as Nelson writes, it is “arguably the specificity of racism in Canada, the fact that it is dismissed

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as a non-issue by whites at the same time as it is being practised and reformulated, that makes it so nebulous and insidious, and the experience for black, indigenous and other people of colour so frustrating, emotionally draining, and psychologically devastating.”89 The continued reliance on the false neutrality of “raceless” white historical writing exasperates this devastation and speaks once again to the need to look beyond what the imperial shutter shows. In Nelson’s work on the visual culture of enslavement and Canada, she teaches scholars of Canadian art to expand our thinking beyond the imperial frame, by provocatively asking, “what happens if we look elsewhere?” What happens, in other words, if we work to look beyond the frame that colonial fields such as Canadian art history provide us with, since they rely on the erasure of histories of enslavement to advance their seemingly neutral white narratives as universal, to see and understand the past? Looking elsewhere has led Black, Indigenous, and racialized diasporic scholars of art and creative practice in Canada to undertake this critical work in various ways. Nelson, for example, has recently published an edited volume entitled Towards an African Canadian Art History, which asserts Black art history in Canada in its own critical space outside the imperial shutter story that Canadian art history provides. This does not mean that Nelson and her contributors do not grapple with the specificities of colonial formations in the settler state of Canada but rather that African Canadian art history is a critically necessary project in its own right that can exist beyond a disciplinary narrative of Canadian art that consistently reorients itself towards whiteness and its false “raceless” neutrality. In her introduction to this book, Nelson states in an endnote that one of the most painful impacts of Canadian racism is its constant denial by white settler Canadians, despite all manner of evidence of colonial violence that exists to the contrary. “Of course,” she writes, “what is missing from white Canadian ideas of race and racism is an acknowledgement that their experiences are not universal, but merely those of white Canadians.”90 Arguably, then, Canadian art history as a discipline will constantly reorient towards whiteness, ignore and erase histories of Canadian enslavement, reduce Indigenous art to its interrelationship with European-derived categories, and exclude racialized diasporic art as being “Canadian” at all. Any understanding that approaches art and culture through violent erasure within the artificial borders of stolen and colonized lands can only achieve more scholarship that reinforces the occupying space of whiteness that forged a discipline and formed a genocidal settler state through terror.

Relating Well in Methodological Refusal

Unsettling Canadian Art History is a book that seeks to look outside the imperial frames of white settler national texts by using art and cultural sources as sites of anti-racist, decolonial, feminist, queer, trans, and Two-Spirit evidence, methodology, and praxis. Readers of this volume will see that some chapters in this book orient more than others

Introduction

to standard art history methodologies and rely on disrupting colonial histories of the white settler state and its cultural institutions in order to do this work. Other chapters refuse colonial organization and approaches to think through complicity, collaboration, and kinship in art-based research and praxis. While these varied approaches to art and culture may seem disparate, bringing them together in one volume helps to dismantle the hierarchies of Canadian art historical scholarship that scholars such as Bear Nicholas, Igloliorte, and Nelson write of and rejects the colonial assumption that everything must necessarily fit together as a whole through the sum of its parts. In situating this book as one that dissects the “settler-centric” whiteness of Canadian art history, however, it remains crucial to understand that when Jas M. Morgan quotes Dayna Danger’s statement in response to a white male curator who “couldn’t see himself ” in Danger’s work, “this work is not for you,” it is a generative assertion of possibility outside the boundaries of European-derived knowledge and institutions.91 Morgan writes, “This work is not for you … This issue is for all my ndn baby girls, women or otherwise. I see you, trying to love that corpse body back to life. This is my offering to you. You are loved. Your voice is so needed. And I assure you, we can topple this boys’ club together, and return our women, gender-variant and sexually diverse kin to their rightful place – to the centre of our nations.”92 Morgan’s refusal to reproduce the desires and expectations of the white male curator exposes the possibilities of what Audra Simpson has famously theorized as “refusal” as it pertains to the decolonial and anti-racist dismantling of academic disciplines and scholarly and cultural institutions in Canada. On refusal, Simpson writes, “There was something that seemed to reveal itself at the point of refusal – a stance, a principle, a historical narrative, and an enjoyment in the reveal.”93 Morgan’s take on Danger’s statement, “this work is not for you,” employs Simpson’s concept of refusal as both an act of creative praxis and a methodological proposition: Danger’s photographs of “transgender and gender non-conforming peoples in an attempt to unabashedly and defiantly represent these bodies that are so often stigmatized. Unfortunately, not everyone was ready.”94 Tackling the complexities of histories of coloniality through an imperial-driven discipline such as art history, and in terms of its particular manifestations in a nationally constituted colonial field such as Canadian art history, without recentring such European-derived knowledge is not without significant challenge. As the previous section demonstrated, the barriers for critically disrupting the imperial shutter stories of white settler national texts remain very real, even in decolonial and anti-racist scholarship where unsettling whiteness is not the primary methodological goal. To put this in concrete terms, when it comes to decentring white curatorial and art historical epistemologies, moments of refusal such as Danger’s showcase the power of attacking a colonially racist structure from multiple decolonial and anti-racist evidentiary, methodological, and curatorial perspectives. In Canadian art history, scholars such as Heather Igloliorte, Julie Nagam, Charmaine A. Nelson, Alice Ming Wai Jim, Ashok Mathur, and Carla Taunton have theorized such perspectives extensively from their respective positionalities in Indigenous, African

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Canadian, Asian Canadian, critical white settler art histories. And while these scholars have distinct goals from their respective positionalities in and beyond unsettling Canadian art history, juxtaposing their decolonial and anti-racist work together to introduce this volume also helps to situate the range of methodological perspectives and situated knowledges in the chapters that follow. Igloliorte (Inuk) and Taunton’s (white settler) collaborative work argues that critically analyzing the collection of Indigenous art by white settler arts institutions and the inclusion of Indigenous art in Canada art history requires “a fundamental shift away from past practise rooted in Eurocentric discussions of Indigenous arts, and a mobilization of productive methodologies – both Indigenous and non-Indigenous – that honour and centre Indigenous ways of knowing and being.”95 This decentring of Canadian art history, combined with the re-centring of Indigenous-led methodologies, is central to Igloliorte and Taunton’s critical reestablishment of Indigenous art beyond the imperial frame. In Igloliorte and Taunton’s collaborative scholarship with Julie Nagam (Métis-German-Syrian), the authors write that Indigenous “tools of survival are rooted in our ability to work in collective methods and Indigenous methodologies. We do so by theorizing the past and present in diachronic ways to contribute to understandings of Indigenous continuities, resiliencies, and resurgences.”96 The decolonial and anti-racist methodology of collaboration also appears in writing histories of African diasporic art in Canada. In her collaborative edited collection, Towards an African Canadian Art History, Charmaine Nelson argues that “the racial biases of art criticism, the discipline of Art History, and the field of Canadian Art History made it difficult for black artists to develop and maintain a public reputation which would have allowed them to be written into the canon … Due to the colonial history of erasure and strategic disenfranchisement, to produce critical scholarship on the representation of black subjects in Canadian art or on black Canadian artists is a defiant assertion of memory.”97 Nelson further notes that the collaborative work of scholars who can write about African Canadian art history is “a testament to a huge breakthrough, a dramatic shift in the field of African Canadian Art History that has occurred within the last decade or so. Significantly, this shift is no accident. Rather, it is a byproduct of the institutional academic presence of professors – like Alice Jim, Andrea Fatona, and myself – who are capable of supervising graduate student research in this and related fields and therefore advancing the scholarship.”98 The development of Indigenous and Black methodologies for writing histories of Indigenous and Black art history and visual and material culture in Canada are very much ongoing scholarly projects. Analyzing racialized diasporic art by non-Black, non-Indigenous artists of colour outside the imperial methodologies of Canadian art history likewise requires a careful reassessment of how Canadian art institutions and art historical writings frame art produced by racialized “arrivant” populations, to use Byrd and Brathwaite’s term. And, in turn, the analysis of racialized diasporic art requires an acknowledgment of the complex colonial intersections that migration brings to relational colonial histories in white settler states. As South Asian Canadian scholar

Introduction

Ashok Mathur argues in the introduction to his co-edited collection, Cultivating Canada: Reconciliation through the Lens of Cultural Diversity, for racialized diasporic communities in Canada, “When we enter into the political jurisdiction of Canada, we acknowledge the Crown, and through it, an explicit history of empire, colonial enterprise, and global interconnections. But we all too often remain blithely unaware of histories inscribed into the land that far predate Confederation and both British and French incursions onto this terrain.”99 This demonstrates not only that Da Costa and Da Costa’s notion of “multiple colonial” formations overlap but also that histories of empire and colonialism pre-exist and pre-configure the settler state temporally and spatially in diaspora, as in Mathur’s calling up of the Crown in Canada. Casting a wide geographic net that includes East Asian, South Asian, Arab, and Muslim art practice, Alice Ming Wai Jim’s 2010 essay “Asian Canadian Art Matters” calls for the “constant probing of what constitutes cultural identifications such as ‘Canadianness’ and ‘Asianness’ applied from different sectors.”100 She argues specifically that critically approaching these identifier concepts requires “divergent perspectives, methodologies and commitments” to take “‘Asian Canadian’ as a political project … [O]ne of the most important tasks of Asian Canadian art as a critical project remains the continuous questioning and negotiation of frames, institutional, curatorial, ideological or otherwise.”101 Jim’s larger work in collaboration with Alexandra Chang as co-editors of the journal Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures in the Americas positions Asian presence in occupied Indigenous territories of the Americas through “a complex system of continual movement, migratory flows, and culture transmission, and the idea of ‘Asian diasporas’ (in the plural) as both an analytic tool and ‘an intellectual and political project’ … A trans-regional Asian Americas perspective underscores how the presences of Asians in the Americas can in fact be traced back to the sixteenth century.”102 To understand Asian diaspora in the Americas as an art historical methodology, then, requires a decentring and destructuring of the historical development of white settler states such as Canada, to understand arrivant migration between colonial encounters as pre-existing settler state formation. As Chang and Jim write, “To consider what shape, form, or method a hemispheric transnational Asian diasporic approach to visual culture may take, then, is a purposeful one, and a key epistemological, intellectual, and creative challenge.”103 This requires a decentring of how art history is bounded territorially, a reasserting of the ways in which Asian diasporic migrants arrived in the Americas prior to settler state formation, and the foregrounding of anticolonial Asian diasporic art and methodologies. Recognizing that normative European aesthetic impositions and methodological traditions in curriculum and scholarship will be carried through in Asian diaspora can also help decipher the “messy” temporalities and territorialities of coloniality and the colonial “intimacies” between four continents as theorized by Lowe.104 Together, these art historians and scholars of art and culture work towards methodologies that excavate the historical presence of Indigenous, Black, and racialized diasporic creative subjects by refusing the settler state of Canada’s institutional and

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intellectual authority to determine academic and curatorial scholarship in art and culture. This work not only radically looks away from Canadian art history’s imperial frame, but also works to re-establish shared radical visions for interrelation and futurity outside of colonial modes of being in white settler states. And while these combined decolonial and anti-racist art historical methodologies remain important to the work of Unsettling Canadian Art History, curatorial practice is also crucial in this work of excavation. As Métis scholar and curator Suzanne Morrissette notes, using curatorial practice to tell Indigenous stories is important to decolonial work because “exhibition spaces have been historically inlaid with systemic practices of misrepresentation and omission … Historically speaking, the types of knowledge produced in these spaces have not been in the service of Indigenous lives.”105 Likewise, curator and professor of Black Canadian studies Andrea Fatona describes anti-racist curatorial work succinctly, writing, “The notion of excavation … is really important in relation to the idea of remembrance and … the notion of trying to unearth what we are walking on, what is present that’s invisible. And through that excavation, [we] narrate stories around the partiality of the histories that we know today. Through objects we are able to create deeply embodied narratives, embodied stories and who and what came before us as opposed to thinking about history in its abstraction.”106 The urgency of decolonial and anti-racist curatorial work in Canada remains because, according to Fatona, the retelling of Black and Indigenous stories in exhibition spaces is what makes them visible, as “processes that allow for individuals or cultures to be rendered invisible or to be erased … [A] lot of work in making public memories has gone into erasing Black and Indigenous people.”107 This is the work that fights against visual reckonings of whiteness in art and culture practice, pedagogy, and scholarship. In layering these stories of “colonial unknowing,” creating new Indigenous, Black, and racialized diasporic methodologies for writing about art and culture in Canada, and excavating the stories of Black, Indigenous, and racialized diasporic subjects in archives and exhibition spaces, the importance of what Igloliorte and Taunton refer to as the “continuum” in decolonial scholarship and curation is evident.108 The telling and retelling of stories is what makes certain narratives visible over others, as Fatona argues above, demonstrating that we all need to be aware of the stories we tell about ourselves and our communities and the ways in which they interact relationally with each other. Nelson explains the criticality of exploring intersections between Black and Indigenous creative scholarship in Canada in an interview conducted by Morgan for their special edited “Kinship” issue of Canadian Art: “Our histories and stories became inextricably linked because we were literally enslaved together, or suffered colonization together. Who is doing the work to recuperate those stories and the shared knowledge – and shared knowledge of resistance, too?”109 Moreover, the methodological impetus to think alongside each other through varied positional lenses on the past helps to approach being “in good relation” with one another. Recently, Indigenous historian Sarah Nickel (Tk’emlupsemc-French Canadian-Ukranian) theorized TallBear’s concept of “good relation” to approach the critical field of Indigenous feminism,

Introduction

quoting TallBear from a panel on this topic where she stated, “Indigenous thinkers need to be at the table with feminists, we need to be at the table with disability scholars, we need to be at the table with Queer theorists because we have very similar critiques of power.”110 This volume likewise approaches TallBear’s concept of being in “good relation,” to suggest that while the chapters in this book do not think together in a relational space, they do approach a form of collaborative and careful decolonial and anti-racist feminist methodologies. Often, the positional lenses on the past offered in the chapters that follow are very specific in their orientations and do not necessarily think relationally among Indigenous, Black, and racialized diasporic anti-racist, decolonial, feminist, queer, trans, and Two-Spirit scholarship. That said, placed alongside each other they do the significant work of gathering critiques of power together that situate various positional standpoints for looking beyond the imperial frame. Unsettling Canadian Art History thus serves as an initial step in “relating well” in terms of respectfully juxtaposing our analyses of art and culture, different as they may be, in ways that “unsettle” dominant white- and settler-centric epistemologies. “Relating well” means that we have each approached our chapters in this volume in ways that centre and care for Indigenous, Black, racialized diasporic, feminist, queer, trans, and Two-Spirit artists, methodologies, and praxis – even if we are doing this from divergent positionalities that lead us as individual authors or collaborative teams to ask different sets of questions about art and culture in Canadian settler state contexts. This disparate approach allows this book to bring together scholarly and creative work that does not always get published together because patriarchal and normative “settler-centrism,” sexualities, and colonial epistemologies often ask us to silo ourselves in our respective perspectives.111 Yet, it remains a strong practice in the methodologies and creative work we draw on throughout this volume, including those located in Black and Indigenous feminism, queer of colour feminism, and queer theory, to generate theories, ideas, and frameworks that can work to disrupt the preventative barriers of colonial disciplinary norms. Unsettling Canadian Art History builds gratefully on these genealogies of scholarship, in ways that pay attention to disrupting white settler states and the political power of their cultural and social institutions, while leaving room for readers to enter into the conversations that we are having together from a range of interest and expertise. Following Nickle, “we wish to cultivate cross-fertilizations and dialogue” in producing generous and generative work alongside each other.112

Situating Our Chapters

This volume situates our conversations into three parts. Part 1, “Unsettling Settler Methodologies, Re-Centring Decolonial Knowledge,” begins the work, detailed in this introduction, of situating anti-racist and decolonial knowledge to decentre white settler positionalities and imperial frames. While this book does seek to look beyond

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the structures of white settler art histories and institutions, part of this work necessitates a critical investigation of colonial narratives, institutions, and methodologies to help disaggregate colonial epistemologies and normative ways of undertaking scholarship, curatorial work, and creative practice. This section pursues unlearning what Azoulay describes as “the shutter’s neutrality … as an exercise of violence; in this way, unlearning imperialism becomes a commitment to reversing the shutter’s work.”113 To reverse the shutter, some chapters use the seeming neutrality of colonial violence and institutional whiteness to pull apart the imperial frames of coloniality. For the white settler contributors to this section (Decter, Morton, and Taunton), our work aims to confront the violence of white supremacy from our positionalities as white scholars working in a field built in imperial conquest and its cultural institutions. We see the necessity of undoing what Cree art historian and curator Gerald McMaster termed in 1999 “a specifically western and ‘mainstream’ discourse whose epistemological foundation was based in modernism, universalism, and imperialism.”114 The Indigenous contributors to this section (McIntyre, Inuit/settler-Scottish; Robertson, Scots-Lakota; Wysote, Mi’gmag) also approach their contributions in ways that use the imperial frame against itself, in order to resituate and recentre Indigenous methodologies, positionalities, and situated knowledges that disrupt Canadian white settler histories, institutions, and violent colonial legacies. This section also offers modes of collaborative decolonial work in two chapters, between Wysote (Mi’gmag) and Morton (white settler) and Decter and Taunton (both white settlers), alongside strategies for rethinking canonical Indigenous art history in settler spaces (Robertson), and creative practice that tells deeply personal stories of settler-led violence in Indigenous-settler families (McIntyre). Each of these methods helps to illustrate the pervasiveness of the colonial shutter story and the need to dismantle white settler legacies from across positional perspectives. Tracing the complexities of these complicit, resistant, and interrelated colonial orders in this book requires expanding conceptions of what the Canadian colonial shutter stories tell through direct lie, omission and erasure, or by foregrounding “colonial unknowing.” In chapter 1, “White Settler Tautologies and Pioneer Lies in Mi’kma’ki,” Travis Wysote and Erin Morton use textual and visual tautologies of the French colonization of Mi’kma’ki to critically question longstanding ideas about Mi’kmaw–Acadian relationality and alliances. The first chapter of the book exposes the challenge of “colonial unknowing” when interrogating the imperial frame, by asking what lies get told in order to support colonial orders. This examination of colonial shutter stories in white settler national texts exposes the complex ways in which settler narratives lie in order to continually advance. We introduce our concept of the “pioneer lie” – a lie that naturalizes white settler ways of seeing through the appropriation and transformation of Indigenous topographies and ecologies – by examining visual art by white settler artists alongside the texts of French colonizer dramatic masques. We introduce the volume with this concept of “pioneer lies” because of the pervasiveness of these “quotidian circulations of colonialist common sense,” to restate King’s quote from the be-

Introduction

ginning of this introduction.115 A particularly violent recent case in the Canadian context is Royal Canadian Mounted Police (rcmp) commissioner Brenda Lucki’s public denial that “systemic racism” exists in the rcmp. Her statement came despite the federal police force being founded in order to enforce racist Canadian laws and policies from the pass system to residential schools to quelling Indigenous dissent against the colonial state through starvation and killing, and to survey, criminalize, and punish Black people from the period of transatlantic slavery to the present. Lucki later admitted that she is “struggling with the definition of systemic racism.”116 Pioneer lies (“there is no systemic racism in the rcmp”) seem truer to settlers the more we repeat them, despite clear and factual historical evidence and the lived experiences of Indigenous, Black, and racialized people that easily dispel them.117 In chapter 2, “Notes to a Nation: Teachings on Land through the Art of Norval Morrisseau,” Carmen Robertson critically and theoretically grapples with the work of Norval Morrisseau to offer new reflections on a well-known artist’s paintings that disrupt logics of land, settler notions of Indigenous art, and land-based creative decolonizing practices. Robertson uses Morrisseau’s well-known artistic legacy to question the settler state use of land to aggregate its colonial power. Intuitively, Robertson moves away from “settler-centric” Canadian art narratives that situate land in relation to white settler landscape art and instead grounds her discussion in Moreton-Robinson’s concept of “possessive logics” in settler colonial formations. Questioning the very nature of settler property orientations through land exploitation, cultivation, division and parceling, Robertson’s chapter recentres Indigenous concepts of land and kinship relationality to land in order to place Morrisseau’s paintings of land in a context that understands them in terms of “Canada-the-land” and outside of “Canada-the-whitesettler-nation.” From Robertson, we learn how to “disrupt settler colonial violence” by approaching one canonical Indigenous (Anishinabek) artist’s particular way of knowing land outside of standard (and “racelessly” universal) settler Canadian art historical categories and methodologies. Robertson’s analysis of Morrisseau’s “visual storytelling,” which, as she writes, knows “land beyond landscape” also firmly establishes the need to look beyond the imperial frames that reinforce the settler colonial understandings of land-as-property. In chapter 3, “Embodying Decolonial Methodology: Building and Sustaining Critical Relationality in the Cultural Sector,” Leah Decter and Carla Taunton discuss the ways in which white settler arts workers need to confront their curatorial and creative methods for living in Indigenous sovereignty, even when they might not immediately recognize it. In particular, Decter and Taunton ask questions about their positionalities as the “intended beneficiaries” (using Leslie Thielen-Wilson’s term) of colonialism when approaching decolonial curatorial work in arts and cultural institutions that still primarily benefit white settlers. In asking how, in their words, “white settlers [can] move beyond consumptive and appropriative practices toward an embodiment of decoloniality and the role of accomplice,” Decter and Taunton seek out ethical forms of decolonial praxis. In doing so, they approach questions raised in parallel ways by many

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anti-racist and decolonial thinkers about the limits of language and the necessity of action. “Co-conspiracy is about what we do in action, not just in language,” says Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza. “It is about moving through guilt and shame and recognizing that we did not create none of this stuff. And so what we are taking responsibility for is the power that we hold to transform our conditions.”118 The neutrality of colonial violence must be pulled apart by white settlers, too, if we are to become accomplices and co-conspirators in the resistance that Black, Indigenous, and diasporic racialized scholars working on art and culture in Canada have been writing about for decades. And as Decter and Taunton show, it is the primary responsibility of white people to undo the violence of white supremacy, in settler colonial states and beyond them. In chapter 4, “Silence as Resistance: When Silence Is the Only Weapon You Have Left,” Lindsay McIntyre examines colonial erasure and loss in her intergenerational matrilineal family story of Inuit-settler relationality, kinship, trauma, and survival. McIntyre begins her chapter with a clear statement on ethical positionality in this work: “I can only tell the stories that are mine.” In her description of the process of making a film that unravels her matrilineal history, McIntyre finds out that her familial past “is buried under thick layers of patriarchal, colonial lies.” In assembling fragments out of silence, McIntyre traces the life of her Inuk great-grandmother, Kumaa’naaq. She describes the relationship between Kumaa’naaq and Ray Ward, McInytre’s stepgreat-grandfather and a white British-born rcmp officer in the north. What does it mean, McIntyre asks, that historical records “from this period in the north often lie”? And how to excavate the fragments of her family life that was deeply impacted by the white settler tendency to direct, speak loudly, and tell people what to do (Ray) and the Inuit tendency to listen, keep histories, and maintain a holistic sense of her community (Kumaa’naaq)? A settler-Inuk history on film gets told with care, compassion, and critique of what McIntyre describes as the “calculated colonization” of the north, in ways that help this book question what it means to have conversations about violent histories across positionalities? This is an important intervention, since while the chapters in this section do not speak to a common set of questions, they do together offer relational conversations about Canadian colonialisms that speak in favour of what McIntyre describes as “a non-hierarchical system of knowing.” It also demonstrates the tension of the imperial frame when colonial histories betray trust in the present, because as she puts it, “I have a troubled relationship with Canada … I thought Canada was my friend. … Although I very much wanted to, I didn’t know how to care about my Inuk side.” The question of care is a thread that extends and ties together the first section of this book to the second, part 2, “Excavating and Creating Decolonial Archives.” This section takes the relocation of imperial frames in the previous section to foreground the work of anti-racist and decolonial excavation of colonial pasts using a range of archival, collecting, and interpretive tactics. These include unearthing the colonial fictions advanced by white settler cultural institutions in the “parafiction” work of Black

Introduction

and Indigenous artists in Tkaronto|Toronto (Cheetham), unearthing the evidence of enslavement in Canada by using art historical methodologies to read visuality and reinscribe humanity into the archives of slavery (Nelson), critiquing the use of historical Indigenous songs and stories in white settler collecting practices and the decolonial ethnographic methods of contemporary Indigenous song collectors (Svec), and the memory work of excavation in creating a site-specific installation that archives, remembers, and materializes African diasporic histories in Mi’kma’ki|Nova Scotia (Hamilton). Each of these chapters demonstrates the ways in which disrupting “colonial unknowing” necessitates mining, undoing, and creatively reassembling archives through anticolonial and decolonizing scholarship, research methods, and creative practice. The chapters in this section each engage with excavating history beyond the imperial frame by examining the ways in which contemporary artistic and curatorial practice can reanimate histories too long erased (Cheetham and Hamilton) and the ways in which decolonial approaches create possibilities for generative gathering practices in archival research and in song collecting (Nelson and Svec). In chapter 5, “Truth Is No Stranger to (Para)fiction: Settlers, Arrivants, and Place in Iris Häussler’s He Named Her Amber, Camille Turner’s BlackGrange, and Robert Houle’s Garrison Creek Project,” Mark A. Cheetham examines site-specific contemporary performance and installation art to reveal truths that imperial frames would have large-scale urban settler populations in Tkaronto|Toronto forget. Cheetham begins with the assumption that European and European-descendant art traditions locate “truth” at least “in part from fictionality”: nineteenth-century landscape artists were amongst the greatest innovators of these fictions because they failed to lie completely (at least according to Baudelaire). In using three site-specific contemporary art projects that play with truth and “parafiction” by German immigrant artist Iris Häussler, African Canadian artist Camille Turner, and Saulteaux artist Robert Houle, Cheetham demonstrates that artistic “fiction” can likewise reveal greater truths about colonial violence than documentary evidence. These artworks offer what Cheetham calls “a profound sense of aesthetic truth that … can reveal the complex and overlapping violences of slave-holding and indentured colonial pasts on the territory of the HuronWendat, Haudenosaunee, and Mississaugas of the New Credit.” By using art to reveal overlapping colonial histories in one place, Cheetham approaches Lisa Lowe’s famous articulation of the intersections between settler colonialism, enslavement, and indenture as “the intimacies of four continents.”119 In drawing out multiple “dispossessions driven by racism,” Cheetham’s chapter also shows how relational histories require “doubting the past” of settler national texts in order to excavate suppressed stories. In chapter 6, “‘Ran away from her Master … a Negroe Girl named Thursday’: Examining Evidence of Punishment, Isolation, Trauma, and Illness in Nova Scotia and Quebec Fugitive Slave Advertisements,” Charmaine A. Nelson builds on the theme of obscured narratives by examining advertisements for enslaved runaways. Nelson’s expansive work on Black Canadian history is part of a crucial excavation of truths about enslavement in North America outside of the US. While the rest of the regions of the

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Americas (including the Caribbean, the US, and northern Latin America) have become, in Nelson’s words, “synonymous with slavery,” Canadian histories of enslavement remains hidden due to celebratory reimaginings of freedom narratives such as the Underground Railroad. In this chapter, Nelson uses a visual interpretation of runaway advertisements as portraits of the enslaved, in order to translate “the textual description of an escaping human being – a freedom seeker – into a visual image – an unauthorized portrait – of a criminal.” Nelson’s visual treatment of runaway advertisement also helps gather sources in the archive of Canadian slavery, which offers historical insights into the specificities of how enslavement happened here in ways that she distinguished from tropical plantation regimes. This chapter builds on the notion of excavating historical truths that Cheetham offers in the realm of contemporary art, in this case by exposing the thick but “un(der)explored archive” of too-often obscured Canadian slavery. Excavating this archive is crucial for Nelson because it helps to expose the imperial frame of a “deep-seated recitation of white Canadian benevolence, race-blindness, and racial tolerance.” This work helps to expose the fiction of Canadian non-violence, as well as the active white settler denial of our violent pasts. In chapter 7, “‘Miner with a Heart of Gold’: Native North America, Vol. 1 and the Colonial Excavation of Authenticity,” Henry Adam Svec also uses the concept of excavation to critically interrogate white settler “collectors” of Indigenous music and their self-proclaimed arbitration of authenticity. In doing so, Svec unravels the white settler lies told in this process at the expense of contemporary, Indigenous-led historical song collecting. Svec maps the entangled history of “white settler colonialism and sound recording” in North America, using the work of the late Mi’kmaq-Scots-Irish singer Willie Dunn (1941–2013). By surveying the colonial history of ethnographic song collecting by white anthropologists in Indigenous communities, Svec re-frames Dunn’s songs in terms of their collected re-release on a settler-led compilation album, Native North America, Vol. 1. White settler “song catchers” become “record curators” in the late twentieth century, and yet they too build on what Svec sees as the legacies of “European Romanticism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.” Svec further examines the ways in which Indigenous song writers, singers, and musicians use the tactics of ethnographic song collecting to “refuse” the imperial frame (in Audra Simpson’s terms), including Khu.éex’ and Jeremy Dutcher. These Indigenous refusals acutely demonstrate that the work of excavation is a living Indigenous musical practice, as colonial tactics get turned on their head and used against the ethnographer who first “caught” songs under the violent colonial guise of preserving a vanishing cultural practice. In chapter 8, “Excavation: Memory Work,” Sylvia D. Hamilton brings the themes of this section into critical relief as she uses her curatorial research to discuss the creative intergenerational process of reassembling archives of African diasporic peoples in Mi’kma’ki|Nova Scotia. Using site-specific installations as a tactic to “offer the nonlinear opportunity to place audiences-visitors inside the work” in ways that are not possible in Hamilton’s well-known film, poetry, and scholarly writing, she writes that

Introduction

this curatorial project allowed text to be “lifted off the page and onto walls to become a different kind of image.” Material objects in the archive of Black Canada such as Black hair combs become experiential and tactile offerings for viewers. Hamilton uses the memory work of excavation in the gallery space to ask questions about whose histories and memories are acknowledged in cultural institutions that rely on imperial frames? As she puts it, “my work thinks about why I am here, how I got here, and what I am to do while I’m here.” Hamilton also uses the strategy of “talking back” to this work, using archival research as what she calls “the infrastructure – the spine or roadmap” to create the multi-layered and textual and material exhibition Excavation: Memory Work. And much like Indigenous song collectors “mine” the ethnographic archives, as Svec demonstrates, Hamilton “mines” textual archives and material museum holdings (drawing on Fred Wilson’s concept) to build her installation that brings African diasporic histories back to Afro-Nova Scotian communities in Mi’kma’ki| Nova Scotia. If excavation work can help to recentre Indigenous and Black histories in the contested settler state of Canada, contemporary creative practice can also render what Lisa Lowe theorizes as an “unlikely archive.”120 Part 3, “Reclaiming Sexualities, Tracing Complicities,” uses varied tactics in contemporary art to grapple with gatekeeping and normative understandings of community, complicities, and sexualities. The term “complicities” is one that Shaista Patel has thoughtfully theorized throughout her work, as discussed above. Here, I use her term “complicity” to help situate this section as one that considers overlapping colonial contexts in thoughtful intersection of what Patel calls, as cited at the beginning of this introduction, the “personal and structural.” The situated knowledge of “complicity” allows us to attend to the “multiplicities and contingencies of our lives lived … to think about complicity as a practice of living.”121 This tracing of the personal and structural as a methodology that denies “settler-centrism” acknowledges that messy colonial interrelations exist. Patel’s concept of complicity also calls for the combining of unlikely experiences under cisheterocolonial norms, of ethical writing collaborations, of personal and scholarly partnerships, of working with kin and in friendships, in order to think through the ways in which all of these things help create open and “productive spaces for hosting honest and difficult conversations.”122 All three of the chapters in this final section of the book bring a level of what Patel elsewhere calls “intellectual humility” to their work by working against the expected imperial frames of academic scholarship.123 This means actually tracing collaboration and what it means ethically across kinship and queer, trans and TwoSpirit workings together (Danger, Huard, and Fraser), as well as working against expected homonational assumptions of freedom and restraint between colonial situations (Gayed) and using caste as a category that situates complicities and harm beyond the limits and violence of the white settler imperial frame (Patel). In chapter 9, “Bear Grease, Whips, Bodies, and Beads: Community Building and Refusing Trauma Porn in Dayna Danger’s Embodied 2Spirit Arts Praxis,” Dorian J. Fraser, Dayna Danger, and Adrienne Huard use collaborative Indigenous relational methodologies to discuss Danger’s embodied art, through a conversation about their

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positionalities and relationships to one another. This outlines important theoretical groundwork and praxis for engaging ethically in discussions of sexuality, queerness, kinship, and Two-Spiritness and carefully moves from a framework of “damage” to one of “desire” (following Eve Tuck). In caring for each other in their writing, art making, research, and community building, this chapter “spans activism” and undercuts “the colonial gaze” (and colonial disciplinary separation) from a kinship, trans, queer, and Two-Spirit perspective. Fraser, Danger, and Huard bring collaboration as kinship to the pages of their chapter, theorizing their interrelational work together and mapping every stage of their journey. It is clear that since two members of the team (Huard and Danger) work “in collaboration” with each other “as kin,” while Fraser (a white settler art historian) primarily wrote the main text of the chapter, reflecting on the relationship and ethics of this shared scholarship is as crucial as the scholarship itself. This decolonial Two-Spirit kinship method allows Fraser, Danger, and Huard to “convey the depth of intertwined practices, experiences and as well delineate the differences between the writer, the artists in collaboration and their working relationship”; the chapter text thus becomes “a site of introduction; kinship; and transformative and transparent authorship, cooperation and negotiation.” In chapter 10, “Coming Out a l’Oriental: Diasporic Art and Colonial Wounds,” Andrew Gayed furthers this foregrounding of transformative and queer, trans, and TwoSpirit praxis in his treatment of queer Arab Muslim experiences under the imperial frame of the West. This queer Muslim epistemology grapples with the Western concept of being and living “out and proud” and reframes these white Western queer theory notions “as an imperial structure of power that masks how modernity colonizes social and cultural practices in the name of Western advancement.” By tracing latenineteenth and early twentieth-century colonial visual ideologies across Europe, the Middle East, and North America on contemporary Arab diasporic sexual politics through the performance and photographic work of French-born Moroccan and Tiohtiá:ke|Montréal-based artist 2Fik (Toufique), Gayed reclaims Arab sexualities beyond white Western “settler-centrism” (to use Patel’s concept). 2Fik’s reconstruction of late nineteenth-century European art from a queer of colour diasporic lens that foregrounds the positionality of a queer Arab artist fosters a decentring of federal settler state claims as “Canada” and its aesthetic and sexual norms. This allow Gayed to write beyond and renavigate “geographic borders, geopolitics, and decolonial aesthetics” against the white settler puritanism in Canadian state politics that historically criminalized queer sexualities despite its “out and proud” reputation. In chapter 11, “Indian Americans Engulfing ‘American Indian’: Marking the ‘Dot Indians’’ Indianness through Genocide and Casteism in Diaspora,” Shaista Patel also moves beyond the imperial frame to critically examine relational colonial and castebased experiences and resistance between Black, Indigenous, and caste-oppressed South Asian peoples in the North American diaspora. In doing so, Patel’s work speaks to the frameworks of the previous two chapters, which clearly locate Two-Spirit and queer Muslim Arab sexualities as a method to reclaim the past and survive in the pre-

Introduction

sent. In Patel’s case, survival looks like tracing her own complicity as a displaced and caste-oppressed Muslim Pakistani diasporic feminist scholar who sees herself “upholding structures of violence” in white settler colonial and anti-Black states, Canada and the US. The generative work of Patel’s methodology in tracing complicities in “structures of domination and violence” helps to account for the “messy” complexities between racialization and coloniality. Using the photographic work of Syrian Christian Indian artist Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, Patel shows how “intermingled processes of racialization” are between “four continents” (to draw on Lowe) and how “other people of colour from Asia and Africa came or were brought to settle (in) Canada or the US in the first place.” This is an accounting for coloniality in global sense, which does not splinter off settler colonialism into what Patel describes as a “closed practice” but instead uses Matthew’s photographs to ask how people who live “under occupied conditions” in South Asia can also show up complicitly on Indigenous territories in an anti-Black North America, where Indigenous peoples “fight against constant colonial encroachment upon their lands and lives.” Patel’s work demands that complicities beyond the settler colonial context be understood in entangled ways with imperialism, casteism, and racialization outside of North American contexts; as she argues, “we cannot afford to tell a selective story that does not allow for the critical intellectual and other political work needed to account for horizontal relations of violence amongst Indigenous, Black, and other (heterogeneously) racialized people.”

Generative Conversations and Care, by Way of Conclusion

This introduction began by situating knowledge in what Donna Haraway describes as the possibilities of “the loving care people might take to learn to see faithfully from another’s point of view, even when the other is our own machine.”124 While we might name the machine colonialism (which, depending on our positionalities, some of us remain complicit in and responsible for dismantling), offering theoretically innovative ways to complicate understandings of contemporary visual art beyond the convolutions of the imperial frame is part of the loving care offered throughout this book. The chapters in Unsettling Canadian Art History demonstrate the need for greater ethical considerations of art, theory work, research methods, creative practice, and scholarly positionalities and complicities through caring and careful work. Read together, these chapters engage in ongoing scholarly conversations that foreground the lives and realities of Black, Indigenous, and racialized diasporic artists, creators, and writers in ways that often integrate queer, trans, and Two-Spirit positionalities. The contributors to this book undertook their work with great empathy and care for the subjects of their research and in ways that implicitly follow models in standpoint feminism that “cares for the subject,” which, as I have emphasized, Kim TallBear articulates in her analysis of Indigenous feminist methodologies in ethical research.125 Certainly, the authors in this book care a great deal about the subjects they write about, and I mean

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this ethically as well as practically; the multiple positionalities and standpoint knowledge represented in the pages that follow demonstrate the level of care that is possible even under the latest confines of a global viral pandemic that again intersects most violently with Black, Indigenous, and racialized diasporic communities, often queer and disabled ones. The writers in this volume did not experience the ongoing covid-19 pandemic equally, and yet they offered their care – to me, to each other, to the communities they write about. This is a mode of inquiry, of critical anti-racist, decolonial, feminist, queer, trans, and Two-Spirit work that combines the daily labour of scholarship and creative research with care work – that is, as TallBear puts it, “inquiring not at a distance, but based on the lives and knowledge priorities of subjects,” which “helps open up one’s mind to working in non-standard ways. It may take you to new and surprising places.”126 I found myself grateful to be in these care networks during the writing and editing of this volume. We will continue to care for each other beyond its pages. But I would be remiss to not describe one such point of care contact from contributor Sylvia D. Hamilton, who included me in a note to a group of her friends and colleagues back in March 2020: “Every day I visit this little pond, tucked away in the woods near me. The red hockey net side-lined until the kids set up a shinny game next winter. As I check-in to see the status of the ice, I wonder how is … Your name should be written in that space instead of the ellipsis; but out of respect for your privacy, and since this little check in is via email, it’s not (sorry). I walk, I think, I should write to … and I wonder how …”127 Hamilton’s poetically loving and generous care work for her scholarly community also made me think, I should write to, and also, I should write. I should take care, and I should care for my work. Even if I could not always care for myself, I did care about this book because I care deeply for the people who contributed to it, for the topics they write about, for the historical subjects they excavate, and for the readers (especially students) who might enter into our conversation. A politics of care means caring for people beyond publishing timelines and beyond the normative scholarly output that colonial university and cultural institutional structures demand of us all unevenly and unequally. I hope that readers will engage with and critique this work from a standpoint of care, even if they ask necessary and difficult questions about the careful work that follows. And I hope that, as Unanga xˆ scholar Eve Tuck puts it, white settlers who come to this text resist the temptation to read “extractively, for discovery. To watch the white settlers sift through our work as they ask, ‘isn’t there more for me here? Isn’t there more for me to get out of this?’ I have spent most of my career in education,” she writes, trying to convince non-Indigenous people to read Indigenous people. Now that there’s been a “turn” (to where we already were/are), unsurprisingly surprised by how demonstratively settlerish their reading is. “Isn’t there something less theoretical? Something more theoretical? Something more practical? Something less radical? More possible?” “Can’t you make something that

Introduction

imagines it clearly enough for me to see it? For me to just plunk it into my own imagination?” “Can’t you do more work for me?” Because I have given this five whole minutes of thought and I don’t see the future like you. I have spent this entire time being complicit in your early deaths, and feeling like I earned the right to ask you to do more work. I’ll just keep sifting through all of this work that was never meant for me, sorting it by what is useful to me and what is discardable. I’ll complain, saying this is too theoretical, and stay oblivious to the ways that what is “theory” to me is life for Indigenous people. Tuck concludes, “I forgot that all these years of relation between settler and Indigenous people set up settlers to be terrible readers of Indigenous work. If you suspect this thread is about you, it probably is.”128 And I include myself in the “about you” of Tuck’s powerful thread because it is a thread about the white “settler-centrism” of white scholars like me who cannot help but centre ourselves even in a book that means to unsettle the colonial disciplinary violence we have helped to build and maintain and continue to benefit from. And yet I write this in order to follow the transformative call by Shaista Patel, cited at the beginning of this introduction, who insists that to break outside of settler attachments we must learn “to embrace failure while resisting institutional repercussions of embracing and announcing that failure, it is a constant effort to be honest and accountable to the people whose lands I call home.” We must, as she notes, resist the heavy and constant urge to jump at the opportunity to do something; to say something … Complicity is never a passive state but it doesn’t mean we have to work forward, toward something. Sometime backing away, removing ourselves from the center, passing on the microphone, reading important texts by Black, Indigenous, racialized, Muslim, Dalit-Bahujan (not mutually exclusive) scholars without excitedly announcing them on social media, without instagramming covers of their books, without quoting from them in y/our own work is important and can move us toward genuine racial world re/building work.129 This is my careful wish in my own attempts to do more ethical work as a white settler scholar, and my hope for the continued community of care that the contributors to this book have so graciously offered to those around them and so generously folded me into. We fold you as readers into the pages of this community, too.

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n ote s 1 McLean, “‘We Built a Life from Nothing,’” 32. 2 Ibid., 33. 3 Brian Bergman, “Newfoundland Celebrates 500 Years,” The Canadian Encyclopedia (17 March 2003), https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/newfoundland-celebrates-500-years. Originally published in Maclean’s (23 June 1997). 4 Tiffany Lethabo King, “New World Grammars: The ‘Unthought’ Black Discourses of Conquest,” Theory and Event 19, no. 4 (2016), https://muse.jhu.edu/article/633275. 5 Azoulay, Potential History, 6–7. 6 Ibid. 7 I draw here on Vimalassery, Hu Pegues, and Goldstein’s concept of “colonial unknowing,” which suggests that colonialism itself needs to be understood through the overlapping colonial structures, events, embodiments, and experiences that render that same colonialism as “unintelligible” (Vimalassery, Hu Pegues, and Goldstein, “Introduction”). Dia Da Costa and Alexandre Emboaba Da Costa likewise use Vimalassery, Hu Pegues, and Goldstein’s work to confront what it means to “not know” colonialism “when we see it,” despite clear evidence that presents colonial violence as an everyday reality (Da Costa and Da Costa, “Introduction,” 350). 8 Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 15. 9 Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 581. 10 Ibid., 582. 11 Ibid., 583. 12 Ibid., 584. 13 Hekman, “Truth and Method,” 346, drawing on Nancy Hartsock. 14 Hartman, Lose Your Mother, 6; Rinaldo Walcott, “I’m Here Because You Were There,” tvo Docs (1 May 2009): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEZVMnJ7eYk. 15 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 1. 16 Patel, “Talking Complicity, Breathing Coloniality.” 17 Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” 1. 18 Ibid., 10. 19 Ibid., 21. 20 Westcott, “Witnessing Whiteness: Articulating Race and the ‘Politics of Style.’” 21 Ibid. 22 Ahmed, “Declarations of Whiteness.” 23 Ahmed, “Wound Up,” Feminist Killjoys, 7 January 2017: https://feministkilljoys.com/2017/01/ 04/wound-up/. 24 Patel, “Talking Complicity,” 2. 25 Kleege, More Than Meets the Eye, 6. 26 Ibid., 10. 27 Ibid., 11. 28 Kim TallBear, “Standing With.” 29 Ibid.

Introduction

30 Sara Ahmed, “Evidence,” Feminist Killjoys (12 July 2016): https://feministkilljoys.com/2016/07 /12/evidence/. 31 James I. Charlton states that he first heard the often-used phrase “nothing about us without us” at a South African disability rights event in 1993 where Michael Masuta and William Rowland used this slogan as two leaders of Disabled People South Africa. Masuta and Rowland used the phrase after hearing it from Eastern European activists as a disability rights conference. See Charlton, Nothing About Us Without Us, 3. 32 See Kerry G., Patty K., “Medicine for the Resistance,” https://soundcloud.com/patty-wbk; also “Reconstructing Sexuality with Dr. Kim TallBear,” Gender and Sexuality series, https://sound cloud.com/patty-wbk/kim-tallbear, also accessible at The Critical Polyamorist, http://www. criticalpolyamorist.com/, 29 October 2018. 33 At the time that this volume is going to press, Jas M. Morgan has just published an open letter about their experience in Canada’s most established institutions for art and culture, including their position as Indigenous editor-at-large for Canadian Art magazine. It is critically important to name and cite Morgan’s intervention into the white and settler-centric orientations of such Canadian institutions for curating and writing about art, not to mention the violence against Indigenous scholars, artists, and writers that such orientations necessitate. Morgan writes, “It felt like Canadian Art only cared about its reputation and the safety of the organization, at the expense of my mental and physical safety … To this organization, I was something to be controlled. But I was also not disposable because I represented a steady stream of reconciliation income from private and public funding bodies” (Jas M. Morgan, “Letter to the Board of Canadian Art and Hyperallergic Magazine,” 17 March 2021, https://aabitagiizhig.com/2021/ 03/17/letter-to-the-board-of-canadian-art-and-hyperallergic-magazine/). Morgan’s letter is crucial to read in full in order to understand its impact and the full context of how Canadian art institutions both tokenize and exploit and dispose of Indigenous scholars, curators, and artists. 34 Simpson, “The State Is a Man.” 35 Justin Leroy, “Black History in Occupied Territory.” 36 For explanations of land-as-property under settler colonial formations, see Coulthard, “From ‘Wards of the State’ to Subjects of Recognition?,” 56–98 and Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive, 3–57. For explanations of how enslavement dehumanizes the enslaved under chattel slavery to turn humans-into-property and the relationship between property and abolition, see Walcott, On Property, 8–74. 37 Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism,” 389. 38 Leroy, “Black History.” 39 Veracini, Settler Colonialism, 1; Wolfe, “Recuperating Binarism,” 257. 40 Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism,” 387. 41 Kauanui, “A Structure, Not an Event.” 42 Patel, Moussa, and Upadhyay, “Complicities, Connections, and Struggles,” 5. 43 Mamdani, “Beyond Settler,” 651–64; “Settler Colonialism,” 596–614. 44 Da Costa and Da Costa, “Introduction,” 343. 45 King, “New World Grammars.”

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Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” 390. Byrd, “Weather with You,” 210. Ibid., 208. Ibid., 210. Ibid. Lawrence and Dua, “Decolonizing Antiracism,” 120. Byrd, “Weather with You,” 210. Ibid., 211. Patel, “The ‘Indian’ of Four Continents,” 256. Ibid., 256–7. Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents, 3. Patel, “The ‘Indian’ of Four Continents,” 77. Saidiya Hartman defines the concept of “afterlife” in the context of transatlantic enslavement as establishing “a measure of man and a ranking of life and worth that has yet to be undone.” See Hartman, Lose Your Mother, 6. Nelson, Slavery, Geography and Empire, 3. Bear Nicholas, “The Role of Colonial Artists,” 27. I am very grateful to Bear Nicholas, a language keeper, for instructing me on Wəlastəkwey grammar and language. Any unintentional mistakes in this grammar and spelling are, however, mine to account for. Ibid., 28–9. Ibid., 29. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 30. Quotation from Bear Nicholas’s excavated document, Lyman, “Remarks on the Province of New Brunswick,” 68. Leroy, “Black History in Occupied Territory.” Igloliorte, “Tending the Kudlik,” 7. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 8. Ibid. Ibid.,7. Bloomfield, “InutuKait|Elders,” 15. Again, Jas M. Morgan’s open letter is crucial to understanding the complexities of these hiring and tokenism strategies in art and culture institutions in Canada. See Morgan, “Letter to the Board of Canadian Art and Hyperallergic Magazine,” https://aabitagiizhig.com/2021/03/17 /letter-to-the-board-of-canadian-art-and-hyperallergic-magazine/. See the title of Patel’s “Talking Complicity, Breathing Coloniality.” Nelson, Slavery, Geography and Empire, 2. Ibid.

Introduction

79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88

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See again Morgan, “Letter to the Board.” Morgan, “You Want Our Art.” Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Morgan in conversation Nelson, “Fugitive Portraits.” King, “Labor’s Aphasia.” Cooper, The Hanging of Angélique, 69. de B’Béri, Reid-Maroney, and Kashope Wright, “Introduction,” 5. For a critique of “raceless” writing, see Emily Bernard, “‘Raceless’ Writing,” 87–117. I am indebted to conversations with Dia Da Costa and her theorizing of writing “castelessly” in the South Asian context, and I cite her pathway to this work on caste through “raceless” writing here. Nelson, “Introduction,” 14. Ibid., n47. Emphasis in original. Morgan employs and slightly modifies Danger’s original statement, “this work isn’t for you,” in order to activate their provocation, “this work is not for you,” as a site of praxis and possibility. Jas M. Morgan, “This Work Is Not for You,” 5 June 2017, https://canadianart.ca/features/ summer-2017-editors-note-lindsay-nixon/. Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus, 107. Morgan, “This Work Is Not for You.” Igloliorte and Taunton, “Introduction,” 6. Igloliorte, Nagam, and Taunton, “Introduction,” 5. Nelson, Towards an African Canadian Art History, 6–7. Ibid., 7. To Nelson’s point here, at the time this volume is going to press, Concordia University has just announced the hire of Dr Joana Joachim as assistant professor of Black studies in art education, art history, and social justice in the Faculty of Fine Arts. Dr Joachim completed her PhD at McGill with Dr Nelson as her supervisor. See Candice Pye, “Joana Joachim is Concordia’s new assistant professor of Black studies in art education, art history and social justice,” Department of Art History, Concordia University, 12 April 2021, https://www.concordia.ca/ news/stories/2021/04/12/joana-joachim-is-concordias-new-assistant-professor-of-blackstudies-in-art-education-art-history-and-social-justice.html. Mathur, “Cultivations,” 3. Alice Ming Wai Jim, “Asian Canadian Art Matters,” Asia Art Archive, July 2010, https://aaa.org. hk/en/ideas/ideas/asian-canadian-art-matters-334/type/essays/page/4. Jim, “Asian Canadian Art Matters.” Chang and Jim, “Asian/Americas,” 2. Ibid. Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents, 1. Morrissette, “Practices of Learning,” 45. Fatona, “Settling in Place,” 4. Ibid., 5.

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108 109 110 111

Igloliorte and Taunton, “Continuities between Eras,” 5. Nelson, “Fugitive Portraits.” Nickle, “Introduction,” 2. Again, I employ Shaista Patel’s term here. Nickle’s introduction makes a similar observation in her use of TallBear’s approach to relationality, in the context of “siloed” conversations in Indigenous studies. See Nickle, “Introduction,” 3. Ibid. Azoulay, Potential History, 7. McMaster, “Towards an Aboriginal Art History,” 77, 81, as cited in Nelson, “Introduction: Towards an African Canadian Art History,” 15. King, “New World Grammars.” For a summary of Lucki’s comments in relation to the anti-Indigenous history of the rcmp, see Palmater, “Brenda Lucki Must Go.” Palmater writes in the context of recent police killings of Indigenous peoples, Rodney Levi and Chantel Moore, “The rcmp took the lead role in the historic and ongoing violent removal of Indigenous peoples from their lands and nations. They were involved in the theft of Indigenous children into residential schools; they illegally prevented Indigenous peoples from leaving reserves; and they prevented Indigenous peoples from engaging in their traditional economies like hunting, fishing and tobacco. The brutal beating of Chief Adam was ruled by the rcmp to be an appropriate use of force. So long as the standard of what is reasonable force is based on rcmp culture, nothing will change … The rcmp, like other police forces in Canada, are responsible for killing Indigenous peoples at disproportionately high rates.” See also Maynard, Policing Black Lives. Alicia Garza quoted in Move to End Violence, “Ally or Co-Conspirator?” Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents, 2. Ibid., 70. Although this is Lowe’s concept, and I cite it here as such, it is important to trace my understanding of its complexity through Shaista Patel’s theorization of the “unlikely archive,” including in this volume, but also in her dissertation, “The ‘Indian’ of Four Continents,” 45–8. Patel, “Talking Complicities, Breathing Coloniality,” 2. Ibid. Ibid. Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 584. TallBear, “Standing With and Speaking as Faith,” using Schuurman and Pratt, “Care of the Subject,” 291–9. TallBear, “Standing With and Speaking as Faith.” Sylvia D. Hamilton, personal email communication, 23 March 2020. Eve Tuck, @tuckeve, “To watch the white settlers,” 8 October 2017, 12:54 p.m., https://twitter.com/ tuckeve/status/917070693300408321. Patel, “Talking Complicity,” 18.

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Part One Unsettling Settler Methodologies, Re-centring Decolonial Knowledge

1.1 Michael J. Martin, map of Mi’kma’ki. Native Council of Nova Scotia’s Micmac Language Program.

1 White Settler Tautologies and Pioneer Lies in Mi’kma’ki t r av is wysote and er in morton

Introduction

This chapter examines white settler tautologies – things that seem true by the very nature of their repetition and their logical irrefutability under settler colonialism – in order to understand their particular violence in Mi’kma’ki, Mi’kmaw territory (fig. 1.1). We use the term tautology to explain how settler colonialism uses parallel concepts, images, ideologies, and narratives to repeat things until they become commonsensical according to settler logic, using examples from visual art and textual historical sources to outline how such tautologies function. In the first section of the chapter, we use the example of oxen and plough as one such visual tautology that helps us to understand how historical white settler narrations and visualizations depend on the cultivated appropriation of Indigenous land and lifeways. Oxen and plough work in parallel to enact seemingly placid actions (cultivating soil) and yet they are actually violent examples of what Goenpul scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson terms “the white possessive”: white settler tautologies that naturalize and normalize the owning of land as property, enslaved people as property, and Indigenous people as propertyless.1 If oxen and plough then represent a peaceful rural life when painted on canvas, the logic of the white settler tautology has succeeded in making colonial violence look innocuous to the settler eye. Having examined the oxen and plough in its affirmation of this white possessive logic, we then use the next two sections of the chapter to describe how “the pioneer lie” naturalizes white settler tautologies through the European transformation and appropriation of Indigenous topographies and ecologies. The “pioneer lie” here is simply another exercise in white settler nativism and revisionism, which insists that European settlers belong to Mi’kma’ki more so than the Mi’kmaq. Yet, this white settler nativism also forces the land to lie for settlers because the topological and ecological

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transformations caused by settler colonial violence in Mi’kma’ki have been so dramatic since the French settler colonization of Mi’kmaw lands beginning in 1598–1604. In Mi’kma’ki, the Acadian transformation of Mi’kmaw lands through a 300-year-old cultivation process changed its very landscape, seemingly forever, as aboiteaux dyking systems changed the path of tides through arable lands. What do these land pathways tell Mi’kmaq today, who do not remember the land differently? What lie does the land tell under settler tautology? If generations of white European settlers have forced the land to tell pioneer lies, becoming not a space of Mi’kmaw lifeways but a new property-based reality for the white settler state – in law, in terms of ownership through allodial title, in terms of cultivation through European-led land transformation, in terms of the parallel violence of chattel slavery, and in terms of vision and narration about what land does under pioneer settlement – then what does the land have to say now? We approach these questions by examining various historical stages and sociocultural sources of the pioneer lie as it intersects with French Acadian and British Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Celtic settlement through the irrigation and cultivation of Mi’kmaw lands. We argue that this pioneer lie not only erases Mi’kmaw histories but also obscures the histories of the enslaved Africans and indentured Asians who cultivated settlements for the primary benefit of white Europeans and their descendants.

Oxen and Plough: Narrating and Visualizing the White Settler Tautology

Envisioning oxen and plough as a white settler tautology is one way to examine the visual legacies of settler colonialism in Mi’kma’ki under overlapping French, British, and Canadian settler empires and to approach the ways in which settlers force the land to tell pioneer lies. This particular tautology provides a locus for understanding the logic of European settler colonial cultivation that has so transformed the landscape of Mi’kma’ki, so much so that white settlers see this land as originally ours/theirs. In this section, we regard the oxen and plough as primary evidence of the development of white settler imaginaries, using Judeo-Christian theology, the seventeenth-century colonial expedition writings of Parisian lawyer Marc Lescarbot in Mi’kma’ki, and the artistic renderings of professional French and British Canadian painters and self-taught agricultural worker-artists. What we show is that the oxen and plough is foundational to advancing the pioneer lie of white settler nativism, not only because it cleared land for European settlement but also because it provided a theological underpinning for the colonization of Indigenous peoples, set the limits of settler–Indigenous kin making, and enabled the transformation of the “settled” way of doing things into the “normal, natural, common sense, and rational” way of imagining the white settler past, linking to the white settler future.2 This tautological process, we argue, sets the backdrop to force the land to lie.

White Settler Tautologies and Pioneer Lies

The parallel basis of the white settler tautology of the oxen and plough is both agricultural and Biblical. Typically, a shared yoke between two oxen enables them to pull together, to work in a pair. The equal yoking of two other-than-human animals enables the effective pulling of a plough to clear the land that settlers then inhabit as their own. In Judeo-Christian terms, to be “unequally yoked with an unbeliever” means that one’s partnership cannot survive challenge or strife. To be equally yoked is thus a political, moral, and spiritual positioning of the European Christian’s dedication to and performance of faith. Extending this theological understanding of yoking, European farmers generally did not place two unequal animals on the same yoke, such as a horse and an ox, because the height differentiation would mean that the pair could not work effectively together in the commercial or agricultural task at hand. Yet, unequal yoking had a purpose in generating new modes of efficiency, for example, teaching an untrained ox through the experience of working with a well-seasoned one. If the unseasoned ox dragged behind, the experienced one would set the proper pace and the trainee would need to match it. The seasoned ox remained in control. In New France, the theology of unequal yoking served as an imperial analogy for miscegenation between French settlers and Mi’kmaq. In his The History of New France, originally penned in 1609 two years after a year-long expedition to the French colony of Acadia in the Sipekne’katik district of Mi’kma’ki, Parisian lawyer Marc Lescarbot wrote, And to take to wife pagan women was not just, the Old Testament law being rigorous against those who do such a thing, which even under the law of Grace is also forbidden by the Apostle St. Paul, when he says: “Be ye not yoked together with unbelievers”; in which passage, though he is speaking of the profession of faith, yet it can very suitably be applied to marriages. And in the Old Testament it was forbidden to yoke to the plough two animals of different species. It is true that in that country [Mi’kma’ki] it is easy to turn a pagan woman into a Christian, and such marriages could have been contracted had the French settlement proved lasting and permanent.3 If, in the words of Jesuit missionary Pierre Biard, Lescarbot’s vision for the permanent settlement of New France was to, “make a Garden out of the wilderness,” then the tautological understanding of the plough was indeed a necessary civilizing agent preceding the conversion, “Frenchification,” and assimilation of Mi’kmaq peoples.4 While Lescarbot tried to reflect some positive aspects of the Mi’kmaq to his readership, even comparing them favourably to “simpletons” in his native France, he is as keen to look forward as he is to look backward when he imagines the literary frontiers of New France.5 By rhetorically humanizing the Mi’kmaq, the literary field opens the physical terrain to settlement by presenting it as knowable – as a wilderness awaiting its garden.6 Lescarbot’s idyllic portrayals of Mi’kmaq life served as propaganda tools to encourage French settlement, shining an unsavoury light on certain aspects of

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metropolitan existence while conveying an image of the Mi’kmaq that later conceptualized the bon sauvage or “noble savage.” This Indigenous “nobility” is derived from an “ancient” path to innocence that Lescarbot theorizes when he suggests that the Mi’kmaq and the French shared a common ancestor in Noah, whom he considered to be the first true Gaul.7 However, if the unequal yoking of the settler and native was a settler colonial hypothesis that ultimately proved false, Lescarbot nevertheless integrated the tautology of the yoke into a flexible colonization strategy. This helped to set the stage for the French transformation of Mi’kma’ki landscapes that later forced the land to lie. French settlers would cultivate the land while also planning an escape route: “Two faults must be pointed out in [French Captain Ribaut’s failure to colonize Florida], one that they did not cultivate the soil which they wished to colonise [sic], the other that they did not keep in reserve or build in time a boat wherewith, in case of necessity, to return home.”8 For Lescarbot, the key to a successful permanent settler colonial presence in New France lay in the plough. Its failure, in turn, lay in the unequal yoking of white settlers with the Mi’kmaq who needed to be pacified through the plough. The yoking of oxen thus became a purposeful tautology of white settler nativism. Lescarbot leaves it open to French settlers to return home to France if their yokes should fail, which would in turn lead to a failure to own land through its cultivation. In other words, should French cultivation strategies fail, settler colonizers could retract themselves from a land they couldn’t possess with their plough. While the purposeful yoking of two apparently uneven parts – nativizing the settler in order to settle the native – were the goals of imperial French and, later, British conquest in northern North America, it was not entirely achieved. Wabanaki Indigenous nations, peoples, territories, clans, and kin continue to both suffer and resist settler colonial transgressions through the affirmation of their own ways of being. Furthermore, Black Loyalists who came to Mi’kma’ki beginning in 1783, as well as those formerly enslaved “freedom runners,” to use Sylvia D. Hamilton’s term, who sought refuge there during this period, complicated the duality of white settler–Mi’kmaq relations when it came to the turning of soil.9 Although a return across the Middle Passage to Africa, a journey that nearly 1,200 Black people made from Mi’kma’ki to Sierra Leone in 1792, was part of the radical Black imagination of the period, European settlers en masse did not imagine they would ever return to Europe, as Lescarbot did, even under the extreme conditions of British colonial violence in the Acadian expulsion of 1755– 64. Despite overlapping settler colonial governance structures and violent confrontations over European imperial sovereignty in Mi’kma’ki, the cultivation of lands became a pervasive and permanent white possessive logic between French and AngloBritish empires. The continued European presence in Mi’kma’ki required tautological reimagining in order to claim continuous occupation through white nativism: that is, even as one European empire gave way to another in Mi’kma’ki settlers could imagine themselves as belonging to its lands.

White Settler Tautologies and Pioneer Lies

Nativizing the settler is crucial to getting the land to lie on settlers’ behalf, since settler nativism assumes both past and permanent presence in Indigenous territories. Collaborators Eve Tuck (Unanga xˆ ) and K. Wayne Yang have cogently argued that mappings of settler futurity remain when settlers refuse what decolonization actually requires in a settler colonial context, namely, the return of land and the removal of settler-invaders.10 Indeed, white settler tautologies make such refusals seem natural, since the continuous remaking of settler truths refuses the material, corporeal, and political reality of Indigenous presence on the land and of enslaved people of African descent forced to turn Mi’kma’ki soil (indeed, many “freedom runners” were reenslaved in the colonies of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick). The yoking of oxen as a tautology of white possession is not only widely present in white settler narratives of Mi’kma’ki like Lescarbot’s but also in white settler visual representations of the land. Paintings of oxen reshaping the landscape at the hands of European settler colonists are commonplace in the history of Canadian visual art. Through the clearing of trees to the construction of settler homesteads and the ploughing of the fields that would sustain white settler diets and livelihoods, the oxen and plough is made complicit in the very treaties that set up the future relational context between settler colonizers and Indigenous nations across the white settler state of Canada. In Mi’kma’ki, these interrelationships take the form of “Peace and Friendship” treaties beginning in 1725, in which Mi’kmaw signatories wilfully refused the surrender of lands, waterways, or access to non-human animals and plants in their territories.11 Professionally trained white Canadian settler artists tackled the subject of ploughing oxen in a style reminiscent of the French Barbizon school, among them nineteenthcentury Canadian painters Horatio Walker and Clarence Gagnon, and in ways that reinforce ploughing oxen as a settler colonial tautology (figs. 1.2 and 1.3). These artists re-represented on canvas and paper the lost European homeland through such aesthetic reckonings as the Barbizon tradition. White settler interpretations of ploughing oxen suggest a reconfiguration of territories that simultaneously naturalizes, and is naturalized under, an imperial gaze. Deployed as colonial agents of naturalization, oxen also appear heavily in representations of the white settler experience by untrained artists well into the contemporary period. Especially pertinent here are the combinations of historical representations of European settler life and the later reimaginings of these settler realities, both exercises in establishing white settler nativism across a long historical trajectory. In other words, self-taught artists who were also often farmers decorated oxen yokes (fig. 1.4), the tools of their agricultural trade. The result is a consistent visual representation of oxen as cultivators as evidence of Europeandescendent belonging and ownership of land that spans three centuries. The white settler tautology of oxen and plough began with French colonization of Mi’kma’ki during the seventeenth century, transitioned in the period of British colonization during the eighteenth century, and extended into the period of Canadian settler state making beginning in the nineteenth century. Yet, the oxen and plough was

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1.2 Horatio Walker, Oxen Drinking, 1899. Oil on Canvas.

1.3 Clarence Gagnon, Oxen Ploughing, 1902. Ink on paper.

1.4 Painted single ox yoke, Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia, ca 1920s.

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but one way to cultivate lands for white settler expansion and to reinscribe white settlers as native to those lands. Indeed, white settler artists often called back to the premechanized phase of settler colonial agricultural expansion as evidence not only of a simpler time but also of a moment to which white possession and thus white settler belonging could first be traced. The collective narratives and images of yoked oxen and plough present the white settler experience of land not as conquered but as originary, as “new,” and as available for appropriation and possession. The material culture evidence of conquest is here reimagined as proprietary evidence of ownership, not only as white settler appropriation of Indigenous land but also culture and lifestyle.

Pioneer Lies: White Settler Nativism

The white settler appropriation of Indigenous land and lifeways is also the ideological source of the pioneer lie, a tautology that allows settlers and settled land alike to tell the lies of nonviolent imperial expansion. In this section and the one that follows, we articulate the pioneer lie in Mi’kma’ki that reimagines European settlement not as violent conquest but as projecting Indigenous territories as terra nullius. The lie is that this “nobody’s land” had never been subject to state sovereignty until European invasion, conquest, and occupation, and that it could only have been yoked into productive flourishing through peaceful collaboration with its original Indigenous inhabitants.12 The pioneer lie is also the denial of Mi’kma’ki as terra alicuius, of land belonging to those already here.13 The pioneer lie is connected to broader white Canadian settler notions of coureurs des bois, habitants, fur trading voyageurs, and those otherwise expanding forest, mining, and ranching “frontiers,” which in fact did not break “new” ground, domesticate a “wilderness,” or open up “vacant” territories for settlement.14 What the white settler reconfiguring of land did do was create a new spectre of normalcy that violently bleeds into the present. Like its manifestation in the oxen and plough, the pioneer lie is also evident in visual art. In this case, though, the pioneer lie provides for the permanence of white settler nativism because it emerges not as a lie but as an obvious and naturalized truth. This is most observable in art’s normalizing of the topographical and ecological violence that white settlers wrought using methods of cultivation in addition to ploughs. It is here that we truly see a normalization of settler presence and permanence in Mi’kma’ki, through a form of land cultivation that forces the land itself to tell pioneer lies. The Acadian dykelands in Mi’kma’ki are well known topographical areas, especially near the place the settler state now calls Grand Pré, Nova Scotia. As the settler story goes, French Acadian migrants-turned-occupiers in the area had such a good relationship with the Mi’kmaq in the seventeenth century that they were able to completely reconfigure the coastal salt marshlands into an intricate dyking system without resistance. The dykelands Acadians created allowed for the use of mineral rich earth for agricultural purposes through the accumulation of fertile soil next to tidal marshes.

White Settler Tautologies and Pioneer Lies

Famous white Canadian settler artists such as Alex Colville have since memorialized the dykelands around Grand Pré according to particular white settler tautologies; in this case, the Acadian settler move to innocence through the narrative of British imperial violence against them in the Acadian expulsion – Le Grand Dérangement (great deportation) – to other British colonies and to Britain and France between 1755 and 1764. Indeed, the marshlands became the subject of an entire postwar rehabilitation and commemoration project in the second half of the twentieth century funded by the Nova Scotia provincial government in an homage to maintaining settler futures through preservations of the past. The settler state now regularly refers to the dykelands as “the 350-year struggle” in terms of the effort spent to ensure settler survival and continuity in colonized territory.15 Marshland memorializations also typically use the 350-year struggle to establish settler colonial topographies as originary in another effort to advance white settler nativism. Unlike oxen and plough, which cultivated topsoil only to a certain depth that the plough could till, les aboiteaux reconfigured the soil, waterways, and distribution of marshlands. Colville’s 1988 painting French Cross (fig. 1.5), for example, depicts a

1.5 Alex Colville, French Cross, 1988. Acrylic on hardboard.

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woman on horseback looking back at a monument that resides in Grand Pré just kilometres away from the artist’s home in Wolfville, Nova Scotia.16 This stone cross, which Acadian poet and historian John Frederic Herbin erected at Grand Pré in 1924, rests atop what he believed to be the foundation of an Acadian house and stands in memorial to the deported settlers. The rider and cross in the foreground are placed in relief with the salt marshes in the background, which remain forever marked by Acadian presence and reconfiguration. This is indeed the landscape of settler colonial tautology in both its focus on a twentieth-century memorial to an eighteenth-century event and a vision of marshlands dug out and reorganized by Acadian hands that now appear as untouched and originary rather than as an outcome of French invasion. Here, there is no oxen ploughing soil to demarcate the violent change of settler cultivation. Instead, the topography of the marshlands stands not as forever reconfigured but as an exercise in white settler nativism – as “the way it has always been.” The land itself tells a lie: topographically, it appears as if the coast has always been configured this way, as if grasses have always grown here amongst marshy waterways that bring salt water inland, that the coastline has always been ripe for cultivating. How is it then possible to remember the land as something else, if the land tells its own lie of settler presence and permanence? What, then, are the implications of settlers forcing the land to lie 350 years ago? Complicating the Acadian pioneer lie of les aboiteaux even further is the fact that Colville sketched the rider based on photographs he took of his neighbour, a girl of Chinese descent. “I had a brainwave,” Colville later recalled, “that I could use this Chinese girl, whose house I would cycle by every day.”17 The resulting image of the rider, according to art historian Mark A. Cheetham, creates a “double temporality” that is typical of Colville’s contrasting of the human and non-human animal worlds, here achieved through the horse and rider’s placement in front of the monument. “The horse sees where it is going; the young woman sees more, even while she gazes back” to the commemorative plaque on the cross.18 The rider gazes back on a history that she can see, the cross of the Acadian deportation, rather than on a history that she cannot, the pre-dykeland ecologies and topographies of Mi’kma’ki. Again, the marshlands seem to have always been that way, the land always irrigated and available for European settler use and propertied ownership and control. And yet, clearly, this pioneer lie is part of what settler Canadian theorist Eva Mackey calls the “origin stories of private property.”19 In a typical exercise of white settler nativism, Colville stresses the racial origins of the rider as more than Chinese. He later discovered that in addition to being the daughter of a first-generation Chinese immigrant father and a white mother, she was a matrilineal descendent of Acadians. She thus belongs to the Acadian landscape as Colville imagines it because she too can trace back her European lineage. For Colville, such lineage seems important to establish the Chinese rider as originary to the marshlands he paints in the background. As Cheetham notes, there is redemption in the rider choosing to “pass by the cross she knows so well.” Instead of forgetting the Acadian

White Settler Tautologies and Pioneer Lies

displacement at the hands of the English, Colville’s rider “looks back and remembers, with the result that historical tragedy and suffering stalk this painting.”20 The nature of this tragedy and stalking begs further probing in the context of establishing white settler nativism through histories of Asian arrivants.21 Colville’s depiction of a racially invisible Chinese Acadian rider (whose face is turned away from the viewer) in fact achieves the dual erasure that white settler nativism depends on: Europeans as rightful and originary inhabitants and owners of Acadia in ways that erase and eliminate Mi’kmaq presence, and make invisible the indentured labour of early Asian arrivants and the complex positioning of racialized arrivants such as Chinese migrants who were exploited by but also unevenly benefitted from the European settler colonial project that attempts to eliminate Indigenous people in the continuous colonization of ancestral lands.22 Colville’s whitewashing of the Chinese rider shows the pervasiveness of white settler nativism in Mi’kma’ki since the days of Lescarbot. He was reassured by her Chinese Acadian identity, however generationally distant the latter, because her Acadian lineage planted her in the land of the French Cross as seemingly naturally as the dykelands themselves. Colville’s identification of the rider as more than Chinese, as more than the descendant of Chinese indentured labourers who operated within the historically racist confines of a French turned British settler empire and state, serves to nativize her, in near complete contradiction, as a white Acadian settler. This nativizing of the Chinese rider through her Acadian lineage is consistent with many romanticizations of Acadian populations in the contemporary period, which depict Acadie as a distinct and historical settler society nativized through generations of intermarriage with Mi’kmaw.23 In Colville’s reidentification of the rider as the descendent of a Chinese arrivant as well as of Acadian settlers, the artist in effect indigenizes her according to a very set pattern of white settler nativism; she (through Colville’s vision of her) claims remembrance over this land more directly than Mi’kmaq themselves, whose landscapes were forever changed by her Acadian ancestors and then later forgotten by white settler descendants altogether. To be sure, Mi’kmaq are erased in Colville’s vision of Acadian and Chinese Canadian histories on lands forever reconfigured by generations of settler and arrivant labour and under the violence of chattel slavery. This Mi’kmaq erasure simultaneously displaces what Chinese American scholar Lisa Lowe describes as “the coeval conditions of settler dispossession, slavery, and indentureship in the Americas.”24 Instead, both Mi’kmaq and Black people in Mi’kma’ki have had to resist and survive multiple and ongoing reconfigurations of this environment and the impact that multiple European colonial violences have had on their societies.25 Asian arrivants, in turn, who escaped British imperial violence elsewhere to emigrate to Mi’kmaw territory, operated in an ambiguous status that was tied to indenture in the nineteenth century, even if such escape also implicated them in what Lowe calls “the dispossession of indigenous peoples and the settler logics of appropriation.”26 And yet, through the pioneer lie represented in the irrigation of marshlands, Acadians fictitiously appear to belong to these

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lands more than Mi’kmaw. In Colville’s offering a dual sense of belonging is extended to Asian arrivants in Mi’kma’ki too, by collapsing complex sets of racialized relationships to settler colonization into a relationship with the land that lies.

Pioneer Lies: Mi’kmaw Consent

The particular relevance of Colville’s painting for unsettling the pioneer lie remains in the distant presence afforded to the dykelands, which appear only as a faint representation below the horizon where settler homes sit in the background. In this section, we extend our previous analysis of the pioneer lie in Coleville’s painting to the level of property rights and ecological transformation in the Acadian dyked marshlands to reveal the complexities of Mi’kmaq consent that the pioneer lie rests upon. Colville’s twentieth-century vision of the dyked marshes represents a settler colonial transformation so longstanding and successful that it now appears as a natural landscape – the dykelands – like the Acadians appear as native to the land itself. In this section, we trace this normalization back to the narrative that Acadians could not have dyked this land without the support of the Mi’kmaq, who outnumbered them during the seventeenth century. This aspect of the pioneer lie not only prefigures the naturalization of white settler imaginaries but, as we will show, also bolsters the legal premise of white possessive ownership of land through irrigation and cultivation first elucidated by Lescarbot. The pioneer lie of the dykelands functions because the notion of Mi’kmaq consent erases the nuances of legal deliberation and negotiation that defined European settler colonization of Mi’kma’ki. Taking terra nullius as the on-the-ground convention of settling before extinguishing Indigenous property rights rather than as a specific legal doctrine, legal scholar Edward Cavanagh finds that property rights in New France were founded on an exclusionary logic of corporate rather than monarchical recognition.27 He questions how historians of New France have somehow held the contradictory view that these lands were vacant and uninhabited while also claiming their inhabitants were welcoming and willing.28 The evidence Cavanaugh presents suggests that the first recorded legal titles to New France from 1627 coincide with the establishment of permanent settlements rather than with the assertion of any coherent imperial doctrines. Settlers acted as permanent occupiers before these titles were first consolidated into coherent imperial laws in 1663, laws that sanctioned the established practice of pre-emptively claiming new rights before old rights were extinguished.29 A similar historical hegemony is at play in normalizing the pioneer lie in Acadia. In reality, with regards to prominent French Acadian military settlements such as Port Royal, there are few historical sources that provide evidence of land title or the operations of social and economic institutions in the colony.30 There are few written sources that describe how Acadians organized the labour required to build dykes or

White Settler Tautologies and Pioneer Lies

how these settler communities accorded cultivation lands or pasturage.31 Indeed, this is part of the reason the land lies so successfully through the dykelands, as they tell a settler story through topological remnant that is largely absent from written documents. There were likely common grazing rights for non-human animals, but little else is known about the agricultural political economy of the dykelands.32 Despite the dearth of written documentation, historians have generally assumed the dykes to be the result of a peaceful reorganization of land undertaken with Mi’kmaq consent. But is this a pioneer lie? Is it possible that the building of the dykelands and the apparent cooperation between Mi’kmaq and Acadians – or, at least, non-violent rapprochement – is an example of the complex personhood behind settler colonial histories? Complex personhood, as Avery Gordon writes, “means that all people (albeit in specific forms whose specificity is sometimes everything) remember and forget.”33 In this case, it seems plausible to forget, and perhaps even reasonable to deny, inconvenient histories, with the result that they are continually hidden from sight and forced beneath the surface of the soil to the depth of the plough. When the truth is hidden from view, the lie becomes easier to remember; however, it can also be easy to forget and as a result get caught in the lie. The pioneer lie is thus a pioneering lie: a conditioning of the evidentiary terrain such that when one looks back the lie is made manifest and the truth is reduced to its manifestation. It games the ambivalence of memory, recursively evoking ontological arguments as settler folk truisms in order to mask their contradictions. The lie tautologically prefigures a “baked-in” plausible deniability, much like Lescarbot’s escape route. The desired effect of white settler logic is both to deny and to supersede settler colonialism by presenting the colonization of landscapes as the inherent coloniality of the land itself. The pioneer lie tries to devolve the labour of lying to the land itself and makes the land complicit along with the settler-introduced oxen that toil it, in the telling of settler stories. In other words, by narrating settler colonial innocence into the land, the pioneer lie not only becomes more believable with time but also as tautology it literally, visibly, ecologically, and experientially becomes more true. As with our rereading Colville’s Chinese Acadian rider, complex personhood means that European settler–Indigenous communication and kinship across historical time and space must be accounted for through the lens of settler colonial violence and corresponding notions of settler–Indigenous cooperation and peace. From the white settler perspective, understanding Indigenous and non-Indigenous cooperation must acknowledge that violence also takes place in the form of replenishing and subduing and in the realm of the willing.34 As Sara Ahmed asks, “what follows when we do not assume willing is the absence of coercion?”35 In the case of the dykelands, which forever reshaped the cultural and physical landscapes of Mi’kma’ki, it is difficult to know, now, where willingness began and ended along the lines of white settler–Indigenous interactivity, sharing of knowledge, dialogue, and cooperation in the context of settler colonialism and continuous occupation. We cannot now know for sure the historical

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process that created the Acadian dykelands on Mi’kmaq lands, let alone the particulars of the white settler labour and later Asian indentured labour and enslaved Black Africans forcibly tilling property as property throughout Mi’kma’ki and the shared colonial proprietary systems that sustained them (land as property and people as property).36 Yet, we must question the notion of consent under a settler colonial system that forces the land to tell the pioneer lie on behalf of European settlers. To colonize is also to replenish and subdue; a tautology that masks willingness as consent through settler narratives of non-violence. Acadian dykelands suggested Mi’kmaq willingness through mapping pioneer lies of Mi’kmaq consent and cooperation, which English colonists would later achieve through gardening. While the French typically fertilized their European soil with compost, and Acadians in Mi’kma’ki with salt-water minerals, the English replenished their colonial terrain with the manure of non-human farm animals. These various agricultural tactics became compounded in the broader settler colonial process at play throughout the violent transition from French to English North American empires resulting in the 1755 expulsion of the Acadians. When one understands these distinct cultivation techniques as varying tautologies of the pioneer lie, it is possible to understand that while the sixteenth-century English verb to manure meant “to own” in addition to “to cultivate” by hand and “to enrich the land with manure,” both French and British cultivation in Mi’kma’ki were violent acts of white possession.37 Both settler colonial expansions applied notions of pacification, subduing, replenishing, and consent through cultivation of the land. In English terms, as historian Patricia Seed observes, subduing through the use of tools “appears to have meant the use of the Anglo-Saxon plough drawn by oxen … Both words [replenishing and subduing] referred to characteristically European and sometimes distinctively English methods of working the soil.”38 In French imperial terms, too, both plough and manure worked as one. As Jacques Cartier wrote of the initial settlement on Sainte Croix river, “it is as good a country to plough and manure as a man should find and desire.”39 Likewise, Lescarbot understood Mi’kma’ki to be ripe for settlement because he thought its environment marked a superimposition of ecologies: “This province having the two natures of earth that God hath given unto man for to possess, who may doubt but that it is a land of promise when it shall be manured.”40 Read together, all of these understandings of various stages of Anglo-British and French subduing of landscapes lend themselves to parallel notions of white possession in that the land could be subdued through cultivation. If the ox-led plough was used to initially subdue the post-Acadian settler landscape of Mi’kma’ki and to permanently claim it through manuring as the British did, then both were violent acts. To claim proprietary ownership of the land through its cultivation is to enact colonization down to the level of the plough, as English-turnedBritish settler colonists reframed Acadian topographies as their own in the evolving claim to empire. Much like the oxen and plough is a settler colonial tautology, terms like “replenish” and “subdue” are no less accidental forms of rhetorical and real invasion.41 As Seed points out,

White Settler Tautologies and Pioneer Lies

the most popular biblical quotation in the English occupation of the New World – Gen. 1:28, “Multiply and replenish the earth, and subdue it” – was often described as the “grand charter given to Adam and his posterity and Paradise” … The security of the English faith that their planting practices alone guaranteed legitimate title to the land stemmed from their language.42 The pioneer lie, as with its pre-emptive logic of possession, is thus irrefutable down to the level of the plough; the lie consumes the land itself, making the claim to white settler nativism difficult to dislodge.

Conclusion

Pioneer lies persist. They penetrate deep into the subterranean reaches of settler imaginaries, deeper than ploughs. We see their work at play in the fall of 2020 Atlantic lobster fishery, where lobster fishers from the Mi’kmaw community of Sipekne’katik have come under attack by mobs of angry settler fishers for attempting to exercise their constitutional right to a moderate livelihood.43 The crux of this conflict surrounds Mi’kmaw exercising their treaty rights to freely harvest lobster across Mi’kma’ki, the Peace and Friendship Treaties of 1725–79, and the 1999 Supreme Court decisions Marshall I and Marshall II. The Marshall decisions respectively upheld treaty rights of Wabakani nations to freely hunt and fish in their territories and claimed that treaty rights were not infinite, thus introducing the ill-defined concept of a “moderate livelihood” fishery that claimed the Canadian state had a right to intervene in fishing and hunting for conservation purposes. Notwithstanding the fact that the Sipekne’katik First Nation is exercising a treaty right that falls under moderate livelihood practices, and section 35 of the Canadian constitution legally protects this treaty access, angry commercial settler fishers organizing under the Canadian and Acadian flags have subjected Mi’kmaw fishers and their allies to a range of hostile behaviours. These attacks range from theft, vandalism, terroristic threats, intimidation, assaults, arson, and pioneer lies of settler belonging and stewardship undergird the rationales behind this violence. A common refrain among the settler fishers who are opposed to the Mi’kmaw “moderate livelihood” fishery is that Acadians have been stewards of the lobster fishery since time immemorial and that Mi’kmaw are latecomers trying to use “special rights” to encroach on an Acadian fishery. In an interview with Michael Tutton of Global News, Acadian fisher Roger LeBlanc channels this pioneer lie: “This [lobster] stock has been building up for 150 years, and my grandfather and my father and myself, we sat at the table with governments, we made rules to have a livelihood for our kids and grandkids […] In a few more years, what we worked for … will be gone.”44 The invocation of “150 years” by LeBlanc is not arbitrary. It’s a clear reference to Canadian confederation in 1867, and it is an attempt to establish a temporal threshold that

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circumscribes Mi’kmaw influence in the lobster fishery. Mi’kmaq have been shaping these landscape and waterways for 12,000 years, but LeBlanc negates this stewardship in one fell swoop by privileging 150 years of settler supremacy. LeBlanc attempts to subvert Mi’kmaw treaty rights by adopting the language of “moderate livelihood” from the second Marshall decision and invoking the language of “future generations” – truly a pioneering lie encroaching on Mi’kmaw discursive terrain. But, just like the plough, this pioneer lie also goes deeper. As with the Esgenoôpetitj|Burnt Church lobster fishing crisis in 2000–01, which resulted in both settler fisher and Department of Fisheries and Oceans officer-led violence against Mi’gmaw harvesters, settler fishermen have attempted to justify their violence based on flimsy conservationist arguments.45 As LeBlanc confessed so candidly, “In a few more years, what we worked for … will be gone.”46 But is this true? If indeed the settler fishers have been expertly managing the lobster stocks for 150 years, then how did the situation come to be so dire? To be sure, conservation biologists have disputed the claims of these commercial fishermen, affirming that the scale and scope the Mi’gmaw lobster fishery poses no conservation risks. But even if it was true, LeBlanc’s line of reasoning, which is widely shared by other settler fishers, is revealing. If indeed the activities of non-Indigenous and primarily white settler fishers are so conservation oriented, then why are lobster stocks always on the brink of collapse whenever Mi’gmaw try to participate in the fishery? Why would settler fishers consistently harvest lobster to such a degree that any further harvesting – to say nothing of a natural disaster – would result in a catastrophic decline in the lobster fishery? If one were to accept the tautological as true and take the settler fishers at their word, then one would eventually reach the conclusion that settlers have conditioned the lobster fishery in such a way as to make Mi’gmaw involvement appear as intrusive, excessive, and against the “natural” order of things. Indeed, the Mi’gmaw lobster fishery is seen as a threat not only to white settler supremacy but also to settler futurity itself. As LeBlanc stated, without irony, at the conclusion of his interview, “There’s no longer a future in St. Marys Bay, and it’s absolutely sickening to those who have been here all these years.”47 As with the conditioning of the land, the conditioning of the water via the lobster fishery is thus another avenue where settlers present themselves as somehow being more Indigenous than Mi’kmaq. It should come as no surprise, then, that this same sentiment is later expressed explicitly by LeBlanc in terms of consanguinity. “We all have Indigenous blood,” he says, “We [Mi’kmaq and Acadians] always worked side by side. The Acadians are not racist. We know they (Indigenous fishers) have rights, but we can’t respect what’s happening in St. Marys Bay. We never will.”48 Besides affirming a commitment to “never” respect Mi’kmaw participating in the lobster fishery on their own terms, LeBlanc here pioneers the lie of Indigenous identity based on blood myth and genealogy, since “We all [Acadians] have Indigenous blood.” This race-shifting tactic, to use Circe Sturm’s term, and its attendant claim that it absolves Acadians of

White Settler Tautologies and Pioneer Lies

any racist intent, was also forwarded by Conservative mp Chris d’Entremont in an interview with Sheldon McLeod: “Quite honestly, when we talk about Acadians and francophones, most of them would qualify themselves as Indigenous as well, or at least of Métis blood. So this race thing that continues to flow around is getting to be a little bit heavy on some people’s heads.”49 What this demonstrates is that pioneer lies have no end in sight and that white settler nativism and revisionism continue to have material and cultural consequences for Mi’kmaq. If settlers can force the land to lie, so too can they attempt to lie with and through water and non-human relations. As the settler imaginary knows no limits to its own deception, Mi’kmaq will continue to resist the permanence of white settler tautological normalcy.

n ote s 1 2 3 4 5 6

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10 11

See Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive. Mackey, Unsettled Expectations, 30. Lescarbot, The History of New France, v.1, 183. Biard cited by Cook, “1492 and All That,” 8. Lescarbot, The History of New France, v.1, 32–3. On the Gaspé Peninsula of the settler provinces of New Brunswick and Quebec, Mi’gmaq communities use Listuguj orthography that includes the “g” spelling of Mi’gmaq. In the settler provinces of Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland, Mi’kmaw (the singular form of the plural non-possesive term “Mi’kmaq”) communities use a common orthography that includes the “k” spelling of Mi’kmaq. We interchange these spellings in our chapter even though both orthographies refer to people of the Mi’kmaq/Mi’gmaq nation, a Wabanaki Indigenous nation within Mi’kma’ki, the northeastern region of Turtle Island. Lescarbot, The History of New France, v.1, 47. Ibid., 75–6, our emphasis. African diaspora scholar, filmmaker, and historian Sylvia D. Hamilton coined the term “freedom runners” to describe those escaped Africans who are more commonly known as “fugitive slaves” or “runaways” in the historical literature on slavery. Her intervention into this terminology importantly speaks to the resilience and resistance of African descendent peoples who “took their freedom” from those who claimed ownership of their lives through the act of running away. She uses the heading “Freedom Runners” to gather together a series of seven poems that she wrote in relation to a historical newspaper advertisement for enslaved runaways Joseph Odel and Peter Lawrence, in Digby, Nova Scotia, 21 June 1792. See Hamilton, And I Alone, 28–35. Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” 1. We originally published this chapter in extended article form in Settler Colonial Studies, where we expand on the notions of Mi’kmaw consent that we present at the end of this chapter, to discuss Mi’kmaq wilfulness in the signing of treaties. While we omitted this section on wilfulness here due to length constraints, it is important to note that we read the Wabanaki signatories in the Peace and Friendship Treaties not only as acts of wilful resistance to the surren-

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dering territories but also as outright refusals of conquest and the establishment of a possible future of alliance. We are grateful to the reviewers of this volume for drawing out attention to the work of Scott Richard Lyons (Ojibwe/Dakota), whose book X-Marks: Native Signatures of Assent (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010) suggests that treaty signatures simultaneously signify coercion, resistance, and acquiescence. Certainly, we see this as true to the context of Mi’kma’ki’s Peace and Friendship Treaties, which offer complex ways to read into Mi’kmaw consent and resistance. For more, see Wysote and Morton, “‘The Depth of the Plough.’” Cavanagh, “Possession and Dispossession,” 98, 121. Veracini, The Settler Colonial Present, 62. The coureurs des bois, meaning “wood runners” in English, were unlicensed fur traders in New France, as opposed to the licensed voyageurs, who attempted to trade fur outside of Indigenous trading “middlemen.” The figure of the French settler coureur des bois has long been racialized in Québécois history as a “white Indian.” Germain, Les coureurs des bois. Rudin, “Les Acadiens et leurs aboiteaux.” We are grateful to Mark A. Cheetham for pointing us toward this example from Colville’s catalogue. Colville quoted in Cheetham, “French Cross.” Ibid. Mackey, Unsettled Expectations, 34. Cheetham, “French Cross.” We use Kamau Brathwaite’s notion of “arrivants” following Jodi Byrd to “signify those people forced into the Americas through the violence of European and Anglo-American colonialism and imperialism around the globe.” See Byrd, The Transit of Empire, xix. In this chapter, we are primarily concerned with the history of white settlement on Turtle Island/northern North America rather than directly with debates over either the complicity of racialized arrivants or the entanglements of the native–“slave”–settler triad in settler colonialism as outlined in the introduction of this volume. Our perspective on the advancement of white settler nativism in this chapter follows recent work that examines the ways in which white settlers in particular “readily present as other than colonists” in their moves to innocence (Tuck and Yang “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” 4). Scholars working on the interrelated frameworks of white settler and arrivant complicity continue to ask important questions about multiple forms of settler colonial presence on stolen Indigenous territories and in the context of transatlantic slavery and an anti-Blackness that dually separates Black people from North American lands and from Indigenous lands in Africa. See especially Lawrence and Dua, “Decolonizing Antiracism,” 120–43; King, “New World Grammars”; Vimalassery, Hu Pegues, and Goldstein, “On Colonial Unknowing”; Day, “Being of Nothingness,” 102–21. For more on the complexity of Chinese indentured labour and its interrelation to settler colonialism and histories of slavery in British settler colonies, see Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents, in which she explores the ways in which representations of “indentured labour as ‘freely’ contracted buttressed liberal promises of freedom for former slaves” (24). As she argues,

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24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32 33 34 35 36

in the interrelationship between indentureship, slavery, and settler colonialism during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, “The Chinese were instrumentally used … as a figure, a fantasy of ‘free’ yet racialized and coerced labor, at a time when the possession of body, work, life and death was foreclosed to the enslaved and the indentured alike” prior to the legal end of the British slave trade in 1807 and the legislative abolition of slavery in its empire in 1834 (24). For more on Acadian Mi’kmaq identity formations across generations, see Palmater, who in Beyond Blood writes, “Take the example of an Acadian whose parents, grandparents, and great grandparents for four or five generations lived as Acadian, who has always identified with French language and culture, and who one day finds out that he or she has a Mi’kmaq ancestor in the family. Should such a person be considered Mi’kmaq? Assuming that the only connection this Acadian applicant had to the Mi’kmaq Nation was this ancestral connection, I would say no” (203). Darryl Leroux cites this passage in full, in order to discuss white French descendants in North America (Acadian and Québéçois) “race-shifting” to adopt “Eastern Métis” identity based on Indigenous geneological ancestry. See Leroux, Distorted Descent, 101. Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents, 39. Metallic and Cavanagh, “Mi’gmewey ‘Politics,’” 7–8, Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents, 38. Cavanagh, “Possession and Dispossession,” 108. Ibid., 106. Ibid., 110. Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 98. An important exception is French trader Sieur De Diéreville’s account of a 1699–1700 voyage to Acadia published in 1885 by Fontaine as Voyage du Sieur. Diéreville described in detail the process of planting rows of large logs at the point where the tide enters the marshlands and filling the spaces between them with clay to prevent water from entering. We are grateful to Margaret Conrad for bringing this source to our attention. Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 98. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 4. Seed, Ceremonies of Possession, 31. Ahmed, Willful Subjects, 57. There is a rich discussion in Black, Indigenous, and critical ethnic and race studies on the racist colonial emergence of Black people as property under transatlantic slavery in settler colonial contexts. Tiffany Lethabo King summarizes much of this scholarly discussion by arguing that “forms of Native decolonization and Black abolition scrutinize the violently exclusive means in which the human has been written and conceived [as white, male, able-bodied]” (165). This means that such scholarship is less about asking how decolonial and abolitionist literature actually defines “the human,” in terms of the ways in which European-led chattel slavery and settler colonialism worked together to dehumanize Black subjects as property and Indigenous subjects as needing elimination in order to make their lands property and more about how Black and Indigenous thought can together question “the very systems, institutions, and order of knowledge that secure humanity as an exclusive experience and bound identity in violent

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ways” (165). See King, “Humans Involved,” 162–85. For more on this discussion on humans as property under slavery and settler colonialism, see also Sharpe, In the Wake; Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property; and Day, “Being or Nothingness,” 102–21. 37 We are very appreciative of Rachel Bryant directing us to the dual meaning of “to manure” in Seed, Ceremonies of Possession, 32. 38 Cartier originally wrote these documents over the course of three voyages 1534–42, which were later translated and published in 1890. Seed, Ceremonies of Possession, 32. 39 In turn, Lescarbot regarded the 1604 French colonization of St Croix island, called Muttoneguis, in Passamaquoddy territory in the present settler state of Maine, as a failure because of the goal of settler permanence through agriculture: I will always be of the opinion that whosoever goes into a country to possess it must not stay in the isles, there to be a prisoner. For, before all things, the culture and tillage of the ground must be regarded. And I would fain know how one shall till and manure it, if it behoveth at every hour in the morning, at noon and the evening, to cross a great passage of water, to go for things requisite from the firm land. And, if one feareth the enemy, how shall he that husbandeth the land, or [is] otherwise busy in necessary affairs, save himself if he be pursued? – for one findeth not always a boat in hand, in time of need, nor two men to conduct it. Besides, our life requiring many commodities, an island is not fit for to begin the establishment and seat of a Colony. (Nova Francia, 9)

40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

St Croix saw one of the first French imperial efforts to establish a permanent colony, but more than half of the settler group died in the first winter there leading Samuel de Champlain and others to move the settlement to Port Royal in the Bay of Fundy the next year. Lescarbot, The History of New France, 76. Seed, Ceremonies of Possession, 32. Ibid., 32–3. Googoo, “Sipekne’katik Chief ” Tutton, “For Acadian Fisherman.” Unbracketed ellipses in original. See, for example, Hartai, “Lobster Stocks”; Bender, “ubc Fisheries Department”; Dalhousie Biology Department, “Dalhousie Department of Biology”; Benjamin, “Indigenous Fisheries.” Tutton, “For Acadian Fisherman.” Unbracketed ellipses in original. Ibid. Ibid. See Sturm, “States of Sovereignty,” 228–42. The Sheldon McLeod Show, News 95.7, 13 November 2020, 3:00 p.m., https://www.news957.com/audio/the-sheldon-macleod-show-2/.

2 Notes to a Nation: Teachings on Land through the Art of Norval Morrisseau car men robertson

For a white settler state such as Canada, land is power – physically, culturally, and artistically. With settler borders that stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific to the Arctic oceans, Canada is second only to Russia in landmass. It comes as no surprise, then, that Canadian culture has been shaped by its vast expanses of wilderness. Artists and writers have continually responded to the vastness of this territory in creative ways. Relating to land means different things to different people. When settlers arrived on these shores most understood land claiming through a patriarchal, Eurocentric lens that positions man above nature. The possessiveness of patriarchal white sovereignty is key to ongoing colonial conditions in countries colonized by the British, according to Australian Aboriginal scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson. In her recent text, The White Possessive, Moreton-Robinson posits “possessive logics” as driving “a mode of rationalization … underpinned by an excessive desire to invest in reproducing and reaffirming the nation-state’s ownership, control and domination” over Indigenous lands and bodies.1 Through a Foucauldian analysis with clear applications to the pattern of British possession in Canada, she argues that British migrants claimed and maintained possession through a regime that imposed laws upon the land and dispossessed Indigenous peoples. “The white body was the norm and measure for identifying who could belong.”2 Historian Patricia Seed, in charting the colonial legacies of five nascent nation-states of early modern Europe, analyzes the nuanced ways Europeans claimed new world land, facilitating comparative examples of early imperialism to ongoing forms of settler colonial behaviours.3 Exploiting resources, tilling land, putting up fences, and parcelling out acres reflected the systematic process of claiming possession that contributed to the civilizing of the space that is the nation. Clashing differences in ways of knowing the land remain key to understanding possession. At an ontological level, Moreton-Robinson explains that the structure of subjective possession results from the imposition of

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one’s will-to-be on the thing that is perceived to lack will; thus is land opened to being possessed.4 Original or Indigenous inhabitants of this land conceive of their relationship to territory differently. An adversarial system of exploitation does not figure into traditional territorial stewardship. Rather, a sacredness underpins the diverse ways in which specific Indigenous peoples know the land. While this approach does not mean there were not ongoing territorial disputes among First Nations, it does mean that relationships carried different meanings. Land was and remains today part of an interconnected living whole – a form of living for Indigenous peoples of diverse regions, and the juxtaposition of this different way of knowing the land with the white possessive impulse continues to unsettle. Moreton-Robinson confirms that “questioning the integrity and legitimacy of ways of knowing and being has more to do with who has the power to be a knower and whether their knowledge is commensurate with the West’s “rational” belief system.”5 Recent resistant actions including but not limited to the Dakota Access Pipeline protests in 2016 or the Coastal Gaslink Pipeline across traditional Wet’suwet’en territory in 2019–20 reflect this clash. While political leaders struggle to articulate treaty relationships and land sovereignty, artistic actions can reflect how land holds meaning and hold the key to unlearning structural imperialism.6 Through three works by Anishinaabe artist Norval Morrisseau (1931–2007), this chapter critically engages with renderings of the land at a time when recent discussion about the newest geological epoch, the Anthropocene, which reflects human incursions so immense that they will endure in geological time, have been tied to settler colonialism. “As the economics of colonial extraction continues full force,” it appears now more than ever that the time has come to know this land differently.7 Heather Davis and Zoe Todd wish to use the “momentum that this concept has gained”8 to align the Anthropocene to settler colonialism because of its “severing of relations between humans and the soil, between plants and animals, between minerals and our bones.”9 I aim to articulate differences between Canada-the-land and Canada-thewhite-settler-nation in an effort to better capture the different ways of knowing the land that Norval Morrisseau referenced in his work. The works discussed below include Land (Rights) (1976), The Storyteller: The Artist and His Grandfather (1978), and Androgyny (1983), all created over a seven-year period at the apogee of his artistic career.10 These works reveal how the artist used his understanding of territory to offer teachings about respecting kinship ties to land, timely lessons in light of the scale of destructive violence exerted on the land. The “pioneer lie,” a concept advanced in Wysote and Morton’s chapter in this volume, naturalizes white settler ways of seeing through the European transformation and appropriation of Indigenous topographies and ecologies. Reinforcement of the empty, rugged landscape in Canada’s landscape art tradition erases Indigenous presence and it also erases ways of knowing land as an interconnected whole where land and thought are one. The ongoing agential presence of such paintings in Canadian art institutions unconsciously reinforces complicity with the colonizing project. Mis-

Teachings on Land through the Art of Norval Morrisseau

interpretations of ways of seeing the art of Norval Morrisseau have meant that audiences mistake the artist’s paintings as facile representations of stories or “legends” when they contain much deeper significance about interconnectedness in accordance with the power of Anishnaabeg stories – past, present, and future.11 Land as a concept for Morrisseau intersects directly with Anishinabek ways of knowing land. His paintings and performative actions from the 1970s remain today important teachings that disrupt settler colonial violence.

Land and Sustainability

Land (Rights) flows directly from the artist’s experiences with colonialism and contemporary issues related to land rights present in the media at the time. Issues of cultural assimilation, fallout from the Trudeau government’s 1969 White Paper on Indian policy, a rise in militancy and activism related to sovereignty and land rights exemplified by the Anicinabe Park standoff in 1974, the proposed Mackenzie pipeline project in the 1970s, and the James Bay (Northern Quebec) land secession of the mid-1970s in which the James Bay Cree sued the Province of Quebec over the development of a hydroelectric project on their territory, resonate in these works.12 Mining, forestry, pipelines, and land rights across Canada had become, as they remain today, powerful political issues. The artist understood political discourses within a relational understanding of land as part of an interconnected whole as seen in his work Mother Earth from 1975 (fig. 2.1), a work that precedes Land (Rights). Land (Rights) reflects contemporary colonial issues related to the James Bay hydroelectric development project in Cree territory and numerous other issues regarding mining, forestry, and land rights across Canada that had become national news stories at the time. Many of those stories continue today as seen in the resistance movements of Idle No More, water keeper resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline, and ongoing challenges in support of the Wet’suwet’en Nation to protect its territory against the construction of the Coastal Gaslink pipeline. Mostly, though, Morrisseau expressed his complex relationship to the land in the form of visual stories that offered teachings rather than scorn. Morrisseau uses a compositional structure in this painting that reinforces divergent ways of thinking about land rights. He bifurcates the canvas using a strong vertical line that separates the left and right quadrants to reinforce two very different ways of considering land and land rights. For the left the land is sacred territory, while for the right that land is the nation-state intent on exploiting resources for economic gain. The line for Morrisseau symbolizes competing perspectives of the land that is Canada.13 Both sides view territory as valuable, but thereafter world views and agendas clash pitting capitalism against sacred relational understanding. Land (Rights) configures land and identity at the border – an interstitial space that both Indigenous and settler Canadians must consider. Attempts to engage, teach, and

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2.1 Norval Morrisseau with painting, Mother Earth, 1975, 203.2 cm x 104 cm. Acrylic on canvas.

Teachings on Land through the Art of Norval Morrisseau

implore settler Canada to halt exploitation of the land are visualized by the black tendril lines that reach from ancestors, animals, and youth into the space occupied by the nation. Yet these cries appear not to impact the figures on the right. Even the ferocity of youth ready to do battle, a fist crossing the line, seems of little consequence. The two figures on the right side actively step forward, toe over the line, unphased by calls to end the exploitation of resources. Morrisseau explained this piece in 1979: The world of the white man represented by a government or corporation white man and a construction or miner white man. The Indian figure represents the older generation and the ancestors are behind him, looking backwards to the treaties they made with the white man. He speaks about the old ways. The baby looks aggressive. It represents the younger generation, the militants who speak about what they want. The worlds cross the lines between the white man and the Indian. The fist is clenched. The animals are protesting the change in their environment. They are an important part of the land, the water, and the Indian’s life. In the center part of the painting I show the land and its ownership.14 This is a colonial tale about land usage. In place of a heart, a black void exists in the body of the bureaucrat. Yet, the artist remains undeterred. Cognizant of his own agency in this colonial landscape, Morrisseau purposely upset the power dynamic exerted by the nation, employing parody as resistance, defining the bodies of the clownish white men. Morrisseau mocks the two government agents with their hyper-white faces broken only by tendril-like moustaches and stupefied looks, symbolically resisting the efforts of the nation to fully take control. Visualizing an organic whole, positing intergenerational understanding of unity between land, animal, and human, the ancestors form the backbone of the stable arrangement of the Mishomis or grandfather figure seated upon fish, cradling a womb made of plants and animals, and protected by bird figures with a child, a symbol of the future and the interconnectedness of land with all living beings, seated upon them. This way of knowing the land appears powerful, painted on a blue field that symbolically conveys a calmness while the opposing red on the other side of the canvas signifies anger. The intense red in this contested borderland could also reference “Red Power” movements such as the American Indian Movement (aim) that was active the late 1960s and 1970s on both sides of the Canada/US border and its attempts to disrupt the ongoing colonial actions of settler nations.15

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Landscape/Land

The settler history of art in Canada is deeply shaped by its rich landscape tradition. From Paul Kane to the Group of Seven and Emily Carr, landscape painting, whether pastoral or rugged, represents land in particular ways. Many of those constructions reinforce notions of possession, as noted by Moreton-Robinson above. Morrisseau’s art resides outside the standard narrative of landscape art largely because of his approach to land through a lens of kinship. As a result, his work has long been viewed as being representations of themes other than land. Landscape artists, meanwhile, paint within a narrative accessible to most visitors to art museums. Irish-born Paul Kane, for example, grew up in Tkaronto|Toronto in the midnineteenth century and painted more than one hundred oil paintings of Indigenous peoples in romanticizing, formulaic ways that intersected with ethnographic forms of salvage anthropology, seeking to capture visually the “last of the dying breed.” A century later, the male, settler-artist Group of Seven based in Tkaronto|Toronto in the 1920s, further reinforced landscape tropes as they created an art movement that many view as having helped to visually define Canada in ways most settler Canadians relate to. The iconic canvases created by Canada’s best known artistic group in the early twentieth century says much about settler Canada. Settler artist Emily Carr, closely affiliated with the Group of Seven, painted west coast expressionistic scenes of British Columbia’s rainforests in the 1930s inspired by the landscapes produced by her compatriots in central Canada. Many of Carr’s most famous works include depictions of decaying totem poles and long houses that, like works by Kane, present a frozen-in-time vision of Indigenous presence. A walk past paintings by the Group of Seven in one of Canada’s art museums produces a steady stream of iconic images of land and trees, scenes that define the nation. Empty vistas and stormy skies claim land in ways that visually assure Canadians of the white settler nation’s divine providence. These canvases do not typically evoke imperialism to settler viewers, so naturalized are their meanings. The galleries, like the Canadian press or the National Film Board of Canada, serve as agents of colonialism. Such linkages between the Canadian landscape tradition and power are not new. In art historian W.J.T. Mitchell’s collection of essays titled Landscape and Power (1994) numerous scholars confirm that landscapes justify individualism and colonial desire. In the preface to this noted text, Mitchell defines landscape as “a particular historical formation associated with European imperialism.”16 The purposeful emptiness of the spaces reinforces the claiming of uninhabited land. Terra nullius or the Doctrine of Discovery used by European monarchies beginning in the fifteenth century to legitimatize the colonization of lands beyond their European borders not only informs the Canadian landscape tradition but also naturalizes it as a common sense way of understanding land in the first place (as property, as empty of Indigenous inhabitants, as ripe for colonization).17 Advancing the critical concept of “colonial unknowing”

Teachings on Land through the Art of Norval Morrisseau

Manu Vimalassery, Juliana Hu Pegues, and Alyosha Goldstein write against this “colonial alibi of empty land and vanishing Indians in the colonial present.”18 Many Indigenous artists, most notably Cree artist Kent Monkman, have decolonized the theory and method of landscape art practised by romantic settler artists such as George Catlin, Paul Kane, and Albert Bierstadt to construct what Karen Ohnesorge refers to as “artistic sovereignty.”19 Monkman’s contemporary paintings challenge the complicated Euro-Canadian landscape tradition by revisioning and repositioning power within his paintings, which insert images of colonial violence into the otherwise empty landscapes rendered by settler artists. Monkman’s pointed references to this art history confronts entrenched settler viewer positionalities and when hung in Canadian or European art galleries in art museums, the works challenge romanticized notions about landscape. Monkman’s efforts challenge viewers, opening up complicated narratives in spaces that have not otherwise challenged viewers to consider the implications of the landscape tradition. Monkman’s revisioning of Giovanni Domenico Tiempolo’s 1760 painting The Procession of the Trojan Horse into Troy painted for the artist’s Canada 150 project Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience, for example, pushes long-established landscape tropes in directions otherwise unseen in Canadian (and now international) art museums. In this way, Iron Horse (2015) (fig. 2.2), staged as a bucolic landscape with soaring mountains, an expansive sky, and a pristine lake cannot hide what is happening in the foreground where a number of nude Indigenous men under the direction of Monkman’s iconic trickster alter-ego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, according to Monkman, realize too late that the “Iron Horse is really a trojan horse.”20 “The railroad was offered as a gift, as a symbol of progress,” explains Monkman, “but it destroyed the people who received it.”21 As he takes on the canonical history of art, Monkman’s paintings and performances are sought after in part because they are seemingly approachable. This tact has paid off.22 Monkman’s decolonizing paintings challenge the landscape narrative embedded in the history of Canadian art in ways that not only titillate museum-going audiences seemingly still unaware of the history of imperialism on this land. Some viewers leave these colonized spaces after viewing works like Iron Horse with a new awareness or realization that the primacy of Greek myths is superseded by narratives of colonialism and resilience. Still, Monkman’s “cannibalizing” of the western canon does not sit well with all viewers.23 Responding to a comment by a Metis curator at the Winnipeg Art Gallery who called Monkman the “Norman Rockwell of Native Trauma,” Metis curator/artist David Garneau critically questions the audience Monkman attempts to reach in a recent discussion of the artist’s decolonized version of Edvard Munch’s Scream, which uses parody in a painting that shows police and clergy taking young children out of the arms of distraught mothers to transport them to Indian residential school. Garneau concludes that the painting’s “wholeness, brightness, and staginess feel awkward, intrusive, and superficial. Our Métis curator wonders who and what the painting is

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2.2 Kent Monkman, Iron Horse, 2015, 213.4 cm x 320 cm. Acrylic on canvas.

meant to satisfy.”24 Monkman’s Scream, like many of his landscapes, serves most effectively a settler audience in need of didactic visual lessons about Canadian history rather than speaking directly to a seasoned audience attune to visual narratives found in Indigenous arts. Staged works, like Iron Horse by Monkman, contend with more than simply landscape conventions because the hyperreal imagery he formulates serves to unsettle the canonical history of art and the genocidal history of nation building in Canada. With Monkman’s art on display in art institutions like the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, his work is well known, recognizable for undoing, in small part, the pre-eminence of the Group of Seven et al. On the other hand, few settler Canadians know the work of the so-called “Indian Group of Seven,” which formed in the 1970s. Like the wellknown Group of Seven, this group of Indigenous artists situate land at the centre of

Teachings on Land through the Art of Norval Morrisseau

their artistic production. Anishinaabe artist Norval Morrisseau was a central member of this group known formally as the Professional Native Indian Artists Incorporated (pniai) and painted for more than forty years.25 Private settler art collectors began purchasing his art as early as the 1950s, though it was not until after 1962 that his work entered the gallery system. About forty years later, in advance of his 2006 retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada (ngc), Canada’s premier art museum purchased its first piece of his art for their permanent collection. Like so much Indigenous art, Morrisseau’s work was mostly relegated to ethnographic institutions that positioned art outside art museum collections of Western-style art. And while that has changed, many settler institutions predictably situate his art in confining ways that undermine the Indigenous aesthetic sense embodied in his art aligned with Anishinaabeg ways of knowing. He painted land rather than landscapes. His art both reinforces interconnected Indigenous understandings of land and defies Western notions of landscape. Unlike Monkman, Morrisseau did not paint back to empire with his depictions of the land. Morrisseau did not paint landscapes but instead created thousands of works that articulate his unwavering reverence for the land informed by cultural teachings, often labelled “paintings of legends.” Morrisseau painted the land, animals, Mother Earth, and unified interactions between all living things. His work speaks to ontological concepts particular to Anishinaabe culture combined with other spiritual pursuits. This is the case with Land (Rights) discussed above, The Storyteller: The Artist and His Grandfather, and Androgyny, all painted after he became interested in the spiritual tenets of Eckankar that intermingle and slip into a kind of syncretism with Anishinaabeg ways of knowing. For Morrisseau, land is kin as his paintings performatively reveal. Anishinaabe-kwe scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson explains that within Anishinaabeg epistemology, aki or land includes all complex aspects of creation. Simpson conveys an expansive vision of land that includes “spirits, sounds, thoughts, feelings, energies, and all of the emergent systems, ecologies, and networks that connect these elements.”26 Morrisseau similarly expresses and also embodies land through his unique visual language to capture on paper and canvas aspects of this relational way of knowing the land. Over the course of a career that began in the 1950s, Morrisseau, from Bingwi Neyaashi Anishinaabek First Nation (formerly known as Sand Point) on the shores of Lake Nipigon in northwestern Ontario, routinely painted works that visualized his multifaceted relationship to land in subtly provocative ways. Canada’s colonial actions such as the Indian residential school system, the White Paper of 1969, ongoing resource extraction in northwestern Ontario and beyond, and the James Bay Cree Hydroelectric conflict beginning in 1971 inspired him to paint a series of political works in the 1970s including Land (Rights) discussed above. Morrisseau typically avoided overt expressions, but one can discern a passion, even an activist’s vision, for caring for Mother Earth in works that celebrate relationships to land and living beings as in his art.

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Land as a Living Being

Conceptions of spirituality and an attachment to place and to all living things are not unique to Morrisseau’s contemporary artistic expressions. His art draws on a long tradition of intergenerational aesthetic knowledge transmission in the form of visual storytelling. Such ideas coalesced in art through the storied patterns inherent to the oral traditions of the Anishinaabeg and other First Nations to formulate Indigenous aesthetics. In “Animikii miinwaa Mishibizhiw,” for example, Anishinaabe scholars Alan Corbiere and Crystal Migwans explain that traditionally for the Anishinaabeg “the basic unit of this visual language was not the individual word, but rather, a culturally embedded narrative – aadizookaan. These narratives were widely and consistently understood within communities (though comprehension among communities varied), enough that people could make readable signs and marks by referencing this canon.”27 Such relationships with land, of course, run much deeper than settler notions of legal ownership or mineral rights. Anishinaabe scholars writing over the past forty years have contributed to a body of text-based knowledge that draws upon a long and respected oral record to provide a rich understanding of Anishinaabeg ways of being with regard to the land. Such concepts are difficult to articulate textually. Still, in Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back, Simpson sets out to theorize such knowledge “from within Nishnaabeg thought.”28 Simpson mines Anishinaabeg creation stories as a way of accessing knowledge from within the culture. She argues that it is not only the stories but the need to “engage our entire bodies: our physical beings, emotional self, our spiritual energy and our intellect. Our methodologies, our lifeways must reflect those components of our being and the integration of those four components into a whole.”29 Learning to live and enact those teaching, according to Simpson, happens through a “personal embodiment of mino bimaadiziwin [living a good life].”30 Connection to land in this context means a linked relationship to all living beings past and present, encompassed by the term aanikoobijanag, for example, that articulates the collapse of time by simultaneously referring to ancestors and descendants in Anishinaabemowin. Land is identity, and this ancient connection shapes cultural ontology and epistemology. Add the sky and the universe to the equation and this capacious way of relating to land shifts notions of sovereignty from the political to the sacred. Other First Nations similarly understand relationships to the land as holistic, interconnected, and sacred. Nîhiyaw Cree theorist Willie Ermine explains epistemological approaches to land through the Nîhiyawîwin term mamatowisowin or the “capacity to tap the creative life forces of the inner space by the use of all the faculties that constitute our being – it is to exercise inwardness.”31 Lakota thinker Vine Deloria Jr posits that for the Oceti Sakowin (the seven council fires of the Dakota, Nakota, Lakota), “an individual’s intimate relationship with the spiritual and physical elements of creation is at the centre of a learning journey that is life-long.”32 Relations with land infuse Indigenous artistic output, whether painting, sculpture, dance, song, per-

Teachings on Land through the Art of Norval Morrisseau

formance, oratory, or an interconnected expression. At its essence, creativity conceptually operates as a fulcrum, a centre point at which story expresses systems of belief. Morrisseau’s art practice infuses story into the creative process. Stories handed down from his Grandfather Moses Potan Nanokonagos and other elders from his community shaped the intimate ways in which Morrisseau understood the relationship with land from the roots up and then painted it. His paintings pulse with energy, story, and life. Contemporary Indigenous arts reflect ontology and epistemology through experience, through performative making, and through deep connections with all living beings on this land. While stories told by Indigenous artists are specific to a person, a culture, and a time, and inform ways of being and knowing, subject matter formulates only part of this equation. Morrisseau embodies story in the making of works that engage spiritual, physical, mental, and emotional aspects. Performative gestures, then, broaden enactments of storytelling as they relate to intergenerational knowledge, reciprocity, spiritual attachments to land, as well as colonial entanglements. The fabric of Morrisseau’s experiences, past, present, and future, weave through story to mould the myriad creative expressions present in his paintings.

Morrisseau and a New Way of Painting

Norval Morrisseau shook Canada’s art world in 1962 when he became the first Indigenous artists to breach the divide of exhibiting Indigenous art in contemporary art galleries by debuting work in downtown Tkaronto|Toronto’s Pollock Gallery. His story, however, is complicated by a media-driven construction of him as an “Imaginary Indian,” the problematic frame that Anishinaabe literary scholar Gerald Vizenor argues has distracted the Western world.33 Over the course of his career Canadian newspapers focused on his behaviour rather than his art, constructing him in stereotypical terms.34 These framings of the artist contributed to facile readings of his work as simple renderings of legends. On the other hand, Morrisseau’s art practice troubled his Anishinaabe home community because of his visualization of privileged knowledge, and for a time he was scorned for breaking protocols and revealing cultural stories to outsiders. Yet, his images, outside of an Anishinaabe cultural sphere, ironically held little meaning for viewers who lacked the esoteric knowledge of the larger cultural milieu. In the beginning settler viewers mostly saw the paintings through a lens of exoticism and primitivism. Morrisseau continued to draw upon cultural stories throughout his career as he pushed story in new directions that intersected with a wide variety of diverse sources and advanced a narrative form of active presence, a concept Vizenor refers to as survivance.35 Morrisseau’s painting Mother Earth (fig. 2.1) from 1975 clearly signals the ways in which he weaves Anishinaabeg ways of knowing with his own creative vision for land as kin. After 1976, Morrisseau’s interest in the spiritual movement called

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Eckankar, consisting of an amalgamation of Eastern religious traditions, impacted his ways of seeing. Cree curator and scholar Gerald McMaster refers to the artist’s syncretic understanding of shamanic travels, concepts that influenced the visual directions Morrisseau explored in the works discussed below, as a form of “spiritus mundi.”36 Morrisseau articulated his theoretical visualization of land in his art, as a form of storying. Although his connection to land was threatened by environmental contamination, resource extraction, dispossession, and residential school, Morrisseau maintained relations with aki. When he resisted settler colonial realities by painting, the artist did so as a form of teaching and activism. Land (Rights), discussed above, reflects the artist’s experiences with contemporary colonial issues related to the James Bay hydroelectric development project in Cree territory and numerous other issues regarding mining, forestry, and land rights across Canada that had become national news stories at the time. Many of those stories continue today as seen in the resistance movements of Idle No More, water keeper resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline, and ongoing challenges in support of the Wet’suwet’en Nation to protect its territory against the construction of the Coastal Gaslink pipeline. Mostly, though, Morrisseau expressed his complex relationship to the land in the form of visual stories that offered teachings rather than scorn. In The Storyteller: The Artist and His Grandfather, Morrisseau comments on his complicated relationship to Canada and his own spiritual connections to this land in ways that articulate his own complex identity in a world much changed from that of his ancestors. Androgyny serves as Morrisseau’s most direct attempt to teach the nation his understanding of claiming the land in both his efforts as well as his artwork. While Land (Rights) visually critiques colonial efforts to displace Indigenous peoples in overt ways, Morrisseau sidesteps the Western history of landscape painting and its colonial implications in the work to formulate his own understanding of land. Similarly, Cherokee painter Kay WalkingStick, who began to create paintings of the land in the 1970s, declares of some of her works, “Those are not landscapes, but paintings about my view of the earth and its sacred quality.”37 Morrisseau also visually ascribes a reciprocal relationship with land in his paintings that has deep spiritual meaning related to his Anishinaabe roots, which entangle other cultural influences important to him. Born in Port Arthur, Ontario, in 1931, Morrisseau’s youth was shaped by colonial rules instituted by Canada the nation through the Indian Act and events occurring in Canada at that time. First Nations were dictated to by this act in many ways, including by an 1881 ruling that banned ceremony (in place until 1951), and only received the right to vote in 1960. Morrisseau attended residential school as a boy where he suffered from sexual violence, before returning early to his home community to complete his scant formal education in the Western European settler sense. He mostly grew up in a home on the shores of Lake Nipigon with his Grandmother Veronique and Grandfather Moses Nanakonagos, a Midewiwin shaman, who taught him cultural stories,

Teachings on Land through the Art of Norval Morrisseau

ceremonial protocols, canoe routes, and knowledge about the land, and who he represents in his painting The Storyteller: The Artist and His Grandfather. Morrisseau’s first publicly exhibited paintings were displayed in Tkaronto|Toronto at the Pollock Gallery in 1962. His unique visual language, unseen in Canada before that exhibition, borrowed from Anishinaabe traditions fused with his personal artistic vision that drew upon multiple mainstream and Indigenous visual references. Using black line, interior segmentation, unorthodox colour combinations, and an unorthodox representational structure, Morrisseau experimented with aspects of his visual style throughout the 1960s and early 1970s as he formulated a visual storytelling vocabulary. From the beginning, the artist’s works connected directly to story. In 1965, he published a book of stories, Legends of My People, so that his audience could better understand the works he was producing inspired by Anishinaabe stories.38 By the mid1970s the artist had travelled and exhibited his work internationally and had lived in various urban areas for close to ten years. His art during this period demonstrates his engagement with the issues facing Indigenous peoples in Canada, including those related to land.

Drawing Lines, Drawing Attention

Colonialism’s effects on First Nations inspired Morrisseau to create overtly political works in the 1970s. Paintings such as Indian Jesus Christ (1974) and The Gift (1975) serve as fitting examples of how Morrisseau’s relationship to Canada the nation inspired him to creatively respond to his experience of being an Indigenous man in this nation. Still, even as Morrisseau painted a politicized perspective, he was situated as a painter of “Indian legends” rather than a maker of art that explored colonial issues.39 In Indian Jesus Christ, a work Morrisseau painted from a Kenora, Ontario, jail cell where he spent six months in 1973–74, the artist’s self-representation provocatively confronts Christianity’s role in settler colonialism.40 The artist again painted the complexities of Indigenous–settler contact the following year in The Gift. Here, Morrisseau visually articulates a reciprocal gift exchange suggested by a handshake between a Shaman and a Christian missionary. From the missionary figure in the painting, through the utilization of interior segmentation and circular dots, comes the spread of disease, a “gift” that devastated Indigenous populations throughout the Americas. The missionary brings spiritual ways of knowing through Christian doctrine, while the Shaman readily reciprocates with the gift of his spiritual teaching through the visual rendering of the blended handshake. Through differences in colour and pattern in the hearts and brains of the two main figures, Morrisseau visually communicates divergent ways of knowing in the exchange between the two male figures. Morrisseau’s depiction evokes both Christian symbolism and Anishinaabe conceptions of time and space – past, present, and future – situating the offer of spiritual teachings to the settler

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from the Indigenous knowledge keeper as prescient in 1975 when he made this painting as it was at the time of contact and as it remains today. While concepts of land are not the focus of either Indian Jesus Christ or The Gift, both draw attention to a process of colonization that ruptured relations between land and humans.

Changing Stories

By the time Morrisseau painted The Storyteller: The Artist and His Grandfather in 1978 his visual language was fully realized.41 In Storyteller Morrisseau connects himself and his grandfather to the land that is commonly known by settlers as Canada, returning compositionally to the vertical format used in Land to tell this story. Here, however, he utilizes a diptych, or a painting comprised of two separate panels, to more pointedly convey relational meanings. The left panel renders Moses Potan Nanakonagos, Morrisseau’s grandfather, as firmly part of the land – as intrinsically connected to Mother Earth as the two-legged, the four-legged, and the spirit figures that envelope him. The calm articulation of this elder’s relationship to the earth is profound, invested with the sense of balance and harmony he has achieved in his life that makes him one with Mother Earth. On the right panel is a self-representation of the artist as a young man. The artist reveals that while he remains connected to the land in ways that link him to his grandfather, because of colonialism his spiritual hold to Mother Earth has changed, impacted by colonialism. By painting himself in a separate panel Morrisseau visually acknowledges an interest in knowledge and ideas from outside of Anishinaabeg ontology. The strong diagonal formed by a swooping bird symbolically brings new ideas to him. Morrisseau’s interest in the Eastern spiritual movement of Eckankar, uppermost in his mind at this time, is indicated by the inclusion of “HU” in the energy bundle the artist includes above his head. HU refers to the Eckankar mantra.42 Juxtaposing the elder and the youth acknowledges old and new ways of living as an Indigenous man in settler Canada. Here, the anger of Land (Rights) has been rechannelled, the visual story shifted to respectful teaching, yet an implied settler colonial violence with regard to land remains central to this complex narrative. In addition to the diptych structure, Morrisseau exploits colour symbolism through the washes on each panel, just as he did in the earlier painting, drawing together influences that shaped his own conception of the sacred through colour. Calm blue washes of paint bathe his grandfather, communicating his relationship to all living things, the land, and his embodiment of mino bimaadiziwin. Morrisseau also paints the right panel with a clear reverence for the land, yet his own relationship is more complicated. The yellow wash on the right panel, a spiritual light, acknowledges the influence of Eckankar on Morrisseau, a spiritual tradition he had studied since 1975. When Morrisseau was invited to an artist residency at the Tom Thomson shack in Kleinberg in 1979, evidence of Eckankar can be seen in his handling of colour and symbolism (fig. 2.3).

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2.3 Norval Morrisseau painting at Tom Thomson shack, 1979.

Morrisseau resists severing himself from traditional ways of communing with the land even as he navigates his role in the settler nation. He, therefore, shares with viewers the complexities he encountered living in Canada. While Morrisseau’s grandfather in the left panel continues to inhabit a space tied intrinsically to Anishinaabeg culture, the artist’s self-representation, in contradistinction, communicates the complicated space the artist occupies by engaging more directly with the settler nation. Morrisseau navigates land and culture outside the protocols and ceremony practised by his Mishomis. He has come to know the land in terms of Canada-the-settler-nation-state

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and looks back to his grandfather respectfully, and perhaps wistfully, effected by outside forces that have set him on a path where he acknowledges the gifts of Anishinaabeg teachings but is influenced by so much more.

Gifts That Embody the Land

“In Anishinaabe tradition, an offering is a gift. It’s a gesture of relationship between people, animals, spirits, and other entities in the universe, given in the interests of creating ties, honoring them, or asking for assistance and direction,” explain Jill Doefler, Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair, and Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark in the introduction to Centering Anishinaabeg Studies. This quotation reminds readers that an offering in an Indigenous context carries with it responsibility articulated in particular cultural protocols.43 The acceptance of an offered gift forges a bond that should be “a mutually beneficial partnership, not only for participants, but for the universe around them.”44 While Morrisseau rendered aspects of the ceremonial gift he received from his grandfather in The Storyteller: The Artist and His Grandfather, in Androgyny (fig. 2.4) he enacted an actual gift-giving process to once again challenge the settler nation’s conception of land. This ceremonial exchange is central to the narrative surrounding the 1983 masterwork. In gifting this painting to Canada, Morrisseau intended to issue a call for action to Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau to formulate a different relationship with land, one that recognized territory as more than a resource to exploit. Hoping to facilitate and inspire a different relationship for First Nations with Canada – a symbolic gesture for future change – his call remains today a narrative of unfulfilled promises. Despite recent official apologies, including Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s 2008 apology for the Indian residential school program and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s broad apology in 2017 to Indian residential school survivors in Newfoundland and Labrador, not covered in the earlier settlement, critical Indigenous scholars such as Audra Simpson (Kanien’kehá:ka) soberly point to ongoing efforts by the settler state to dispossess Indigenous peoples.45 Painting in glowing yellows, a colour sacred to Eckankar teachings, Morrisseau melds Eckist ways with Anishinaabeg ontology to create a syncretic vision of the land that is Canada. He renders his complex vision, including life below and above the land, as an acknowledgment of the balance and privilege that all living things and spirits contribute to the full understanding of land. While the painting itself offers a clear celebration of land, when coupled with Morrisseau’s performative gesture of giving it takes on added significance culturally. By gifting this powerful painting to the nation, Morrisseau expected something in return, but there was no reciprocity. What Morrisseau hoped to gain when he wrote to Trudeau in February 1983 to propose gifting Androgyny to Canada is open to speculation, but I do not think it is a stretch to say he intended the prime minister to re-evaluate the nation’s approach to

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land sovereignty and to open a dialogue about sacred relationships to land given the subject matter of the painting. The painting itself is impressive, one of the artist’s acknowledged masterworks. Morrisseau described it in the three-page letter he sent to the prime minister: “A shaman that is Androgyne in four directions filled with all parts of nature in Canada, thunderbeings, sacred serpents and turtles, floweres [sic], and we children of Mother Earth.”46 Boldly coloured renderings of animals, humans, and spirit beings living in

2.4 Photograph of Norval Morrisseau, Androgyny, 1983, acrylic on plywood, 366 cm x 610 cm, taken during installation in the ballroom at Rideau Hall, 18 September 2008.

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an interconnected universe, layers of storytelling, and cultural ontology are all a part of this work. The yellow ground pulses with energy. Concepts of balance, relationality, and considerations of future generations are not only central to the painting itself but also impact the ways Morrisseau intended the work to serve as a performative catalyst. Instigated in order to engage and transformatively inspire a new way of considering Canada’s relations with land and Indigenous peoples, Morrisseau’s gift was a significant gesture. Although Morrisseau had imagined presenting the painting directly to the prime minister, in the end the splashy event he envisioned for the gift exchange as outlined in the three-page letter he penned to Trudeau did not occur.47 Instead, the ceremony took place at the headquarters of Indian and Northern Affairs Canada (inac), the colonial branch of the government that oversaw First Nations people. Dignitaries and the artist were in attendance on 15 April 1983 to unveil the work hung in the lobby. Federal minister of supply and services Jean-Jacques Blais accepted the work on behalf of the prime minister who could not attend. Morrisseau spoke and the department’s internal newsletter covered the story. Despite introductory remarks by government officials that noted of the work, “It is a way not only of communicating with each other, but of communicating with the people we are here to serve: the native people of this country” and that “Indian artists have opened our eyes to the subconscious relationships that exist between our environment, the animals and people that populate our corner of the world,” the importance of the painting was not fully appreciated in the sense Morrisseau intended. It hung until 2006 largely unnoticed by much of Canada in the large office complex that houses the bureaucracy of the Department of Aboriginal and Northern Affairs.48 The artist’s generous gift, laden with ceremonial protocol, was misunderstood as simply a pretty picture rather than as a cultural map, a teaching of relational accountability among all living things as implied by concepts such as “all my relations” that acknowledge intrinsic interconnectedness with land. The government’s disinterest in Morrisseau’s gifting aligns with Simpson’s nuanced argument about ongoing settler violence narrated mythologically as benevolence.49

Final Notes

Norval Morrisseau’s groundbreaking contemporary visual language is reinforced by his trailblazing form of visual storytelling. Taking time to think more deeply about how the artist understood his relationship to land in his paintings aesthetically opens a window onto his enduring reverence for his territory in the face of ongoing violent colonialism. His work also and importantly provides lessons about how to live on this land differently from settler-Canadian practice. What Morrisseau’s art teaches us about land through both his visual language and his performative efforts to gift a painting to Canada is complex and sadly often lost on viewers who encounter his works in con-

Teachings on Land through the Art of Norval Morrisseau

ventional institutional settings that typically situate them within a standard Western art historical narrative. His art, collected and hanging in galleries as art for art’s sake, belies the larger context within which Morrisseau embodied a rootedness with community that shared a common world where land was relation. Through the paintings discussed here we can discern the ways Morrisseau negotiated his place on the land in the nation-state of Canada. Knowing land beyond landscape, and beyond land as an economic resource, is key to unlearning the imperial efforts that shape the settler colonial state. Aileen Moreton-Robinson cogently argues that “patriarchal white sovereignty pathologizes itself through the tactics and strategies it deploys to maintain subjugation,” including obfuscating, I argue, the lessons found in these art works.50 She further asserts that the settler state uses blame, abuse, and violence to impede Indigenous claims of land sovereignty, “which are perceived to threaten the integrity of patriarchal white sovereignty’s inherited right to rule.”51 This form of governance negates opportunities to know the land in ways that not only support sustainable, ecological ways of living – rhetoric espoused by the nation-state – but also provide a map to futurity. Morrisseau’s artistic contributions noted above offer a revisioning of the nation’s relationship with territory, positing a transformative discourse based on resilience and sovereignty, to express bonds of kinship. Critiquing resource consumption, Morrisseau confronts existing dichotomous approaches to land in Land (Rights). The artist pulls no punches in providing lessons of unlearning, discounting land usage models in order to offer the nation other ways to live in harmony with the land. In Storyteller, Morrisseau moves from an overt political message toward a demonstration of ongoing and enduring relationships with land even in the face of the external influences of settler sovereignty. Finally, by gifting Androgyny to the nation, Morrisseau signals to Canadians other ways to live on this territory, modeling and painting his teachings. When Heather Davis and Zoe Todd call for the enactment of processes of decolonization as a form of action in relation to the recent discourse of the Anthropocene, they do so in expansive ways that bring together art, science, and culture to question human-led destruction tied to the period of world colonialism. Wiisaakodewinini artist, activist, and scholar, Dylan Miner has forged an artistic and political conversation with Morrisseau’s aesthetic language in service of the land. As part of ongoing opposition and resistance to the Dakota Access pipeline, the former Kinder Morgan– owned Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion, Enbridge’s Line Five, and the Coastal Gaslink Pipeline across traditional Wet’suwet’en territory, Miner creates protest art in the form of graphic prints which he shares openly via internet sources.52 The images serve as emblems of ongoing battles against settler land abuses.53 No Pipelines on Indigenous Land (fig. 2.5), with its interior segmentation and menacing teeth and claws, conjures similar images of Mishibizhiw painted by Morrisseau in the 1960s and early 1970s. This contemporary activist iteration of Morrisseau’s visual aesthetic invokes Vizenor’s noted concept of survivance in ongoing, active forms of

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2.5 Dylan Miner, No Pipelines on Indigenous Land, 2016.

presence and resistance. News stories of resistance, such as those that accompanied media reports from Wet’suwet’en in 2019 often include photographs with such these graphic prints such as these prominently displayed. Reorienting settler discourses away from a system of land stewardship tied to extractive economic imperatives is no easy task. Yet, as the concept of the Anthropocene gains traction in mainstream culture, Morrisseau’s paintings take on added weight in defiance of the apolitical ways of seeing so often assigned to them. Through a visual discourse that counters treatment of the land by the settler state, Morrisseau’s art works resonate as an indispensable primer that interconnects past, present, and future – notes to a nation to unlearn entrenched structures of colonialism and restore relational bonds between “between humans and the soil, between plants and animals, between minerals and our bones.”54

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n ote s 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27

Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive, xii. Ibid., 5. Seed, Ceremonies of Possession. Ibid., 50. Ibid., 12–13. Azoulay, Potential History, 11–12. Dylan Miner, “Gichi-mookomaanan.” Davis and Todd, “On the Importance,” 769. Ibid., 770. Because of ongoing litigation issues, copyright approval to include images of art by Norval Morrisseau was not possible at the time of publication. Representative examples have been provided in some cases. Images of some of Morrisseau’s art discussed in this essay can be accessed online: www.aci-iac.ca/art-books/norval-morrisseau/. For a discussion of the pivotal importance of stories within Anishinabeg culture, see Doerfler, Sinclair, and Stark, eds., Centering Anishinaabeg Studies. For an overview of historic and contemporary Indigenous relations with the Canadian government, see Morrison and Wilson, Native Peoples. Sinclair and Pollock, The Art of Norval Morrisseau, 134. Ibid. For a visual history of the American Indian Movement with commentary from activists who were part of the struggle see Bancroft and Waterman Wittstock, We Are Still Here. Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” 5. Canada’s recent Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s “Call to Action #45” specifically calls for the repudiation of this concept because it was used to justify European sovereignty. “Repudiate concepts used to justify European sovereignty over Indigenous lands and peoples such as the Doctrine of Discovery and terra nullius.” See Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 45.i. Vimalassery, Hu Pegues, and Goldstein, “On Colonial Unknowing,” 1045. Ohnesorge, “Uneasy Terrain,” 43. Enright, “The Incredible Righteousness.” Lewsen, “Kent Monkman Reimagines.” See Kent Monkman’s Canada 150 travelling exhibition first mounted at University of Toronto, Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience, https://artmuseum.utoronto.ca/exhibition/shameprejudice-story-resilience/. David Garneau, “Writing about Indigenous Art with Critical Care,” Momus, 25 March 2020, https://momus.ca/writing-about-indigenous-art-with-critical-care/. Ibid. Lavallee, Seven. Simpson, “Land as Pedagogy,” 15. Corbiere and Migwans, “Animikii miinawaa Mishibizhiw,” 38.

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28 This is one of several texts this Anishinaabe author and thinker has written in recent years that speaks of the need to consider theoretical concepts from within Anishinaabek ways of being. Simpson, Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back. 29 Ibid., 43. 30 Ibid. 31 Ermine, “Aboriginal Epistemology,” 104. 32 Deloria, Jr, “Traditional Technology,” 60. 33 Vizenor, “Aesthetics of Survivance,” 1–24. 34 Robertson, Mythologizing Norval Morrisseau. 35 Vizenor, Survivance. 36 McMaster, “The Anishinaabe Artistic Consciousness,” 75. 37 WalkingStick, “Native American Art,” 17. 38 Morrisseau, Legends of My People. 39 For reproductions of these paintings, see www.aci-iac.ca/art-books/norval-morrisseau/. 40 See Robertson, Mythologizing Norval Morrisseau, 150–1. 41 For a reproduction of this painting, see www.aci-iac.ca/art-books/norval-morrisseau/. 42 Hill, Norval Morrisseau. 43 Doerfler, Sinclair, and Stark, Centering Anishinaabeg Studies, xv. 44 Ibid. 45 Simpson, “The State Is a Man.” 46 Correspondence from James P. Richards on behalf of Norval Morrisseau to Tom Axworthy, secretary to Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, 19 February 1983, Indian Art Centre Archives. Androgyny 1. pdf. 47 Ibid. 48 Carol Jerusalem, Intercom Newsletter, Department of Indian Affairs, April 1983: np. Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Aboriginal Art Collection archives. Norval Morrisseau fonds. 49 Simpson, “The State Is a Man.” 50 Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive, 172. 51 Ibid. 52 For high-resolution download, see: https://justseeds.org/no-pipelines-on-indigenous-land/. 53 Miner, “Gichi-mookomaanan,” 144–6. 54 Ibid., 770.

3 Embodying Decolonial Methodology: Building and Sustaining Critical Relationality in the Cultural Sector l e a h d e c te r a n d c a r l a tau n to n

Introduction

How can non-Indigenous cultural workers, whether artists, curators, scholars, or arts administrators, participate in decolonizing practices that support and advocate for Indigenous-driven self-determination, sovereignty, and resurgence? What are the roles and responsibilities of white settlers in particular as the “intended beneficiaries”1 of prevailing systems of colonialism and racialization in settler states, in decolonizing cultural institutions such as the gallery and the university, as well as in unsettling the cultural norms of settler societies? What, in this context, constitutes decolonizing practices? How can ethical decolonial methodologies be activated to engender real systemic social, cultural, and institutional transformation that challenges white supremacy, white privilege, and white fragility and promotes Indigenous sovereign futurity? And further, how can white settlers move beyond consumptive and appropriative practices toward an embodiment of decoloniality and the role of accomplice? These are some of the questions we ask ourselves, as critical white settler scholars and cultural practitioners, in the course of working on collaborative projects with Indigenous artists, curators, and scholars, as well as on arts-based initiatives that critique settler colonialism. These are questions that need to be revisited and reconsidered as conditions and relationships change and in light of context- and place-specific realities. In alignment with many Indigenous thinkers, artists, and activists we argue that there is an obligation for white-dominated settler institutions and white settler subjects, to participate in decolonizing or “unsettling” colonial structures that continue to perpetuate the settler colonial order and its unbalanced environments of representational and epistemic violence. On some level our discussion here is part of a process of engaging and reengaging with the questions above in order to parse the most effective and ethical ways of doing so.

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This chapter advances models for engaging accountable forms of decolonial praxis that can be applied to the cultural sector (arts-based research/research-creation, curating, and artistic production) within and outside of institutional contexts. It builds upon the creative and pedagogical foundations described in our 2013 article for Fuse magazine’s Decolonial Aesthetics issue2 and the independent and collaborative work we have undertaken within the cultural and academic sectors over the ensuing years. This is the first in a series of academic texts in which we articulate specific methodologies of theory–practice3 that can be mobilized in these contexts. In this chapter our intention is to introduce two methodologies: “unsettling depremacy”4 and “embodying treaty”5 and to provide insight into their underpinning and foundational features. We also briefly discuss curatorial projects as well as institutional initiatives as examples of how these methodologies can function and to theorize and clarify their definitions and activations. Our main aim in introducing unsettling depremacy and embodied treaty as critical white settler projects6 is to mobilize parallel methodologies and to frame the foundations that are contingent to their ethical activation. We have incorporated into our afterthoughts a set of questions that help to situate and evaluate intentions, modes of creation, and aspects of reception in relations to these foundations. In future writing we will continue to elaborate on these questions and on the validity and productivity of these and other critical settler methodologies. Our experience and our focus here is primarily embedded in the Canadian context, and we recognize that each settler colonial state has a different trajectory that is reflected within its respective cultural sectors. While keeping these particularities in mind we suggest that, due to the many parallels in historical and contemporary politics, culture and society, the methodologies we introduce here have relevance across settler colonial contexts. We work from the premise that a tendency toward complicity with settler colonial systems and structures on the part of white settlers and settler colonial institutions such as the university and the art gallery, whether inadvertent or otherwise, is deeply established and supported through the normative consciousness of settler Canada. Further, our approach recognizes that this complicity perpetuates inequitable conditions, violence against Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (bipoc) communities, and the occupation of Indigenous sovereign territories. We want to think critically about how decolonization can be mobilized by white settler scholars and practitioners who still dominate employment contracts and opportunities for exhibition within the Canadian cultural and academic landscape. Moreover, as white settlers, we are careful to implicate ourselves as beneficiaries of settler colonialism regardless of our actions as individuals, acknowledging that the ongoing colonial project positions us as dominant or what feminist sociologist and activist Sunera Thobani refers to as “exalted” subjects.7 In other words, we recognize the ways we inherently benefit from and are complicit in systems of colonial whiteness and do not set ourselves apart as having achieved a state of decolonial transcendence. Rather, in order to trouble the obfuscating performance of “good white-settler politics,” or what might be understood in terms

Embodying Decolonial Methodology

of settler “moves to innocence,”8 we promote the potential of white settler engagement with decolonial praxis while recognizing its limitations in the light of colonial co-option, epistemic violence, and the systemic oppression engendered by white supremacy. The intersecting trajectories of settler colonialism and racism, among other forms of colonial violence, must be accounted for in decolonizing praxis. The methodologies we propose are informed by a recognition that the colonial whiteness inherent within Canadian cultural institutions, and Canadian society as a whole, affects Indigenous peoples as well as differently situated non-Indigenous People of Colour, albeit often in different ways. As such, we are committed to critiquing contemporary settler colonial and white supremacist systems, structures, and attitudes, as well as both advancing and mobilizing decolonizing methodologies in conversation and collaboration with bipoc scholars and cultural workers. Situating Indigenous dispossession as the underlying feature of colonial formation and therefore the crux of decolonization, in the following discussion we primarily focus on strategies that interrupt the mechanisms of colonial whiteness as they relate to Indigenous sovereignty in all its forms. There is certainly a lineage of critical, and in some cases transformational, work being undertaken by individual white settler cultural workers and white settler dominated cultural institutions in Canada, and such initiatives have increased markedly even in the time since we began to work on this chapter. However, the propensity for settler institutions and cultural workers to perpetuate the colonial order when engaging with Indigenous cultural production or in critiques of settler colonialism is longstanding, systemic, and entrenched. Whiteness pervades settler institutions regardless of who works within them. Therefore, as we enter into a discussion of how white settlers might engage with Indigenous artwork and artists, and work to interrupt deeply rooted settler colonial logics, we might first consider whether doing so is an advisable or sustainable undertaking moving forward. In a recent issue of Canadian Art magazine, Michi Saagig Nishnaabeg scholar and poet Leanne Betasamosake Simpson state, I don’t think that non-Indigenous people, Canada or the state actually get to define what’s Indigenous art or not. I think Indigenous artists get to define that, and they have, in a really consistent, brilliant way for hundreds of years now. I think that refusal, the idea of generating an Indigenous space and holding the space, is critical, not just in the making process but in the sharing process. I really love it when Indigenous writers talk to me about my work, Indigenous curators curate me or I get to perform in an Indigenous space with lots of Indigenous people in the audience. I think those kinds of conversations and connections then add depth and conversation to the work. I think that then produces a conversation through self-representation where these conversations are presented to Canadians and to non-Indigenous people on our own terms.

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When we do that – when we have those intelligent, ethical, political, artistic discussions about our work – it really decentres whiteness. Instead of dumbing our work down for the masses, it elevates the whole thing up.9 The importance of Indigenous-mediated spaces for the production, presentation, and interpretation of Indigenous cultural production that Simpson advances remains paramount. Why then are we embarking on a discussion of how white settler cultural workers might ethically engage with Indigenous artists and artistic production and contribute to disturbing the logics of settler colonialism through creative production? There is no doubt that a rapidly growing and diverse contingent of Indigenous curators, writers, artists, and other cultural workers are deftly creating and occupying the vital spaces and opportunities of which Simpson and many others speak, and effectively challenging colonial norms. At the same time, many white settler institutions and individuals in Canada are striving to respond to the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (trc) “Calls to Action” and other appeals for “Indigenizing” or “decolonizing,” and it is becoming increasingly apparent that these efforts often result in significant errors. While the scope of this text does not allow us to go into detail, suffice to say that such failures contribute to the burden of decolonizing while Indigenizing (meaning the insertion, claiming, and mobilizing of Indigenous self-determined representation) being placed on the shoulders of Indigenous artists, scholars, curators, educators, thinkers, and knowledge keepers.10 The tendency toward an unbalanced distribution of labour in this regard signals the urgent need to clear the way for and create decolonial pathways that support the advancement of selfdetermined initiatives based in Indigenous resurgence, refusal, and sovereignty. It also points to the importance of sharing the responsibilities for undertaking this work. As growing institutional presence and sustained institutional critique continue to expand the scope and prevalence of Indigenous self-representation in cultural sectors against the institutional grain, attention must be paid to contemporaneous dynamics within the greater sociopolitical–cultural landscape that influence conditions of both production and circulation. The mainstream prominence of issues pertaining to relations between Indigenous peoples/nations and settler states/societies put forward through discourse and activism that promotes Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination, decolonization, Indigenization, and credible forms of (re)conciliation has rippled into the Canadian cultural sector. Exhibitions that address these issues and feature both Indigenous and non-Indigenous11 artists, curated by Indigenous and non-Indigenous individuals or curatorial teams that cross various Indigenous/non-Indigenous lines are becoming more prevalent. Between 2013 and 2015 Dr Janine Marchessault curated Land/Slide: Possible Futures (2013), a site-specific public art exhibition in Markham, Ontario; Cheryl L’Hirondelle curated Owning with the Gaze (2015) at Gallery 101 in Ottawa, Ontario; Wanda Nanibush and Matt McIntosh curated N2N: Widening the Narrows (2015) at the Orillia Museum of Art and History in Orillia, Ontario; and Jaimie

Embodying Decolonial Methodology

Isaac and Leah Decter curated Mammo’wiiang to Make Change (2015) at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba in Brandon, Manitoba. In 2017, the 150th anniversary of Canadian confederation, the nation-wide LandMarks/Repères 2017 enlisted multiple Indigenous and non-Indigenous curators and artists to engage critically with national parks and historic sites; Bojana Videkanic curated Unsettling at the Doris McCarthy Gallery in Toronto, Ontario; and Andrew Hunter curated Every. Now. Then. Reframing Nationhood at the Art Gallery of Ontario.12 This list, which is by no means exhaustive, highlights a growing curatorial practice that brings forward the simultaneous decolonizing projects of Indigenous sovereignty and settler responsibility by centralizing and prioritize Indigenous art and cultural production in relation to and/or alongside critical white settler, Black, and poc artists’ practices. The curatorial premises of these exhibitions and the work represented within them complicate settler colonial histories of place and identity and in turn highlight nation-to-nation relationships and longstanding alliances amongst Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. Similarly, institutions have been increasing the number of Indigenous artists in their programs, and this means that their resident – predominantly white settler – curators are more frequently called upon to mediate Indigenous cultural production. This is not to say that institutions could not offer these opportunities to independent Indigenous curators or hire Indigenous curators on staff and recently a number of institutions are doing so. Further, as a growing number of non-Indigenous cultural workers focus on addressing colonial issues from their varied positionalities, the resulting production implicitly and/or explicitly enters into conversation with the work of their Indigenous counterparts. That these individual and institutional “conversations” occur on a spectrum spanning the extremely fraught and destructive to the deeply affinitous demonstrates the need for some nuanced discussion concerning strategies for approaching this work as a white settler from a number of disciplinary perspectives. In other words, the drive for decolonial institutional change must correspond with careful listening and accountable dialogue as a means to fundamentally reduce harm. The need to prioritize Indigenous cultural production, Indigenous mediation of Indigenous artwork, and Indigenous viewpoints on what is necessary for changing Indigenous-settler relations to a sustainable and equitable non-colonial model is clear. However, in accordance with calls for all those in settler states to activate decolonial praxis, it is also important that non-Indigenous cultural workers engage with such work.13 Moreover, when such work is carried out in ways that align with Indigenous movements it can make a significant contribution to important ongoing dialogues that both constitute and lead to actual social transformation. Embracing such endeavours as a responsibility also begins to balance the labour involved on both institutional and individual levels. An ethical approach to this evolving cultural landscape and the sociopolitical dimensions that influence it, demands that all institutions and non-Indigenous artists and curators working in this area deeply examine and actively

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address the power dynamics inherent in conditions of opportunity, visibility, and access. It is incumbent upon artists, curators, and writers working with, and in conversation with, Indigenous peoples and movements to do so carefully, reflexively, and relationally. What we aim to do in this text is discuss strategies white settler cultural workers and white settler dominated institutions might use to approach this work in responsible and accountable ways. We suggest that it is vital to take into account and confront the pressures and privilege exerted by colonial whiteness, to be soundly informed by Indigenous knowledge, and to develop a sensitivity to knowing when to step back, when to stand beside, and when to walk forward – both together and apart. In other words, if white settlers are going to undertake this work accountably, it is crucial for us/them develop a sense of how to do so in sustainable, non-colonial ways, while also knowing when to exercise refusal (stepping back and out) and when to support Indigenous refusal.14 Here we put forward two distinct, yet interconnected decolonial methodologies – embodying treaty and unsettling depremacy – both of which enter relationality through principles of respect, reciprocity, responsibility, accountability, and trust. In doing so we offer models that ultimately aim to build critical relationality between white settler individuals and institutions and bipoc scholars, artists, and activists on stolen Indigenous lands. These models draw and build upon the work of leading Indigenous scholars such as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, and Jodi Byrd; non-Indigenous scholars of colour such as Sara Ahmed, Rita Dahmoon, and Leigh Patel; and critical white settler scholars such as Paulette Regan, Avril Bell, Fiona Nicoll, and Eva Mackey. The approaches we discuss are not meant to be prescriptive or static but rather fluid and evolving, continually adapting to place, positionality, and circumstance. They all, however, call for white settler cultural workers to begin by gaining a solid understanding of the relational, theoretical, and conceptual factors underlying the broader social–political issues that shape cultural production and its circulation in contexts where settler colonial occupation is an historical and contemporary reality.

Decolonization in Settler Colonial Spaces

Our approaches are informed by principles of Indigenous decolonization and sovereignty, Indigenous and critical methodologies, and Indigenous conceptions of treaty relations. They are grounded by the recognition that intersecting yet distinct forces of colonialism and racialization constitute an enduring and systemic imposition of (settler) whiteness in settler colonial states such as Canada that extends forcefully into the present. Moreover, they recognize that, while Black people and (nonIndigenous) People of Colour (bpoc) have been conscripted into “settlement” on conditional terms throughout the history of colonization in Canada, and therefore are implicated in Indigenous dispossession, the prevailing thrust of white supremacy ensures that white settlers dominate as the intended beneficiaries of settler coloniza-

Embodying Decolonial Methodology

tion.15 In other words, while settler colonization performs an expedient and limited inclusion of bpoc subjects, whiteness is a systemic feature that oppresses Indigenous peoples and bpoc in different ways.16 As such, in Canada, as in other settler states, the normalization of whiteness perpetuated by both racialization and settler colonial logics bolsters a stance of colonial denial and elision that serves the interests of the settler state and the majority (white) settler society. Settler colonization can be characterized as a direct and ongoing assault on Indigenous sovereignty and personhood that assumes the primacy of white settler populations. As settler/Pākehā scholar Avril Bell suggests, “settler colonization is a project of creating a new world, rather than a project based on finding one.”17 Its mechanisms are predicated on dominion over Indigenous land and the replacement of Indigenous peoples and nations with a settler polity and a European model of governance. The seminal aim of the settler colonial project is thus to cause the Indigenous inhabitants and societies of an invaded territory to “disappear” and to bestow the status of origin on the white European settler. Aleut Unangaˆx scholar Eve Tuck and settler scholar Marcia McKenzie state, Settler colonialism wants Indigenous land, not Indigenous people, so Indigenous peoples are cleared out of the way of colonial expansion, first via genocide and destruction and later through incorporation and assimilation (Wolfe 2006). The settler colonial discourse turns Indigenous peoples into savages, unhumans, and eventually ghosts. As a structure and not an event, settler colonialism circulates stories of Indigenous peoples as extinct, disappeared, or maybe as never having existed at all. The goal of settler colonialism is to erase Indigenous peoples from valuable land (see McCoy 2014; Paperson 2014).18 In the settler colonial project it is deemed necessary for Indigenous sovereignty to be extinguished because, as Bell contends, “indigenous nationhood represents a challenge to settler nationhood and indigenous rights represent a challenge to settler rights.”19 As a flexible and durational structure,20 settler colonialism persists in the contemporary context through legal, political, social, and cultural systems that work to maintain control over Indigenous life and lands in order to continuously undermine Indigenous populations and deny the legitimacy of Indigenous claims to land rights and sovereignty. The notion of sovereignty is not only found in political, judicial, and territorial autonomy but is also reflected in demonstrations of self-determination in relation to cultural and creative expression, as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson eloquently describes. Although remarkably persistent and adaptable, colonial structures and processes in Canada, as in other white settler colonial states, are not inevitable. The settler colonial agenda of Indigenous disappearance and dispossession has been forestalled by Indigenous resistance and resurgence advanced by academics, activists, communities, and cultural workers. Moreover, strategies for cohabiting “settled” lands have been proffered from multiple Indigenous perspectives. However, settler states and society

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continue to exhibit resistance to propositions for change asserted by Indigenous peoples, preferring a direction that is limited and self-serving, and the arts and culture sector is no exception. Art and cultural production, including the writing of art histories, have been utilized as colonial agents to perpetuate doctrines of European “discovery” of Turtle Island, terra nullius, the vanishing Indian, and white supremacy. In this way they have a long history of being harnessed as tools to legitimate colonial expansion and the denial of Indigenous sovereignty. The twenty-first-century art gallery, and the cultural sector more broadly, have continued to deny Indigenous cultural sovereignty by largely failing to undertake hard inclusions21 and sustained commitments to self-determined Indigenous representation. Soft inclusions,22 or rather periodic representation in the form of guest curators, a group exhibition, and other sporadic programming, have been celebrated by many institutions as “stepping in the right direction” or as a response, for example, to the trc’s “Calls to Action.” In contrast, hard inclusions take the form of multiple hirings, exhibitions, increases in collections and commissions, institutional governance transformation, and Indigenous leadership and stewardship at all levels of governance, for example. If the white settler curator/ artist/writer engaging with Indigenous art or resisting colonial narratives and systems is not conversant in the aims and methods of decolonial and other Indigenous movements that promote self-determination, it will be difficult to understand the ways their work and their actions may support, or conversely impede, these endeavours. In the face of the Canadian state and majority settler society’s self-aggrandizing posturing and entrenched denial, Indigenous activist movements such as Idle No More, and more recently, the trc’s “Calls to Action” have propelled concepts of (re)conciliation,23 Indigenous resurgence, Indigenization, and decolonization into popular spaces and discourses. As these discussions move further into the mainstream, the definitions of these terms and their actualization, particularly in the case of “decolonization,” often become muddied. Those calling for decolonization largely agree that questions of land rights and fundamental change to governance lie at its root, both in historical and contemporary terms.24 In this sense, decolonization requires reparations and the repatriation of land, as well as the recognition of Indigenous understandings of land as different from Western concepts tied to ownership and exploitation. In asserting that “decolonization is not a metaphor,”25 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang are among those who contend that the application of “decolonization” as a term connoting a broad set of social justice initiatives has the potential to distract from and interfere with the actual dismantling of colonial structures with respect to land and Indigenous sovereignty. Ngāti Awa and Ngāti Porou Māori scholar and educator Linda Tuhiwai Smith is among those who contend that decolonization as a comprehensive project necessitates a range of intersecting constituents. She states, “Decolonization, once viewed as a formal process of handing over the instruments of government is now recognized as a long-term process involving bureaucratic, linguistic, cultural and psychological divesting of colonial power.”26 Settler scholar Keavy

Embodying Decolonial Methodology

Martin and Stó:lō scholar Dylan Robinson recognize that while “almost nothing we can do will lead immediately or directly to the return of land or to the unsettlement or dissolution of Canada’s claims over Indigenous territories” called for in decolonization, “a wide range of diverse actions … play a part in the broader project of achieving justice.”27 Echoing Smith, Martin and Robinson, and others, white settler scholars Emma Battell Lowman and Adam J. Barker characterize decolonization as an “open ended … [and] radical … transformative process” that calls for multiple approaches, suggesting further that it is “the responsibility of individuals and communities of all kinds to figure out how they fit.”28 If decolonization is understood in these ways – without losing sight of the very real priorities regarding land rights and sovereignty for Indigenous nations – multiple strategies can be effectively mobilized, including in the arts and culture sector.29 The methodologies we put forward here can be utilized by individuals, collectives, and institutions to advance decoloniality in parallel with Indigenous sovereignty and resurgence within and outside of the arts and culture context. They are distinct, yet overlapping, and are underpinned by some common foundational principles and practices. In particular, they build on the concept of what white settler Australian scholar Fiona Nicoll refers to as “being in Indigenous sovereignty.”30 Being in relation in a way that contributes to building a sustainable and decolonial or non-colonial practice requires a profound reimagining and reformation of what it means to be a white settler within the territories of sovereign Indigenous nations. Articulating the notion of being in Indigenous sovereignty, Nicoll reminds settler Australians that they are already living in Indigenous sovereignty but simply do not recognize it, and the same can be said for other settler states such as Canada. An ethic of being in Indigenous sovereignty prioritizes all aspects of Indigenous self-determination while denaturalizing colonial claim and authority. Rather than activating a co-option of Indigenous knowledges and frameworks, the ethic of being in Indigenous sovereignty is a respectful understanding of the pre-existing rights and distinct knowledges and relationships with place tied to historical and ongoing Indigenous presence. Put another way, being – or living and working – in Indigenous sovereignty calls for one to acknowledge the occupation of Indigenous territories in settler nations and to challenge systemic erasure of Indigenous histories and presence and the violences of settler colonial histories and contemporary practices within settler consciousness. Moreover, it calls attention to the continued presence of indigeneity and propels forward an unsettling of settler practices that attempt to possess Indigenous lands, knowledges, and cultural practices. In this there is a balance of working independently and collaboratively, of stepping forward to embrace the responsibility of affecting one’s spheres of influence and stepping back to decentre colonial whiteness. A recent example that engages and conceptualizes being in Indigenous sovereignty through curatorial programming is the Wood Land School: Kahatènhston tsi na’tetiátere ne Iotohrkó:wa tánon Iotohrha/Drawing a Line from January to December, for which

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artist Duane Linklater (Omaskêko Cree), artist Tanya Lukin-Linklater (Alutiiq), curator cheyanne turions (settler), and artist Walter Scott (Kahnawake Mohawk) undertook a year-long “exhibition” at the sbc Gallery (figs. 3.1–3.4).31 Handing over, and supporting, a year of the gallery’s programming to this Indigenous collective, Wood Land School not only creates an opportunity to highlight Indigenous cultural workers and their production, it creates a space for reconceptualizing what constitutes the gallery’s programming, processes, and priorities, in part, by “testing the limits of Indigenizing and reconciliation and searching out new ways to relate

3.1–3.4 Opposite and above Installation views, Wood Land School: Kahatenhstánion tsi na’tetiatere ne Iotohrkó:wa tánon Iotohrha/Drawing Lines from January to December, Second Gesture, 2017.

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to settler institutions.”32 As an intervention of extended (albeit limited) duration the Wood Land School experiment can be seen to gesture a model for how systemic institutional white settler supremacy can be uprooted in favour of Indigenous ways of thinking, doing, and being. We suggest that in this case the gallery as a settler institution, entered into a temporary state of being in Indigenous sovereignty that can be understood as the antithesis of coloniality and white supremacy and the inversion of the way treaties have been recognized by the state in which Indigenous perspectives, ontologies, epistemologies, and methods were prioritized.

Activating Critical Decolonial Settler Methodologies

As we have discussed, it is increasingly understood that there are important roles for non-Indigenous People of Colour and white settlers in the project of decolonization as understood through an expansive lens. Indigenous proponents of decolonization are clear that these roles must be based in alliance rather than enacted as interference; that dominant settlers must make a commitment to undertake personal and institutional change without imposing their view of what that change entails on Indigenous peoples.33 Leanne Betasamosake Simpson maintains that “settler society must … choose to change their ways, to decolonize their relationship with the land and Indigenous nations and to join in building a sustainable future based upon mutual recognition, justice, and respect.”34 She also makes the distinction that Indigenous peoples are advancing resurgence “on our own terms without the sanction, permission or engagement of the state, western theory or the opinions of Canadians.”35 White settler people are called upon to recognize our/their privilege, contend with our/their complicity, and decolonize our/their minds and actions in ways that align with and make space for Indigenous futurity and sustainable relations.36 We believe that embodied treaty and unsettling depremacy as interconnected relational strategies make a crucial incursion into doing these things through an ethic that embraces being in Indigenous sovereignty as a form of non-intrusive, nonconsumptive respect for Indigenous knowledges and adherence to Indigenous protocols.

Unsettling Depremacy

While it is clear that there are (arguably different and in some cases limited) roles for the white settler in advancing the priorities of Indigenous movements that promote self-determination and decolonization, the question remains: how does the white settler undertake this work without recentring whiteness? Unsettling depremacy can be understood as a methodology that compliments or is affinitous with Indigenous methods while attending to these concerns. White settler Australian scholar and activist Clare Land discusses her approach to researching her book, Decolonizing Solidarity,

Embodying Decolonial Methodology

through a framework of adjacent methods by invoking Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s “Twenty-Five Indigenous Projects,”37 which demonstrate Indigenous-driven decolonizing methods. Land notes the ways her research methods speak specifically to Smith’s projects of “indigenizing, intervening, reading, reframing and restoring.”38 She states of her work, [Indigenous] projects concerning intervention “are usually designed around making structural and cultural changes” (Smith, 1999: 147). This research is supportive of the Indigenous project of intervention through its clear intention to strategic questions about what will engage and maintain the contribution to meaningful change by members of dominant groups … questions of non-Indigenous people’s responsibilities to change ourselves and our institutions, rather than “changing indigenous peoples to fit the structures.”39 The other strategies Land describes work in similar ways as non-Indigenous companions to Smith’s Indigenous projects. For example, she discusses her research as broadly aligning with Smith’s project of restoring Indigenous well-being in that it “challenges the lack of understanding by non-Indigenous people of their/our collective and individual impact on Indigenous well-being, and their/our inherent privilege.”40 The strategies Land describes can be characterized as critical white settler projects that compliment (and it could be argued, intersect with) Smith’s Indigenous projects. Thus, they are models for acting in parallel to, and/or in conversation with, Indigenous methodologies and movements in ways that promote rather than disrupt Indigenous sovereignty. Such strategies can be mobilized by white settlers to shine a light on colonial legacies and their contemporaneous systems of racialization as a counterbalance to denial, erasure, and, importantly, moves to innocence, all of which currently saturate the colonial consciousness.41 They can also be utilized as a foundation from which to undertake ethical collaboration and other practices of relationality and within institutions to generate non-colonial pathways for Indigenous resurgence and futurity. Decter identifies this type of methodology as unsettling depremacy, using the word “unsettling” to signal an ongoing disturbance of the colonial and, as an inversion of “supremacy,” the word “depremacy” to suggest a deliberate and active decentring of whiteness. The term thus describes methods of praxis that account for the interruption of settler colonial and race-based logics and the ways they confer white supremacy and colonial dominance onto settler states and white settler citizens within them. Much like any critical white settler project, in order to undertake accountable and responsible approaches to working with Indigenous arts or decolonial disruption through a practice that exercises unsettling depremacy it is imperative for the white settler cultural worker to contend with the ways we/they are situated and implicated in the systemic operations of colonial forms of whiteness and to do so with attention to relationality. A framework for this approach can be found in feminist scholar Sara Ahmed’s discussion of the “double turn,” in which she asserts the “task of the white

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subject” is “to stay implicated in what they critique, but in turning towards their role and responsibility in these histories … as histories of this present, to turn away from themselves and towards others.”42 For the white settler subject staying implicated necessitates a practice of selfreflection, an inward turn that is both critical and unflinching. Clare Land maintains, “Non-Indigenous people examining our complicity in colonialism, including by interrogating who we are in terms of identity, culture and history and the shape of our lives … is part of dealing honestly with the impact of dominant culture on Aboriginal people.”43 Staying implicated also requires that, in calling dominant systems to account or challenging dominant narratives, the white settler subject does not lose sight of our/their position(s) within those systems, historically and in the present. Further, we/they must be cognizant of the ways the very systems under critique impart unearned benefits, regardless of our/their actions. The state of being implicated is not a route to personal absolution through “good deeds.” Instead, it is a position of unsettling and often productively uncomfortable awareness that the white settler should both become accustomed to and activate in ways that seek neither premature resolution nor transcendence. As long as the colonial project and its logics of white supremacy and Indigenous dispossession retain a tight grip within the settler state, looking inward at the self in relationship to the structures being called into question is a vital step in understanding the roles and responsibilities of enacting resistance from the dominant position. Looking inward in this manner is indeed crucial in order to stay implicated as a white settler. Yet, as Ahmed suggests, this inward turn alone, regardless of how unflinchingly it is exercised, is not sufficient. Looking inward as an end goal simply recentres assumptions of whiteness and coloniality and highlights the dominant story. The inward turn must instead re-turn scrutiny of the self to an outward-facing stance that mobilizes an ethic of being in relation. This not only involves contending with being implicated in the systems and histories from which we/they as white settlers benefit but also entails considering the implications of relationality to the histories and peoples with whom place is shared, that is, to Indigenous peoples and histories, and to Black people and People of Colour and related histories, as those who have also been impacted by white supremacy in settler states, as well as to other-than-human inhabitants and entities. Further, as Ahmed contends, identifying one’s privilege and position is not the same as unlearning it.44 The failure to activate these exercises of critical self-reflection can congeal them into self-indulgent avoidance or, perhaps worse, redemption. Moreover, the impulse toward activation must be undertaken through both individual and collective means in order to “subvert the interplay between structure and subjectivity that sustain colonial relations.”45 If this activated inward turn forms the groundwork for understanding and embracing the responsibilities that arise in challenging white settler entitlement from a white

Embodying Decolonial Methodology

settler position, the outward turn builds the armature necessary for doing so in ways that decentre white settler authority and align with Indigenous led decolonial and anticolonial movements. This turn away from the self and “toward others” includes looking outward to Indigenous scholarship, activism, cultural knowledge, and artistic production in order to gain insight into the imperatives of such movements and to formulate ethical and effective approaches for contributing to them. It also entails undertaking the work of educating oneself in other ways. The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s “Calls to Action” echo many Indigenous and allied scholars, activists, artists, and community leaders by highlighting the importance of “mainstream” settler populations learning about Indigenous histories, cultures, political and legal structures, cosmologies, and so on. It is worth emphasizing here that white settler people need to look toward others and seek out opportunities for un/learning in ways that are not consumptive, reckless, or entitled. The outward-facing component of the double turn thus necessitates engaging respectfully and reciprocally – in collaboration, in parallel, in conversation, sometimes incommensurably – and always with attention to the responsibilities of decoloniality and relationality. A genuine commitment to sharing the labour and responsibilities of enacting change requires a distinct practice of listening. If this practice is to be productive, and not in itself detrimental, it must be undertaken in a way that rejects the colonial desires of hungry listening46 and relinquishes the authority of colonial whiteness. Stó:lō scholar Dylan Robinson’s theorization of settler listening as “hungry” draws from the word “Xwelitem” which is the Halq’emeylem word Stó:lō people use for non-Indigenous persons and means “hungry ones.”47 Hungry listening exposes the ways in which many white settler scholars, artists, curators, and other cultural practitioners have listened to the sharing of Indigenous knowledges in order to extract, consume, and possess them as a resource. As Robinson explains, “[this] settler mode of perception driven by hunger … [as] perceive[ing] knowledge with a voracious appetite that devours without consideration of those who have cultivated, harvested, and prepared the food of thought.”48 It is critical for the white settler cultural worker to be informed by a spectrum of Indigenous viewpoints and relational experiences. However, merely consuming Indigenous knowledge and/or engaging indiscriminately with Indigenous communities and individuals does not necessarily decentre white authority. As such, it is vital to employ an approach to listening that is respectful, committed, and injected with humility. Engaging in this way entails a wholly different expectation of what it means to interface with knowledge and one another, one that discards the “white/settler/liberal desire for mastery”49 in favour of being amenable to encountering unfamiliar ontological, pedagogical, and epistemological concepts that one may not be able to fully apprehend. Thus, unsettling depremacy is informed by Indigenous methods, yet is attentive to not appropriating them. Rather, it is a way of embodying deep, respectful, and reciprocal spaces of encounter. In the arts and culture sector, these encounters

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can lead to transformative collaborations and institutional changes that highlight the condition of being in relation, and in turn bring us to a consideration of how such encounters might be enacted through the embodiment of treaty.

Embodied or Embodying Treaty

How can Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples be in relation – be neighbours – when settler colonial occupation and racism prevail? What does it mean to be a guest – usually uninvited – on sovereign Indigenous territories? With an underpinning of unsettling depremacy as a foundational methodology for enacting ethical relations as a dominant subject, a methodology of embodying/embodied treaty aims to generate sustainable relational practices built upon treaty principles of trust, respect, responsibility, and reciprocity among others. In essence, to embody treaty principles is to refuse to be complacent in colonial violence and to commence working in collaboration with Indigenous leadership, as well as to harness reciprocity and responsibility as the creative, operational, or research method. Indigenous treaties signed between Indigenous nations and imperial European and settler nations outline principles that can be returned to as means to establish coexistence between Indigenous nations and non-Indigenous peoples living in white settler states and between Indigenous nation and settler nation governments. Indigenous treaty principles have governed and continue to be part of Indigenous governance in the Americas. Prior to colonial contact with European nations Indigenous treaty protocols referenced in wampum, for example, the Dish With One Spoon Treaty between the Indigenous nations of the Anishinaabe, Mississauga, and Haudenosaunee peoples, which established an agreement for sharing and stewarding the lands of Tkaronto| Toronto. This wampum belt covenant, like the Great Tree of Peace of the Haudenosaunee, which established the Haudenosaunee confederacy, is not only an agreement but also a set of teachings that outlines responsibilities, codes of conduct, relationships, histories, stories, and protocols. Indigenous communities continue to hold knowledge about Indigenous nation-to-nation treaty agreement relationships, as well as those with colonial settler nations such as the Guswenta (Two Row) signed in 1613 in what is now New York, the Treaties of Peace and Friendship first signed in the 1700s in Mi’kma’ki, and the 1763 Royal Proclamation.50 These treaties establish and govern what are nation-to-nation relationships among Indigenous nations and between Indigenous nations and settler nations such as Canada and the United States. Many of Canada’s earliest treaties of coexistence and nation-to-nation relationships have been erased from public memory, arguably due to the fact that they identify Indigenous nations as sovereign. Founding agreements such as the Peace and Friendship Treaties, the Royal Proclamation, and the Treaty of Niagara are not commonly understood nor are they taught in our public school system. For example, it was only re-

Embodying Decolonial Methodology

cently, after advocacy from and consultation with various Mi’kmaw stakeholders, that the province of Nova Scotia mandated treaty education. The removal from settler institutions of the ongoing presence of Indigenous sovereignty and the parallel negation of longstanding treaties between Indigenous nations and the state are key parts of the project of colonial amnesia. Eva Mackey writes, For many Indigenous peoples, Treaty was and is a sacred covenant made between sovereign nations in which they agree to ongoing relationships of respect, friendship and peace, and thus recognition of the ongoing nationhood, autonomy, and, rights of Indigenous nations. “Treaty,” seen in this way, potentially disrupts settler sense of entitlement to land because seeing all of us as “treaty peoples” brings material and social aspects of colonial pasts into the present in a manner that recognizes the ongoing autonomy of Indigenous peoples and the ongoing treaty relationships in which the settler nation-state participates as one party to (and beneficiary of) past land agreements, not as the assumed unilateral sovereign.51 Mackey concludes, “Therefore, instead of seeing treaty as an object – a noun – I think that one way to begin to decolonize is to learn to conceptualize and experience treaty-making as a verb … In other words, we need to think about how ‘we treaty,’ and how to behave responsibly if ‘we treaty together’ or ‘make treaty’ together.”52 Treaty epistemologies embody and activate respect, responsibility, and reciprocity: a host and guest way of knowing and being in the world. They have within their foundations the guiding principles that will help to unsettle colonial relationships and activate sustainable coexistence. As such they are teachings from which white settlers can unlearn white supremacy and entitled, possessive land practices, and learn a non-colonial way of being. Recalling, re-establishing, and importantly, activating the founding principles established by early treaty protocols are crucial features of a methodology for non-Indigenous cultural workers who are working to advance personal and professional decolonization. Learning about Indigenous treaty relationships and protocols will generate and guide the renewal of accountable approaches to coexistence. Moreover, studying both the oral history and written documents of historic treaties and thinking through their principles will support a profound relearning and build new ways of doing for non-Indigenous cultural workers. Thinking through the notion of embodied treaty entails exploring what it means to be treaty people, to consider both who is a treaty person and why these historic agreements and principles have been repudiated and “forgotten” by white settler nations such as Canada. It also requires an understanding of the ways the erasure of such treaties from public memory perpetuates settler entitlement to Indigenous lands and resources as white possessions and undermines both Indigenous sovereignty and Indigenous stewardship over sovereign land. The methodology of embodying

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treaty thus necessitates a commitment to a) learning the treaties of the lands you live on; b) thinking through host and guest relations; c) decolonizing white privilege and fragility; and d) adhering to decolonial ethics of reciprocity, treaty-focused collaborations, and white settler accountability. Collaboration between Indigenous and settler thinkers and cultural workers can be incredibly effective in decolonial transformation whereby through working together we can combat settler colonialisms. However, to move into spaces and practices as accomplices, white settlers must always step back and reflect on their distinct accountabilities and their potential to re-inscribe the settler colonial order of white dominance. Within initiatives towards individual and collective settler responsibility, Snelgrove, Dhamoon, and Corntassel cautiously warn, Without centering Indigenous peoples’ articulations, without deploying a relational approach to settler colonial power, and without paying attention to the conditions and contingencies of settler colonialism, studies of settler colonialism and practices of solidarity run the risk of reifying (and possibly replicating) settler colonial as well as other modes of domination.53 Much like unsettling depremacy, embodying treaty necessitates carrying the truths of settler privilege and benefit, of colonial violence (historic and contemporary, such as Indian residential schools and missing and murdered Indigenous women), and of colonial erasures. In a treaty-based curatorial collaboration, for example, reciprocity and responsibility are foundational methods from which decolonial practice emerges. This means that the work produced must contribute to Indigenous sovereignty, to meaningful (re)conciliation, to decolonizing settler colonialism, and to reinstating treaty protocols. Primarily, when embodying treaty all project participants must reciprocate, and both share and contribute labour. Indigenous projects of resurgence and sovereignty are the foundations on which a return to treaty methodologies must be built. Embodied, treaty-based artistic research projects must be for or with, not about, and must be directed toward dismantling and critiquing settler colonialism. Such methodologies are activations of accomplice politics with agitators in institutions and independent artists making visible naturalized colonial systems that undermine Indigenous self-determination, resurgence, and sovereignty. Fundamentally, if nonIndigenous cultural workers, and specifically white settlers, do not come to know and “be in” Indigenous sovereignty then any attempt to embody treaty and embrace it as a verb will only lead to appropriative and co-optive methodologies. To move toward a politic of accomplice requires making commitments to taking professional risks to dismantle the structures that oppress and continue settler colonial order. This is reciprocity. This is decolonial embodiment of treaty.

Embodying Decolonial Methodology

Afterthoughts: Toward a Politic of Accomplice

The two methodologies we propose are underpinned by guiding principles and practices of accomplice and form a practice of un/learning in which the white settler embraces accountability in relation to local and broader Indigenous communities. In this way, they can be seen as advancing a relational practice of being in Indigenous sovereignty. In order to mobilize them accountably it is necessary to be rigorously informed by Indigenous activism, theory, methodologies, and knowledges, to commit to an ongoing practice of unflinching self-reflection, and to consider the ways one inhabits the condition of being-in-relation. The practice of decolonization can (and likely should) be inhabited differently by differently situated peoples. In this sense, white settler strategies of engaging in decolonization can be understood as functioning in conversation with Indigenous and bpoc strategies. When thinking about decolonizing methodologies we advocate for formulating strategies that contribute to overarching decolonial goals through parallel or complimentary means. For a white settler engaging critically with the conditions and ramifications of one’s whiteness and colonial complicities as a component of colonial critique it is foundational to acknowledging that one is part of the problem one is seeking to disturb.54 Yet, as vital as such self-reflexive strategies are, in isolation they run a great risk of recentring colonial whiteness even in the attempt to create a foundation for enacting resistance to it. As such, efforts toward decolonial change must be implemented in relation. Responsible and accountable engagement in “alliance” as a white settler subject is predicated on cultivating an understanding of how we/they are situated – spatially, politically, culturally, and socially – in relation not only to settler colonial and race-based structures but also to those with whom we/they inhabit this land. This work helps to move toward a politic of accomplice, which means to work as active co-conspirators to combat settler colonialism and power relations, as co-agitators who take risks to expose settler colonial order, and as decolonizing collaborators. The foundation of any productive critical settler methodology, such as embodied treaty or unsettling depremacy, is being in Indigenous sovereignty, an ethic of foregrounding Indigenous knowledge, cultural protocols, and futurity while resisting consumption and co-option. These critical settler methodologies are key to institutional transformation as they have the potential to clear settler obstacles and debris in order to work in collaboration with Indigenous initiatives and projects. They are key also to white settler cultural workers who are committed to working decolonially. As a result of the persistence of Indigenous cultural workers over time, some institutions are beginning to break the cycle of soft inclusion and co-option that has largely characterised representation until recently. White settler cultural workers must undertake the labour involved in sharing this responsibility and do so in ethical and accountable ways. We argue that the two methods we have introduced are steeped in relationality, are contingent on critical self-reflection and the ability of the white settler subject to understand and not retreat from the responsibilities stemming from their

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“position in empire,”55 and developing a stance of being in Indigenous sovereignty. Exercising unsettling depremacy and embodying treaty decentres colonial whiteness and disturbs the colonial order laying a foundation for reciprocal interaction and recognizes the responsibilities of relationality when occupying stolen Indigenous land and the ethics of working in collaboration. A reflection of unsettling depremacy can be seen in practice in the recent institutional initiatives at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, which hired four Indigenous women curators – Dr Julie Nagam (Métis/Syrian/German), chair of the History of Indigenous Art in North America, a joint appointment at University of Winnipeg and Winnipeg Art Gallery (2015); Dr Heather Igloliorte (Inuk), lead curator for wag’s new Inuit Art Centre; Jaimie Isaac (Anishinaabe/British), curator of Indigenous and Contemporary Art (2017); and Jocelyn Piirainen (Inuk), assistant curator of Inuit Art (2019) – to spearhead a decolonial reshaping of the institution with guidance from a twenty-eightmember Indigenous advisory circle established in 2017 (co-chaired by Nagam and Igloliorte).56 By committing to multiple Indigenous hires in key roles and supporting the curatorial and programming interventions they have initiated, the wag begins to decentre the primacy of white settler knowledge and practices from within the institution. As Nagam notes in the public announcement about the advisory circle, The Winnipeg Art Gallery is undergoing a ground-breaking transformation and we are excited to lead the way for Winnipeg to be the centre of Indigenous Contemporary Arts in Canada and abroad. At the same time we need to continue to break down barriers and open up spaces for dialogue, reflection and engagement. The City is at a pivotal moment where Indigenous artists could radically transform public space, galleries and museums. The Inuit Art Centre and the wag can support this shift and scholarship by creating new templates of unprecedented Indigenous methods, ideologies, and community involvement in museum practices.57 This commitment to sustained positions, as opposed to cycling through short-term contractual or grant funded positions, demonstrates a significant gesture on the part of this institution towards long-term systemic change. Embodied treaty methodology is exemplified by the Art Gallery of Ontario’s hiring of Anishinaabekwe Wanda Nanibush and white settler Georgiana Uhlyarik as cocurators of Canadian and Indigenous art, a move which, the curators argue, engages in a treaty relationship in the disassembling and exposing of the violent settler visualities of colonial art collections. This treaty-based collaborative model of curatorial practice holds space for distinct roles and responsibilities for Nanibush and Uhlyarik. The naming and configuration of the new Department of Indigenous and Canadian Art as noted by the ago “was created to better reflect the Nation to Nation relationship that underlines the treaty relationship that allowed Canada to come into existence. This new name acknowledges the historical and contemporary position of Indigenous Art as existing prior to and extending beyond Canada’s borders.”58

Embodying Decolonial Methodology

The reason these projects are ethical, effective, and productive is due in no small part to the commitments of the people involved, who have and continue to build decolonial initiatives based on their ongoing relationships. We stress that such models of critical decolonial practice – whether in relation to academic research, art making, or institutional policy – cannot be disconnected from the individuals and the relationships they have built. Fundamentally, we conclude that in order to embody decoloniality – meaning to advance parallel and intersecting critical settler and Indigenous methodologies that critique and resist colonial power structures – it is necessary to invoke multivocal approaches that honour, respond to, and activate relationships of trust, reciprocity, respect, responsibility, and accountability. In this sense white settler strategies of engaging in decolonization as can be understood as functioning in conversation with Indigenous strategies. Similarly, when thinking of decolonizing methodologies, we must formulate strategies that contribute to overarching decolonial goals through parallel or complimentary means; for example, the critical white settler projects that dialogue with Tuhiwai Smith’s “Twenty-Five Indigenous Projects.” In all of this work foundational questions that must be consistently and continually asked of white settlers beginning with what is my relationship to the colonial project, how do I benefit from settler colonial structures, and what is my place within them? From there, key questions for white settlers when working with and in collaboration with Indigenous cultural producers, communities, and histories through unsettling depremacy or embodied treaty are • Who does this research benefit? How do I benefit? • What is my role? How do I reciprocate? • Why and how am I participating? Should I be leading this work? Key questions for white settlers when working on unsettling and decolonizing projects through unsettling depremacy or embodied treaty are • Why and for whom am I making this work? • How does it participate with Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination and not co-opt Indigenous knowledges, epistemologies and ontologies? • How is it unsettling whiteness and colonial structures? • How is it a critical white settler project? How is settler accountability and reciprocity activated? It is arguably impossible for the white settler artist or curator to create work that speaks from a white settler positionality as an exercise of unsettling depremacy or embodied treaty without recentring settler whiteness in some measure. Although interventions articulated through artistic and curatorial production hold the potential to illuminate one’s complicity, challenge embedded power relations, call into question valorizing mythologies, and bring people together in ways that account for and interrogate colonial asymmetry, the white settler artist or curator also risks re-inscribing

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the colonial while trying to unseat it. For instance, if we apply Audre Lorde’s oftrepeated dictum “the master’s tools cannot be used to dismantle the master’s house”59 to art making and curatorial practice of this nature, we might be moved to ask whether it is possible for the masters themselves to embody dissent in a way that dismantles their metaphorical houses. Given the fine line between unsettling and settling into the flow of dominant culture, this is a question worth grappling with in the development of such work. Yet, as challenging and/or problematic as it may be, it is necessary for white settler people to take on the labour and risk of acting politically. It is crucial to do so with an understanding of our/their position-in-relation, of our/their “identitiesin-politics,”60 of the ways our/their work dovetails with continuing conversations and debates as they are critically enacted from multiple perspectives and positionalities, and of the ways these factors shape our/their responsibilities. By stating that there are challenges and risks for the white settler subject undertaking this work, we do not mean to imply that doing so is in any way “heroic” or exceptional. Rather, we suggest that if the challenges and risks are not recognized, the white settler subject can cause significant and often unintended harm. While the process of self-reflection or reckoning will not in and of itself change colonial structures or repatriate land, as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Paulette Regan, Victoria Freeman, and many others suggest, decolonial advances will arguably not be made without the transformation of settler society’s mindset and priorities. It is crucial for white settlers to become accustomed to the discomfort arising from difficult knowledge61 in order to effectively contend with what it truly means to be subjects-in-relation in light of the structural power imbalances of current conditions and in envisioning the potential for change. Moreover, it is vital to recognize that experiences of discomfort often underline the conditions of difference and location that continue to be embedded in the hegemonic power relations of the settler state and society. The capacity and commitment to accept, embrace, and ply discomfort as an unsettling state of tensile counterbalance is, we suggest, an essential component of unsettling or engaging decolonially from a dominant position. We argue in “Addressing the Settler Problem” that to unsettle white settler privilege, “discomfort is a valuable and necessary component. A productive relationship with discomfort produced through creative practice can apprehend the ways in which settler comfort has perpetuated colonial agendas of settler privilege, occupation and Indigenous oppression.”62 Exercising the double turn as a relational decolonial space of encounter is vital to cultivating methods of unsettling depremacy and embodied treaty as critical white settler projects that parallel Indigenous movements in ways that are both respectful and generative. Mobilizing critical settler methodologies that continuously challenge and interrogate white settler privilege at personal and institutional levels, thus generating space for ethical relations, necessitates that white settler cultural workers take on the responsibility of decolonial labour and activate momentum toward a politic of accomplice.

Embodying Decolonial Methodology

n ote s 1 Thielen-Wilson, “White Terror,” 320. Quoted in Chris Hiller, “Tracing the Spirals,” 419. 2 Decter and Taunton, “Addressing the Settler Problem,” 34–9. 3 Loveless, “Towards a Manifesto,” 53. Here, Loveless discusses working practice–theoretically in the context of research–creation in academic settings as a way of intertwining theory and its application. Expanding from this premise we suggest unsettling depremacy and embodied treaty function through fully integrated theoretical and methodological facets. 4 On unsettling depremecy see Decter, “Per/forming Memoration,” and “Place in Relation.” 5 On embodied treaty see Taunton “A Decolonizing Settler Methodology,” and “Decolonizing Archives.” 6 Decter, “Per/forming Memoration,” 15. 7 Thobani, Exalted Subjects. 8 Tuck and Yang famously draw upon Janet Mawhinney’s (1998) concept of “moves to innocence” and Mary Louise Fellows and Sherene Razack’s (1998) notion of the “race to innocence” in their description of white settler, anticolonial, and anti-racist work. See Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” 9. 9 “Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Jarrett Martineau: In Conversation,” Canadian Art, 12 June 2017, https://canadianart.ca/features/leanne-betasamosake-simpson-and-jarrettmartineau/. 10 See, for example, Métis scholar Zoe Todd’s critique of “Indigenizing” the academy in “Indigenous Stories.” 11 When we use the term “non-Indigenous” we are referring to both white settler and non-Indigenous people of colour. 12 For more information about these curatorial projects please visit the project and gallery websites: Land Slide: Possible Futures, http://www.landslide-possiblefutures.com/; Owning with the Gaze, https://g101.ca/exhibits/owning-gaze; N2N: Widening the Narrows, https://www.orillia museum.org/events/472-nation-nation; Mammo’wiiang to Make Change, https://agsm.ca/ mammowiiang-make-change; LandMarks/Repères: https://partnersinart.ca/projects/land marks2017-reperes2017/; Unsettling, https://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~dmg/html/exhibitions/ unsettling.html; Every. Now. Then. Reframing Nationhood, https://ago.ca/exhibitions/everynow-then-reframing-nationhood. 13 See Byrd, The Transit of Empire; Dahmoon, “A Feminist Approach,” 20–37; Patel, Decolonizing Educational Research; Simpson, Lighting the Eighth Fire; Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future; and Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies. 14 Simpson, “On Ethnographic Refusal,” 67–80. 15 Razack, Looking White People; Mackey, Unsettled Expectations; Patel, Decolonizing Educational Research; Dahmoon, “A Feminist Approach;” Thobani, Exalted Subjects. 16 See Cannon and Sunseri, Racism, Colonialism, and Indigeneity; Smith, “Indigeneity,” 66–90. 17 Bell, Relating Indigenous and Settler Identities, 14. Emphasis in the original. 18 Tuck and McKenzie, Place in Research, 66. The in-text citations are original to the source and

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refer to: Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism”; Tuck, McKenzie, and McCoy, “Land Education”; and la paperson, “A Ghetto Land Pedagogy.” Bell, Relating Indigenous and Settler Identities, 13. Wolfe sets settler colonialism apart from genocide through its structural and durational constituents. See: Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Martin, “The Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion”; Martin and Wood, Exposed; Jessup, “Hard Inclusion,” xiii–xxx. Martin, “The Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion.” For further commentary on and critiques of official federal reconciliation as well as discussion of the shortcomings and possibilities of models such as the trc, see Robinson and Martin, Arts of Engagement; and McCall and Hill, The Land We Are. See Alfred, Wasáse; Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks; Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized; Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 98. Robinson and Martin, Arts of Engagement, 2. Lowman and Barker, Settler, 121. Although we recognize the utility of these expansive views of decolonization we also acknowledge that the increasing prevalence of the term’s usage to describe endeavours that fall demonstrably short of its intentions embedded in land and sovereignty should be viewed with caution. Nicoll, “Reconciliation In and Out of Perspective,” 17–31. In April 2021, cheyanne turions stated that she was “raised believing I had mixed settler and Indigenous ancestry” following a Twitter statement from the account @nomoreredface. The tweets suggest that turions received a total of $73,000 in Canada Council grants under the Aboriginal Curatorial Projects sub-category for Indigenous applicants. On her blog, turions states that she is changing her self-identification to “settler” and pursing reparative actions that involve the return of grant monies. See @nomoreredface, 16 March 2021 and https://cheyanne turions.wordpress.com/. John Hampton and the Wood Land School, “Inside a Year-Long Experiment in Indigenous Institutional Critique,” Canadian Art, 2 May 2017, https://canadianart.ca/features/indigenousinstitutional-critique-case-study-wood-land-school/. Simpson, Lighting the Eighth Fire; Alfred, Wasáse; Byrd, The Transit of Empire; Snelgrove, Dhamoon, and Corntassel, “Unsettling Settler Colonialism,” 1–32. Simpson, Lighting the Eighth Fire, 14. Simpson, Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back, 17. Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism; Green, Making Space for Indigenous Feminism; Freeman, “‘Toronto Has No History!,’” 21–35; Regan, Unsettling the Settler Within; Lowman and Barker, Settler. Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 141–61. Clare Land, Decolonizing Solidarity, 20–30. Ibid., 29.

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40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

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51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

59 60 61

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Ibid., 30. Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” 9. Ahmed, “Declarations of Whiteness.” Land, Decolonizing Solidarity, 29. Ahmed, “Declarations of Whiteness.” Coulthard, Red Skins, White Masks, 140. See Robinson, “Public Writing, Sovereign Reading,” 85–99. Ravensbergen, “Potluck Protocols.” As Dylan Robinson further explains, “As I understand it, these words came into use because, when settlers first arrived in our territory, they were starving. They were starving literally, for food, but starving also for gold. This hunger for resources has not abated with time, indeed it has only grown – a hunger for the resources of our land: the rocks, the trees, the water, the land itself. Each has been thirsted after, each has been consumed” (as quoted in Ravensbergen 2016). Robinson, “Public Writing, Sovereign Reading,” 97. Bell, Relating Indigenous and Settler Identities. White settler scholar Elizabeth Mancke recently (2014–17) served as an expert witness for the Madawaska Maliseet First Nation on their successful Specific Land Claim. This case and Mancke’s writing around it shows that the Royal Proclamation of 1763 needs to be recentred as a geopolitical marker for shifting relations between Indigenous nations and European empires. See Madawaska Maliseet First Nation v. Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Canada, Specific Claims Tribunal Canada, sct-1001-12, https://decisia.lexum.com/sct/rod/en/item/301532/ index.do. Mackey, Unsettled Expectations, 141. Ibid. Snelgrove, Dhamoon, and Corntassel, “Unsettling Settler Colonialism,” 4. Probyn, “Playing Chicken at the Intersection.” Byrd, The Transit of Empire, xxx. Winnipeg Art Gallery, “Quamajuq.” Nagam, “wag Announces Indigenous Advisory Circle.” Art Gallery of Ontario, “ago’s New Department of Indigenous and Canadian Art Launches Major Exhibitions by Kenojuak Ashevak and Tim Pitsiulak, and Rebecca Belmore,” press release, 3 April 2018, https://ago.ca/press-release/agos-new-department-indigenous-andcanadian-art-launches-major-exhibitions-kenojuak. Lorde, Sister Outsider, 110. Mignolo et al., “Decolonial Aesthetics (1).” As we noted in our 2013 Fuse article, Deborah Britzman first defined the term “difficult knowledge” in her book Lost Subjects, Contested Objects. For further investigations of difficult knowledge see Simon, Rosenberg, and Eppert, Between Hope and Despair; Lehrer, Milton, and Patterson, Curating Difficult Knowledge; Dewar and Goto, Reconcile This!. Decter and Taunton, “Addressing the Settler Problem,” 38.

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4 Silence as Resistance: When Silence Is the Only Weapon You Have Left lindsay m c int y re Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can’t remember who we are or why we’re here. Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees1

The Original Silence

I can only tell stories that are mine. In 2012, I completed (or perhaps abandoned) a seven-year journey making a series of film works about my family stories. The most important of these was her silent life (2012), a thirty-one-minute personal experimental documentary about the stories we tell in my family and those we don’t. This film in particular was a journey, and to be fair to the reader, I should say that this writing too is a journey, rather than a destination. No matter our background or history, stories define us, shape us, and make us who we are. Good and bad, they are our connection, our culture, and our identity. The stories that I explored in her silent life impact the way I walk through the world. As Thomas King said, “the truth about stories is, that’s all we are.”2 Kumaa’naaq’s daughter, Marguerite, is a strong-willed child. Never listens and never does exactly as she is told. No one knows where she got this from. Certainly not from her mother, who all describe as meek and mild. Marguerite is being taken from Qamani’tuaq, an inland, sub-Arctic district of what is now Nunavut, in the winter of 1938. She is taken by dog team. This isn’t a dramatic statement. It’s simply the only way to travel – overland, when the snow is abundant. They’re on their way to Edmonton, 1,800 kilometres to the southwest. She is six years old. Her travelling companions are her little brother Kiviaq who will come to be known as David C. Ward, her mother, Kumaa’naaq, who is the interpreter and servant to the RCMP , and Ray Ward, the British-born RCMP constable, soon-to-be stepfather, who she will fight with constantly until her twenty-second year when she will leave and never come back. But she doesn’t know this yet. She doesn’t know anything yet.

Silence as Resistance

She is riding on the qamutiik, in the middle as she always does, wiggling her toes in her kamiks to stay warm, but this time her father isn’t driving it. This time they left in the night and the qimmiit aren’t happy. This time it feels wrong. Where are her other brothers and sisters?

In this story, Kumaa’naaq, many months pregnant, is taken to the south with her two youngest children by a Royal Canadian Mounted Police constable who wanted her for his wife.3 Kidnapped, some say. Left behind in the north were her husband Paakaarjuak (Paaka) and four other children. She lived in Edmonton for fifty-one years until she died. Out of a sense of propriety or maybe shame, she was forbidden to speak her language or about her culture or family. She was never able to return to the north. She is my great-grandmother. Consisting primarily of high-contrast, hand-processed black and white images, her silent life is a film that traces the storied life and exile of Kumaa’naaq, an Inuk woman who died at the approximate age of ninety-one in Edmonton in 1990. A series of interlocking 16mm sequences place my mother and my grandmother (Marguerite) on opposite sides of the same story. The film primarily documents some small pieces of the traumas passed down through this bloodline – some biologically, some in practice and in deed, and some by omission. While the journey I took in the making of this film consisted of an attempt to understand my matrilineal history, I found that this history is buried under thick layers of patriarchal, colonial lies. And for the most part, through every generation, the response to these lies has been, and still is, silence. The film explores these and other silences through reconnected fragments of oral stories told by the women of my family – myself, my mother, and my estranged grandmother – all in an effort to understand the woman we all shared, Kumaa’naaq. Through six connected themes of silence – the original silence, the silence of hatred, the silence of fear, the silence of a generation, the silence of sadness, and the final silence – Kumaa’naaq’s silent life is traced. The stories that populate these silences are held in the hands of women, where family stories are traditionally heard and told. “Families are a female institution,” Elizabeth Stone writes in Black Sheep and Kissing Cousins, despite the patrilineal tradition that we follow.4 In my family, however, oral matrilineal stories were interrupted. Through a learned mechanism rooted in shame, some of us still practise a kind of colonial amnesia – a deliberate ignorance, which ends, ultimately, in silence.

A Silence of Fear

I blame (as I am human) a large part of this silence on my step-great-grandfather, and if it sounds like I’m holding a grudge it’s because I am. Ray Ward, tall and strong, charismatic and domineering, stands at the centre point of my relationship with Kumaa’naaq (fig. 4.1). With words and presence, he filtered her, shielded her, belittled her, and loved her. He loved the kind of love that smothers a person. The desperate

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4.1 Ray Ward as an RCMP constable in Igluligaarjuk (Chesterfield Inlet), 1932, from her silent life, 2012.

Silence as Resistance

kind of love that doesn’t love the person but the need of a person, and she was trapped in that love. She disappeared into his needs almost completely. A British-born citizen who worked hard all his life to provide for his widowed mother, Ray Ward volunteered for a job with the rcmp in the relatively early days of Arctic interest. Sent up north with regular-issue boots and sleeping bags, most of the constables would have died in a matter of days were it not for the Inuit servant families employed by the rcmp. Kumaa’naaq’s husband and the father of her youngest children, Paaka, was a hunter and guide for the rcmp and she was their interpreter and caregiver – but servants is what they were called. Practical possessions. Documents from this period in the north often lie, and the totality of the exact details of what happened in 1938 are not known, but the following is true: she was pregnant with Ray’s child; that child, once born, would have belonged to the husband, not the father; and most importantly, you do what the police tell you to do. When Ray Ward showed up with his police badge and big personality, Inuit listened (fig. 4.2). Whether she agreed to go or he took her in the night, I think he needed to possess her. Kumaa’naaq had already been taken once before. It is said that she was born at the time of the winter solstice around 1900 in the high Arctic near Ukkusiksalik (where there is material for stone pots), which is an exceptionally rich and abundant inlet near the northwestern tip of Hudson’s Bay. She was told that she was too beautiful to live out her life with the savages and that she had promise, and so, as a young girl, she was taken from her land and family by an Anglican missionary and his wife. And kept. A possession. Reared in a southern community, she experienced a kind of preresidential school education, learning to speak English and French. Whalers and their ships had been coming for many years. Inuit knew their tools and firearms, their food in metal containers, and their whaleboats. These Qallunaat were good for Inuit, more or less. These new Qallunaat with their bibles and badges were a little different, but they seem to have good intentions and people are generally to be trusted.5

In her new life, the first thing the missionaries did was take her name. It took me years to uncover her real name. In Inuit tradition, names mean something. Names link you to your ancestors, your community, and your identity. They are your social identity and your essence. Along with a body and a soul, a name is one of the three essential parts of a human.6 When a baby is born they are given an atiq, which links them to the person they were before this life – these relationships are strong.7 A person’s name is not only their identity, it is their place and position in the community, as well as the spirit of their sauna (bone) or namesake. Names make you who you are, and if you change your name, you become a different person.8 The missionaries felt the right to impose a name on her. They gave her a new name: Maria Therese. It wasn’t wrong; it was common sense. Her holistic sense of community, her nation, and herself within them was intentionally unsettled and undermined. Killed by common sense. She was a future ghost, shaped by the system to eradicate culture.9 Designed to be

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4.2 Ray Ward as an RCMP constable, Winnipeg, 1931.

weak and to be assimilated. Dislocated, estranged, and distorted, how could she value herself when no one else did? What kind of a future could she provide for her children when she brought them into this world? I often think about that moment, that first defining moment of calculated colonization. At the time she was taken, the collective and misguided Inuit hope was in the knowledge of new tools for things like cooking, stitching, and hunting – stronger tools – ones that she could use to help her community. Inuit were generally not as powerful as Qallunaat, so it was also believed (they were told) that their children would become important and skilled, and so parents softened their role in inunnguiniq (the making of a whole human being).10 I don’t mean to feed the idea that Kumaa’naaq came from an idyllic, frozen, precontact world. On the whole, we fantasize about the Arctic. The southern gaze on the north. It is so vast and so distant that we allow the fantasies that plague it to infect our minds and fix our judgements. This fantasizing is compounded by many of the concrete tactics used to preserve the purity of the concept of the “Eskimo,” such as when, in the 1950s and ’60s, Inuit artists were actively discouraged from depicting anything that included contact with the Qallunaat in their works.11 As

Silence as Resistance

Heather Igloliorte points out, The Canadian Handicrafts Guild, with their on-theground agent of change James Houston, asserted in its 1922 bulletin that for an Inuit object “to be of value it must keep its Indian character in design, colour, material, and workmanship.”12 From the very beginnings of contact, “Inuitness” has always been valued above Inuit lived reality. Even the various “official” Arctic researchers of history – Knud Rasmussen, Franz Boas, Vallee, and Brody (the first two are considered forerunners of the fields of Eskimology and North American Anthropology, respectively) – emphasized Inuit authenticity by privileging and featuring only those who did not already have strong ties to colonial concepts of being, what Inuit might call Inummarik.13 This privileging reinforced developing dichotomies within the Inuit population and narrowed the scope of further inquiry.14 At the time of this writing it is nearing 2022. If we polled the population of what is

4.3 Ukkusiksalik RCMP patrol house, pre-fabricated building, 1910.

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called Turtle Island we would probably find that the vast majority still hold in their minds an image of the Eskimo version of the savage/stoic Indian man and his Indian princess. The iconic images of Nanook (whose real name was Allakariallak) and his family in Robert Flaherty’s infamous “documentary” film, Nanook of the North (1922), and fanciful visions of pre-contact life, still infect our collective mind.15 In reality, even a hundred years before what I refer to as the first defining moment of calculated colonization, Inuit of the Ukkusiksalik region and much of the northwestern coast of Hudson’s Bay were in daily or near-daily contact with Qallunaat whalers. In communities that sometimes numbered in the 150s, dozens of Inuit men were employed on whaling ships in the summer months as whalemen, hunters, sled drivers, and casual labourers, and many Inuit were employed to feed, clothe, and care for crews all year round when they over-wintered in the Arctic.16 One study asserts that between 1860 and 1903 more than 140 whaling ships arrived in northwestern Hudson’s Bay and many of them stayed the winter.17 These ships created relationships, communities, livelihoods, practices, and reliance. As Philip Goldring writes in Inuit Economic Responses to Euro-American Contacts, “such partnerships, whether equal or not, allowed aboriginal societies … to retain essential elements of their ideology, social structure and way of life even when superficially subordinated to a nonindigenous system of production.”18 And while they were able to maintain their traditional diets and lifestyle, they increasingly relied on goods from outside tradition, so much so that they developed new traditions incorporating these items, foods, and tools.19 In fact, it is this resourcefulness, innovation, and ability to adapt – qanuqtuurniq, a guiding principle of Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit – that has proven the strength and resiliency of Inuit time and time again in the face of change.20 It is from this kind of community that Kumaa’naaq was taken, one that had likely seen sewing machines, light bulbs, woollen underwear, magazines, and Christmas trees. After the decline of the whaling industry in the early 1900s, this role was taken up by the rcmp (fig. 4.3), missionaries, and especially by trapping white fox for the hbc trading posts.21 After nearly a decade, Kumaa’naaq returned to her people. It is a longstanding Inuit value and belief that others are never to be treated as outcasts but rather welcomed with openness; however, she struggled to reintegrate and suspicions were held.22 The story goes that her mother, Ungangai, wanted her back, but Kumaa’naaq was now different – not like them. She’d learned too much. She’d learned shame. And she’d learned to believe their “pioneer lies.”23 She was too old when she was taken to forget how to be Inuk and too old when she returned to forget the undoing of it. In this way, generations of children and grandchildren grew ashamed of who they were and where they came from. Being Inuk was something to hide. To some, it still is. So how can I find space to explore these important ideas of identity? How can I find a place for myself that is neither north nor south, Inuk nor settler, or perhaps, more appropriately, both? Where do I belong in this story that I feel materially, deep in my bones? For me, these are basic and crucial questions. I believe in blood memory. As Patricia Hampl writes, “pain has strong arms,”24 and I feel these arms binding me

Silence as Resistance

from generations past. I am, as yet, unable or unwilling to let these stories go. More importantly, I do not want to be complicit in unknowing. I explore the idea of blood memory in several of my experimental documentary works, mostly in indirect ways. Several of my films unpack elements that feed this story, some more abstractly than others. her silent life is the most comprehensive piece in the series Bloodline, which is made up of five interconnected experimental films exploring this history. These films, made between 2005 and 2012, include what she would not leave behind (2005), where no one knew her name (2007), though she never spoke, this is where her voice would have been (2008) (fig. 4.4), where she stood in the first place (2010), and lastly, her silent life (2012). Arguably, other works I produced in or about the north, especially the 16mm projection performance A Northern Portrait (2011–17), seeing her (2020), and Ajjigiingiluktaaqtugut (We Are All Different) (2021) also touch upon the themes of these works. Each of the five components in Bloodline deals with one or more of the traces of Kumaa’naaq’s life. Some are autotopographical portraits considering the physical objects that endure, notably, the uluit and saliguut, notebooks, her elaborately designed amauti, sewing tools, beading tools, and decorative caribou teeth that were among the very few objects she deemed important enough to bring south with her.25 Others, such as where she stood in the first place (2010) and where no one knew her name (2005) explore ideas of place, identity, and belonging. Each of the films seeks lost knowledge within and without Kumaa’naaq’s material culture, willing it to be present. Some recognize and locate a distinct lack – a vacancy or a void – selfimposed or otherwise, such as though she never spoke, this is where her voice would have been. In this short 16mm work, which also exists as a looping installation, audio recordings of my eight-year-old self-made on a Fisher Price tape recorder densely intercut with close-up images of caribou and fox teeth that she had saved on a wire. The film plays with the presence and absence of objects and words. The high contrast images never share the same screen time with the flippant childish recordings. The result is an intentionally jarring disconnect between image and sound, each denying the presence of the other. As the tape goes on, we hear Ray Ward insistently repeat a phrase, “go and get your grandmother to say something,” an idea to which my eight-year-old self promptly expresses disgust. This is the most visceral record I have of my insolence and disrespect. In reality, I eventually, and begrudgingly, recorded Kumaa’naaq telling a story, only to inadvertently record over it with nonsense within a matter of days. That recording, for its short life, was the only known piece of moving media that made record of her existence at all. What I wouldn’t do to take back that blunder and hear that story now. Memorably, because of my mindless destruction, for days afterward my mother was angrier at me than ever she had been before or since. I had destroyed a piece of our history. Did we perhaps lose the right to listen? Thematically, hands play a large role in the works that I’ve made about my family and about the north. Hands symbolize work and time; they are the tool of tools.26 Hands speak. They are the record of our lives. They represent guilt and things unsaid. They dismiss, threaten, summon, feed, and signal friendship and love. They are how

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4.4 though she never spoke, this is where her voice would have been, 2008.

a mother shows love to her child. In her silent life, hands appear in lieu of seeing people speak (fig. 4.5). This is out of love and respect for my mother and her own mother, who are the two main storytellers in the film, although they’ve nearly never met. They were raised in the same household but in discrete time frames, separated by many years. They tell their own distinct versions of the same stories, the same woman, the same mother. Despite their lack of familiarity with one another, they are linked by their hands. “These are my grandmother’s hands” are the first words to appear across

Silence as Resistance

4.5 Marguerite’s hands, her silent life, 2012.

the screen in the film. “I didn’t know these hands growing up – but I know them now. In case there is any question, they are exactly the same as my mother’s and mine.” Reflecting on family history is almost never a tidy business, especially when that history is so caked in colonial constructs and confusion. I needed to turn it into a film in order to sift through the details and understand what they mean. As an artist, analogue film itself is my approach to knowledge. For me, the very material of film has agency. It is my way of navigating a space or a process, documenting a happening, unmediated by plans or prior understanding. I undertook something of a different process than what might be considered usual for me to make her silent life and the corresponding works in Bloodline. I gathered materials tirelessly, but not aimlessly, in a search that never ceased, not even when I closed my eyes. Instead of inserting the material into a predetermined structure, I responded to it. None of the works fit into a traditional film form and all favour a non-hierarchical system of knowing. It may be important to note that none of them specifically began with a plan. Most began with searching through material, often for a need to locate a core of truth. I think of

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her silent life as a collaboration with process. In truth, I think the film made itself and determined its own course. All I did was open up, listen, and respond. Filmmaker and writer Dan Browne writes that some of this work opens “a meeting point between colonial and indigenous visions, opening a potential space of decolonization.”27 I offer it up as a place to examine all family histories. As a young filmmaker, I grew up watching and loving the work of the American avant-garde, 1960s underground, and early experimental film largely made by Eurocentric people with privilege and pale skin who were challenging the mainstream. Challenging ideas in the mainstream was also something that I was interested in, but in a different way, and I always had something like a rock in my stomach, an internal unrest in relation to my love of this work. While these artists vitalized the margins, they seemed only interested in particular margins, which didn’t include people like me or the things that mattered to me. I would learn about the work and its production in cities like New York and then I would apply the ideas I had gleaned to my own early work in the late nineties and early aughts. My work seemed so much outside of that and so much more central to me, but still very unimportant. And in this way, I spent much of my practice knowing that the work I was doing was separate and didn’t belong, and for a long time I didn’t show any of it. It did not feel refined enough, or relevant beyond its relevance to me. In the years that have passed since its making, I have come to understand more about the importance of this work and how it might matter beyond the surface of my skin. Although much of it is far from becoming the personal as universal, it sheds light on a story that matters that is not otherwise being told. The other four components of this series of films are arguably less complex than her silent life. For example, for where she stood in the first place (fig. 4.6), filmed entirely on 16mm in Qamani’tuaq, I filmed static shots of the land and lake, community and surroundings – the physical places where Kumaa’naaq once lived. The place from whence she was taken. While the film has an arc of sorts, is it relatively simple, a wordless portrait. It transitions through a sequence of landscapes to a sign that declares Baker Lake (Qamani’tuaq) the “Geographical Centre of Canada.” From there, it moves through images that provide clues of settlement and on to a quicker-paced sequence of death and decay. It then transitions to depictions of manmade objects that litter the tundra and, finally, on to groups of young children playing amidst the landscape created by all of this, oblivious to it all. This is the first real human or living element in the film. In contrast to the simplicity and wordlessness of where she stood in the first place, her silent life is intentionally multilayered sometimes telling more than one story at a time. Voiceovers frequently intermix with high-contrast images and a line of deliberately slow-moving subtitles. Occasionally, it’s not clear who is speaking or what relationship the speaker might hold to me, the filmmaker. But I am there, present via the subtitles, occasional vocal slips, and in every choice made in filming and constructing the work – the messiness of filmmaking. Writing her story down here with fixed words on paper feels unfitting. At least in the ever-present filmic inquiry into her personhood in her silent life, she is always almost there (and never there).

Silence as Resistance

The settlement era began in the 1950s. For centuries before and during this time, Inuit communities were patrilocal, and in the early 1920s, Kumaa’naaq left her family once again, married into the family of her husband, Paakaarjuaq, from Qatiktalik (Cape Fullerton), and moved inland to the community of Qamani’tuaq, and for work to Igluligaarjuk (fig. 4.7). As a perfectly fluent English speaker in the community (perhaps the only one), she was highly employable in the fledgling wage economy. Although it was Paaka who was officially employed by the rcmp, as a servant (hunter and guide), it was her they wanted. She was their translator for more than a decade. The constables and staff sergeants needed a lot of help. There were usually four of them, and they were highly dependent. None was ever stationed there long enough to learn the language like the missionaries and whalers had done, so they tended to need a lot of caretaking. Much of the time was taken up in support of the important activity of hunting; however, while no one remembers why, trapping was considered an acceptable bonus income for the rcmp. This was especially rewarding, since beyond all the traps that they managed, the constables also took for themselves 50 per cent of

4.6 where she stood in the first place, 2010.

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4.7 Kumaa’naaq in front of the RCMP servants’ residences in Qamani’tuaq, date unknown/earliest known photo.

Silence as Resistance

“their” Inuit catch. They paid Inuit $5.00 per fox fur, which represented $2.50 of real value at the Hudson’s Bay Company store because of the mark up. The rcmp would then turn around and sell the furs at market for $36.00 each, depending on the year and the market trends.28 Kumaa’naaq was a speaker – a metaphorical loudspeaker – although she was anything but loud. She broadcast the needs of many besides her own. Although mostly the translations came from the authority of the rcmp to Inuit, sometimes Inuit had things to say as well. For example, in Red Serge and Polar Bear Pants: The Biography of Harry Stallworthy (one of the constables stationed in Chesterfield Inlet/Igluligaarjuk in 1923) there is an account of how Kumaa’naaq (named Maria in the text) conveyed to Stallworthy, on behalf of an Inuk hunter, the grave concern the hunter had for the constable’s welfare because of a vision, which had prompted a session of all-night chanting on the part of the hunter. She explained how Tornjak (likely tuurngaq), the evil spirit of the sea, was coming to take the tops of the iglus and take the constable in the night, and the only way to stop it was for the hunter to chant and sing to ward off the darkness.29 Kumaa’naaq often found herself explaining to Inuit how what they believed didn’t matter, and how the constables wanted only to be taken out on their patrols anyway, regardless of Inuit concern about the constables’ abilities in the harshest of conditions.30 She herself remained neutral, mute in her own body, unable to have needs of her own. She revealed others’ ideas, to each other and beyond. She smoothed over the rough edges of these relationships, and in so doing she contributed to the imposing ambitions of the colonial powers and softened the blows to Inuit. Ray Ward was lucky enough to have been stationed in Igluligaarjuk as a relatively young man near the end of the depression, and by then, Kumaa’naaq had been on the job for many years. By the time she was taken with her two youngest children in 1938, she and Paaka had worked in the employ of the rcmp for at least thirteen years, had a well-established community, and had many strong children.31 Inuit have a law that teaches that it is best to never be disobedient – to be patient and to be accommodating.32 In the time that I knew her, Kumaa’naaq fully embodied these values. Whether she trusted the Qallunaat promise of a better life for her children or she was following Inuit law, Ray Ward used her patient and gentle nature all to his advantage.

The Silence of a Generation

Kumaa’naaq and Ray Ward’s home was next door to my childhood home and acted as a literal and metaphorical extension of it. Every day, after elementary and junior high school, I knew nothing else. There was never any knocking (unannounced entrances are commonplace in northern communities).33 After all, you can’t easily knock on the door of an iglu, tupik, or qarmaq, and it makes no sense to wait outside. By this time, Kumaa’naaq, whom I called Mum, nearing ninety years old, was absent. Standing

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four feet tall to her husband’s six-foot-two, she could be described as meek and mild, slight and yielding, the kind of woman that needs taking care of. Not the mirror of me. The grey shell of a human who lies eternally on that blue couch of my memories was not the powerful, strong, self-led, self-taught woman who overcame all obstacles I sought. In those later years, she often tried to speak to me and I wanted badly to understand her but I couldn’t. She’d had several small strokes by then and would only speak Inuktitut. Once Ray had selfishly installed her firmly in an extended care centre, another show of possessive individualism on the part of the man I then took to be my biological grandfather followed. He suddenly issued a law: from now on, we children were to make an appointment to come over to visit, and even then, only on predetermined, scheduled days. Tears and devastation ensued before my mother set him straight, but the open-door policy never felt the same after that. While the central element of her silent life (fig. 4.8) and this essay is Kumaa’naaq’s story, it is interwoven with my own story and the stories of my mother and grandmother. Together we make up one fragment of Kumaa’naaq’s bloodline – others lie across the tundra and the continent. An essential, underlying element of these interwoven stories is how we are together and how we are not. Marguerite, my maternal grandmother, is the six-year-old girl on the qamutiik. She was kicked out of the family

4.8 her silent life, 2012, Marguerite’s birth certificate, dated 8 May 1932.

Silence as Resistance

in 1954, around the time she abandoned my infant mother on the lap of her own mother, and nearly no one has spoken to her since.34 Marguerite, like me, was not silent – not a good Inuk, some would say. She fought and argued and defended herself. In return, she was cut off from her family. After leaving, she lived a life of welfare, instability, and insecurity. She lost her second husband to alcohol, her second child to suicide, and her first grandchild to drugs. When I met her for the first time about ten years ago during the making of this film she was proud. “You’re the one that’s trouble, like me. I can see it,” she said to me. Having heard only a few stories about her from my mother who saw her only once throughout the duration of her childhood, Marguerite sounded like a rebellious and challenging person, and she was. I expected this. What I didn’t expect was how thoughtful and kind she would be, despite her position in life and her broken history. I didn’t expect to have the feeling you only have for your mother and grandmother, the feeling of sharing an unnameable thing that connects us – deeper than words or simple resemblance ever could. Marguerite looked like my mother and unmistakably like Kumaa’naaq, her own mother, whom I had come in search of. I liked her. But because my mother had so much hurt from being abandoned as a child, I shoved my feelings down deep and held them there in solidarity with my mother and my need to make this film. Besides, Kumaa’naaq couldn’t be found – at least, not there. Marguerite had lost her in 1954.

Chasing Ghosts

In the making of the film, perhaps the largest undertaking was the journey north. Not overland or anything complicated, just by modern, though rickety, local plane service. I went in search of connection to the land and for traces and answers to everything Kumaa’naaq. I travelled first to Qamani’tuaq (the place where the river widens). Otherwise known as Baker Lake, Qamani’tuaq is a small hamlet not very unlike other small hamlets that dot the beautiful liquid tundra of Nunavut. It is the only inland settlement in the north and one of the primary settlements for many of the communities that make up what Rasmussen called “the Caribou Eskimos,”35 the people of my real great-grandfather, Paakaarjuaq. Filming and hand processing in the fly-in-only community added a layer of complication to filmmaking that went beyond my expectations. My two nemeses were finding spaces dark enough to use as a darkroom when the sun stays in the sky eternally during the summer months and encountering moments that were bright enough to film during the dark winter months. Plus, the grease in my lenses would freeze in just a few minutes outside, so focusing became a fantasy after a while. Noticeable static flashes on the edges of the 16mm film are a result of the cold, dry conditions in the north. A visible physical manifestation of the Arctic’s rejection of me and my technology. It was important for me to experience some of the harsh conditions there, to

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4.9 where she stood in the first place, 2010. The lake from the settlement in Qamani’tuaq.

stand at the lake edge, to walk for hours on the tundra. I needed a firsthand understanding of just how much the climate affects absolutely everything, how it is not ever an afterthought. In the north, it is always your first thought, and all else, if anything, trails afterward. I lived there for most of a year. I went in search of answers. I felt derailed before I’d even begun because all I got were questions. I recall being shocked, but in retrospect I am shocked that I was shocked. I was the privileged one; I was the one who’d had her my whole life. I met many new relatives, aunties and uncles, cousins and second cousins that I didn’t know I had. She had been taken from them. And just like that, perspectives shift. I chased her ghost. I sought the house the missionaries took her to in the early 1900s – the place that destroyed her connection to her community – thinking “maybe if I can find it, maybe I can understand something more about why and how and then what I might be able to do about it.” But I came to realize that the house of oppression was right next door. In one of the other connected short films, where no one knew her name (2005), I document what is left of her Edmonton home, which stands as it did,

Silence as Resistance

4.10 where no one knew her name, 2005.

nearly untouched since those of her generation passed. Buried under an old western song and lament to pioneering that Ray used to sing are the few silent traces of her in the home I knew so well (fig. 4.10).

A Silence of Hatred

For my grandmother and great-grandmother, the importance of place plays a different role. Inuit do not own the land; they belong to land. We are all extensions of the earth, and I think that intimately knowing the land and people you come from is not a privilege; it is a right. It is home. Our connection to it is tethered to language and community. One’s home shapes a person for life. My home was next door to her home and her home was my home. Her home was also my Grandmother Marguerite’s home, my Great-Uncle Kiviaq’s home and, years later, my mother’s home. And the truth about it is that it wasn’t a very good home. Before my time and for many years, Ray’s widowed mother, Winnifred Ward, lived there too. Winnifred refused to speak to Kumaa’naaq,

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wife of her only child, mother of her only grandchild. For over twenty years, they lived in the same house together and never spoke a single word to each other. Winnifred referred to her as “she” or “her” when necessary. Inuit custom says it’s better not to open your mouth (especially to your family-in-law).36 Marguerite and Kiviaq remember their mother as Winnifred’s slave. They remember her beaten and disregarded. Yet again, in this new world, Kumaa’naaq found herself a possession. Winnifred is a product of her past – her environment and upbringing, and it may not be fair to measure the past by the present but at the same time, I must.37 We are the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of a dismissive, abusive, authoritarian parent. We have been designed to recognize and measure our own inadequacies. For Marguerite and Kiviaq in the 1930s and 1940s, being Inuk was the foundation for being beaten, bullied, and chased home from school. For my mother in the 1950s and 1960s, it was the core of all her childhood trauma. To disabuse these long-held colonial perceptions of ourselves is an unending process, and it’s not an easy one. I have a troubled relationship with Canada. Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s I thought Canada was my friend. I thought I was important to Canada and that Canada cared about me. Canada’s was the loudest voice I knew growing up in a metropolis on the prairies; I believed in Canada. I wanted only to please him (yes, Canada was a man38). I didn’t recognize that all the while, Canada was calculatingly disfiguring my ability to identify and connect with my history and my family, eroding my sense of self. Inevitably, my sense of custom and history is skewed. It was cut up and ground down and handed back with a delicious colonial sauce, and I ate it up. I grew up in the Edmonton Public School system. Although I very much wanted to, I didn’t know how to care about my Inuk side. It didn’t seem possible. I devoured anything related that I had available to me, searching for my own Arctic treasure in books like Black Diamonds, Whiteout, and Ice Swords by the aforementioned James Houston, and even at the age of eleven proclaiming him to be the best writer ever. Everything I was taught in school seemed to support what I was already learning from the television news, from the people in my neighbourhood, from my family, and with my own two eyes: Indians are a hopeless drain on society; Eskimos are foreign and strange and bound for extinction. Throughout my teenage years, that piece of me, however drawn to it I was, was corrupted and devalued. Although in school, I always spoke up as much as I was able to about so-called Indians and Eskimos (and was expected to), the only way that as a child I could value and appreciate my background was through my own silences because it was clear that to do so was otherwise not appropriate. And now, many years later, even as colonization and assimilation are publicly renounced and recognized as a shameful part of our collective history, colonial dealings are not a thing of the past. We believe we are doing colonial damage control but it’s really a kind of colonial evasion. These days, decolonization is said in such a casual way. As if we’re all doing it, all the time. This is the age of indigenization and decolonization is the new black.39 We now consume it without question, the way we consumed without question the

Silence as Resistance

concept of assimilating Indigenous people by taking their lands, languages, and liberty. As Tuck and Yang write, “decolonization is not a metaphor.”40 True decolonization is a process of questioning and a process of becoming that is also an unbecoming.41 As a society, we don’t tend to be very comfortable with unbecoming. Maybe Ray Ward should be forgiven. After all, Kumaa’naaq was already his Inuk servant, as were the husband and family he took her from. Inuit were not citizens – they weren’t even officially wards of the state. They were not considered the responsibility of the government until 1939, and they couldn’t vote until 1962.42 He didn’t create these conditions or make the rules; he only enforced them. He didn’t design the system that repressed her nor make her think she did not belong or question her becoming or her kind. In fact, he did nothing. Inconvenient elements were placed in the category of not known and through the magic of colonial power, ceased to matter. It’s often not the one intensely racist person that matters – sometimes the most outwardly racist thing to do is to do nothing. “It is a historically racist system and so you don’t have to do any bad thing for racism to perpetuate itself. All you have to do is do nothing.”43 In Kumaa’naaq’s life with Ray Ward, whole systems of unknowing were built up and fortified as if everything was reasonable and normal. Her rights were “configured through the possessive logic of patriarchal white sovereignty.”44 And it wasn’t just him and his racist mother. “For centuries, the logics of possession have treated the earth and its indigenous people as something that is always predisposed to being possessed and exploited.”45 Natural resources. Ecological goods and services.46 As a child, I wondered if she ever tried to leave him. I spent hours wondering about her life and who she was inside the tiny frail grey frame that she had come to occupy by the time I had perspective enough to think about it. As James Baldwin, an African American social critic, wrote in 1962, “It is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.”47

A Silence of Sadness

Isolated and dispossessed from her land, language, and culture, she was a possession. So, what am I digging for in this personal history of dispossession? I suppose I want people to recognize the damage done to a person – a perfectly good person – and the generations she bore. her silent life has a rawness to it that still hurts when I watch it. When, halfway through the film, my grandmother insists that I turn off the audio recorder and “tells me some things that, out of respect and shame, I cannot repeat but will never forget,” I still get shivers. I also feel I have a duty of care regarding this material, in both its filmic and textual forms. Some people, particularly those from her community, my immediate or extended family, could experience trauma. Can I heal my family with these stories? I doubt it. There is so much damage done and so much

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distance. But I at least want to set the record straight. For her. So how do I tell this story in a good way? How do I speak out about the trauma, the silences, and the cultural memory loss and still do justice to her and her legacy?

The Final Silence

In the last section of her silent life, my mother describes what it was like near the end, once Kumaa’naaq had “lost it” enough that she didn’t know what was going on. She could barely walk and yet she tried to escape him. Kumaa’naaq always had a severe and genuine mistrust of the Western medical system. So much so that when she fell and broke her back one day in 1960, she refused to be seen by a doctor and lay on a couch for years until the injury healed. She didn’t talk much, and then only in Inuktitut, which none of us understood. Eventually, she stopped speaking altogether. Especially in her later years after some transient ischemic attacks, it became quite clear that she was his property – his to do with as he pleased, in sickness and in health. Contrary to everything she ever wished for, she was stuck in an institutional room, silent, for years until she died. Catheter, feeding tube, teeth removed, bedsores. Depression, boredom, prison, hell. In the final moments of the film, my mother says, “but by then she’d completely quit speaking. Whether she could or she couldn’t – she just didn’t. No one understood her and she’d just, you know, follow you with her eyes … but never a word.” With the exception of a single day, nearing death, when she broke out crying and she cried and cried and that was it – she was silent. She never spoke again. In Inuit custom, when a person is sick or dying they are meant to speak freely of anything they want. They are listened to by everyone. And they are to be given anything they want, such as special meats, in the hopes that they might heal.48 They are also given lots of help because they will remember you when they move on and help you from the other side.49 What Kumaa’naaq got in her final years was a total violation of these things. For my greatgrandmother, Kumaa’naaq, Maria Therese, Mum, or whatever else we called her, the old ways didn’t work this time. The stories hadn’t been shared and there wasn’t anyone around her who understood what needed to be done. But I do now. Her suffering has been passed on to me and as my duty and promise to her, because she could not or would not speak of it, I will. Kumaa’naaq’s job was to talk – to speak and understand; to translate and make known in multiple languages. In one sense, her language made her powerful. Her specialized knowledge was valued, and words can, and often do, empower. More recently, Inuit in Qikiqtarjuaq and Igloolik listed talking as number two in the list of important things for a person, whether to family, friends, or others in the community; second

Silence as Resistance

only to family and kinship, and more important even than Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit (broadly translated as things that Inuit have always know to be true, encompassing Inuit traditional knowledge).50 And yet, Kumaa’naaq stopped talking for the last several years of her life in that hospital bed. Perhaps no one was listening anymore. Perhaps she had said enough. Or was she, perhaps, still saying something? Some thinkers, such as Susan Gal, in Between Speech and Silence, say that women’s linguistic manners, including silence, should be considered verbal strategies, strategies that develop as a response to power dynamics created by the production of gender, rather than as inherent traits.51 She goes on to say that silence can also act as resistance to dominant, often masculine, discourses, rather than demonstrate powerlessness.52 In the end I think Kumaa’naaq bit her tongue and refused to speak. I believe she did this because silence was the only weapon she had left. It was not just survival; silence was her resistance. Kumaa’naaq was “saved,” several times it seems, due to her beauty and her intelligence. And although she didn’t go to a proper residential school, she was subject to the classic theft of land, language, and liberty, that perfect alliterative triumvirate to obliterate cultural literacy. She didn’t live to see the government’s meagre attempt at an apology in 2008. She didn’t live to understand what it means that her son became the first Inuk lawyer nor to see him shrug off his Qallunaat name and fight the government and win the right to reclaim his singular Inuk name, Kiviaq. She didn’t live to see me grow up to be fiercely proud of who I am and where I come from. She didn’t live to see that her life has value.

Forgetting and Remembering

In the second half of the film there is a moment when my mother and I are reminiscing about the stories Ray told about Kumaa’naaq. “I remember him saying, ‘she could skin a caribou before it hit the ground,’” I say. What a magical phrase that was to me. I could fly and dream for hours on that phrase alone. “You’ve got good Inuit blood flowing through those veins, you know. Don’t you ever forget it,” he often said to me. I made sure to never forget. In those moments, he recognized what I could not at the time – that Kumaa’naaq’s culture was being forgotten. He understood that forgetting is not a passive event, it is an active process and we all contribute to it. And he understood that the process was well underway. We need to tell our stories. Making films is embedded in me in much the same way that skinning a caribou was for my great-grandmother. Although my films don’t usually fit the classical narrative form, they are still embodiments of our stories. Stories are knowledge; stories are power. In the filmic inquiry into our matrilineal history in her silent life (fig. 4.11), I seek out and privilege her stories not to negate his version or contributions but to

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4.11 Preparing caribou meat. her silent life, 2012.

celebrate hers, which until now have been utterly silent. On the other hand, I struggle with the idea that if her story has been intentionally discarded, perhaps it is not my place to pick it up. Traditionally, things are sometimes offered to the land to ward off someone’s sickness. And when a person died, something of theirs was often discarded. You should never pick up the things that you find and keep them or you could end up with that sickness. Is it her sickness I have now as I create a full-length film of her story?53 There can be no one absolute telling of any story. Stories are like maps, you get to choose what to show and what to conceal. It’s a dangerous position. I value his stories. His time; his dedication to her. His sense of duty. Were it not for his stories, I would

Silence as Resistance

not know some of these wonderful things about her. But I question whose memory becomes history? Who draws the maps and sets these things down in ink, and what is their intention? When only one side of a story is told, does the other really happen? There are no easy answers to my questions. A long time ago Kumaa’naaq told me that the answers to my questions would come to me in my dreams or through living life itself. I’ve always asked too many questions, and so I too, like her daughter Marguerite, am perhaps not a good Inuk. But this is what Thomas King might call “a lower order of true” and there are things to be learned from these stories.54 These stories, and others like them, hold an invisible presence in my life. They are my truth. Working through this historic trauma gives me pause to think about and understand how it impacts the way I walk through the world and relate to the land, how I parent my young daughter, and how I am kind to myself. I repeat these stories because it is my personal responsibility. This public remembering feels something like my family dues. I resist suppressing the intergenerational memory thread of what she lived for us, and I sit with this because I have to. I forget who it was, but someone once said that the purpose of art is to give you what life cannot. If I decide to conjure a story, I conjure it for her. I need to reorient our history back toward her in a good way. I don’t intend to betray the choices she made to make my life better, as these are among the incredible gifts she gave. But I am not inclined to accept a narrative that writes us out, and if I have to I will become my own storyteller and I will not apologize for this. “Each of us must possess a created version of the past … If we refuse to do the work of creating this personal version of the past, someone else will do it for us,” Patricia Hampl claims in Memory and Imagination.55 This is what constructs our self and enables us to interpret our lives and where we come from.56 Typically, there is a lot of fiction in filmmaking and there is even fiction in these words. But when I made her silent life seven years ago, I wasn’t ready to move beyond truth. I wasn’t ready to presume truth into fiction. I foraged and scavenged in the ditch of history to dig up every detail I could about her life. Lee Maracle, a writer and thinker whom I respect immensely, once told me, “the most profound truth can be found in fiction.” I wasn’t ready to believe her when I heard it, but I am now. I’m ready for truthful fictions. Over the years my approach has changed, and while I still work with this material, I do so in different ways, recognizing the good in the bad and the bad in the good. Now it’s about giving rather than declaring. It’s about what she contributed, not what was taken from her. It’s no longer a discourse about our collective and accumulated pain but rather one about everything she gave. It’s a welcome change. Because for all the hurt and trauma, the intergenerational silences and abuses, the decisions not made and the words not said, she was actually as strong a woman as I’ve ever known.

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n ote s 1 Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees. 2 King, The Truth about Stories. 3 Ross, “Canadian Sovereignty in the Arctic,” 87–103. Regarding rcmp officers fathering children in the North, although it was forbidden by the rcmp, many had done it. Beyond whalers who’d fathered many half-breed children in the bay areas, there were even at least six children fathered by rcmp constables at Fullerton, the very first rcmp outpost in the Eastern Arctic. These children totalled 22 per cent of babies born in the first seven years of rcmp presence in the area. 4 Stone, Black Sheep and Kissing Cousins. 5 Qallunaat were generally believed to have small minds, not unlike children. Because they tempered easily, it was best to listen to them and do what they asked. Laugrand and Oosten, Inuit Shamanism and Christianity. 6 Bennett and Rowley, Uqalurait. 7 Alia, Names and Nunavut, 20. 8 Ibid. 9 Tuck and Ree, “A Glossary of Haunting.” 10 Akittiq and Karetak (in conversation), “Inunnguiniq (Making a Human Being),” 126. See also in the same volume Karetak, “Healing Unresolved Issues,” 203. 11 Searles, “Anthropology in an Era of Inuit Empowerment,” 96. 12 As quoted in Igloliorte, “Influence and Instruction,” 73. 13 Ibid. See also Searles, “Anthropology in an Era of Inuit Empowerment,” 95, and Stevenson, “The Ethical Junction to Remember,” 169. 14 Searles, “Anthropology in an Era of Inuit Empowerment,” 96. 15 Nanook of the North was billed as a documentary but is, in fact, a complete fabrication. From the family unit, which was said to be made up of Flaherty’s own wives, to the trader’s post visit, and the tools used for hunting (another attempt to preserve the concept of the “pre-contact Eskimo”), to the idea that Nanook died of starvation two years after the film was made, Flaherty constructed the whole ordeal to successfully capture the minds and hearts of the public. 16 Goldring, “Inuit Economic Responses to Euro-American Contacts,” 252–77. 17 Ross, “Canadian Sovereignty in the Arctic.” 18 Goldring, “Inuit Economic Responses to Euro-American Contacts,” 252. 19 Ross, “Canadian Sovereignty in the Arctic.” 20 I take this term from the “Guiding Principles of Inuit Quajimajatuqangit” poster campaign by the Nunavut government, date unknown. As Womack explains in Red on Red, the traditional could mean “anything that is useful to Indian people in retaining their values and worldviews, no matter how much it deviates from what people did one or two hundred years ago … Only cultures that are able to adapt to change remain living cultures; otherwise they become no longer relevant and are abandoned” (42). 21 Richard Finnie referred to the economic role and authority of the hbc in the early decades of the twentieth century has been rightly referred to as “economic enslavement” in Canada Moves North, 34, as cited in Igloliorte, “Influence and Instruction,” 29.

Silence as Resistance

22 An Inuit Quajimajatuqangit principle, tunnganarniq, also taken from “Guiding Principles of Inuit Quajimajatuqangit,” as cited above. All things are shared no matter how scarce, and everyone, including orphans, strangers, and even Qallunaat are to be welcomed. Ayalik, “Inutsiapagutit (Inuit Teachings),” 94. 23 See Wysote and Morton, this volume. 24 Hampl, “Memory and Imagination,” 29. 25 Uluit are women’s knives of various sizes and sharpnesses designed for cutting meat and skins, and saliguut are scrapers used to remove excess fat and liquid from skins. These are among the only objects that Kumaa’naaq brought with her from the Arctic. 26 Aristotle, De Anima, 65. 27 Browne, “Projection as Performance.” 28 Barr, Red Serge and Polar Bear Pants, 39–71. 29 Ibid. Stallworthy probably refers to tuurngaq, a spirit that can be good or evil, can possess persons to help or harm, and can be held at bay by ritual or exorcised. See “Angakkuuniq: The Powers of the Angakkuq,” Listening to Our Past, http://www.tradition-orale.ca/english/ angakkuuniq-the-powers-the-angakkuq-51.html. 30 Barr, Red Serge and Polar Bear Pants, 39–71. This story is one of Harry Stallworthy’s from when he was an rcmp constable working with Kumaa’naaq. 31 Paakaarjuaq, who served the rcmp until 1954 was the first Inuk to be awarded the Long Service Medal. 32 Karetak, “Healing Unresolved Issues,” 182–207. See also Martha Angugatiaq Ungalaaq quoted in “Family,” in Bennett and Rowley, Uqalurait, 37–8. 33 Kulchyski, “Six Gestures,” 162. 34 The details of my grandmother’s situation are not entirely clear. There was talk of “the girl’s home,” and I know my mother was passed around as a young child. At the time, unwed mothers were often pressured into maternity homes run by religious organizations and the provinces, whose policy was to see the woman “made marriageable” after giving birth. There was great societal pressure for mothers to “rehabilitate” themselves by relinquishing their babies and returning to society where they could fulfill their proper role to society. However, for Inuit, to be raised be another family or community member is a common, respected, and often necessary component of family structures. See Valerie Andrews, “Maternity Homes in Canada.” 35 Rasmussen, Iglulik and Caribou Eskimo Texts. 36 Uluadluak, “Pamiqsainirmik (Training Children),” 147–73. See also Martha Angugatiaq Ungalaaq quoted in “Family,” in Bennett and Rowley, Uqalurait, 37–8. 37 But to her credit, she was a kind and loving grandparent to my mother when she grew up in that house years later. Nevertheless, that’s still an awful lot of hatred and racism in a house full of children and future parents and grandparents. 38 Simpson echoes this point in “The State Is a Man,” 3, where, in assigning the true character of the country based on its own record, she calls out the Canadian state: “The state that I seek to name has a character, it has a male character, it is more than likely white, or aspiring to an unmarked center of whiteness, and definitely heteropatriarchal. I say heteropatriarchal because it serves the interests of what is understood now as ‘straightness’ or heterosexuality and patriarchy, the rule by men.”

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39 Left of Brown and Rodriguez, “Is Decolonizing the New Black?” I thought I came up with this phrase, but sista resista use it here. 40 Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” 1–40. 41 Vimalassery, Hu Pegues, and Goldstein, “Introduction: On Colonial Unknowing.” 42 Government of Canada, “The 1939 Re Eskimo Decision.” Courtney, “Right to Vote in Canada.” 43 An anonymous African American male professor speaking on institutional inertia regarding racialized treatment of various faculty quoted in James and Chapman-Nyaho, “‘Would Never Be Hired These Days,’” 98. 44 Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive, afterword. 45 Ibid. 46 Kimmerer, “Maple Sugar Moon,” 65. 47 Baldwin, “My Dungeon Shook,” 17–24. 48 Kalluak, “About Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit,” 55. Also, Jaypitee Amagualik quoted in “Medicine,” in Bennett and Rowley, Uqalurait, 219–20. 49 Kalluak, “About Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit,” 55. 50 Kral and Idlout, “Participatory Anthropology in Nunavut,” 65. 51 Cook, “Tragic Women.” 52 Gal, “Between Speech and Silence,”176–96. 53 This film, entitled The Words We Can’t Speak, has received funding for shooting in 2022–23, and will likely be released in 2023–24. 54 King, The Inconvenient Indian, 216. 55 Hampl, “Memory and Imagination,” 32. 56 Episkenew, Taking Back Our Spirits, 69.

Part Two Excavating and Creating Decolonial Archives

5.1 Iris Häussler’s He Named Her Amber, 2007.

5 Truth Is No Stranger to (Para)fiction: Settlers, Arrivants, and Place in Iris Häussler’s He Named Her Amber, Camille Turner’s BlackGrange, and Robert Houle’s Garrison Creek Project m a r k a . che et h a m

In modern colonial European art traditions, “truth” arises in part from fictionality. Charles Baudelaire illustrated this truism in the Salon of 1859: “I prefer looking at the backdrop paintings of the stage where I find my favorite dreams treated with consummate skill and tragic concision. Those things, so completely false, are for that reason much closer to the truth, whereas the majority of our landscape painters are liars, precisely because they fail to lie.”1 Parafiction is a contemporary Euro-North American art practice “in which a fiction is presented as fact … a practice of fabulation and figment.”2 To articulate how this new mode goes beyond the nineteenth-century contest between realism and imagination in painting to explore issues of truth and fiction highly topical today in and beyond the arts, I will consider two prominent contemporary artworks sited in the historic Grange neighbourhood in downtown Tkaronto| Toronto. Both are self-conscious excavations and re-instantiations of violent colonial histories of marginalized residents from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, complex histories whose frequent suppression in contemporary settler understandings of Tkaronto|Toronto as a place are in part recalled through the methods of parafiction. Individually and together, these works reveal violent and unsettling truths about settler colonialism and slavery in this confined area, truths that are all too frequently disavowed by dominant settler art histories and by most of the art created on this land. White settler and German immigrant artist Iris Häussler’s He Named Her Amber (2007) (fig. 5.1) was an extensive archaeological installation on two levels of the historic aristocratic residence known as The Grange, which was built for the prominent settler merchant and lawyer D’Arcy Boulton Jr (1785–1846) in 1817 and is now part of the Art Gallery of Ontario. Häussler putatively “discovered” (but actually made) sculptural work attributed to Mary O’Shea, a seventeen-year-old maid from Ireland employed at the house. Amber thus joined other works by Häussler that present “the material

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evidence of obsessive lives and works,” as the artist puts it on her website. It is important to recall how elaborate and prominent Häussler’s installation was. The gallery commissioned Amber as part of its “Transformation ago” expansion, which featured an extension designed by internationally renowned (but locally born) architect Frank Gehry. Amber was a prominent part of the renovated gallery’s reopening in November 2008 and closed in June 2010.3 The ambition of the installation magnified how unusual it is for art to feature a woman from Amber’s social station. African Canadian artist Camille Turner’s ongoing BlackGrange investigates histories of the African diaspora in the same Grange neighbourhood (fig. 5.2). Though not her focus, she also acknowledges and sees as consonant the longer local presence of Indigenous peoples with the later abuses experienced by Black arrivants.4 Commissioned by Toronto WalkingLab and exemplary of walking methodology’s emphasis on “four major themes in walking research: place, sensory inquiry, embodiment, and rhythm,”5 the work exists as a self-guided tour and as a group exploration led by Turner, sometimes in her celebrated role as “Miss Canadiana” and more recently, as a one-time only live performance in March 2018 with her company of AfroFuturists, Outerregion. Creating a cast of protagonists by weaving a series of Grange residents’ stories into a performance, Turner exposes layers of slavery, migration, and colonial exploitation in order to reveal both the past and future of this place and its peoples anew.6 Against the adage that “truth is stranger than fiction,” I suggest that these parafictional works by Häussler and Turner are not only more peculiar and compelling than straightforward verism on the one hand and conventional artistic fictions on the other but also that a viewer’s understanding of these elaborate artworks can yield a profound sense of aesthetic truth that in turn can reveal the complex and overlapping violences of slave-holding and indentured colonial pasts on the territory of the Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee, and Mississaugas of the New Credit. When art works explore issues such as slavery and migration, race and colonialism, labour and class, as they do in the cases presented here, access to and through the aesthetic becomes all the more important, perhaps especially to a settler art historian whose work should acknowledge and draw on the scholarship of Black and Indigenous art historians.7 To expand these discussions, I also consider Saulteaux artist Robert Houle’s nearby but relatively unknown Garrison Creek Project (1996) (fig. 5.3), which quietly articulates the long-term Indigenous and geological presence beneath the quintessentially modern colonial enterprise of turning Garrison Creek in the centralwest part of Tkaronto|Toronto into an underground sewer system.8 As we will see, Houle’s work is embedded in the land and is a walking piece; it is not strictly a parafiction but is crucial in this chapter as a comparator. Different though they are in format and intent, many characteristics link Turner and Häussler’s parafictions. One is place. Another is the overlapping nineteenthcentury timeframe and its attendant colonial histories. Visitors are led or escorted through both works, often by the artists themselves. The artists’ orchestrations delineate the specifics of how what we might call the protagonists of both works came to

Settlers, Arrivants, and Place in Häussler, Turner, and Houle

5.2 Camille Turner and Outerregion, BlackGrange, 2018.

be in the Grange neighbourhood and how they fared there as women, servants, and, in Turner’s work, as Black arrivants. These artworks remind us to avoid any hierarchy of belonging. In Charmaine A. Nelson’s terms, “to buy into the idea of historical presence as the only legitimate way for one to be/become Canadian is to accept and to contribute to a limited colonial logic which privileges certain forms of geographical emplacement over mobilities, trajectories and other types of engagement with place.”9 Both Turner and Häussler are also persistent researchers. Overt fictions on several planes but replete with veracity as participatory acts of memory, their artworks have the capacity to communicate truths about settlers, arrivants, and place that have long been invisible and silenced in historical and contemporary settler contexts. Setting

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5.3 Robert Houle, Garrison Creek Project, 1996 (detail).

these two complex reinvestigations of elided histories in this specific place into dialogue, I seek to illuminate Häussler and Turner’s aesthetic techniques and commitments as they address issues of slavery and settler colonialism through art’s capacity to reconstruct historical realities in the present. Before turning to the intricacies of these works, however, I want to comment briefly on two historical and theoretical matrices that attend the notion of parafiction, ideas that are relevant to our apprehension of the effects and peculiar affect of this form in general, and that thus subtend what we can learn from specific works in this genre such as Turner’s and Häussler’s: the nineteenth-century English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s well-known idea of the willing suspension of disbelief and Jacques Rancière’s influential understanding of fiction and the aesthetic. One must suspend disbelief to experience any number of parafictional works: for example, Lebanese media artist Walid Raad’s creation of the fictional but fully believable Atlas Group’s work in the Middle East as a way to explore the fraught history of the region; the lives of those inhabiting British installation artist Mike Nelson’s abandoned trailers; Scottish writer William Boyd’s invention of the AbEx artist Nat Tate; American performance artist Andrea Fraser’s 1989 Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk, in which she adopted the alter ego of a docent named Jane Castleton and led unconventional art tours of the Philadelphia Museum of Art;10 and in Canada, Carol Sawyer’s creation of Surrealist performance artist Natalie Brettschneider and Vera Frenkel’s pioneering videos The Secret Life of Cornelia Lumsden: A Remarkable Story (Part 1, Her Room in Paris, 1979; Part 2, “And Now The Truth” (A Parenthesis), 1980). Coleridge explains in the Biographia Literaria (1817 – coincidentally, the year The Grange was built) that his memorable and influential phrase, “the willing suspension

Settlers, Arrivants, and Place in Häussler, Turner, and Houle

of disbelief,” arose in the context of discussions about poetry with William Wordsworth. “Our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry,” he reports, “the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination.”11 They agreed that Coleridge would experiment with the latter mode, the imaginative and supernatural, topics that required readers to abandon their quotidian frames of reference in favour of what Coleridge calls “poetic faith.” Adaptations of Coleridge’s idea are numerous and intricate.12 I bring the idea of the suspension of scepticism forward as a factor in the truth effects of parafiction. As Lambert-Beatty points out in her masterly article on parafiction in contemporary art, trust in the truthfulness of what one experiences in parafiction is crucial to its power for viewers.13 How and to what effect do we adopt such a liminal state of mind? The psychological efficacy of Coleridge’s early nineteenth-century notion can be understood via the twentieth-century British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott’s notions of suspension, play, and transitional space. Winnicott asserted “how important it can be for the analyst to recognize the existence of this place, the only place where play can start, a place that is at the continuity-contiguity moment, where transitional phenomena originate.”14 Parafictional works self-consciously problematize boundaries between everyday reality and art and are akin to what Winnicott theorized as a “third area” or space. The selves constructed in parafictions – and, arguably, in those of us taking in a parafictional work – fleetingly operate in an imaginative and embodied space that we can productively call “aesthetic.” In the parafictions that I discuss below, however, Coleridge’s willing suspension of disbelief powerfully morphs into our sometimesunwilling engagement of belief. Jacques Rancière implores us to reconsider the nature of fiction: “Fiction is a way of changing existing modes of sensory presentations and forms of enunciation; of varying frames … temporality. Similar to political action, it effectuates a change in the distribution of the sensible.”15 “Making fictions does not mean telling stories,” he elaborates. “It means undoing and rearticulating the connections between signs and images, images and times, or signs and space that frame the existing sense of reality. Fiction invents new communities of sense: that is to say, new trajectories between what can be seen, what can be said, and what can be done.”16 In my view, parafiction takes this all-important shift further because as participants we are not sure that we are in an art context and thus whether what we experience is fiction or something else. When we consider the gender, racial, and colonial politics in He Named Her Amber and BlackGrange, Rancière’s reconceptualization of fiction is key because he offers a way to understand both pieces as “political” in the sense that they reorganize our views. He claims that we should localize the politics of fiction not in terms of what it represents but in terms of what it operates: the situations that it constructs, the populations that it convokes, the relations of inclusion or exclusion that it institutes, the borders

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that it traces or effaces between perception and action, between the states of things and the movements of thought; the relations that it establishes or suspends between situations and their meanings, between temporal coexistences or successions and chains of causality.17 These critical perspectives on fiction, belief, and truth in part inform my readings of Häussler and Turner’s focused revelations through parafiction of colonial circumstances in the Grange neighbourhood of Tkaronto|Toronto. In retrospect, these two works collaborate to expose many fictions created by colonialism, including that discourse’s privileging of a white servant, however oppressed she was, over any Black or Indigenous presence in Tkaronto|Toronto. What is ultimately fictional, but appallingly present in so many lives nonetheless, then, is the prevailing narrative and practice of colonialism – what scholars Vimalassery, Hu Pegues, and Goldstein have famously referred to as “colonial unknowing,” of not recognizing colonialism when it is in front of us.18 Iris Häussler’s elaborate “immersive installation”19 He Named Her Amber was by no means her first parafictional work, but in scale it was her most extravagant to date.20 The archived website for the project explains its parafictional nature: Haussler presented a complex narrative around a young Irish woman who had worked as a maid at The Grange. Mysteriously bequeathed papers revealed that Mary O’Shea had over the years hidden objects and documents in and around the house. Subsequently, Archeological Services Ontario (aso) found a veritable Pandora’s box of items and, since opening in 2008, thousands of visitors have toured the site. Only after the event did the artist and the Gallery reveal to the world that “He Named Her Amber” was a commissioned work of art and not an historical find.21 It was the household’s butler who named O’Shea “Amber” (likely because of her habit of encasing objects in reddish wax and then hiding them) and who also purportedly helped to uncover and literally to map her peculiar, perhaps artistic, preoccupations, the traces of which Häussler and her colleagues ostensibly unearthed and displayed in meticulous archival detail. Not allowed to wander this archaeological site at random as they might a conventional art exhibition, visitors were obliged to follow Häussler’s carefully scripted formal tour. Though questions were encouraged, we were not left on our own to imagine that the work means whatever we think it does. Sometimes she led this forty-minute exploration herself but without revealing her authorship. Trained docents also guided visitors through the manse’s library, the below stairs kitchen, and into formerly secret places where Amber purportedly worked.22 We learn that Amber was obsessed with wax. She skimmed the home’s candles, hoarding this valuable commodity in order to encase a range of objects important to her (letters for example) and then, as we see in the dramatic conclusion of the tour, secretly to create

Settlers, Arrivants, and Place in Häussler, Turner, and Houle

a low relief sculpture that bears the imprint of her own face. Amber’s work was clandestine, dangerous, and obsessive. The careful construction of the tour was crucial to belief, beginning with the butler’s credible if paternalistic nickname for the protagonist whose life we retrace. I took the excursion three times, first with an invited group when my disbelief was at times suspended, and twice as a fascinated observer of the works’ myriad details and brilliantly manipulative structure. After an introduction, visitors were conducted downstairs and implored not to touch anything in this apparently active archaeological site. The guide then mentioned the resident archaeologist from the aso – Chantal C. Lee – and suggested that we might sneak into her office, since she’s away at the moment. Tour members manifestly approve of this (tightly scripted) serendipity and are thus strategically given a dose of scientific reality in the private office: diagrams, charts, notes, etc., and, noticed by some, a picture of Dr Lee herself. We are encouraged to ask questions and give comments on the spot or via email later, which many do as they develop their own theories about why Amber behaved as she did.23 So persuaded by this part of the installation was one visitor that he wrote to thank the (fictitious) Dr Lee afterwards, saying that he knew they’d met at a conference.24 Other respondents offered professional advice on the excavation. As these responses suggest, visitors are typically “into” the experience, both in the sense of being enthusiastic and of buying into the narrative of Mary/Amber as it unfolds on the tour. Before turning to the important issue of when, how, and what Häussler revealed about Amber as a parafictional artwork and “Amber” as an historical actant (that is, of her parafictionality), however, let us pause on the question of authenticity, specifically the fiction that we were visiting an archaeological site. That this site was in a major art gallery should, in retrospect at least, have alerted many visitors, including me, to the possibility that it was art. Many of us know that archaeology is an important trope in contemporary art,25 part of a recent broad historiographic turn. Exemplifying again a remarkably eager suspension of disbelief, perhaps, I was not only aware of these tendencies in contemporary art but was also invited by a then-curator at the ago, David Moos, to take the tour before it opened to the public. I was more intrigued than suspicious. Good timing guaranteed the cover that Häussler and ago staff exploited. The Tkaronto|Toronto art community was used to hearing about Gehry’s expansion of the gallery and the attendant work on The Grange; archaeological finds were easily believable. That the artist was part of this particular tour might have alerted those who recalled her analogous earlier project The Legacy of Joseph Wagenbach (2006), which told the story of a productive if eccentric artist who lived in Häussler’s (actual) basement and whose (fictive, in most respects) working and living space audiences visited during Toronto’s 2006 Nuit Blanche, to legendary acclaim.26 I knew about this work, but not having met the artist at that time, was not alert to potential parafictional analogies by her presence on this tour. At the conclusion of regular tours of the installation, visitors received a brochure in which Häussler revealed the nature of the project, its status as art. Like Coleridge

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and Winnicott, Häussler’s priority was her visitors’ affective experience of the many dimensions of Amber. “There is a very large difference between thinking about emotions and actually experiencing them,” she claimed. “It’s about enabling imagination,” she said. “You give up intellectual control for a moment and let yourself go.”27 Part of what was given up – suspended – were the overbearing structures of museum display. The parameters established by her carefully stage-managed parafiction supported viewers’ trust in what they were seeing. The experience was more real because it paralleled the real but did not fully replicate it. Paradoxically, it was aesthetic in Rancière’s expanded sense of the “distribution of the sensible” because, despite its location, it seemed not to be an artworld phenomenon. Coleridge, whose ideas Häussler credits in conversation, also sought to create a space for imagination through the temporary suspension of disbelief found when we enter the state of “poetic faith.” Häussler’s parafiction intensified emotions by inverting quotidian expectations. Instead of a willing suspension of disbelief, Amber was able to occasion an unwilling – because hesitant, in my case – engagement of belief. How can this odd intermediary state of consciousness be described and explained? As noted above, Winnicott postulated a “third part of the life of a human being, a part that we cannot ignore, … an intermediate area of experiencing, to which inner reality and external life both contribute. It is an area which is not challenged, because no claim is made on its behalf except that it shall exist as a resting-place for the individual engaged in the perpetual human task of keeping inner and outer reality separate yet inter-related.”28 Amber garnered a considerable range of emotional responses: from those who were apparently unaware of its fictitiousness and found it fascinating as a “dig,” to those who were in on the art game played and thought it was done well, and those who were upset at having been duped. One of the tour guides for He Named Her Amber, Martha Baillie, reflected on her role in creating this parafiction and concluded, “we are made vulnerable by our desire to trust, by our faith in the authority of institutions, [by a] story about our ability to overlook crucial details, about the shaping and fabrication of history, memory, and art.”29 Veracity carries high stakes. Häussler received death threats over what some perceived as the work’s prevarications, its intention to mislead.30 Amber is especially powerful because Häussler labours to encourage our sympathy for – even identification with – Mary, a young woman with few choices in life thanks to her indentured position, who harbours an odd but unmistakable creative urge. Häussler’s installation uproots the colonial, aristocratic, British story of The Grange that is typically told at the Art Gallery of Ontario, given that the Boulton family gave the house and land to the city to establish an art gallery. Noblesse oblige is overturned by Mary; we want to believe in her and might well be upset to discover that her life is, from an empirical perspective, a fiction. At the same time, as a white settler male, I also have to ask if my sympathy for this indictment of Mary’s servitude elides the Black and Indigenous histories of this place. She wasn’t enslaved; her employers did, at the least, expropriate

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land. I – and I think the still dominant white settler heteropatriarchal “we” – need Turner’s BlackGrange to throw the partiality of Amber into further relief. Credibility is equally important to Camille Turner’s performance BlackGrange and is achieved on the ground through the artist’s interweaving of verifiable historical people and events with fictive elaborations. By guiding us through seven historical vignettes sited in the Grange neighbourhood, Turner creates a continuous narrative of Black citizens as community builders and activists. Some migrated voluntarily from the US and the Caribbean; others came to the Grange as enslaved people. The home of the first Canadian-born Black physician, Anderson Ruffin Abbott, is the first stop. The penultimate place where Turner explicitly stages a reckoning with this past is Peter Street, very close to the Art Gallery of Ontario, and named (as she emphasizes) for the Irish-born enslaver who was also the receiver and auditor general of Upper Canada in the late eighteenth century, Peter Russell. In 1806, Russell advertised Peggy [Pompadour] and her son Jupiter for sale as slaves (fig. 5.4).31 In the enlightened future that BlackGrange envisions – an AfroFuturist “time when crimes against humanity have been exposed and those whose future was stolen have been compensated … we have thrived,”32 she asserts in the first narrative segment – we would celebrate Peggy and her son for their fortitude and resistance rather than commemorating Russell and his many transgressions.33

5.4 Camille Turner, documentation of Peggy Pompadour from Jane’s Walk, 2011.

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Turner’s performances in the Grange neighbourhood bring Black history to mind as we walk these streets today, a history often violently separated from land through slavery and by later dispossessions driven by racism. As historical plaques located at some of her stopping places suggest, she is not alone in recalling these histories, yet they remain elided, submerged in the infrastructure of settler society, and thus ultimately part of an interlinked and dual erasure and elimination of Indigenous peoples and anti-Blackness. In her scholarship, Turner shows that “Blackness has been systematically ‘disappeared’ from the Canadian nation. [She explores] various mechanisms through which this disappearance has been achieved, ranging from historical omissions to social exclusion as well as literally burying evidence of Canada’s Black past.”34 She reminds us that we have to look for and work hard to recuperate such histories, even in Häussler’s Amber. Her walk is successful in reminding us specifically of these intersecting histories of land – that it was violently expropriated from its Indigenous population and made unavailable to enslaved Black people whose bodies settler-slave masters, including some of the Irish immigrants memorialized in Häussler’s recollection of The Grange, used for land-based production. Given the hardships endured by her protagonists, Turner’s narrative is nonetheless generous to all contemporary viewers in its optimism. She reanimates historical Black figures who were valiant and successful in this neighbourhood despite the violence and erasure they faced. While there is no doubting the past that Turner brings into the present, BlackGrange is not a straightforward history lesson. Her adoption of two powerful alter egos in versions of her Grange work distinguishes it specifically as a parafiction – as elaborations on the more “normal” templates upon which she builds, such as the historical walking tour – and, I believe, paradoxically makes her story more believable. Kate Warren describes the linkage between alter egos and parafiction: “Parafictional personas are a specific iteration, characterised by two key components: they compulsively imbue every opportunity with layers of interconnections and self-reflexive moments; and they involve artists and performers appropriating their own ‘proper name’, constructing fictionalised doubles of themselves.”35 In Hidden Black Histories of The Grange (2011), Turner led in the memorable guise of “Miss Canadiana,” a fictive beauty queen. While a Black woman is convincing in this role in contemporary downtown Tkaronto|Toronto, Turner first adopted this persona in 2002 after her experiences in less urban parts of Ontario where her Blackness made her feel more visible. “My image as Miss Canadiana points to the contradiction of the Canadian mythology. My body, as a representative of Canadian heritage, is surprising only because Blackness is perceived as foreign in Canada,” she explains.36 Much more than a knowledgeable tour guide, here Turner’s persona allows her to both show pride in elements of her heritage in The Grange neighbourhood and to implicitly challenge viewers who might construe her narrative as unusual or even inappropriate. Her performance provides continuity for the narrative; her affirmative arrival in the present recalibrates what we see from the past.

Settlers, Arrivants, and Place in Häussler, Turner, and Houle

5.5 Camille Turner as “Miss Canadiana,” Hidden Black Histories of the Grange (part of Jane’s Walk), 2011.

In BlackGrange, Turner elaborates some of the same histories but orchestrates their effects via another persona, that of a leader in an AfroFuturist collective with knowledge of the future. Highly visible in the costume for this role, and in contrast to the guide in Häussler’s Amber who passes simply as a tour guide rather than the artist, she embodies her radical acknowledgment of Black history across The Grange. By recalling what happened to Black people in the past on this land, she changes the present and, potentially, the future. But the tense of these disruptions differs from the 2011 performance. Where Miss Canadiana insisted on a rather dramatic present, Turner as AfroFuturist sees the potential of Black futurity. In Rancière’s terms quoted above with reference to fiction, parafiction of this sort “is a way of changing existing modes of sensory presentations and forms of enunciation; of varying frames … temporality. Similar to political action, it effectuates a change in the distribution of the sensible.” I have claimed that BlackGrange and Amber are comparable in that they are parafictions focusing on the same delimited place, The Grange. I have also maintained that such parafictions have a special ability to elicit various truths. When we compare the two works by asking what each tells us about its chosen subjects, complementary differences appear between the works as they are brought to comment on one another.

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Häussler’s Amber begins with a welcome to The Grange and a few words about the site’s history and current role at the heart of the Art Gallery of Ontario. Significantly, though, the guide immediately states that “our focus today is not on the history books or the landed gentry of the time, but on an altogether different story”;37 that is, the story of Mary O’Shea and, indirectly, of parafictional art’s unique ability to tell her story. Had she been an actual historical person, Mary would have been silenced, even while she was also unwittingly a part of Tkaronto|Toronto settler society’s racial hierarchy defined by what Wysote and Morton call in this volume “white settler tautologies – things that seem true by the very nature of their repetition and their logical irrefutability under settler colonialism.” She would have been ignored and forgotten because she was young, Irish as opposed to English (and thus still subject to the habits of centuries of British colonization of Ireland and the Irish, which contextualized Irish participation in the settler colonization of the Americas), a woman, and a servant. Häussler’s elaborate parafiction gives Mary a presence that those whom she represents and makes present emotionally would not have had in early nineteenth-century Upper Canada. This was the world of the ruling class, the paradigmatically colonial Family Compact. British law professor A.V. Dicey recalled on a visit to The Grange, “Here one is suddenly set down in an old English house, surrounded by grounds, with old fourpost beds, old servants, all English, and English hosts … an English mansion in some English county.”38 D’Arcy Boulton Sr (1759–1834) compared the US, to which he initially emigrated from England, to Upper Canada in his 1805 Sketch of His Majesty’s Province of Upper Canada: “When I first crossed the St. Lawrence, and set my foot on British ground … I seemed at once to step home … I need not describe my feelings … a true Englishman can well imagine them, and with respect to those that are not so, I am perfectly indifferent.”39 Fleeing famine in Ireland and likely supporting her family there, according to Häussler in her catalogue notes, O’Shea was a servant in this heart of Englishness. Her low status is enacted in He Named Her Amber through her habits of secrecy. The artifacts that Häussler laboriously produced in her name, and which we see displayed in The Grange for anthropological assessment, had to be concealed by Mary/Amber, then excavated physically from the basement and grounds of the estate. Their burial suggests the recesses of Amber’s psyche and, by extension, the immeasurable underside of the colonial and patriarchal class system. We see and feel the fact that as a woman and a servant, Amber could never have revealed herself – or the status of so many migrants that we extrapolate from her fictional depiction here – in the way that parafiction can. To bring our two works at and around The Grange into conversation, it is the documentary, explicitly non-fictional dimension of Turner’s BlackGrange – including the historical but semi-fictional Peggy Pompadour – that forcefully reminds us that Mary’s life at The Grange (which is to say, Häussler’s parafiction) depends in part on earlier, all too real dispossessions. Through an archaeology of Mary O’Shea’s life, Häussler digs deep into mid-nineteenth-century mores and customs in colonial Tkaronto|Toronto. As she readily acknowledges in conversation, her method brings parafiction close to Freud. Two of the

Settlers, Arrivants, and Place in Häussler, Turner, and Houle

most potent analogies ever imagined in European culture were Freud’s likening of psychoanalysis to archaeology and to the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious as a Mystic Writing Pad that employed a wax foundation to preserve trace impressions. Describing how he and Josef Breuer worked with hysterics, for example, he wrote, “I arrived at a procedure which I later developed into a regular method and employed deliberately. This procedure was one of clearing away the pathogenic psychical material layer by layer, and we liked to compare it with the technique of excavating a buried city.”40 We have seen that Häussler’s stated purpose in this work was to uncover the life of her main protagonist. This she does in compulsive detail yet with extraordinary subtlety. By siting the work at The Grange and detailing Amber’s life, she reveals the material and colonial underpinnings of the society in which Mary worked – the transplanted and thriving English society of the Boultons. As we have seen, D’Arcy Boulton Sr published a paean to his adopted city (called York at this time) and its surrounds in 1805 and dedicated it to “The King.” Coincidentally or not, his colonial enthusiasms appeared in the same year that the much-disputed Toronto Purchase,41 which first transferred a massive tract of land from the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation to the British in 1787, was revised. “When Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe investigated the [1787 transaction] personally in 1792, he was able to uncover but a single document: a blank deed with no description of the land that had been purchased by the Crown, with the totems of the three Mississauga Chiefs.”42 From a settler colonial perspective, the “clarification” of 1805 established this land as British and ripe for the early nineteenth-century’s sense of expansionist “development.” Though this history is not examined directly in He Named Her Amber, Boulton would have been aware of the recent and fraught “transfer” of the land that he had bought for his estate. At the outset of BlackGrange, Turner acknowledges that her narratives take place on Indigenous land and proposes that the suffering of the Black lives that she describes is a continuation of that of the Mississaugas and other groups under colonial rule – one can be recalled through the other. This recognition, and D’Arcy Boulton Jr’s colonial transformation of Indigenous land into settler property at The Grange, suggest the need for a deeper excavation, however; one provided in 1996 by Robert Houle’s insufficiently known Garrison Creek Project.43 Anchored by an in-ground map and text at the southeast corner of what is now Tkaronto|Toronto’s Trinity Bellwoods Park and a twin plaque in Stanley Park, several blocks toward the lake to the south, and joined by roundels that depict the area’s fauna from salmon to crayfish set into the sidewalk between these maps, the meandering installation as a whole invites us to experience the Garrison Creek Project as a walking work (fig. 5.3). But the Garrison Creek Project stands its ground without a guide or indeed any didactic markings along the way. Set in the urban infrastructure that now overlays the land, and without the self-conscious, sometimes didactic mechanics of parafiction, in its quiet way, Houle’s work is the most temporally and culturally inclusive of the three I discuss. As a memory of the ancient and pre-colonial earth, it marks part of the now underground

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course of Garrison Creek, which flows south from the ancient shoreline of ice-age Lake Iroquois to the edge of present-day Lake Ontario. Because of an abundance of fish and access to the lake, the mouth of this waterway was the site of Indigenous communities for millennia, as well as of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century settler fortification that gave it its English name, one redolent of invasion and occupation. The fishing weirs used by Indigenous groups in this and similar nearby locales where rivers flowed into the lake inspired the name Tkaronto, which, according to some sources, was expanded from a reference to fishing weirs and trees reflected in the water to mean a more general gathering place.44 Houle describes the project as follows: Commissioned by the city, the map … was designed by me with the word water translated into … languages spoken in Toronto; and critters on Walnut St. from Queen to Wellington Streets are a kind of memory lane of the creek which is now buried underneath. Like Rome our city has developed layers of human evidence upon where we walk daily. I wanted to remember the previous landscape by focusing on the pavement especially while going for a walk. As Anishnabe, I like walking and observing the ground upon which my feet are stepping. It goes with the notion of knowing that Mother Earth is just underneath. It brings me some comfort to an otherwise manufactured manicured landscape.45 Houle’s reference to the “manufactured” landscape adds a later – but also largely invisible – colonial stratum to the layered history of the land and its first human and other inhabitants. Just as D’Arcy Boulton Jr participated in Tkaronto|Toronto’s rapid westward expansion along the lake in the early-to-mid nineteenth century by establishing The Grange, building around Garrison Creek turned it from a salmon stream and meeting place into an open sewer that was linked to outbreaks of cholera and typhus in the area (fig. 5.6). The city’s narrative on the two plaques that anchor Houle’s work makes this white European settler history paramount. Today’s settlers are reminded that the creek is important because it fed Fort York, a crucial military asset in colonial history. Beginning in 1884–85 in the midst of a scandal over land speculation in the area sparked by the city’s need to buy property for its Garrison Creek project, and for decades following, the city undertook engineering schemes to make the stream into a covered sewer, burying it in the process and using excavated materials to create relatively level parks and streets along its path.46 Scandal dogged the often-shoddy construction of this sewer. The city’s narrative urges visitors to “Trace the path of the buried Garrison Creek Ravine. Explore parklands, traditional neighbourhoods and vibrant main streets.” Houle evokes a much longer and more complex history and a more meaningful set of connections for walkers of his artwork. The two full-size maps of the nineteenth-century city and its water systems that bookend Houle’s work are bordered

Settlers, Arrivants, and Place in Häussler, Turner, and Houle

5.6 Robert Houle, Garrison Creek Project, 1996. Detail, roundel set into the sidewalk.

by twenty-four translations of the word “water,” some in Indigenous languages, suggesting again the multiple and dynamic overlay of peoples on this land. Houle’s work brings to mind in our fleeting, precariously imagined present the geological history of this place, that of its human and other-than human inhabitants – Indigenous and other– its tumultuous white settler colonial past, and our individual and collective consciousness today as walkers through the Garrison Creek Project. In the terms set out by Gerald McMaster, Julia Lum, and Kaitlin McCormick, this interaction is inevitably but now explicitly an “entangled gaze” that combines how Indigenous artists creatively view settler contexts and vice versa.47 It might seem odd to include the Garrison Creek Project in a chapter that examines the special qualities of parafiction. While it shares with Amber and BlackGrange a commitment to excavating and restoring memory from subterranean strata and from the elisions of settler histories, and like them is perambulatory, as a work of public art commissioned by city planners, it must speak to a wider audience than that envisioned by Häussler or Turner. While all three works effectively inform, evoke, and sometimes persuade their interlocutors with the narratives they weave, the lack of control that Houle has over the Garrison Creek Project makes evident that it is finally the individual participants in these works who co-create fiction, parafiction, and truth. To create a truthful and efficacious (para)fiction, the work must allow and enjoin us to dream – as Baudelaire claimed – to occupy that privileged psychic and material space envisioned by Winnicott as a “third part of the life of a human being, a part that we cannot

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ignore, … an intermediate area of experiencing, to which inner reality and external life both contribute.” It is from this place that we can remember the history of the earth and of Indigenous and settler realities as we walk through their material traces in He Named Her Amber, BlackGrange, and the Garrison Creek Project.

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I want to acknowledge the generous engagement and support of artists Iris Häussler, Robert Houle, and Camille Turner, as well as research funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Erin Morton’s keen editorial suggestions and those of two anonymous readers were salutary, as were the many conversations about Häussler with Elizabeth D. Harvey. Cited in Benjamin, “The Decorative Landscape,” 295. Lambert-Beatty, “Lost Wax.” While parafiction is related to the larger category of the hoax, which Jessup examines brilliantly in This Is Not a Hoax, I emphasize what I believe are the unique aspects of parafiction. Jessup discusses the nature of the hoax in connection with Häussler’s He Named Her Amber, among other works. A full history of this site in colonial times is given by Jessup in This Is Not a Hoax. The term is Caribbean writer Kamau Brathwaite’s. It identifies people who are neither Indigenous nor settlers in the sense of free migrants. Arrivants, in Braithwaite’s use of the term, have instead been forcibly transported to the Americas as part of the colonial and imperial project of slavery. Byrd employs the term in Transit of Empire, as does Patel, following Byrd, in “Complicating the Tale of ‘Two Indians,’” both in ways that expand Braithwaite’s category to reference arrivants from multiple colonial contexts arriving in North America (see n21). Springgay and Truman, Walking Methodologies in a More-than-Human World (italics removed), and Pinder, “Ghostly Footsteps,” 1–19, who in his analyses of audio works by Janet Cardiff approaches the notion of parafiction from this medium. Turner has described her walking works in detail in “Miss Canadiana Confronts.” I wish to acknowledge the crucial work of Charmaine A. Nelson on these topics in Canada, in particular, her collection Ebony Roots, Northern Soil and Slavery, Geography and Empire, which details the visual cultures of slavery in Upper and Lower Canada. Just before this chapter went to press, I was also able to benefit from the analysis of Houle’s Garrison Creek Project by Julie Nagam (“Disrupting Toronto’s Urban Space”). I wish to acknowledge that the research for this chapter and the works it examines exist on the traditional land of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and most recently, the Mississaugas of the Credit River. This meeting place is still home to many Indigenous people from across Turtle Island. I am grateful to have the opportunity to work on this land. I am also grateful to Erin Morton, Iris Häussler, Robert Houle, and Camille Turner for conversations about this work over many years. My thanks to Wanda Nanibush for her expert introduction to Houle’s Garrison Creek Project. Nelson, Ebony Roots, 2. Issues of race and national belonging are also examined by Francis in Creative Subversions. Whether all artistic creation is in part autobiographical is an abiding question. Artists who

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famously crafted alter egos include Marcel Duchamp, Joan Jonas, and Theaster Gates. See Warren, “Double Trouble.” Coleridge, “Chapter XIV.” See Jacobsen, “Looking for Literary Space.” Jacobsen points to Winnicott as a way to understand Coleridge’s seminal idea. Lambert-Beatty, “Make Believe.” Winnicott, “The Location of Cultural Experience,” 372. Rancière, Dissensus, loc. 2665, Kindle. Rancière, “Contemporary Art,” 49. Rancière, The Lost Thread, loc. 346, Kindle. Vimalassery, Hu Pegues, and Goldstein, “Introduction,” para 1. The artist’s term. See Häussler, “Immersive Installations.” See for example the “Joseph Wagenbach Foundation” or “The Sophie La Rosière Project” at Iris Häussler, “Project Sites,” http://haeussler.ca/project-sites (accessed 2 November 2018). Art Gallery of Ontario, “Iris Häussler: He Named Her Amber.” A video tour may be taken at Art Gallery of Ontario, “Tour of The Grange Exhibition,” 3 May 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGRvxRKXf30&spfreload=10 (accessed 3 May 2018). Häussler’s own “Narrative Tour,” including notes to other guides about information to convey at various stations on the tour, is published in the catalogue of the exhibition, Iris Häussler, “Narrative Tour,” in He Named Her Amber (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 2011). Characteristic follow-up emails are archived: Art Gallery of Ontario Visitor Emails, “Mystery at Grange House,” 16 March 2009, http://www.ago.net/mystery-at-grange-house (accessed 2 November 2018). Art Gallery of Ontario Visitor Emails, “Strange Coincidence or Truth,” http://www.ago.net/ strange-coincidence-or-truth (accessed 2 November 2018). For example, The Way of the Shovel: On the Archaeological Imaginary in Art (2013–14), Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. This was Häussler’s first full-scale parafictional work after her emigration to Toronto, but it echoes Ou Topos (Vienna 1989), which she reprised in Toronto in 2012 as Ou Topos – Abandoned Trailer Project. As well, Ou topos (Munich 1990), Pro Polis (1993), Mneme (1996), Monopati (2000), Paulina, (2000), and Therese (2004/2005). She meticulously and wryly maintained the fiction of sculptor Joseph Wagenbach for years. When she moved house, she moved him into her new basement. Touring this refictionalized site in 2013 and asking to see the basement, one of us was treated to Häussler’s knowing response to the effect, “yes, I think he has gone out for a while.” She has also maintained his archive and exhibits work under his name. See “Joseph Wagenbach Foundation,” http://www.wagenbach.org/en-foundation.shtml (accessed 2 November 2018). Every element of Amber similarly maintains the fiction that the narrative is not fictional. Häussler continues to create elaborate parafictional works but is now more explicit about their fictional characteristics from the outset. Iris Häussler, He Named Her Amber. Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” 90. Baillie, “Memoir of a Tour Guide,” 96.

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30 Iris Häussler, interview by author, August 2013. 31 Turner created a separate work exploring Peggy’s life, Hush Harbour (2013), which she describes as “a Sonic Walk that incorporates sound, walking through space and listening through headphones to (re)imagine Toronto’s Black past and to remap Blackness onto the Toronto landscape.” Camille Turner, Hush Harbour. 32 Quotations are from the archived version of Turner, BlackGrange. The AfroFuturist temporal dimensions of BlackGrange are an evolution of Turner’s project The Final Frontier, which she describes as “an ongoing performance that chronicles the voyage of African Astronauts, descendants of the Dogon people of West Africa, who have returned to earth after 10,000 years to save the planet. Performed live across Canada in places such as Lethbridge, Alberta, and Kamloops, British Columbia, it uses the iconography of science fiction to explore the coded terrain of the mythic Canadian landscape.” Turner, The Final Frontier. Another related project, the Afronautic Research Lab, similarly envisions practical aide from the future: “Tackling one issue at a time, [the Afronauts] invite citizen researchers to join them in their Afronautic Research Lab. Currently, they are confronting Canada’s historical amnesia … by unveiling 18th century newspapers and inviting visitors to contemplate the ads posted by Canadian slave owners.” Turner, “Afronautic Research Lab.” 33 Turner’s focus on names and commemoration is directly relevant to the current call in Toronto to rename Dundas Street – which borders the Grange neighbourhood – rather than recognize Henry Dundas (1742–1811), a Scottish politician who successfully delayed the abolition of the slave trade in Britain. 34 Turner, “Evoking a Site of Memory,” 2. 35 Warren, “Double Trouble,” 55 (italics removed). 36 Turner, Miss Canadiana. 37 Häussler, “Narrative Tour,” 7. 38 Quoted in Plummer, “Historicist.” 39 Boulton, Sketch, 4. 40 Breuer and Freud, Studies on Hysteria, 80. 41 The Toronto Purchase was only one of approximately twenty treaties between the British and Mississaugas c. 1783–1820, which together deprived Indigenous people of almost all of their land. See Mississaugas of the New Credit, Toronto Purchase Specific Claim. The Toronto Purchase remained in dispute until a settlement was made between the Mississaugas and the Government of Canada in 2010. 42 Historical Maps of Toronto, “1787–1805 Plan of the Toronto Purchase.” 43 Nagam’s “Disrupting Toronto’s Urban Space through the Creative (In)terventions of Robert Houle” was published after I wrote this chapter and articulates a full understanding of this piece in the context of Houle’s related works. She writes: Houle’s artwork confronts settler mythologies regarding the occupation of space and challenges these constructs by bringing into public discourse counter-models of Native space articulated through Indigenous stories of place. His re-mapping of the City of Toronto is grounded in ideas of geography, history, and Indigenous knowledge in ways that, I argue, complement

Settlers, Arrivants, and Place in Häussler, Turner, and Houle

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45 46 47

the notion of Native space as a network of relationships akin to those traditionally navigated over waterways and across land. Bringing these connections to the forefront challenges the grid system constructed by settler culture that overwrites Indigenous mappings of the cityscape. (192) Howard, “Toronto’s Native History,” 5. For a fuller account of the disputed origins and meanings of the word, see Dragonfly Consulting Services Canada, “‘Toronto’ Is an Iroquois Word,” 20 August 2012, http://dragonflycanada.ca/toronto-is-an-iroquois-word/ (accessed 6 May 2018). Robert Houle, e-mail message to author, 31 March 2018. Michael Cook, “Burying the Garrison Creek: A History,” The Vanishing Point, http://www. vanishingpoint.ca/garrison-creek-sewer-history (accessed 6 May 2018). McMaster, Lum, and McCormick, “The Entangled Gaze,” 125–40.

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6 “Ran away from her Master … a Negroe Girl named Thursday”: Examining Evidence of Punishment, Isolation, Trauma, and Illness in Nova Scotia and Quebec Fugitive Slave Advertisements char maine a. nelson The sound of the whip is so common in the field, that one gets to hear it as a matter of course, and that without any particular observation or feeling. Hence many persons, after a residence of a few years in the colonies, fall into the idea, that the slaves are, on the whole, mildly treated, and that there is really no necessity for making any material alteration in their circumstances. (italics mine) thomas cooper 1 Jamaican slaves lived in a world of radical uncertainty, always vulnerable to the depredations of whites and fellow slaves. Unprotected by law, subject to a harsh work discipline, and forced to submit to the wills of often unpredictable masters or else suffer horrific punishments, slaves were cast adrift in a hostile and uncertain sea. (italics mine) trevor burnard 2

As the nineteenth-century observer of slavery Thomas Cooper explained, corporal punishment was such a common aspect of Jamaican slavery that it seemed perfectly normal to the island’s ruling, white minority. However, as Trevor Burnard suggests, the ubiquity of corporal punishment led to dire consequences for the enslaved majority population, both physical and psychological. Transatlantic slavery was premised upon the strategic dehumanization and animalization of enslaved Africans as a way to “break” or “season” a population that was deemed, by Western pseudo-sciences and popular thought alike, to be uniquely fit for servitude due to their supposed brutishness and insentience.3 In the early modern world, slavery and the conceptualization of Africans as subhuman allowed Europeans to export various forms of corporal punishment to their colonies, which were deemed to be too cruel and inhumane for the punishment of whites. The physical dehumanization of the enslaved went hand-inhand with strategic material deprivation, cultural prohibitions, and social humiliation. A part of this process necessarily involved the regularized use of corporal punishment.

Examining Evidence in Fugitive Slave Advertisements

As a Caribbean island that enriched British plantation owners through mono-crop plantation agriculture, histories of Jamaica – like other regions of the Caribbean, the American South, and the northern reaches of South America – have become synonymous with slavery. The slave owner’s desire for agricultural labour in these tropical and semi-tropical colonies drove the mass importation and “breeding” of enslaved people from Africa, who often became the majority of the population. Although Canadian slavery transpired in the settler provinces of Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Cape Breton, pei, and Newfoundland, Canadian participation in transatlantic slavery under the French and British empires is little known both inside and outside of Canada. What replaces slavery in the national imagination is celebratory narratives of the Underground Railroad, the period between 1834 when the British abolished slavery by an act of parliament and 1865 when the American Civil War ended. Through this narrative, Canadians have enshrined a period of three decades, casting themselves as the liberators of enslaved African Americans. While it is true that thousands fled north across the US border, it is also true that from at least the 1600s until 1834, the British and French enslaved thousands of Black and Indigenous people in the regions that became Canada. Therefore, before 1834, crossing the northern border from the US into British North America was to travel between slave-holding states. The study of Canadian slavery lags far behind other regions in both the quantity and scope of the scholarship. The number and disciplinary diversity of the scholars devoted to the study of slavery in tropical plantation contexts have led to a host of specialized studies on slave culture, diet, dress, family structures, literacy, maternity, resistance, and the detailed study of population size, mortality, and ethnicity. Significantly, while the analysis of fugitive slave advertisements has been a subfield in American, Caribbean, and South American slavery studies since the 1970s, my publications are the first to undertake a similar study of Canadian notices.4 I am invested in understanding these notices as a form of text-based print culture that necessitated a visual interpretation for their proper function – the translation of the textual description of an escaping human being – a freedom seeker – into a visual image – an unauthorized portrait – of a criminal;5 a person who was supposedly guilty of what Marcus Wood has called “self-theft.”6 Although the commonality of abuse and torture against the enslaved is a routinely studied topic in warmer climatic regions, a significant body of scholarship on the white use of violence to control, punish, and torment the enslaved in the northern territories that became Canada has yet to be produced. The absence of such studies is obviously connected to the widespread ignorance of Canadian slavery. However, it is also attributable to the flawed settler colonial mathematics (or the “pioneer lie,” as Wysote and Morton put it in their chapter in this volume) that fewer enslaved people must have amounted to better treatment. Such miscalculations rest upon an avoidance of uncomfortable realities that should be obvious to the thinking academic or lay person alike, that enslaved minorities – especially those within linguistically, culturally, and regionally diverse populations, like those in Canada – living under the

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oppressive restrictions of white households, would necessarily have suffered from excruciating isolation from self and community.7 Notwithstanding the endemic physical brutality of slavery, the obviousness of the specific psychological oppressions of Canadian slavery indicates that our ongoing and pathological desire for national narratives that not only elide such histories of racial violence but also replace them with unblemished ones can only be sustained by a dedicated and far-reaching national practice of forgetting. This chapter seeks to redress this scholarly void while demonstrating the usefulness of the fugitive slave archive for an understanding of the practices of violence and the brutalization of enslaved people within the institution of transatlantic slavery. Simultaneously, such advertisements are also extremely useful for understanding the ways in which the enslaved continually resisted enslavement and the various forms of physical, social, and psychic oppression that it entailed. The nature and content of fugitive slave advertisements also offers a window into slave labour practices and the ways in which aggressive physical coercion, psychological manipulation, dangerous work, and a lack of leisure time created the perfect storm of circumstances through which the bodies of the enslaved became increasingly marked, scarred, and debilitated over time. As Graham White and Shane White have ably argued, Throughout the centuries of their enslavement the bodies of African and African American slaves were surfaces on which were inscribed the signs of inferior status. Partly, of course, this mutilation was the inevitability of slaves’ allotted role, laboring at tasks that were hard and physically dangerous in a time and place where medical care was severely limited. Badly set legs, missing fingers, and mangled feet were commonplace.8 An understanding of the normalcy, pervasiveness, and duration of the endemic violence of slavery is aided by Cree writer Billy-Ray Belcourt’s articulation of “slow death” in his examination of indigeneity as “a zone of biological struggle” and the reservation “as a non-place calibrated by affects … of misery.”9 However, whereas Belcourt exposes the violence of Indigenous people’s positioning as “surplus populations” and the framing of their expendability within the specific geographies of the reservation, a deliberately narrow(ed) site, enslaved people in Canada and elsewhere were never surplus economically, and although plantations became ubiquitous in tropical and semi-tropical locations, the physical source of enslaved misery was not as easily locatable in one specific type of geography in northern or temperate regions. However, their centrality as the labour for European imperial expansion in the Americas coupled with their intertwined classifications as captive, cargo, slave, and chattel made the enslaved “renewable” and expendable sources of labour within a capitalist system where it was often cheaper for the slave owner to procure new enslaved people from Africa than to care for the people they already possessed. In his study of St Domingue (later Haiti), Malick W. Ghachem has determined that,

Examining Evidence in Fugitive Slave Advertisements

During their first three to five years of labor in Saint-Domingue, newly purchased Africans died on average at a rate of 50 percent … During that decade, the importation of Africans to Saint-Domingue served not to augment the total number of slaves but rather to replace those who perished as a result of overwork, neglect, and abuse on the colony’s plantation fields.10 In what follows I examine the evidence of corporal punishment and other forms of violence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries within the practice of British Canadian slavery (Kjipuktuk|Halifax, Tiohtià:ke|Montreal, and Kébec|Quebec City) and distinguish it from Jamaica, a British tropical plantation regime. Using the ubiquity and refinement of violence in the slave holding territory of British Jamaica as a point of contrast, I analyze the un(der)explored archive of Canadian fugitive slave advertisements to argue that our current and deep-seated recitation of white Canadian benevolence, race-blindness, and racial tolerance – rehearsed in part through an entrenched, nation-wide curricular celebration of the Underground Railroad – facilitates a strategic erasure of the racist violence, surveillance, and policing that was inherent to Canadian Slavery.

Content, Function, and Circulation: Reading Fugitive Slave Advertisements

Fugitive or runaway slave advertisements are full of resistive promise. The promise was at least two-fold. First, that such advertisements existed across the Americas is a testament to the consistent resistance of Africans to slavery. But the function of the advertisements – to recuperate property – also resulted in an uncommonly “honest” archive being produced. Second, in comparison to slave sale advertisements through which the slave, as product, was presented almost always without defect (physical or moral), fugitive advertisements functioned through the description of corporeal detail, which consistently pointed out the lie of the supposed homogeneity, inhumanity, inferiority, dependency, and lack of civility of the enslaved population. Indeed, the desire to recuperate their “lost property” was so great that white slave owners took great pains to detail all manner of characteristics, attributes, traits, mannerisms, and skills of their missing people, details that arguably individualized and humanized the enslaved. The process of slave escape, often deliberately revealed in such advertisements, also inadvertently exposed the forethought, intellect, and sophisticated reasoning of the enslaved that involved the intimate knowledge of their owners’ lifestyles, the customs of the colony, and regional knowledge of the governing racial, class, religious, and political orders. For instance, when Cloe (fig. 6.1), described as “a negro wench,” fled from the Jewish merchant Judah Joseph of Berthier, Quebec, Joseph’s advertisement disclosed that “She got out of a garret window by the help of a ladder” and subsequently departed in a canoe with an unidentified man.11

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6.1 J. Joseph, “RUN AWAY From the Subscriber in the Night of the 13th Instant.”

In another example, when a twenty-six-year-old enslaved Black female named Cash escaped from the Quebec City-based tailor Hugh Ritchie on 24 October 1779, she did so with “a large bundle of wearing apparel belonging to herself, consisting of a black sattin Cloak, Caps, Bonnets, Ruffles, Ribbons, six of seven Petticoats, a pair of old Stays, and many other articles of values which cannot be ascertained, it is likely she may change her dress.”12 Clearly the process of attempting to recapture an enslaved person through the textual order of print culture required that slave owners disclose details about the runaway that were unhelpful to the idea of the enslaved as controlled, idle, unintelligent property. Printers fundamentally reinforced slavery and its racial hierarchy by facilitating the rights of slave owners to reduce certain humans to property. The arrogance of the slave owning class can often be deduced in the tone of the notices, which, when the enslaved made a habit of escape, became more aggressive. For instance, while upon her first (documented) escape on 18 August 1778, the enslaved female Bell was described by her owner George Hipps as a “Mulatto Negress,”13 when she again fled on 29 October 1778, he referred to her instead as a “Mulatto wench,” a word commonly used to describe a female of low morality.14 The fact that Hipps’s second notice combined the description of Bell as both a wench and a girl is indicative of the imposition of an abject sexuality upon Black females at a young age by white colonialists.15 Fugitive slave advertisements circulated widely due to the cheapness and reproducible nature of the print medium. This circulation was also calculated to match the distances across which fleeing people travelled, and enslavers sometimes blanketed a region with simultaneous advertisements in multiple papers or placed notices in newspapers in other regions where they assumed the fugitive to be heading. When

Examining Evidence in Fugitive Slave Advertisements

the sixteen-year-old white bond servant named Francis Freeland and a twenty-eightyear-old “Negro Man” named Ireland escaped from the Irish-born New York merchant William Gilliland,16 Gilliland place a fugitive notice in the Quebec Gazette urging the public to apply to “Moses Hazen, Esq, at St John’s, Mr John McCord, Merchant in Quebec, Mr Thomas McCord, Merchant in Montreal” for the six-dollar reward.17 The slave owning class sought to criminalize demonstrations of agency by the “selfmotivated”18 people, to code running away as what Marcus Wood has termed “an act of theft, albeit a paradoxical self-theft.”19 Against this colonial act of dehumanization, I would like to position the fugitives not as criminals but as freedom seekers and the act of running away as a defiant and extremely perilous act of self-(re)definition.20

Grappling with a Colonial Archive

Fugitive slave advertisements were also a primary source with prescribed limits. The limit of the slave advertisement is that it confirms only that someone, socially deemed to be a slave, ran away from the person who claimed to own the runaway. Such advertisements also confirm that the runaway was valuable enough to be pursued. The advertisements provide a window into the lives and worlds of the enslaved because each example was about the recapture of an individual or individuals who had fled and as such required that their owners share details that illuminated what made the runaways unique, both in manner and appearance. As such, these advertisements, ubiquitous across the Americas, are repositories of data on enslaved populations, recording all manner of visual characteristics, skills, and oral attributes of the runaways. Amongst the visual characteristics most commonly recited were the condition of the bodies of the enslaved. While such details included scarification and hairstyles created by the enslaved person and their communities, they also described bruising, lacerations, branding scars, and other marks of owner-imposed violence, torture, and corporal punishment. While, as described above, the corporal punishment and torture of the enslaved was ubiquitous and “normal” in Jamaica, did the proximity of the enslaved to their owners in the urban spaces of Halifax, Montreal, and Quebec City, and the “heavy burdens of continual surveillance,” change the way that white slave owners used material deprivation, physical violence, and psychological manipulation to control the enslaved?21 Fugitive slave advertisements are what Shane White and Graham White have referred to as “the most detailed descriptions of the bodies of enslaved African Americans available.”22 I would argue that their contention applies to most regions of the Americas, particularly places where abolition predated the development of photography.23 Enslaved Africans displaced from their homelands and forced to take up the role of unfree labour in the Americas were severely impeded in their ability to remember their histories, preserve community ties, make family units, and practise their cultures.

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This was strategic on the part of white colonialists and slave owning classes and evident in the immediate implementation of slave practices24 – like branding and renaming – that were meant to break the enslaved from their sense of individuality, family, and ancestry.25 Furthermore, ruling-class whites deliberately developed the colonial archive to allow Africans to enter as partial and incomplete entries – the objects or “stock” owned by another. This disturbing fact – that the most detailed representations of the enslaved were produced by their owners – provokes a confrontation with the archive, not as objective or neutral container of facts and information but as a site where the elite secured their power through determinations of who could be represented and in what fashion. The colonial archives of European empires were defined by the effacement or the strategic partial representation of the enslaved African. As such, as Ann Laura Stoler has explained, we are left to sort out “what was ‘unwritten’ because it could go without saying and ‘everyone knew it,’ what was unwritten because it could not yet be articulated, and what was unwritten because it could not be said.”26

6.2 Anonymous, “To be SOLD, By PUBLIC AUCTION.”

Examining Evidence in Fugitive Slave Advertisements

The callousness of slavery, wherein whites sought to demarcate and preserve their supposed racial difference and superiority, was also enshrined through sale advertisements in what Aimé Césaire called a process of “thingification.”27 This strategic racial hierarchy was the same in Canada as it was in more southern, tropical colonies. To my point, the 23 March 1773 advertisement (fig. 6.2), “To be sold, By public auction,” in the Nova Scotia Gazette and Weekly Chronicle listed amongst the items to be auctioned at the late Joseph Pierpont’s Wharf as “Three Gondalaes, three small Boats, a quantity of Salt in Barrels, a quantity of empty Barrels, a Negro Man, three Horses, three Seines, Salmon Nets, a Parcel of Iron, a large Canoe, Carts and Cart wheels, &c.”28 Sandwiched between local and international wares, materials, and animals, the Black man’s dehumanization was advanced by his listing as merely one of a variety of goods for sale. Following Stoler’s list, I would add, what was unwritten because to do so would further humanize the enslaved? I want to suggest that the representation of the enslaved by white slave owners and their surrogates was intended as a strategy of erasure. To this end, the colonial archive, of which fugitive slave advertisements were a significant part, was an attempt to master an ever-changing world and to conflate Africans with the status of slave.

Fugitive Slave Advertisements as Evidence of Corporal Punishment and Psychic Abuse

While fugitive slave advertisements noted forms of bodily manipulation like scarification chosen by the enslaved and their communities, they also registered the transformations inflicted by white owners and their surrogates through violent acts like branding and whipping. The dangers of slave labour in Jamaica where sugar cultivation was the norm were many. Commonly shoeless, the enslaved often worked with machetes to cut the tough stalks of the full-grown cane, and processing the plant into sugar, rum, and molasses meant dangerous mill and distillery work, the latter in extreme heat.29 The workers who were tasked with “feeding” the mill at crop time faced the ever-present threat of the loss of fingers or limbs. Even two visiting white women to nineteenth-century Jamaica, Eliza Chadwick Roberts and Maria Nugent, recounted being schooled on the frequency and necessity of the amputations of hands and limbs performed by overseers with hatchets, when the enslaved got their fingers drawn into working mills.30 The disfigurement of the enslaved was a common outcome of their work regimes and the ferocity of the planters and their surrogates, the overseer and drivers who induced the enslaved to labour beyond natural human limits, producing the extreme fatigue that led to disabling accidents. For the field labourer, work was always incentivized by force with the whip or other implements of torture. The brutality of the disciplinary regime was not reserved for enslaved males or for adults.31 Indeed, the enslaved Black men who the Jamaican planter Matthew Lewis referred to as “governors”

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or “chief governors”32 (otherwise known as drivers) were described by some like the observer of Jamaican slavery the Reverend Bickell as “ignorant and revengeful” slaves.33 That the whips that were commonly used on horses, mules, and cattle were normatively also applied to enslaved Africans in Jamaica allows for an understanding of the extent to which not only scars but also nerve damage on various part of the body (particularly the back and buttocks) would have been common causes of ongoing suffering and shame. As Marcus Wood has argued of fugitive notices, “The scars and deformities listed recreated the slave’s body as a living and moving text. The advertisements constituted a perpetual catalogue of the abuse of the slave body and as such had the potential to be subverted by antislavery authors.”34 Although it is unclear if branding was a uniform slave practice in parts of Nova Scotia or Quebec, certainly some enslaved people in those places would have had brand marks, if not from their time in Canada then from their previous residences. However, runaway slave advertisements from Nova Scotia do reveal signs of abuse in their descriptions of the bodies of the enslaved. An advertisement placed by John Rock on Tuesday, 1 September 1772, recounts the flight of a Black female known as Thursday. While the name bestowed upon the girl may have been intentionally demeaning and comical – as was the practice of naming the enslaved after their day of birth in other regions35 – Thursday’s description as a girl is also alarming.36 While the advertisement describes her as a “Negroe Girl … about four and a half feet high, broad sett,” upon John Rock’s death, Thursday was also listed in his estate inventory as a “Black Girl” when she was sold to John Bishop for £20 (fig. 6.4).37 The duplication of this description, along with the fact that the drive to infantilize the enslaved was more commonly directed at males, seems to indicate that Thursday truly was, by eighteenth-century standards, a child who had not reached the age of sixteen.38 While Rock did not mention if Thursday was branded, he did describe her body in a way that signalled the possibility of corporal punishment. The notice describes Thursday as having “a Lump above her Right Eye.”39 While the lump may have been caused by an accident, illness, or birth defect, which had nothing to do with Rock, there also exists a distinct possibility that the lump was a mark of violence inflicted by Rock as a punishment of some kind. If so, the fact that the “lump” was still visible and the protuberance had not healed sufficiently to deprive Rock of this further means of describing Thursday’s body may indicate that a physical assault against Thursday had immediately precipitated her flight. The impact of the isolation of enslaved Africans in temperate colonies where owners tended to possess far fewer enslaved people must not be underestimated. While the sexual violation of enslaved women in tropical colonies was ubiquitous, similar acts of sexual coercion and terror were surely employed in temperate colonies with impunity, since the lack of a significant slave community within the same residence or property meant that white male sexual predators would have been faced with little to no immediate resistance from other enslaved people, like slave “husbands,” and there-

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6.3 John Rock, “Ran away from her Master John Rock.”

fore would have felt less constrained in their actions.40 This would have been particularly true in cases where the male slave owner was unmarried. Similarly, the isolation and living arrangements of enslaved people in places like Nova Scotia and Quebec left them open to various forms of corporal punishment and torture. Many fugitive slave notices hint at the effects of such physical abuse. Reuben

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6.4 John Rock, estate inventory, 25 September 1776.

Tucker’s advertisement for the twenty-eight-year-old “negro man, named frances zebb,” discloses that Zebb had “lost all the Toes off one of his Feet, and walks somewhat lame.”41 Similarly, Andrew Reynold’s fugitive notice of 7 September 1790 describes “a Negro Boy Slave Named dick,” as having “lost the first joint of his great Toe of the left Foot.”42 While Zebb’s and Dick’s missing toes could have been caused by frost bite or labour accidents, another equally plausible explanation is corporal punishment.

Examining Evidence in Fugitive Slave Advertisements

When a slave owner named Richardson offered four guineas for the return of two Black men, he described the older, Bon Porter, as about thirty years old, “stout and well made; nearly Five Feet Six Inches high,” but also as “lame in one Foot, and limps much in his Walk.”43 While Porter’s limp may have been the result of a birth defect or an accident, it could just as easily have been the outcome of corporal punishment. Quebec fugitive notices also yield evidence of physical hardship and abuse. The twenty-three-year-old Andrew of Maryland was described by his owner, James Crofton, as having crooked fingers, and twenty-five-year-old Fortune was noted as having “lost the toes off his right Foot.” Twenty-year-old Charles had “a white mark on the right side of his forehead.”44 Described by Elizabeth McNiell as “A negro man,” Cuff had “some scars on his temples, and a scar on one of his hands.” The printer William Brown’s enslaved pressman Joe had “several scars on his legs”; John Sargent’s enslaved “Mulatto fellow named pascal puro” had “a scar under one of his ears”; Azariah Pretchard Sr’s enslaved “negro man” Charles had “lost some of his foreteeth, and has the ends of his great toes frozen off ”; and “a mulatto” named Thomas Etherington who broke out of the jail with three white male accomplices was described as walking “somewhat lame.”45 But it was perhaps Ishmael (fig. 6.5) who possessed the most evidence of abuse and physical hardship. The thirty-six-year-old “Negro-Man” “wants some of his Upperfore Teeth, as likewise the first Joint of the fourth Finger of his left Hand; and besides, on the middle of his Right-Leg, he has a fresh Eschar from a Horse Kick lately received and cured [sic].”46 The enslaved also bore marks of untreated illnesses. In one such case, an unnamed Negro man was described as having “a small Scar on the left Side of his Neck joining the Jaw-bone, occasioned by a Gland not yet cur’d [sic].”47 Although the accumulation of the marks, scars, and wounds of labour, material deprivation, malnutrition, physical abuse, and psychological torment could occur over different durations, the cruel compounding nature of these elements often led to an accelerated corporeal and mental breakdown and catastrophic mortality rates. Death could be abrupt or the result of an accumulation of countless horrors but, given the typically shortness of enslaved life, not necessarily “slow.” Therefore, the enslaved in Canada lived with the threat of death as a daily presence.48

The Scourge of Disease: Smallpox

While the enslaved succumbed to various illnesses, one that plagued people across race and class was smallpox. As my discussion of the inscription of the bodies of the enslaved with signs of violence and neglect demonstrates, whites used physical traces of Black suffering for their own ends. This included the strategic reporting of traces of diseases like smallpox. Both fugitive slave and slave sale advertisements printed in both Nova Scotia and Quebec routinely mention the disease. It was cited for two primary reasons. In the former notices, the scarring that the illness inflicted was documented as a means

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6.5 John Turner, “FOURTEEN DOLLARS Reward. RUNAWAY, on Sunday Night last.”

of identifying runaways, and in the latter, declaring that an enslaved person had survived smallpox indicated their immunity and healthiness. Robin Winks’s research on enslaved people of Indigenous and African descent in Canada indicates that Africans possessed greater resistance to this European disease than Indigenous people. He documents the death of fifty-eight Indigenous people but only two Blacks to an epidemic in 1733 and later fifty-six Indigenous and six Blacks in 1755. Illness for the enslaved was not merely a problem of living amongst whites in the Americas; it often confronted them prior to embarkation in Africa. As Sowande’ Mustakeem has noted, before his ship, the Duke of Argyle, could depart from West Africa, the Liverpool-based captain, John Newton, was forced to dispatch seamen to shore with sickly enslaved people.49 This decision was arguably taken more with the aim of removing the diseased person from the ship to stem the spread of infection than to save the lives of the enslaved captives. As Marcus Rediker has explained, once doctors became a standard part of the British slave ship crew with the passage of the Dolben Act, or Slave Carrying Bill of 1788, it became a central aspect of their job to inspect the newly enslaved on shore “for signs of sickness and debility,” since a state of good health increased the survival rate during the transatlantic voyage.50 Neither the unnamed boy nor the girl known only as no. 92, destined for Newton’s ship, survived the outbreak of the flux.51 In this case, since flux likely referred to dysentery (sometimes con-

Examining Evidence in Fugitive Slave Advertisements

taining blood), it is not surprising that the captain ordered that the unnamed enslaved people be removed from the ship.52 For enslaved people in Nova Scotia and Quebec smallpox appears to have been the illness to which they most often succumbed. As Donald R. Hopkins has noted, “Over three millennia, smallpox probably killed even more people than plague.”53 In the eighteenth and into the nineteenth centuries, smallpox was a deadly disease that killed indiscriminately and left its survivors sometimes blind and commonly horribly scarred or pox marked. Known also by the medical name variola (from varius, spotted or vari, pimples), as Dunglison explained, the contagious illness was characterized first by fever, “with pustules appearing from the third to the fifth day, and suppurating from the eighth to the tenth.”54 The spread of this global scourge to Africa and the Americas went hand-in-hand with Western imperialism. As S.L. Kotar and J.E. Gessler explain, “Religious travelers to and from Mecca, Crusaders, slave traders, merchants and explorers all played a part in importing it throughout Africa, the Middle East, India and finally to Europe and the New World.”55 In the ninety-four Quebec advertisements recovered by Frank Mackey “concerning the sales of black slaves and the flight of black prisoners, ship deserters, servants, and slaves,” smallpox is commonly mentioned by slave owners seeking to recapture or to sell enslaved people and by employers and ships’ captains seeking fugitive indentured servants and deserting sailors.56 Indeed, the scars left by smallpox were so ubiquitous and widely acknowledged, that slave owners noted when enslaved fugitives did not bear these marks. Such was the case when an anonymous owner commented in a 1769 Quebec Gazette fugitive slave notice that “a Negro Woman, named Susannah” was “smooth fac’d. [sic]”57 As Trevor Burnard has argued for the enslaved in Jamaica, the enslaved in Nova Scotia and Quebec also lived in a world of radical uncertainty.58 We must therefore also contemplate the too easily overlooked or underestimated scars (emotional and psychological), which were not necessarily visible to observers. For instance, the stammer of the “Negro Man” named Brouce, documented in a fugitive notice of 6 October 1766 in the Quebec Gazette, may not have been a “normal” speech impediment but rather a manifestation of a nervous disorder.59 Brouce’s psychological suffering may have been exasperated by what appears to have been his rental to a Montreal merchant named John Grant by his owner, Lieutenant Colonel Gabriel Christie.60

Conclusion

Fugitive slave advertisements not only document how the enslaved dressed but also how their bodies appeared. Owners took great pains to describe the runaway’s mannerisms, expressions, and physical habits, things over which they had once exerted extreme even sadistic control. As Charles Joyner has demonstrated,

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Slaveholders’ intervention in the bodily appearance of their slaves could even extend to expectations about gesture, movement, and general demeanor – how slaves reacted when spoken to, how they walked, where they directed their gaze, whether they appeared content. Though he liked being kind to “his people,” Robert F. W. Allston, a South Carolinian with a great many slaves, declared that he “imperatively require[d] of them … cheerfulness in their work, wherever and whatever it is.”61 That whites sought to control not just the labour of the enslaved but also their attitudes toward that labour is evidence of the extreme surveillance and control under which they lived. The naming of scars, branding, or whip marks brings up yet other issues. The gruelling and barbaric nature of slavery and the ubiquity of corporal punishment and arduous and dangerous labour practices meant that the bodies of the enslaved were transformed over time. Newly arrived Africans in the Americas would have undergone a radical physical transformation that began with the material deprivation central to the harrowing shipboard experience of the Middle Passage.62 The lack of a proper and differentiated diet (mainly one which included more than carbohydrates) meant that enslaved Africans routinely arrived in the Americas both infirmed and malnourished – afflictions that were necessarily evident in their bodies – hence the practices of washing and oiling the enslaved prior to auction in various locations in the Americas.63 While there exists irrefutable evidence that the bodies of the enslaved in Jamaica were commonly marked by violence, Canadian fugitive slave notices also documented scars, amputations, and illnesses that were the product of dangerous work regimes and corporal punishment. Furthermore, the isolating nature of life in slave minority contexts like Nova Scotia and Quebec (where one or a small number of enslaved people lived in the same residence or on the properties of their owners) provided an abundance of privacy in which to enact various forms of abuse, punishment, and torture away from prying eyes.64 Across the Americas, fugitive slave advertisements became one key mechanism through which individual slave owners held the enslaved in bondage. But we would be remiss if we did not also acknowledge them as a part of the overall oppressive state infrastructure of carcerality and immobilization; after all, calls for fugitives to be locked away in jails and workhouses became routine in such notices.65 But while the fugitive advertisement worked to criminalize the enslaved person who dared to flee – documenting escapes as illegal acts – they were also public declarations of white slave owner property that conflated freedom with whiteness and wealth. While far more research is needed to determine if specific practices like branding and scarification were employed or prohibited in Nova Scotia and Quebec, in conjunction with other primary sources like slave owner journals, correspondence, and estate inventories, the Canadian fugitive slave archive will allow us to understand the nature of the punishment and abuse from which enslaved Africans were routinely fleeing.

Examining Evidence in Fugitive Slave Advertisements

n ote s 1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14

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Cooper, Facts Illustrative, 53. Burnard, “The Sexual Life,” 165. Wood, “John Gabriel Stedman, William Blake, Francesco Bartolozzi.” See for example Lehner, Reaction to Abuse; Windley, Runaway Slave Advertisements (The volumes include: #1 – Georgia, #2 – Maryland, and #3 – South Carolina); Smith and Wojtowicz, Blacks Who Stole Themselves; Morgan, “Colonial South Carolina Runaways,” 57–79; Parker, Running for Freedom; Hodges and Brown, “Pretends to be Free.”; Waldstreicher, “Reading the Runaways,” 243–72. Nelson, “Servant, Seraglio, Savage or ‘Sarah,’” 43–74. Wood, “Rhetoric and the Runaway,” 79. On the diversity of the Black enslaved population in Canada see, Nelson, “A ‘tone of voice peculiar to New-England.’” White and White, “Slave Hair and African American Culture,” 48. It is also important to note that medical care was often strategically denied to a population who slave owners saw as mere animals. Belcourt, “Meditations on Reserve Life,” 2. Ghachem, The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution, 36. J. Joseph, “ran away From the Subscriber in the Night of the 13th Instant,” Quebec Gazette, 28 July 1791, Mackey, Done with Slavery, Appendix I: Newspaper Notices, 334. Hugh Ritchie, “ran away, From the Subscriber,” Quebec Gazette, 4 November 1779, in Mackey, Done with Slavery, Appendix I: Newspaper Notices, 323 (italics mine). George Hipps, “ran away from my service,” Quebec Gazette, 20 August 1778, in Mackey, Done with Slavery, Appendix I: Newspaper Notices, 321. Ibid. (italics mine). That the term wench, which originally referred to a bold or forward girl of loose character, evolved through slavery into a synonym for a Black or mixed-race female servant or a Negress is telling. Ogilvie, The Imperial Dictionary of the English Language, 619. The advertisement placed by Gibb and Prior confirms the pattern of white projection of an abject sexuality onto enslaved females in its revelation of the age of an enslaved Black girl described as a “Young healthy Negro Wench” as a mere twelve or thirteen. Gibb and Prior, “for sale A Young healthy Negro Wench,” Montreal Gazette, 28 December 1795, in Mackey, Done with Slavery, Appendix I: Newspaper Notices, 337. While Black males faced a strategic infantilization, Black females faced acceleration toward womanhood. Both were necessary to preserve white access to Black female sexuality, which, within the matrilineal order of slavery, was exploited to “breed” new enslaved children who at birth became the property of the enslaved female’s owner. Mackey, Done with Slavery, Appendix I: Newspaper Notices, 532n25. “William Gilliland, “six dollars reward,” Quebec Gazette, 19 September 1771, in Mackey, Done with Slavery, Appendix I: Newspaper Notices, 318 (italics mine). Waldstreicher, “Reading the Runaways,” 248. Wood, “Rhetoric and the Runaway: The Iconography of Slave Escape in England and America,” Blind Memory, 79.

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20 I am grateful to Sylvia Hamilton for sharing with me her idea of fugitive slaves as freedomrunners. Conversation between Sylvia Hamilton and author, 7 November 2015, Halifax, Nova Scotia. 21 Berlin, “From Creole to African,” 283. 22 White and White, “Slave Hair and African American Culture,” 49. 23 Two places where the fugitive slave archive may pale in comparison to photographic archives of the enslaved are Cuba and Brazil where slavery was not abolished until 1886 and 1888 respectively. Bergad, The Comparative Histories of Slavery, xiii. For more on photography of the enslaved in Brazil see, Prussat, “Icons of Slavery.” 24 “Immediate” can refer to several moments like, for instance, the point of commodification when enslaved Africans were inspected in the slave forts of the West African coast or the moment of purchase once in the Americas, whether by auction or not, when slave owners or their surrogates (like overseers) renamed the enslaved. 25 The Virginia planter, Robert “King” Carter (the richest planter in the state), who owned a plantation on the Rappahannock River, instructed his overseer to initiate a process of renaming of his enslaved Africans at the point of purchase. Berlin, “From Creole to African,” 251–2. 26 Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 3. 27 Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 42. For Césaire, colonization in its entirety was thingification. 28 Anonymous, “To be sold, By public auction,” Nova Scotia Gazette and Weekly Chronicle, Tuesday, 23 March 1773, vol. 3, no. 134, p. 4; pans mfm #8155, Reel 8155, 1772– 1774, Nova Scotia Archives, Halifax, Nova Scotia (hereafter nsarm) (italics mine). 29 Nelson, Slavery, Geography, and Empire, 253–4, 304. 30 Klepp and McDonald, “Inscribing Experience,” 650. 31 Cooper, Facts Illustrative, 16. However, Cooper also documented a discussion with the carpenter who claimed that drivers commonly would strike the ground with their whip instead of striking the slave if the overseer or another white person were not present (58). 32 Terry, “Introduction,” xxii. 33 Bickell, The West Indies as They Are, 13. 34 Wood, “Rhetoric and the Runaway,” 81. 35 Ohri, “‘Just Imported and To Be Sold.’” The enslaved were also often named after months of the year. For instance, one of the enslaved people that the governor of Nova Scotia, John Wentworth, dispatched to Surinam (Dutch Guiana) in the 1780s from Halifax was named January. Riddell, “Slavery in the Maritime Provinces,” 366n11. 36 John Rock, “Ran away from her Master John Rock,” Nova-Scotia Gazette and Weekly Chronicle, Tuesday, 1 September 1772, vol. 3, no. 105, p. 3; (repeated 8, 22 September 1772); pans mfm #8155, Reel 8155, 1772–1774, nsarm. 37 Rock, John, Estate Inventory, 25 September 1776, pans mfm #(19)420, RG48 Reel 420, #61 (Halifax), nsa. (italics mine). The estate inventory is seventeen pages in length. On page seven on the third and fourth lines under the title it reads “by the sale of Thursday (Black Girl) to John Bishop – 20.0.0.” 38 According to William Renwick Riddell, Louison was listed as “a negro woman” in the advertisement. Riddell, “Notes on the Slave in Nouvelle-France,” 323–4.

Examining Evidence in Fugitive Slave Advertisements

39 Rock, “Ran away.” 40 I have elsewhere discussed how the presence of enslaved adult males on Vineyard Plantation in Jamaica worked to somewhat circumscribe the violent sexual acts of Thomas Thistlewood, the eighteenth-century English overseer who systematically raped or sexually coerced the majority of enslaved females under his care. See “Imaging Slavery in Antigua and Jamaica: Pro-Slavery Discourse and the Reality of Enslavement,” in Nelson, Slavery, Geography, and Empire. Also, Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica,” 47–76; Burnard, “The Sexual Life.” 41 Reuben Tucker, “Twenty Dollars Reward,” Royal Gazette and Nova-Scotia Advertiser, Tuesday, 18 June 1799, vol. 11, no. 597, p. 3; pans mfm #8168, Reel 8168, nsa. 42 Andrew Reynolds, “Forty Shillings Reward,” Royal Gazette and Nova-Scotia Advertiser, 7 September 1790, vol. iii, no. 77, p. 1; pans mfm #8164, Reel 8164, 5 January 1790–25 December 1792, nsa. 43 Richardson, “Four Guineas Reward,” Nova-Scotia Gazette and Weekly Chronicle, Tuesday, 5 September 1780, vol. 10, no. 744, p. 3; pans mfm #8158, Reel 8158, 6 September 1774–26 December 1780, nsa. Porter escaped with Silas Ruen who Richardson estimated as eighteen years old. The notice specified that Richardson was willing to pay two guineas for the return of either man. 44 “run-away, from James Crofton,” Quebec Gazette, 14 May 1767; Anonymous, “ranaway from Carleton-Island,” Quebec Gazette, 10 August 1780; Pre. Guerout, “ran away from the Subscriber,” Quebec Gazette, 14 August 1783. All are in Mackey, Done with Slavery, Appendix I: Newspaper Notices, 315, 323, 325. 45 Elizabeth McNiell, “ranaway the 28th or 29th of last Month, Quebec Gazette, 9 June 1785; Anonymous, “broke out of His Majesty’s Gaol in Quebec,” Quebec Gazette, 4 May 1786; Constant Freeman, “run away from the Schooner Lucy,” Quebec Gazette, 5 June 1788; Azariah Pritchard Sr, “run away from the Subscriber, at New Richmond,” Quebec Gazette, 22 May 1794; Jacob Kuhn Gaoler and edwd. wm. Gray, Sheriff, “broke out of and escaped from the Common Gaol,” Montreal Gazette, 21 November 1796. All are in Mackey, Done with Slavery, Appendix I: Newspaper Notices, 327–8, 328–9, 331, 337, 337–8. Thomas Etherington’s accomplices were Noah Drew, Moses Little Bailey, and Recompence Tiffany. Etherington was accused of “stealing in a dwelling house” (Mackey, Done with Slavery, 338). 46 John Turner, “fourteen dollars Reward. run-away, on Sunday Night last,” Quebec Gazette, 11 March 1784, in Mackey, Done with Slavery, Appendix I: Newspaper Notices, 326. 47 Anonymous, “run away from Mr Orillat’s Farm on the Island of Montreal,” Quebec Gazette, 7 September 1775, in Mackey, Done with Slavery, Appendix I: Newspaper Notices, 318. 48 Marcel Trudel estimated the average age of death of the enslaved in New France in 1759 as 17.7 years for Indigenous people and 25.2 for Black people. Trudel, L’esclavage au Canada français and Trudel, Dictionnaire des Esclaves. 49 Mustakeem, “‘I Never have such a sickly ship before,’” 474–5. 50 Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Penguin Books, 2007), 59. 51 Mustakeem, “‘I Never have such a sickly ship before,’” 475. 52 Dunglison, “Flux,” 429.

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Hopkins, The Greatest Killer, xi. Dunglison, “Variola.” Kotar and Gessler, Smallpox, 1. Mackey, Done with Slavery, 307. Anonymous, “ran-away, on the 11th of September last,” Quebec Gazette, 19 October 1769, in Mackey, Done with Slavery, Appendix I: Newspaper Notices, 317. Burnard, “The Sexual Life,” 165. “run-away, the 25th Instant, from Mr Grant,” Quebec Gazette, 6 October 1766, in Mackey, Done with Slavery, Appendix I: Newspaper Notices, 315. Mackey, Done with Slavery, Appendix I: Newspaper Notices, 531n13. Mackey believes that Brouce (Bruce/Brous) may have been the same person who was banished from the province in 1773. Joyner, Down by the Riverside, 52–3; cited in White and White, “Slave Hair and African American Culture,” 49. Rediker, The Slave Ship. Smithers, Science, Sexuality, and Race, 111. In Montreal, the enslaved resided with their owners, either in the same home or on the same property. The June 1780 inventory of the Quebec home of the tailor Hugh Ritchie listed “a Negro boy” amongst his other possessions – “a black Stallion, a Cow, Two Calashes mounted, a Cart mounted, a Cart Harness, a Harness for the Calash” – which were held in the stable. Mackey, Done with Slavery, Appendix I: Newspaper Notices, 536n34. This was not the case in Jamaica. Jamaican plantations were customarily composed of hundreds, if not thousands, of acres of land, with the Great House, houses for the managers, works (mill, distillery etc.), and separate Negro villages where the enslaved lived on property customarily chosen for ease of surveillance from the vantage point of the often-elevated Great House. See the transcribed Quebec fugitive slave advertisements in Mackey, Done with Slavery, Appendix I: Newspaper Notices, 314–40.

7 “Miner with a Heart of Gold”: Native North America, Vol. 1 and the Colonial Excavation of Authenticity h e n ry a da m s ve c

White settler colonialism and sound recording have had a long and complicated history in North America. On the one hand, in the late nineteenth century ethnographers scoured the continent in order to preserve on wax cylinders what they believed were dying Indigenous languages and cultures, thus offering both material-cultural and ideological legitimacy to an ongoing and violent settler colonial project.1 On the other hand, sound recordings and sound recording technologies have been used, often in conjunction with voices and songs, to resist and to critique settler colonial states and structures.2 One such voice is that of the late Willie Dunn (1941–2013), an Indigenous singer-songwriter, playwright, filmmaker, and activist of Mi’kmaw and Scots-Irish ancestry. In his song “I Pity the Country,” Dunn offers a searing critique of settler colonialism circa 1967, outlining the numerous actors in a broad assemblage of exploitation and abuse, from “bigoted newspapers” to “[t]he bill of rights,” and from jail and “the colonial governor” to “silly civil servants” and pollution.3 Despite the power of this oppressive, racializing network, Dunn’s voice finds counter-power and agency through the act of pitying, which elevates or at least distinguishes the singer: “I pity the country, I pity the state.”4 Dunn makes room for a pocket of resistance that might join up with other forms and measures. “Revolution is rumbling,” Dunn states in the final verse. Dunn first released this song on his landmark record, Willie Dunn, in 1971, at a time of great activity in Indigenous activism and cultural expression across the continent.5 The track was recently re-released on the compilation Native North America, Vol. 1: Aboriginal Folk, Rock, and Country, 1966–1985 (fig. 7.1), put out by Seattle’s Light in the Attic Records in 2014 and “compiled, produced, and sequenced” by Kevin “Sipreano” Howes. Howes also directed the art and composed the liner notes for the album. Thanks to the efforts of Light in the Attic and Howes, Willie Dunn’s overtly political work is

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7.1 Native North America Vol. 1: Aboriginal Folk, Rock, and Country 1966–1985, album cover art, 2014.

now nestled on accessible vinyl records and cd s beside other recordings from the era, such as Willy Mitchell’s “Call of the Moose,” which recounts the song writer’s memory of being shot by police and refers to mercury poisoning and environmental degradation. Also included are sweet ballads (by John Angaiak, Lloyd Cheechoo, and Philippe McKenzie), rollicking garage-band anthems (by Sugluk, The Chieftones, and Saddle Lake Drifting Cowboys), and meditations on tradition (by David Campbell, Willie Thrasher, and Alexis Utatnaq) – in total, thirty-four tracks variously wrought in the loosely definable genres of country, folk, and rock. But even the personal here is political because the dominant historical narratives of these genres largely exclude First Nations, Inuit, and Métis artists. As journalist Michael Barclay puts it, “This

Native North America and the Excavation of Authenticity

time, everyone is getting their due – financially, but also in the history books and, hopefully, in the collections of music fans everywhere.”6 Happily for both the producers and the artists, the first volume of Native North America has been an indisputable success. The album has been featured by The Guardian, Rolling Stone, cbc, npr, and numerous other media organs, and was even nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Historical Album. Of course, as the project of cultural studies has been demonstrating for decades, there is more to culture than just autonomous works of art.7 Bound up with the sounds, voices, and signifiers comprising Native North America are a wide range of images and documents, including album covers, public performances and presentations, reviews, and magazine features.8 In other words, in addition to the songs (whether analyzed as lyrical texts or as sound recordings) there is an entire edifice of signification to consider, which ultimately intertwines with the recordings themselves. Before I had heard a single track from Native North America, for instance, I was already taken in by accounts I had read of Howes, out in the field, rummaging through crates of records, heroically rescuing this important musical history. Before hearing a note, I had to have these reissued recordings; I had to listen. This specific desire for an Indigenous folk-rock anthology is part of an older historical disposition towards music that xwélméxw (Stó:lō) scholar Dylan Robinson has described as “hungry listening.”9 According to Robinson, settler colonial hunger was initially material – a hunger for both food and gold – but “quickly extended to forests, the water, and of course the land itself.”10 He adds, “In the twentieth century the hunger has grown for indigenous artistic practice.”11 For Robinson, “hungry listening” describes an entire ontological and epistemological way of relating to sound and music. Métis artist, curator, and scholar David Garneau emphasizes the interdisciplinary shape of this episteme when he writes, “The [colonial] attitude assumes that everything should be accessible to those with the means and will to access them; everything is ultimately comprehensible, a potential commodity, resource or salvage.”12 Being a white settler, I need to interrogate further these desires and their manifestation in my own tastes and habits of cultural consumption. So, in this chapter I spend some time investigating the discourses that have been sutured to the songs collected as Native North America, Vol 1. What media–cultural anxieties are palliated by stories of “authentic” Indigenous record collecting and curating? In what ways does the intercultural work of collecting and curating challenge certain stereotypes at the same time that the discursive categories through which this work is received and understood perhaps reinforce others? Native North America, Vol. 1 is important and has been justly applauded for the ways in which it expands and thickens conventional folk, rock, and country music histories. But how has the rhetoric of collection and curation contended with the agency and complexity of the artists assembled here? What “settler moves to innocence” are made, or “white settler lies” told, via the ways this music is applauded, enjoyed, and understood?13

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In the first part of this chapter, I offer a brief genealogy of song collecting, tracing the discourse of authentic collection and of “salvage” ethnography from the early modernist period toward the “curatorial” turn embodied by the artist and filmmaker Harry Smith, the influential editor of the Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music at the dawn of the postmodern period. Next, and following others who have deployed a broadly Foucauldian lens in Indigenous studies,14 I analyze the publicity and promotional discourses surrounding Native North America, Vol. 1, paying particular attention to the persistence of the image of the settler song collector/curator. Of course, scholars have long explored the complex political dimensions of the collection and display of non-Western cultural artifacts.15 As settler scholar Pauline Wakeman points out, however, this work has often focused on visuality at the expense of sonic dimensions.16 By analyzing a recent (and highly acclaimed) work of Indigenous musical anthologization, I hope to contribute to these discussions by focusing in particular on the persistence of the settler “song collector” in contemporary media culture.

From Song Catchers to Record Curators

The valuation of “song catching” in the West can be traced back to the emergence of European Romanticism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Important figures in this history are Johann Gottfried Herder, who argued for the importance of the simple cultural expressions of true Volk (or “Folk”) in opposition to the overly intellectual art of Enlightenment Europe, as well as Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, who conducted fieldwork in rural areas of Germany and Austria.17 Collectors of the music and stories of “the folk,” however, were not always sympathetic towards their sources because, according to John Storey, these middle-class thinkers collectively constructed the concept of (premodern) folk culture as that which is in opposition to (modern) “mass” culture: “The collectors of folk culture idealized the past in order to condemn the present.”18 In North America, the image of the song catcher developed along parallel lines but also within and adjacent to distinct (colonial) cultural institutions.19 Carrying the torch of Herder and the Grimms, English literature professors in the United States such as Frances James Child and George Lyman Kitteridge at Harvard sought out remnants of English balladry by focusing on textual documents.20 Child produced an expansive collection, English and Scottish Popular Ballads, which for decades set the canon for Anglo-American performers and producers. The Englishman Cecil Sharp later scoured Appalachia, which he believed to be isolated from the modern world, for remnants of this heritage.21 These literary folklorists saw the folksong as aesthetic text that could be evaluated and appreciated in its own right.22 Roughly contemporaneously, the nascent field of anthropology was beginning to consider the role of music and other expressive arts in integral cultural systems.23 The Bureau of American Ethnology formed in 1888 and, with the help of Edison’s phono-

Native North America and the Excavation of Authenticity

graph, set out to document the allegedly fading Indigenous cultures of North America, including oral traditions and music; whereas Child had worked exclusively from textual documents, figures like Jesse Walter Fewkes, Franklin Hamilton Cushing, and Frances Densmore investigated living informants, whose songs they sought to preserve via phonograph recordings.24 John and Alan Lomax, a father and son team of field recordists supported by the Library of Congress’s Archive of American Folk Song, also saw themselves as preservationists of fast-fading music and culture; in the 1930s they sought out African American performers who had not yet been “contaminated” by radio and by popular culture, primarily in the prisons and workcamps of the American South.25 In Canada, too, the collection of folk and traditional stories and songs developed within and alongside similar institutions in different regions. In Atlantic Canada, Helen Creighton visited rural communities in order to document songs and stories that she believed were fast disappearing and, working outside of academia entirely, produced numerous books and radio programs.26 In Ontario, roughly contemporaneously, the folklorist Edith Fowke worked with both mass-commercial and public and academic sources of funding and support, though her tastes and approach to “the folk” differed from the more conservative Creighton.27 Another influential figure, Marius Barbeau, working under the auspices of the Geological Survey of Canada, undertook expeditions in Quebec and throughout the North; the bulk of Barbeau’s collecting efforts focused on the remnants of “authentic” Indigenous cultures, which, as Andrew Nurse explains, Barbeau believed were all but completely dead.28 Over the past several decades, however, the figure of the song collector has undergone serious critical scrutiny. Scholars in the humanities and social sciences have seriously questioned the notions that “civilization” evolves from primitive to complex, that “primitive” cultures are isolated and static, and that cultural expressions can be objectively and unproblematically “captured.”29 Equally troublesome for critics and scholars writing in the wake of post-structuralist and neo-Marxist theories has been the overwhelming commitment, from Herder to Lomax and Barbeau, to a Romantic conception of authenticity. Marius Barbeau, John A. Lomax, and Helen Creighton are each guilty, according to their recent critics, of imagining in their subjects a premodern simplicity that in fact did not exist.30 Thus, scholars of song collecting have shifted focus away from the songs and stories that were the objects of collection and toward the institutions and discourses through which the very concept of “authentic” songs and stories was produced and legitimated. For example, Robert Cantwell describes his method as follows: “I like to think of folklore as a historically contingent and relative concept, a kind of perspectival or parallax effect where epochs, technologies, polities, and the outlooks attached to them produce, by their mingling, frames of reference that expose one to the other in their full historical and social dimensionality.”31 One way that the discourse of the song collector has persisted, however – yet without some of the troublesome habits and inclinations of its first incarnation – is by

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transmogrifying into record collecting.32 A significant player here is the artist and filmmaker Harry E. Smith, editor of the hugely influential Anthology of American Folk Music, which was released by Folkways Records in 1952 to become a touchstone in terms of repertoire for the generation of performers that emerged in the early-to-midsixties, including Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. Harry Smith clearly also had an influence on Kevin “Sipreano” Howes – in a 2011 blog post, Howes shared a photograph of the “alchemist” Smith playfully converting milk into milk by pouring it from a carton into a glass.33 Although Smith himself did engage in the practice of field recording, his Anthology is often positioned as a work of pure curation and collection, a proto-postmodernist gesture that repositioned the detritus of regional music industries in the interwar years as high art – and as “folk.”34 Whereas song collectors are criticized for their naivety and belief in romantic authenticity, Harry Smith’s curatorial work is often applauded for the ways in which the Anthology seems to revel in the recorded sound commodity and its packaging (a revelling in which Light in the Attic also partakes).35 Smith’s reputation has only risen over the past several years, with his collections of string figures and paper airplanes exhibited in art galleries and his folkloristic efforts more clearly analyzed in relation to his experimental film work.36 In other words, he is a collector without the essentialist baggage accrued by the discipline of anthropology and has ascended along with his collections into the realms of the avant-garde. The record collector is a complex cultural-discursive assemblage, then, in some ways emergent and in other ways residual.37 The themes of discovery and authenticity persist in the record collector who hunts down and guards the treasures of “authentic” culture. Yet, record collectors also often signal a postmodern openness to a range of genres and scenes.38 In other words, through the figure of the folklorist-as-record-collector the Othering discourses of modernity are able to persist in contemporary media culture, which I will now examine via a particular case study.

Collecting Native North America

White settler Kevin “Sipreano” Howes describes himself using a range of designations, including “reissue producer, Canadian music/culture historian, vinyl archivist, dj, blogger, and journalist.”39 His work as an archivist and collector began in the mid1990s through his role as disc jockey, where his goal in part was to shine a light on forgotten or marginal recordings. His first major release was a compilation for Light in the Attic called Jamaica to Toronto: Soul Funk and Reggae, 1967–1974, on which he collaborated as project coordinator and for which he wrote the liner notes.40 With the positive critical response to the collection, Howes’s image as an intrepid collector and preservationist began. A glowing review in Tkaronto|Toronto’s now magazine, for instance, suggested that Howes “had to do some serious digging” in order to assemble the reissue.41 In addition to his ongoing career as a dj, Howes contributed liner notes to Light in the Attic’s reissues of Sixto Rodriguez’s Cold Fact and Coming from Reality.

Native North America and the Excavation of Authenticity

Native North America, which was released in 2014 after roughly four years of work, is perhaps his most visible project to date. Certainly, it is not easy to compile a collection of mostly forgotten artists, and this important work is deserving of recognition. Further, much of the press coverage of Native North America pointed readers to Canada’s settler colonial atrocities, including the residential school system, which touched the lives of many of the contributors, who also received attention in much of the coverage in addition to their powerful music.42 My question, however, is the following: what heroic images of the intrepid “song collector” persist in this narrative, and what are their rhetorical consequences? After analyzing album reviews, mainstream publicity and promotion, interviews, liner notes, and Howes’s own self-branding activities online, in addition to the album itself, I have identified three themes in the discourse: “Collector as Saviour,” “Music as Land,” and “Technology and Modernity,” each of which is deserving of critical interrogation. Collector as Saviour

One clear shift from the press coverage of Jamaica to Toronto to that of Native North America is the prominence of Howes himself. From a side player of interest in the former, Howes becomes a prominent focus of journalistic treatments, a key artist in his own right. We see this change even before the latter album’s release in Howes’s selfpresentation on his actively maintained blog, voluntary in nature. Each year Howes makes a New Year’s post in which he reflects on the past year and looks to the future. In 2013 he wrote: 2013 is already shaping up to be a monster!@#$%!!! lots of creative projects on the go and BIG goals to accomplish. there’s a certified union on the horizon and work and travel in-and-around it all … always sharing the land. following dreams and dreaming more. at this tender time of the year, i’m once again disgusted by consumer culture. surprised, no, but trying to reduce waste and wasteful actions. it’s the only way and order of the day. family and simple gestures of love trump all. and don’t forget, the dollar record always gets more play than the “holy” grail resting on the shelf. always. so keep posing w/ your regurgitated trophy photos and revealing your true self. if you don’t l-o-v-e music, go back to being a hockey card collector and let the real heads do their thing. in other news, cratery keeps on burning on and on … don’t stop. my beard is getting whiter. as i get older, i’m not inspired by a lot of the people and things that used to stoke my fire. it’s weird. and i gotta say this loud and clear. i’m not like “you” or “that guy” you know who you “think” does the same thing as me. i’m blazing my own path. i’m turning shit up (to 11) and putting it out. i’m trudging through fields for a different type of war. i’m driving my whip. across this country. not in a cubicle or (always) glued to a screen. for the man. i’m pressing flesh. climbing ladders. looking you straight in the eye. taking short steps and continuing to learn from my elders.

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producing content, not simply spinning it (though i can do that too) … i am not alone. voluntary in nature. these are my people. you know who you are. we rap more mellow.43 Here, Howes distinguishes himself from other record collectors – not “you” or “that guy” – presumably poseurs who use their identity as a record collector for selfpromotion on Instagram or Facebook posts. Howes’s motives are authentic.44 The art of collecting is not mere conspicuous consumption (which “disgusts” Howes); it requires discipline and dedication, time and energy. Howes does not stop by downtown record stores only or point and click on ebay, he is “pressing flesh. climbing ladders.” In interviews after the release of Native North America, his self-presentation was much softer. Still, the coverage tended to split its focus between the songs themselves and the creative work of Howes, which is presented not only as art but as adventure. “Equipped with a flashlight, face mask and old compact car, the 41-year-old dj from Richmond Hill, Ont., has scoured everything from flea markets to dusty barns in Hutterite communities and an abandoned hair salon – all in the name of highlighting important fringe artists and learning about Canada’s history,” begins a Canadian Press story posted on the cbc’s website, for example.45 As Tsimshian-Haida scholar Marcia Crosby writes, “Privileging the philanthropic efforts of non-natives also lends itself to the commonly held belief that if it were not for them, native culture would not exist today.”46 Evoking the targets of Crosby’s critique, in his intrepid acts of “highlighting” Howes is not just a promoter or preserver but a veritable doctor, bringing back to life that which has ceased to be. Of course, the word “forgotten” is often repeated in the discourse, but the word “extinct” also appears in reference to the original recordings. “The source material for Native North America (Vol. 1) was unearthed at locations ranging from vinyl swap meets and stores to public and private libraries, personal collections, and thrift shops across Canada,” writes Howes in the liner notes. “Despite the near-extinct nature of these recordings, it’s time they take their rightful place in our collective history.”47 Not only an act of retrieval, then, this collection is an act of cultural exhumation and reanimation.48 Somewhat like the “salvage” ethnographers of the early twentieth century, Howes is regarded as a saviour of an already disappeared cultural form.49 Rhetorically, the collector figure frames as extinguished that which is collected, thus turning the collector into a saviour.50 Willie Dunn, however, the widely anthologized writer behind three tracks on Native North America, Vol. 1, was hardly forgotten before Light in the Attic’s release. Dunn passed away one year before the release of the anthology and his death was covered by the Globe and Mail and by the cbc. In fact, there was a fascinating exchange on cbc Radio’s Q, guest hosted by Wab Kinew, where the host interjects, during an interview with Howes, with the anecdote that his family had Willie Dunn records, the implication being that Dunn is well known, not forgotten.51 Obviously, this is not to say that Dunn does not deserve further recognition. But what is the meaning of the

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exhumation of that which is not dead, other than a way to foreground the creative practice of the white male settler–saviour? Music as Land

Metaphors of hunting and digging are common in record collecting discourses.52 Yet, recalling Marius Barbeau’s collecting efforts under the banner of the Geological Survey of Canada, press coverage of Native North America, Vol. 1 often used images and metaphors of geological excavation in order to emphasize the novelty of the reissue project. A Guardian headline called the reissue a “goldmine of forgotten fusions”;53 Rolling Stone referred to Light in the Attic as a “deep-digging” archival label that has been “illuminating a stash.”54 The headline of a feature published by The Tyee read, “The Vancouver Crate Digger Mining Buried Music Gold.”55 The emphasis these publications placed on music as collected object foregrounds Howes’s role in the project. From this angle, the art is in the preservation itself, in the placing together. The notion that music, a social practice conducted by creative agents, is also a geological artefact or object also appears on the cover art of the Native North America album itself. Faint sketches of Willie Thrasher, Willie Dunn, and Willy Mitchell blend into each other and into the cartographic contours of the continent. Whereas the original recordings were made by individual singer-songwriters and bands, distinct works appear here to blend and morph together into an indistinct “folk” emerging from and back into the land. This framing was deployed in public performances as well. In 2017, for instance, the Vancouver Folk Festival programmed Duke Redbird, Willie Thrasher and Linda Saddleback, Willy Mitchell, Lloyd Cheechoo, and Gordon Dick Sr together as “Native North America.” This rhetoric of music-as-land implies that the artists are objects of desire and pursuit, raw materials to be extracted, preserved, and collected, while the collector is the actual artist and active agent. Technology and Modernity

Finally, the third theme that emerges from a discourse analysis of Native North America is that of technology and modernity, which is not strictly extra-textual, however, but exists in conjunction with the broader generic signifiers of the folk and low-fi rock traditions articulated on the recordings in which immediacy and authenticity have often been lauded as aesthetic values.56 In her writeup for bc Musician, Mohawk/ Tuscarora writer and poet Janet Rogers foregrounds this aspect of the larger effect: “The music is reminiscent of the times they were created in both sound and content, pre-electronics, all the songs were composed and played by human means and ring of Indigenous truths meant to liberate and empower whole nations of people.”57 Rogers’s short review enticingly frames the album less as the curatorial work of the saviour collector than as an important historical document of dialogue amongst artists; however, the generic emphasis on “rawness” or “immediacy” rhetorically distances “Native North America” from modern North America.58 The absence of Buffy Sainte-Marie from the collection, which Rogers also points out, and indeed any

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women at all, is significant. What about Sainte-Marie’s 1969 album Illuminations, a folk record that features a striking and sustained engagement with technology, including quadrophonic vocals and synthesizers? The collection’s exclusive focus on garage rock and acoustic folk fetishizes immediacy and authenticity over the technological experimentation that was also a part of this musical history. Similarly, in reckoning with the significance of the album, some writers distinguished between, on one hand, the Indigeneity of the music or performers, and, on the other hand, the folk-rock structure and sound. “Native North American musicians fell for rock, country and guitar folk, imitating then expanding upon the Beatles, the Stones and others,” writes Kitty Empire.59 However, recent scholars and documentarians alike have thoughtfully explored the Indigenous roots of rock ‘n’ roll, showing that Indigenous musicians did not simply fall for rock or the blues but actually engaged in dialogue with these genres at their inception.60 This element of the media coverage is another throwback to the discourse out of which the modern song collector emerges, where “pure” Indigenous culture existed outside of and prior to the vicissitudes of the cultural industries and modern technologies.

Conclusion

The elements of mainstream discourses surrounding the release of Native North America, Vol. 1 analyzed above act out multiple functions. An act of musical-historical “reconciliation” allows forgotten performers to return to the spotlight at the same time that they are rendered as a collectible part of the landscape, which itself is parceled out and commoditized for a white settler audience.61 “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” as Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang have forcefully argued.62 Neither is decolonization a more diverse record collection. Thus, difficult questions need to be asked in response to the powerful songwriters who nonetheless speak through this anthology, their voices still ringing out on these recordings. At the same time, Indigenous artists are also making use of the discourses of song collecting in ways that challenge the complicated legacies of the media-cultural trope of the collector/curator. For example, the album cover of They Forgot They Survived, a 2017 release by Khu.éex’, an “experimental Native American collective,” also released by Light in the Attic, engages explicitly with this discourse. The image features Frances Densmore, a pioneering ethnographer who made extensive use of technological media in her practice. In the original image, Densmore eagerly watches as a machine records the object of her quest heroically declaiming as he performs into the horn.63 Khu.éex’ modifies the original image by turning the cylinder phonograph into a colourful, glowing machine, a digital filter bank and patch bay through which Densmore’s subject is presumably able to reclaim and modulate his performance (fig. 7.2). A possible nod to the iconography of the Afrofuturist tradition in popular music, Khu.éex’ resists the

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7.2 Khu.éex’, They Forgot They Survived, album cover art, 2017. Cover design by Maurice Caldwell and Brian Williamson.

notion that Indigenous musical history is in the past, a past that needs saving through the heroic efforts of a collector.64 More recently, composer and singer Jeremy Dutcher made a Polaris Prize–winning album by drawing on songs collected from his ancestors of the Wolastoqiyik nation in the early 1900s and recorded on wax cylinders. Dutcher describes the project, which includes him singing in the Wolostoqey language: “[F]or me it’s so important to bring these old wax songs into my community because nobody knew about them. It was only the older people that actually knew these songs. For me, it was really important to show these melodies on the record. You can hear these old voices coming through as well and that, for me, creates a conversation between generations and

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7.3 Jeremy Dutcher, Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa, album cover art, 2018.

through time.”65 Rather than collect records, Dutcher engages in conversation, a dialectic alluded to on the album cover, which also references the Frances Densmore image (or at least a similar song-collecting interaction). However, here the settler song collector is absent. With cylinder recordings gathered at his feet, Dutcher casts himself in the roles of both collector and collected, pointing towards a powerful revision of a history that is not “dead,” waiting to be salvaged or exhumed but which is always already alive (fig. 7.3).

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n ote s 1 Brady, A Spiral Way; Kheshti, Modernity’s Ear, 15–38; Sterne, The Audible Past, 311–25. 2 See, for example, Brady, A Spiral Way, 118–25; Del Hierro, “‘By the Time I Get to Arizona’”; Hoefnagels and Diamond, Aboriginal Music in Contemporary Canada; Johnson, “‘We Were All Wounded at Wounded Knee’”; Lee, “Singing for the People”; Robinson, Hungry Listening. Of course, there is also a long history of scholarship exploring the power of sound recording to challenge racism more broadly. See, for example, Gilroy, ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack’; Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity; Weheliye, Phonographies. 3 Dunn, “I Pity the Country.” 4 Ibid. 5 As Kevin “Sipreano” Howes states in his liner notes for Native North America, Vol. 1, Dunn essentially recorded the album twice for two different labels: first, for Summus, which was not widely distributed, and then again for Montreal-based Kot’ai. See Howes, “Native North America.” 6 Michael Barclay, “Canada’s Long-Lost Aboriginal Music Rocks Again,” Maclean’s, 26 December 2014, https://www.macleans.ca/culture/canadas-long-lost-aboriginal-music-rocks-again (accessed 10 August 2018). 7 See Dyer, Stars; Frith, Performing Rites; Gilroy, The Black Atlantic; McRobbie, In the Culture Society. 8 Howes and Light in the Attic are overtly aware of this context as well, at least with respect to album art and liner notes, as they explained in an interview. See Michael Schmidt, “Open Sound.” 9 Robinson, Hungry Listening. 10 Ibid., 48–9. 11 Ibid., 49. 12 Garneau, “Imaginary Spaces of Conciliation and Reconciliation,” 23. 13 “Settler moves to innocence” is a phrase and concept developed by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, building upon the work of Janet Mawhinney, Mary Louise Fellows, and Sherene Razack. See Fellows and Razack, “The Race to Innocence”; Mawhinney, “‘Giving Up the Ghost’”; Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” 14 See for example Mamers, “Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing”; Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive; Morgensen, “The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism.” 15 For example, Born and Hesmondhalgh, Western Music and Its Other; Clifford, The Predicament of Culture; Krech and Hall, Collecting Native America; Stocking, Objects and Others. 16 Wakeham, Taxidermic Signs, 129. 17 Bendix, In Search of Authenticity; Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe; Storey, Inventing Popular Culture. 18 Storey, Inventing Popular Culture, 10. 19 Zumwalt, American Folklore Scholarship. 20 Filene, Romancing the Folk. 21 Ibid., 20–7. 22 Zumwalt, American Folklore Scholarship, 45–67.

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Ibid., 45–67, 68–98. Brady, A Spiral Way; Kheshti, Modernity’s Ear, 15–38; Sterne, The Audible Past, 311–25. Filene, Romancing the Folk, 47–75. McKay, The Quest for the Folk, 43–151. See Fowke, “A Personal Odyssey and Personal Prejudices,” 39–48. Nurse, “Marius Barbeau,” 52–64. See, for instance, Fabian, Time and the Other. However, as Michael Taussig argues, the field recording interaction is also a poetical site through which colonial categories are challenged and probed. See Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity. Nurse, “Marius Barbeau”; Filene, Romancing the Folk, 47–75; McKay, Quest of the Folk, 43–151. For a revisionist account of song collector Alan Lomax and the American folk revival in general, see Svec, American Folk Music. Cantwell, If Beal Street Could Talk, 223–4. However, the groundwork for this transmogrification was set during the emergence of the music industry at the turn of the century, according to Kay Shelemay, and developed in conjunction with ethnomusicological scholarship. Shelemay, “Recording Technology.” See also Kheshti, Modernity’s Ear. Kevin “Sipreano” Howes, “The Man Behind the Milk,” voluntary in nature (blog), 13 September 2011, https://voluntaryinnature.blogspot.com/2011/09/man-behind-milk.html (accessed 1 December 2019). On the image, there is a caption attributed to Allen Ginsberg, which describes the photo as “Harry Smith … transforming milk into milk.” See Moist, “Collecting, Collage, and Alchemy,” 111–27; Cantwell, If Beale Street Could Talk, 190, 221; Cantwell, When We Were Good, 189–240. In addition to Cantwell’s analyses, cited above, see Crow, “Folk into Art”; Marcus, The Old, Weird America. See Perchuck and Singh, Harry Smith. I am drawing here on Raymond Williams’s conception of the residual and emergent. See Williams, Marxism and Literature, 121–7. Shuker, Wax Trash and Vinyl Treasures, 83–136. Nathanial Schmidt, “Interview: Kevin ‘Sipreano’ Howes and Native North America Volume 1,” National Music Centre, 29 May 2015, https://nmc.ca/interview-kevin-sipreano-howes-andnative-north-america-volume-1/ (accessed 20 August 2018). Mike Devlin, “Music Historian Kevin Howes Carries Vinyl Gems Up His Sleeve,” Victoria Times Colonist, 20 August 2015, https://www.timescolonist.com/entertainment/music-historiankevin-howes-carries-vinyl-gems-up-his-sleeve-1.2035941. Tim Perlich, “Jamaica to Toronto: Lost Stars of the City’s Vibrant 60s R&B Scene Finally Get Their Chance to Shine,” nowtoronto.com, 13 July 2006, https://nowtoronto.com/news/jamaicato-toronto/ (accessed 12 December 2018). See, for instance, Michael Barclay, “Black Sabbath by Way of Salluit,” Maclean’s, 22 December 2014; Kitty Empire, “Native North America Vol 1 Review – A Goldmine of Forgotten Fusions,” The Guardian, 23 November 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/23/nativenorth-america-vol-1-review-a-goldmine-of-forgotten-fusions (accessed 12 December 2018);

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43 44

45

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49 50

51 52 53 54 55 56 57

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Jesse Jarnow, “‘Native North America’: How We Ignored Incredible Folk and Country Made at Home,” Rolling Stone, 21 November 2014, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/musiccountry/native-north-america-how-we-ignored-incredible-folk-and-country-made-at-home192040/ (accessed 12 December 2018). The only journalistic coverage of the album to consider the “frame” itself came on the excellent podcast The Imposter. See Aliya Pabani, “I Pity the Country Part 1,” The Imposter, podcast audio, 27 December 2017, http://www.canadalandshow. com/podcast/imposter-pity-country-part-1/ (accessed 12 December 2018). Pabani applauds the collection but also questions the framing offered by Howes in the liner notes, which focuses on the personal tragedies of the performers without incorporating any quotations from their own accounts. Kevin “Sipreano” Howes, “goodbye 2012,” voluntary in nature (blog), 31 December 2012, http:// voluntaryinnature.blogspot.com/2012/ (accessed on 10 August 2018). On “authenticity” as a criterion of value in rock culture see Keightley, “Reconsidering Rock,” 109–42. Both Roy Shuker and Will Straw have explored how structures of distinction also inflect the practice of record collecting. See Shuker, Wax Trash and Vinyl Treasures; Straw, “Sizing Up Record Collections,” 3–16. The Canadian Press, “Music Journalist Kevin Howes Gets Grammy Nod for Historical Album of Aboriginal Music,” CBC.ca, 11 February 2016, https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/ canada-aboriginal-music-grammy-nomination-historical-1.3444431 (accessed 1 August 2018). Crosby, “Construction of the Imaginary Indian,” 270. Howes, “Native North America, Vol. 1,” 3. For other examples where “extinction” and “exhumation” appear, see Scott Lewis, “Kevin ‘Sipreano’ Howes,” Here Elsewhere, 15 January 2013, http://hereelsewhere.com/listen/kevinsipreano-howes/ (accessed 12 December 2018); Doug Ward, “The Vancouver Crate Digger Mining Buried Music Gold,” The Tyee, 23 May 2015, https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2015/05/23/ Vancouver-Collector-Mining-Music-Gold/ (accessed 12 December 2018). See Gruber, “Ethnographic Salvage,” 1289–99. This rhetorical strategy parallels the “settler adoption fantasies” theorized by Tuck and Yang: “those narratives in the settler colonial imaginations in which the Native (understanding that he is becoming extinct) hands over his land, his claim to the land, his very Indian-ness to the settler for safe-keeping.” Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” 12. Wab Kinew, “Kevin Howes and Lloyd Cheechoo on the Music of Native North America,” Q, cbc Radio One, 16 December 2014. Roy Shuker, Wax Trash and Vinyl Treasures, 109–36. Empire, “A Goldmine of Forgotten Fusions.” Jarnow, “How We Ignored Incredible Folk and Country Made at Home.” Ward, “The Vancouver Crate Digger.” Simon Frith, “‘The Magic That Can Set You Free,’” 159–68; Keightley, “Reconsidering Rock.” Janet Rogers, “Native North America Volume 1 Review,” bc Musician, 21 January 2015, http://www.bcmusicianmag.com/native-north-america-volume-1-review-janet-rogers/ (accessed 21 August 2018). In his introduction to the album, Howes also spends an entire paragraph recounting how

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difficult it was to get a hold of Tayara Papigatuk because he does not have a phone. Howes, “Native North America, Vol. 1,” 5. Empire, “A Goldmine of Forgotten Fusions.” See Catherine Bainbridge and Alfonso Maiorana, dirs., Rumble; Berglund, Johnson, and Lee, Indigenous Pop; Byrd, The Transit of Empire, 117–46. This does not even broach the question of how the individual artists on the compilation are compensated, a question raised by Aliya Pabani on her excellent The Imposter podcast. Pabani, “I Pity the Country Part 1.” Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” 1–40. For an excellent, extended unpacking of Densmore, see Kheshti, Modernity’s Ear, 23–7. For a poetic explication of the aesthetics of Afrofuturism, see The Last Angel of History. Karen Bliss, “Jeremy Dutcher Aims to Disrupt ‘Anglo-Centric Music Narrative’ with WolastoqLanguage Album: Premiere,” Billboard, 5 April 2018, https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/ 8290094/jeremy-dutcher-wolastoqiyuk-lintuwakonaw (accessed 12 December 2018).

8 Excavation: Memory Work sy lv ia d. hamilton

Introduction

In the African Baptist tradition in Mi’kma’ki|Nova Scotia, one is often called upon to give a testimony or to give witness. Without hesitation, regardless of your age, you stand before the congregation to testify. You learn to speak, to use your voice. When I consider my varied artistic practice, and my life’s work, I recognize this training – my work bears witness to the multivoiced, complex stories of African-descended people. The imperative to explore this complexity demanded that I use varied methodologies and vehicles. Temporal site-based installations offered the non-linear opportunity to place audiences–visitors inside the work in a way not possible with film and text-based books. Instead, text is lifted off the page and onto walls to become a different kind of image. Objects seen in films come alive in the gallery space. Excavation: Memory Work is a multiyear, organic, multimedia, and site-specific installation first titled Excavation: A Site of Memory when originally mounted at the Dalhousie Art Gallery in Kjipuktuk|Halifax, Mi’kma’ki|Nova Scotia, in 2013. It uses a personal and collective frame within which to view and explore the complex, linked concepts of memory, place, and history of African descended people. The exhibit evolves and changes as it is hosted by different institutions. The excavations occur at sites of memory both actual and imaginary. The objects displayed – archival documents, still and projected images, newspaper clippings, recorded voices, artifacts, red-ribboned hair locks, potatoes, hogshead barrels, poetry, Black hair combs, straightening irons, books, quilts – are carefully arranged, creating a seamless sensory environment, a place for remembering and imagining (fig. 8.1). I am interested in how the meaning of objects, documents, and a plethora of archival materials can change depending on their position, placement, and location

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8.1 Installation view, The Ledger and Naming Names.

and how they may be juxtaposed or placed into conversation with other material, and critically, with the institutions hosting the installation. I’ve installed five solo iterations of this work: at the Dalhousie University Art Gallery in 2013; the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, also in Kjipuktuk|Halifax, in 2014; the Thames Art Gallery in Chatham, Ontario (land of the Three Fires Confederacy), 2015; the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University in 2016; and the University of New Brunswick Art Centre in Ekwpahak|Fredericton, New Brunswick, in January 2018. Simultaneously, a modified version appeared as part of Here We Are Here: Black Canadian Contemporary Art, an exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum in Tkaronto|Toronto and later on view at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal from June to September 2018, and at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia from May 2019 to October 2019. The title

Excavation: Memory Work

of this group show, Here We Are Here, comes from the title, “Excavation: Here We Are Here,” I created for the Dalhousie University Schulich School of Law iteration.1

Me and the Archive

A set of fundamental questions propel my work: Whose history, whose memory is acknowledged? Whose archive is considered valuable, worthy? By whom? What do we remember? What remains? What has been rendered invisible? What do we really know about the history and presence of African/Black people in this particular Atlantic place? Further, my work thinks about why I am here, how I got here, and what I am to do while I’m here. My first exposure to the archive came in the early 1970s when I began researching material for an article on the African United Baptist Association (auba). This provincial umbrella organization, established in 1834, is the oldest Black controlled institution in Mi’kma’ki|Nova Scotia.2 The Nova Scotia Archives holds the auba’s early minutes, which were recorded and printed after each annual August session; their existence a textual testimony to the vision of the leaders to preserve the auba’s history. I was grateful; I immersed myself in them. They offered insight into the development of Black communities in Mi’kma’ki|Nova Scotia – the role of women, community selfhelp, the quest for educational equality and literacy, and the moral, spiritual, and social preoccupations of the communities and their leaders. These primary documents, along with newspapers and newsletters, demonstrate the community’s insistence on recording its own history and creating vehicles for communications. I continued to dig. By 1981, along with friend and co-researcher Savanah Williams, and then-provincial archivist Hugh Taylor, we mounted the first ever public exhibition of archival documents from the holdings of the Public Archives of Nova Scotia related to people of African descent in Mi’kma’ki|Nova Scotia. It ran from April to August of that year. Many of the documents displayed would become foundational to my developing interest in and understanding of the presence, challenges, and resilience of African people in Mi’kma’ki|Nova Scotia. Among the materials were bills of sale for enslaved people, Sir Guy Carleton’s “Book of Negroes,” Rose Fortune’s watercolour portrait, Black Loyalist Thomas Peters’s petition, and the Settlement List of Black Refugees in Preston and vicinity. Simply because I and others like me didn’t know of the existence of this material didn’t mean it did not exist. It was there in the archives and its visible–invisible presence raises questions about who knows about and uses archives and for what purposes. No doubt academic researchers and historians had seen this material, but outside this select few, it sat unexamined in neatly organized file boxes on countless rows of shelves.3 Black communities in Mi’kma’ki|Nova Scotia were prime sites for sociological research in the 1950s and 1960s. We were “subjects” and “problems” to be studied and

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written about. The resulting publications were rarely seen by or accessible to the very people researched and studied. During one of my trips to the archives I happened upon a 1949 master’s thesis by C.R. Brookbank. He spent about two weeks “in the field.” This study is intended to be a preliminary sociological survey. Field-work preparation included a general review of material concerned with the Negro in various parts of North America … The field Notes found in the Appendix were not written, for the most part, in the presence of the people under observation. The notes were made whenever there was an opportunity for solitude, so that behaviour would not be inhibited. While this method of recording did not sacrifice too much in the way of detail so long as the notes were made at frequent intervals it did produce a mass of written material devoid of much continuity or logical arrangement.4 Of particular interest to me was the set of small black and white photographs Brookbank had taken as part of his research. I had no way of knowing if the people photographed had ever seen the images. To render the people visible, I’ve repurposed them for use in a selection of different projects since first seeing them. It’s my way of returning the images to the broader African Nova Scotian community. Twenty years after Brookbank’s short term study, Tkaronto|Toronto sociologist Frances Henry, along with two graduate students, came to Mi’kma’ki|Nova Scotia in the spring–summer of 1969 to conduct another short-term research study in Black communities. Among the conclusions she drew from her brief stay were these: At the group level, however, Black communities are under-organized and do not show any strong viable institutional support. This is manifested by the lack of leaders and of voluntary associations in the communities, and by the lack of economic organization of any kind, which makes such Black communities dependent on neighbouring White towns for their goods and services. Institutionalized religion in these Black communities is not binding or influential, and it lacks any symbolic or ideational system, so that folklore, music and the like are almost non-existent. The family system, while nuclear and stable as far as the male presence in the home is concerned is frequently conflict-ridden.5 The rich history of the African Baptist Church (Black owned and controlled), its music and leadership dating to the 1830s, stands in opposition to these so-called objective observations, which also included the following: “There has not developed in Nova Scotia a community-specific Black culture comparable, say, to the soul culture of the Black Americans.”6

Excavation: Memory Work

Through my work, I talk back to this work and its thin, poorly executed, and damaging conclusions. Following writer Toni Morrison, I know what my work must do. For me – a writer in the last quarter of the twentieth century, not much more than a hundred years after Emancipation, a writer who is black and a woman – the exercise is very different. My job becomes how to rip that veil drawn over “proceedings too terrible to relate.” The exercise is also critical for any person who is black, or who belongs to any marginalized category, for historically, we were seldom invited to participate in the discourse even when we were its topic.7 My early research into and exploration of the Nova Scotia Archives formed the infrastructure – the spine or roadmap – for my subsequent work. It seeded my imagination; the results came years later in my films, essays, poetry, and art installations such as Excavation: Memory Work. Simultaneously, my expanding knowledge led to more questions, more introspection. During this period, I absorbed the essential work of James W. St G. Walker and Ellen Gibson Wilson on the Black Loyalists, John Clarkson’s original diary describing plans for the exodus of 1,200 Black Loyalists from Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone in 1792, and other primary colonial documents in the archives’ holdings. I learned about the bravery and outspoken leadership of Thomas Peters, who at great peril travelled to England to plead the Black Loyalist case before the king of England. Several decades later I circled back to this knowledge to create the short documentary Thomas Peters: Man of the People (2016), which became part of Excavation: Memory Work at the University of New Brunswick Art Centre in 2018. Even though I knew the extraordinary Black Loyalist story, this production allowed me to take a fresh look at my earlier research while exploring new sources as I now also “mined” the New Brunswick Archives to find answers to questions I had developed during the intervening years. Archivists in Fredericton introduced me to a series of maps and documents I had not previously seen that allowed me to tell a fuller story. As the proverb in the Twi language of Ghana known as Sankofa asserts: It is not taboo to go back and fetch what you forgot.8 Another story I circled back to was that of blacksmith Jason Harper of Menahkwesk|Saint John, New Brunswick, whom I’d interviewed and photographed in the 1970s for an oral history project exploring Black history in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. My poem, The Apollos, about two brothers, freedom runners, trained in blacksmithing, installed as a wall print in the exhibition, reminded me of Harper, his patient, skilled hands, his care for the horses he shod. Black and white images I made of him shoeing a horse were a most relevant and fitting addition to Memory Work. I paired them with a blacksmith’s wrought iron implements on loan from Kings Landing, an outdoor museum that re-creates a nineteenth-century village. It is situated west of Fredericton, along the Wolastoq|Saint John River, New Brunswick. In this moment my personal archive met a public one.

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Black Refugee Survivors of the War of 1812: A Primer Slaves by habit & education, no longer working under the dread of the lash, their idea of freedom is idleness and they are therefore quite incapable of Industry. George Ramsay, Lord Dalhousie, lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia, 1816–209

Who were my ancestors and the ancestors of the people who looked like me? What did they look like? What did their voices sound like when they spoke, sang, or cried? Timbre, tone, and pitch? My practice is informed by my context – history, backstory, and experiences in the world. The Black Refugee Survivors of the War of 1812 were my ancestors. The conditions they faced when they arrived in Nova Scotia on British naval ships were horrendous. Housed in a British-owned and -built stone prison on Melville Island in Halifax’s North West Arm, they faced disease, hunger, and indifference. It would be another twenty-two years before slavery was abolished in British colonies such as Canada. Had my forebears not been imaginative, creative, and determined, they would never have survived. I would not exist. They were the original AfroFuturists.10 Water is central to our story. My ancestors were bold freedom runners: they were courageous, tenacious, wilful. In this present moment, near the end of the second decade of the third millennium, I think about many people around the world who take their fate into their own hands when they crowd into rickety rafts, unsafe rubber zodiacs, or other unseaworthy vessels in a quest to find the elusive aspiration we name freedom. They do so armed only with an uncertain promise but no guarantee of a life without fear, a life filled with peace. In my mind’s eye, I juxtapose images of tall sailing ships stacked with kidnapped, chained Africans, cutting through the wild Atlantic with the faces of these frightened travellers. Or with sketches of frigates sailing north from New York after the War of 1812, transporting self-liberated Africans to Nova Scotia; then vessels sailing south to the Caribbean stocked with salt fish, timber, and enslaved Africans.

The Creation Process Our sad past, I’ve learned much. Thank-you. unb Art Centre visitor comment, January 201811

“Mining the museum” is a phrase coined by installation artist Fred Wilson to describe the practice he used to prepare an exhibition at the Maryland Historical Society Museum in Baltimore that opened to the public on 3 April 1992 and ran for eleven months. To prepare this landmark exhibit, Wilson spent a year talking to curators and staff and

Excavation: Memory Work

exploring the museum’s collection. His goal was to create an exhibition that would disrupt the traditional white viewpoint that underpinned the museum’s curatorial approach. Critic Elisabeth Ginsberg writes, “He did so simply by assembling the museum’s collection in a new and surprising way, deploying various satirical techniques, first and foremost irony.”12 While I too “mine” the holdings of museums to find artifacts to incorporate into my installations, my practice departs from Wilson’s insofar as I place materials and objects from my own archive in proximity to those from museum collections, thereby opening a conversation. These juxtapositions in some cases include very similar objects. When mining the collections of the Royal Ontario Museum (rom), for example, one of the curators showed me several so-called “black dolls.” One was a golliwogg doll, deep black with exaggerated features. Another was called the “Topsy-Turvy doll” – one side was a white doll, flip it to find the black doll, both dressed in matching clothing. Over the years I’ve found similar dolls in second hand or antique stores. My own collection contains dolls with the same hideous stereotypical markings. A cursory internet search turns up many such dolls still in circulation and as models for contemporary fashion accessories, such as the key chains, cell phone cases, and jewellery – the “Pradamalia” collection – created by the fashion house Prada. These items, designed with monkey-like features, black faces, and red lips, appeared in a prominent but short-lived display in Prada’s storefront window in New York in December 2018. A social media firestorm forced the company to remove the items and to cease distributing them. Prada’s public statement of defence asserted that it “abhors racist imagery. The Pradamalia are fantasy charms composed of elements of the Prada oeuvre. They are imaginary creatures not intended to have any reference to the real world and certainly not blackface.” Elsewhere, a “Feel Better Doll,” made of black fabric, with large white eyes, and yarn to simulate dreadlocks, was pulled from One Dollar Zone stores in Bayonne, New Jersey, in July 2019. Instructions that came with the doll urged owners to whack the doll against a wall whenever things did not go well. No comment is needed on the metaphor this presents.13 In Here We Are Here, I displayed the rom’s dolls and my dolls in the same vitrine with identifiers, leaving viewers to wonder why: why I collected them; why those in the rom’s holdings were there; and why these racist and stereotypical tchotchkes still circulate. To create Excavation: Memory Work, I relied on an approach I used at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic (mma) (2014), the Thames Art Gallery in Chatham (2015), and the Royal Ontario Museum (2018), which included site visits to explore their respective holdings and artifacts. Curators at the mma invited me to select and use whatever museum materials I wanted. Two medium-sized wooden barrels I had previously borrowed for the first show at the Dalhousie Art Gallery (2013) were my first choice. Wooden casks or hogsheads, commonly known as barrels, were the primary shipping and storage container for cargo in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. When

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enslaved Africans were sold at auction, they were listed along with hogsheads of all manner of goods. I used these barrels to concretize this equivalency – Black people were property.14 Black Refugee Survivors of the War of 1812 relied on the land and what it produced to survive. They harvested wildflowers and berries, gathered wood for kindling, clothesline props, and to craft baskets – all to sell at the Halifax Market. Barrels of different sizes overflowed with their goods. As I explored the mma’s collection, I found barrels of various sizes, much like people of the past would have filled with newly gathered late summer wildflower bouquets and birch limb props for clotheslines. They exercised great ingenuity and creativity in order to survive, to tramp down the path for those, like me, who would follow. The exhibit at the mma, as described in my artist’s notes, pointed in a direction I would follow for future iterations of the exhibition, especially the one I installed at the unb Art Centre. My work here at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic has earlier roots, origins – dating back many years ago. But it was about 10 years ago during a residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts that I first conceptualized the idea for this installation during the Intra-Nation Residency; artists came from around the world to create and share ideas. I had a small studio in which I created a pilot installation to test some of my ideas. When I mounted the newspaper ads for the “runaways” whom I choose to call freedom runners, I met shock and surprise, not only from the international artists, but from the Canadian artists too. “Not here in Canada, wasn’t that in the US? What about the Underground Railroad and freedom,” etc., etc. It was difficult for them to grapple with Canada as a slave society. At the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, another temporal site of memory, the work shares space with “Prize and Prejudice: Nova Scotia and War of 1812”. When I wrote some of the poems in my poetry collection, And I Alone Escaped to Tell You, that I transformed into large prints, I was unaware of the Black Refugee letters displayed in Prize and Prejudice – what a profound experience to read them and to compare them to the imagined narratives I created out of my deep engagement with our history. Standing before the display case of artifacts excavated at Beechville, my home community, once called Refugee Hill, left me emotionally drained, and at the same time, full of the spirits of my ancestors who walked the same ground as I did as a child. They were real, they were there. I am because they were. The Poem The Passage, that sits above the Memory Table has the line “the Severn in full sail behind us.” The Severn, was a slaver – a ship that kidnapped Africans. In Prize and Prejudice, you will see the history of this ship that was re-named the Liverpool Packet. Of late, Tall Ships sail into Halifax in all of their splendor. Standing watching them, I think not of their splendor but that

Excavation: Memory Work

their earlier versions were also slavers, like the Liverpool Packet – sailing the Middle Passage capturing my ancestors. Some say, this is difficult stuff – why do we need to drag up the past. I am who they imagined. When stepping into the museums to explore their collections I looked for quotidian evidence of enslavement and, simultaneously, evidence of the daily lives of Black people. I found both at the Buxton Historical Site and Museum south of Chatham, which I integrated into the 2015 iteration at the Thames Art Gallery. Buxton was established in 1849 as a safe haven for those fleeing slavery in the United States. I borrowed child and adult iron wrist and ankle shackles, a handmade quilt sown by Buxton Church women, a small mirror and hair combs, and an ancient family Bible, fragile yet strong. These were heirloom treasures imbued with untold stories, with memories. They called; I came. They spoke; I listened.15

Excavation: Memory Work A reminder for all Canadians of the history, culture and hardship that the Black communities of nb & ns endured is part of our heritage and it is a story that needs to be passed to future generations of Canadians so that we will never forget their pain and suffering and hope that future generations will not have to sacrifice and endure as much as they did. unb Art Centre, visitor comment, January 2018 I remember the first time someone revealed to me that there were slaves in New Brunswick. I was shocked and, somewhat, in disbelief, although I believed it quickly thereafter. I have never looked further into the name of the slave owner that was mentioned to me. I am going to do that in 2018 inspired by you. unb Art Centre, visitor comment, January 2018 If history were past, history wouldn’t matter. History is present … You and I are history. We carry our history. We act our history. James Baldwin16

My work is grounded in James Baldwin’s idea that the past is present. Excavation: Memory Work is one way I act my history, our history. It honours the humanity, skills, and courage of my ancestral spirits. I am because they were. The un declared 2015–24 the International Decade for People of African Descent. In announcing this decade, then secretary general Ban Ki-Moon said, “We must remember that people of African descent are among those most affected by racism. Too often, they face denial of basic rights such as access to quality health services and education.” Mounting this work in 2018 across two gallery spaces marked a significant historical moment. The

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longstanding African-descended populations of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick are connected across borders and time to people in West Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States because of the transatlantic slave trade. It is our legacy, our living history.17 I installed Excavation: Memory Work in the West and East Galleries of the unb Art Centre. At the entrance to the West Gallery I displayed a large map from the 1780s to remind visitors of the historic and geographic links between the two provinces. Five fourteen-foot ceiling-to-floor wall scrolls made from cotton-rag archival paper became a contemporary roll call titled Naming Names (fig. 8.2). More than 3,000 names drawn from historical records of African people: enslaved Africans, free Black Loyalists from the American Revolutionary War, and free Black Refugees – Survivors – of the War of 1812 were inscribed on the scrolls. A female voice chanted the names into the record while a second, older male, voice sang No More Auction Block for Me, Many a Thousand Gone. This soundscape echoed in a whisper throughout the space. This second voice was that of the late William Riley of Cherry Brook, a Black community near Halifax. His poignant song was passed down to him by his Black refugee ancestors. For this gallery I thought about presence as I worked with the concept of memory, its meaning from individual and collective standpoints, to reference both absence and presence. Through the generalized narrative of the Atlantic region’s history, we are rendered absent while actually being visibly, physically present; our inherent value as human beings has never been acknowledged.18 Enslavement was a harsh, unforgiving life for African peoples in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Yet, I often hear the refrains, “There was no slavery in Canada.” “Canada was home to Black people seeking freedom from slavery in the United States.” “If we did have slavery, it was not the same or as terrible as in the US.” Such statements represent a combination of wilful ignorance and denial in the face of hard evidence found in archival records and in museums, examples of which I’ve displayed. The existence of countless notices in period newspapers in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick is stark proof of the practice of slavery and of the continuous resistance and resilience of African peoples. “Owners” who placed these advertisements offering rewards hoped to induce someone to capture the socalled “runaways.” But in my language, Freedom Runners who exercised control over their lives, resisted enslavement and took their freedom by escaping. In the temporary memory chamber of the gallery, the real and imagined co-exist. I thought about what it was like for Freedom Runners as they ran. My series of wall prints titled Freedom Runners, which creates their imagined voices in poetry, were juxtaposed with reproductions on Mylar transparencies of archival newspaper notices from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick (fig. 8.3). Black human beings were enslaved, listed as property the same as silverware, tables, equipment, and other personal items. Thursday, Bill, Nancy, Flora, Ben, Isaac, and Lidge, all named in advertisements, were contemporaries in the struggle for freedom.

8.2 Naming Names, preparing to install Excavation: Memory Work.

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Another work in the West Gallery positioned a batch of potatoes beside a nouveau two-sided wooden sandwich board sign printed with the following on different sides: 1769 On Saturday next at twelve o’clock, will be sold on the Halifax Beach, two hogshead of rum, three of sugar and two well-grown Negro girls, aged fourteen and twelve, to the highest bidder. Potato Lady dusty brown potato white eyes protruding she turns it in her hand, knife poised and thinks of Mary Postell sold for a bushel of potatoes.

8.3 Excavation: Memory Work with view of Freedom Runners, background, with On Saturday Next and Slave Collars in foreground.

Excavation: Memory Work

8.4 Excavation: Memory Work, Slave Collars, detail.

Mary Postell was a formerly enslaved woman who went to court to protect her freedom and that of her children but lost her case and was later sold for a bushel of potatoes.19 On a nearby charcoal grey plinth, I positioned two iron and brass chain-link “slave collars,” one with the name A. Demill, Sussex, engraved on its front piece, artifacts preserved at Kings Landing. I was heartbroken as I held these objects, as I thought about them touching the skin of the people enslaved, and now my skin (fig. 8.4). Their presence asked visitors to stop for a moment to imagine such a collar around the neck of a child of theirs or a child they knew and loved. While slavery was formally abolished in British colonies in 1834, the traces, the detritus, remain with us today: in language, and in conscious and unconscious attitudes toward Black people, engendered by the racist stereotypes and exclusionary practices that followed abolition. In its wake we experience racial profiling, job discrimination, over-policing, and continuing anti-Black racism.20

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In the East Gallery, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick met again. I introduced visitors to Black Loyalist Thomas Peters, a key historical leader linking both provinces. His story unfolded in a projected video titled Thomas Peters: Man of the People. Peters, a millwright, along with his wife Sally and their two children, sailed to Nova Scotia in 1784, searching for freedom after the American Revolutionary War. This thirst led him to New Brunswick to seek land and then to England to petition the king to keep the promises the British made to the Black Loyalists in exchange for their loyality during the American Revolutionary War. In January 1792, Peters and 1,200 Black Loyalists from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick accepted the British offer to start life again; they boarded fifteen transport ships docked in Halifax Harbour destined for Sierra Leone, West Africa.21 My family roots are long in Nova Scotia, much like those of my colleague Mary McCarthy are in New Brunswick, as evidenced by her ancestral artifacts housed in Kings Landing’s Taylor-Leek Collection that I borrowed for the display. They represent her legacy by carrying the stories of her relatives. From handmade wooden toys, to a hand stitched quilt, they embody the family’s memory. I was rendered silent when I held the quilt I selected for display, I had only seen a low-resolution image; it bore a striking resemblance to my Grandmother Hamilton’s quilt. A near mirror image. The patterns and colours were uncannily similar even though they were crafted in different provinces, decades and decades apart. And, I was reminded first of the Buxton Church women’s quilt whose pink edging also resembled the colour Grandmother used and second of writer Alice Walker’s essay on Black women and creativity that I first read in the 1970s. I used the Buxton quilt in an iteration of the installation at the Thames Art Gallery in Chatham, Ontario.22 I hung the quilts facing each other on opposite walls and positioned two pine and glass vitrines displaying objects from my archives and the Taylor-Leek artifacts nearby (figs. 8.5–8.6). McCarthy’s ongoing research and dedicated work to restore the Wheary graveyard and other Black burial sites in the Fredericton area reminds us of the need to recover and honour the earliest Black New Brunswickers. We have a duty to keep their stories alive. In spite of overwhelming odds, our ancestors made a way out of no way in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. They stoked the fires of hope, they believed in a better future. I am here because of them. I carry their story. I am their witness.

Leave a Memory

As visitors completed their gallery visits, I invited their participation in my memory work. I placed a small table near the exit with index cards, a pencil, a box to hold completed cards. The James Baldwin quotation and my provocation below were printed on a white text card:

8.5 Top Excavation: Memory Work, Nova Scotia–New Brunswick Family Quilts, Nova Scotia. 8.6 Bottom Excavation: Memory Work, Nova Scotia–New Brunswick Family Quilts, New Brunswick.

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Leave a Memory If history were past, history wouldn’t matter. History is present … You and I are history. We carry our history. We act our history. – James Baldwin We carry a lot of memories with us, many joyful ones, some that are sad, still others that haunt. Sometimes we need a way to voice them, or to find a place for them: to share the joy but also to acknowledge the pain. Sometimes what we carry is a burden that we want to get out of ourselves. The act of writing it down can mean at least it is put somewhere, leaving space for more hopeful ones that will comfort us in the days ahead. If you would like to, please leave a memory of your visit here, or a memory of something else you’d like to leave behind. Thanks for coming. One visitor left this memory, naming the person remembered: I did awful things to Tita Nilda, and she never complained. I put knots in her hair when I said I wanted to braid it. I dumped stuff on the floor all over all the time. Left problems for her to clean up and she never said a word. unb Art Centre, visitor comment, January 2018 Who was Tita Nilda? What was her relationship to the writer? Was she a nanny? Given the nature of my exhibit, was she Black/of African descent? What motivated the visitor to leave this specific memory at this particular moment? Was it a burden being carried that needed to be left behind? What happened the moment after the writer recorded the memory on the card? With each iteration of this work I’ve used a large memory book or a memory box for comments. Visitors leave short notes about the exhibition, memories they want to leave behind, microstories, and unusually cryptic musings such as this one. All are now part of my memory bank, my archive. This archive includes an original copy of Modern Library’s 1944 edition of An Anthology of American Negro Literature, edited by Sylvestre C. Watlkins. The now muted red and beige paper dust jacket is disintegrating to nearly dust. On the inside left blank page, the name Harry J Lewis, Saint John, March 10, 1949 is written in neat cursive. I don’t know who he was or why he had this book or where he may have obtained it. I return again and again to an essay by archivist, bibliophile, collector, historian Arthur A. Schomburg (1874–1938), found on page 101: “The Negro Digs Up His Past.” His dictum is direct: “The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future

Excavation: Memory Work

… History must restore what slavery took away, for it is the social damage of slavery that the present generations must repair and offset.”23 Schomburg wrote this in 1925. My practice, with its slant, after Dickenson, interrogation of the archives, owes much to Schomburg. There is ever more digging to be done, more testimony to give.

n ote s 1 Catalogues were produced for three of the five solo shows and are part of the author’s archive. 2 For a discussion of the African United Baptist Association, and especially the role of women in it, see Hamilton, “African Baptist Women.” 3 Early scholars who wrote about African Canadian communities such as Daniel Hill Sr, W.O. Raymond, James W. St G. Walker, Robin Winks, Ellen Gibson Wilson, and T.W. Smith, among others, visited archives in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Ontario to prepare their publications. 4 Brookbank, “Afro-Canadian Communities,” 65. 5 Henry, Forgotten Canadians, 5. 6 Ibid., 6. 7 Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory,” 104. 8 For a discussion of the use of the Sankofa symbol by African people in the diaspora see Temple, “The Emergence of Sankofa Practice.” 9 The quotation is taken from a letter written in 1816 by Lord Dalhousie, lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia, to his superior, Lord Bathurst, in London. It is one of many references examined by the Scholarly Panel into Dalhousie’s possible links to slavery in Nova Scotia, mandated in 2016 by former Dalhousie University president Richard Florizone and Dr Kevin Hewitt, chair of the Dalhousie senate. The panel presented its first public update in December 2018. See Matt Reeder, “Lord Dal Scholarly Panel Hosts First Community Meeting on Preliminary Findings,” Dal News, 12 December 2018, https://www.dal.ca/news/2018/12/12/lord-dal-scholarly-panelseeks-community-input-on-preliminary-fi.html. 10 The Nova Scotia Archives has an extensive website on African Nova Scotians that covers the period of enslavement through to the settlement of War of 1812 Black refugees and the development of the Black communities they established. A fair range of digitized archival documents from its holdings supports the narrative descriptions. See https://novascotia.ca/archives/ africanns/. 11 Visitor comments recorded on index cards left in the Leave a Memory Box. 12 Elizabeth Ginsberg, “Mining the Museum,” Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for the Revolution, 28 February, 1993, https://beautifultrouble.org/case/mining-the-museum/ (accessed 25 July 2019). 13 Ruth Brown, “Prada Pulls ‘Racist’ Blackface from Soho Stores,” New York Post, 14 December 2018, https://nypost.com/2018/12/14/prada-pulls-racist-blackface-products-from-soho-store/; The Associated Press, “Black Rag Dolls Meant to Be Abused Pulled from Stores,” Al Arabiya English, 27 July 2019, http://english.alarabiya.net/en/variety/2019/07/27/Black-rag-dolls-meant-tobe-abused-are-pulled-from-stores.html. For an analysis of why racist iconography persists in the fashion industry see Raquel Laneri, “Why Racist Imagery Just Won’t Go Out of Style in the

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Fashion World,” New York Post, 2 March 2019, https://nypost.com/2019/03/04/why-racistimagery-keeps-bubbling-up-in-the-fashion-world/. For a foundational text on slavery in Canada see Smith, “The Slave in Canada.” The Buxton National Historic Site and Museum is located in North Buxton in southwestern Ontario. The town was established by formerly enslaved Black people who escaped from the United States to Canada West via the secret network called the Underground Railroad. The Museum’s website features virtual exhibits, e-books, and a range of reference materials. See https://nypost.com/2019/03/04/why-racist-imagery-keeps-bubbling-up-in-the-fashion-world/. I’ve been a student of James Baldwin since I first bought his books, especially the Dell paperback The Fire Next Time (1963), as I finished high school. Baldwin was a student of history and I learned from him to do likewise. He often spoke of history in his countless media interviews, with variations on this quotation, such as: “History is not the past, it is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history.” In Raoul Peck’s stunning documentary, I Am Not Your Negro (2017), Baldwin’s rigorous intellectual engagement with history’s implications is paramount. See Rachel Herzing and Isaac Ontiveros, “Looking the World in the Face: History and Raoul Peck’s I am not your Negro,” Center for Political Education, https://politicaleducation. org/resources/looking-the-world-in-the-face-history-and-raoul-pecks-i-am-not-your-negro/. The un website for the Decade for People of African Descent (2015–24) contains the Programme of Actions, a range of audio, video, and textual resources, as well as background text on the Permanent Forum on People of African Descent. https://www.un.org/en/events/ africandescentdecade/. Helen Creighton (1899–1989) was an internationally known Nova Scotian folklorist, researcher, and collector. Her collection of still and moving images, sound recordings, and textual records constitute the largest private-sector fonds in the Nova Scotia Archives holdings. Her sound recording of William Riley is part of her archive. Hamilton, And I Alone Escaped to Tell You, 14, 28, 85. See Natasha Henry’s detailed examination of the abolition of slavery in British colonies, “Slavery Abolition Act, 1833,” The Canadian Encyclopedia, 29 January 2015, https://www.thecanadian encyclopedia.ca/en/article/slavery-abolition-act-1833. I produced Thomas Peters: Man of the People in 2016 through my company Maroon Films Inc. to pay tribute to his astonishing story. For a summary of the Peters story, see James W. St G. Walker, “Peters (Petters), Thomas,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography vol. 4 (Toronto: University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003), http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/peters_thomas_4 E.html. A vital document I read during my early visits to the Nova Scotia Archives was John Clarkson’s journal. He was a British officer who came to Nova Scotia to command the fifteen ships taking the Black Loyalists to Sierra Leone. See Ferguson, Clarkson’s Mission to America 1791–1792. Alice Walker first published her pivotal text, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: The Creativity of Women in the South” in Ms. magazine in 1974. Later, it was included in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, 231. Schomburg, “The Negro Digs Up His Past,” 101.

Part Three Reclaiming Sexualities, Tracing Complicities

9 Bear Grease, Whips, Bodies, and Beads: Community Building and Refusing Trauma Porn in Dayna Danger’s Embodied 2Spirit Arts Praxis d or ian j. fr aser, dayna danger, and adr ienne huard

This chapter looks at Dayna Danger’s artist praxis as a form of visual art, community building, and kinship in the Two-Spirit community of Tiohtiá:ke|Montreal, Quebec.1 Taking as primary sources Danger’s visual arts practice and an interview conducted between Danger, kin-collaborator and University of Manitoba PhD student Adrienne Huard, and colleague Dorian Jesse Fraser, the authors discuss the awakening of a TwoSpirit drum in Tiohtiá:ke alongside Danger’s deepening art practice.2 This conversation frames the liminal borders of Indigenous material relations, embodied art, and critical analysis, invoking the sovereignty of Danger’s collaborators, models, and kin. Points of introspection emerge from visual art practices and community work in the context of the first two Fierté en Hiver festivals at Concordia University. The authors engage with theorist Eve Tuck’s call to move Indigenous research frameworks from damage to desire and aspire to take it one step further, moving from a Two-Spirit history of scarcity and survival to one of consensual power play in sexual practices, material, and ceremony that spans activism, community building, and visual art while undercutting the colonial gaze.3 As an Indigenous non-binary artist working to support themselves and an art practice, Danger is currently both artist-in-residence at Initiatives for Indigenous Futurisms at Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTec) at Concordia University and works for the Concordia Centre for Gender Advocacy. Their work as a programming manager for the Centre for Gender Advocacy requires participation in the university community and, more importantly, the larger social framework that the centre serves. Working with queers, families, women, and Two-Spirit folk, Danger plans and coordinates events that combine social protest with musical performance, community feasts, and public engagement. The time they spend consulting with families, working with community, and navigating grief, outrage, and activist burnout informs their

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artwork. And these formations enrich and enliven one another, while also reinforcing the untenable work life of a full-time community worker and a full-time practising artist. Their work is both an engagement with Indigenous bodily autonomy in a colonial world through visual art, as well as a community-building endeavour; together the two intertwine and exceed the narrow boundaries of “activist art.” Writing this chapter has been a joint effort. Without the clear and intentional participation of Danger and Adrienne Huard, it would not have moved forward, and the decision to write about this particular moment in Danger’s career came to us in the form of a generous offer from Erin Morton for both Danger and Fraser to write chapters for this anthology. In consideration of their collaborative roles in facilitating the Two-Spirit drum’s presence in Fierte en Hiver celebrations, we decided a joint chapter, along with Huard, who has been involved in every important moment and stage of our journey working in collaboration on the Fierté en Hiver festival, and who works in collaboration with Danger as kin, would be appropriate. We want the interview text with Danger to speak about their personal experiences as an artist practitioner while elsewhere we trace some interesting conversations around their evolving work as they continue to navigate relationships, queerness and bdsm, controversy, and community building. This chapter is representative of a culmination of efforts on the contributors’ parts: Danger’s work as an Indigenous, Two-Spirit artist, and the collaborators’ efforts to make space available for Two-Spirit people in the Tiohtia:ke community through organization and activism, to gather and record this interview, and to present the final rendition of these words. But, as Fraser, a white settler, primarily wrote this text, these chosen words and reflections are not representative features of Danger’s location as an Indigenous, Two-Spirit artist. Rather, they are the considered opinion of an art historian who works in collaboration with Danger and Huard. To convey the depth of intertwined practices and experiences and, as well, delineate the differences between the writer, the artists in collaboration, and their working relationship, the text becomes a site of introduction; kinship; and transformative and transparent authorship, cooperation, and negotiation. In this essay, we consciously disregard strictures of invisible and homogenized work in favour of letting the work show itself. Locating ourselves through accessible language and our kinships and ancestries first and foremost, we engage in a process of decolonial genealogical placements – where we come from, who we are inspired by, and whose shoulders we stand upon. We want to demonstrate principles active in Danger and Huard’s work – to do justice to Indigenous methodologies and practices, we are required to clearly show what we are doing and to make sure those who want to access this are able. After we introduce ourselves as collaborators, we use a located argument that calls on artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s critical lens of Indigenous and state relationships in so-called Canada to bracket the embodied artistic work of Danger in relation to Unangaˆx scholar Eve Tuck’s call for a framework of privileging narratives of desire over damage. This enactment of bodily knowledge and healing through art

Community Building and Refusing Trauma Porn

practices that use sensual desire, hunger, humour, and bdsm contribute to an aesthetic that is a playful subversion of stereotypical hypersexualized and hyperavailable Indigenous bodies. From this narrative of desire-based works that highlight sovereignty and the power of lives lived and experienced, this chapter moves on to the intertwined relationship between the praxes of art and community, specifically in the awakening of the Two-Spirit drum of which Danger is the keeper. Interspersed throughout this text are interview excerpts from a long conversation between Danger, Fraser, and Huard, and commentaries that engage with their individual work, their collaborations and the work they do together in ceremony. This article seeks to highlight the work that happens in art and community while engaging with modes of kinship and collaboration that undo the hegemony of hierarchies and reinforce community knowledges and power in kinship.

Language Counts

In the writing of this chapter there have been more than a few attempts to draw parallels and create connections between the historically obtuse language of Western philosophy and Indigenous knowledges and practices. While there are, of course, ways in which these can be made congruous, there is no reliance in Danger’s work on the languages of academia, a world in which they have also walked. In conversations around editing, the artist disclosed to Fraser that their mfa thesis was based so thoroughly in contemporary queer languages that it verged on cryptic to outsiders. Instead of posing ways in which outsider language can be placed within, this text ventures that working from within for others on the queer inside (and those who want to do the work of reading and learning about the concerns from within the queer and TwoSpirit communities) is more rewarding than allowing voyeurs to transpose their desires, feelings, and philosophical constructions onto Danger’s work in the community or through their multimedia artwork. Where there are ways to explain turns of phrase in less abstracted terms, we do. To honour Danger’s words and experiences, as well as those who wish to read and learn about the Two-Spirit drum and Danger’s transformative practices, we endeavour to make this text as accessible and readable as possible. A text that defeats itself sits on a shelf, unable to contribute to a larger conversation. We would like to offer our thanks to the amazing Indigenous writers with whom we connect through citation and research, such as Eve Tuck, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Qwo-Li Driskill, Jas M. Morgan, and Ma-Nee Chacaby. We also hold thanks for Sedalia Fazio, the generous Mohawk elder who opened our ceremony with thanksgiving and who held a beautiful and gracious ceremony space. We thank Angus Pittman for ongoing support in maintaining the Two-Spirit drum with cheer and care. We would also like to thank our participants and other organizers and the Centre for Gender Advocacy for hosting us. This article was also written with other practising

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Indigenous artists in mind, such as Jeneen Frei Njootl, Raven Davis, Chief Ladybird, Fallon Simard, and curatorial collective gijiit, who continue to inspire and push forward critical conversations around Indigenous art. We are so grateful to work with and be a part of the support and scaffolding for the work of these artists as they persist in an environment of white supremacy, governmental apologetic inaction, and the ongoing genocide of Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island. Most of all, many thanks go to Dayna Danger, Red Eagle who Speaks Truth, and Adrienne Huard, Moonflower Woman, for their commitment to art, to community knowledges, and their desire to share their gifts with kin. How well do we know our kin? How well do we introduce each other and how well do we listen? … Those are things that native people want you to know right away … they want you to know who their mom is, where they come from, because they want to know what your knowledges are. Not what your blood quantum is, but they want to know what worldview you’re packin’ … Dayna Danger In keeping with the desire to know one’s kin, the collaborators introduce themselves before we move on to look at Danger’s work as they enact nonhierarchal, collaborative visual art, and an embodied sovereign desire that brings ceremonial objects and people into holistic alignment through art, play, sex, and community building.

Dayna Danger

Dayna Danger (they/them) is a Two-Spirit, Indigiqueer, Métis-Saulteaux-Polish visual artist. Danger was raised in Miiskwaagamiwiziibiing, Treaty 1 territory, or so-called Winnipeg. They are currently based in Tiohtiá:ke, or so-called Montreal. Through utilizing the processes of photography, sculpture, performance and video, Danger creates works and environments that question the line between empowerment and objectification by claiming the space. Ongoing works exploring bdsm and beaded leather fetish masks negotiate the complicated dynamics of sexuality, gender, and power in a consensual and feminist manner. Their focus remains on Indigenous and Métis visual and erotic sovereignty. Danger has exhibited their work most recently at the National Gallery of Canada with Àbadakone | Continuous Fire | Feu continuel. Danger was featured on the cover of Canadian Art’s June 2018 Kinship issue. Danger has participated in residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts and at Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art. Danger is pursuing a PhD at Concordia University.

Community Building and Refusing Trauma Porn

Adrienne Huard

Adrienne Huard (they/them) is a Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer Anishinaabe curator, art critic, scholar and performer. They are a citizen of Couchiching First Nation, Ontario, and born and raised in Miiskwaagamiwiziibiing/Winnipeg. After graduating in 2012 from the University of Manitoba with a bachelor of fine arts majoring in photography, they pursued a bachelor of fine arts in art history at Concordia University in Tio’tià:ke| Montreal. Huard graduated from Concordia in April 2018 and went on to complete ocad University’s graduate-level program in criticism and curatorial practice in Tkaronto|Toronto. In September 2020, they began the PhD-level program in Indigenous studies at University of Manitoba. Formerly, they worked at national arts publication Canadian Art magazine as an editor-at-large.

Dorian J. Fraser

Dorian J. Fraser (he/they) is of mixed European descent and traces their roots on Turtle Island to settler communities in Miiskwaagamiwiziibiin|Winnipeg and the settler communities on the traditional territories of the Yakama Indigenous tribes along the Columbia River on the west coast of the United States. They are a doctoral candidate at Concordia University in art history on the unceded territory of Tiohtiá:ke|Montreal, and an instructor at MacEwan University on Amiskwacîwâskahikan|Edmonton. Recent curatorial projects include cinema programs at Anthology Film Archives in New York and a guest curator program at the University of Victoria Maltwood Gallery. Their writing practice spans criticism, cultural critique, and creative non-fiction.

Damage to Desire: From Colonial Violence to Indigenous Pleasure and Power

It is critical to draw attention to the current state of affairs in Canada in order to frame Danger’s work within the colonial borders and knowledges that belong to an Indigenous artist asserting Indigenous sovereignty on unceded land through exhibition, installation, and monumental art works.4 In these moments of revision and revisitation, we cannot forgo a discussion, however brief, of the current mode of “reconciliation” through which state relationships with Indigenous peoples are bracketed. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, in Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back, spares no colonizer’s feelings in her comparison of the Canadian government’s treatment of Indigenous people to an abusive relationship. She writes: If Canadians do not fully understand and embody the idea of reconciliation, is this a step forward? It reminds me of an abusive relationship where one

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person is being abused physically, emotionally, spiritually and mentally. She wants out of the relationship, but instead of supporting her, we are all gathered around the abuser, because he wants to “reconcile.” But he doesn’t want to take responsibility. He doesn’t want to change … Collectively, what are the implications of participating in reconciliation processes when there is an overwhelming body of evidence that in action, the Canadian state doesn’t want to take responsibility and stop the abuse?5 Simpson invites her readers to imagine reconciliation as a consensual practice that must be embodied and practised with enthusiastic agreement by all Canadian settlers in order to not cause more harm through bluster and apology without government action. She calls for a radical re-investment in relations and kinship between Indigenous people and Canadian settlers. As the authors of the recently published Reclaiming Power and Place: The Final Report on the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls want readers to know, it is clear that violence against Indigenous women, girls, and 2slgbtqqia people is not an individual problem, or an issue only for certain communities. This violence is rooted in systemic factors, like economic, social and political marginalization, as well as racism, discrimination, and misogyny, woven into the fabric of Canadian society.6 The violence revealed by these statements is part of the indisputable truth that violence against Indigenous women, girls, and 2slgbtqqia is normalized, and has been historically ignored by racist government authorities. This is a truth that needs to be confronted by Canadian people willing to enter into trust-building and genuine relationships, rather than engage in the rhetoric of reconciliation as part of entrenched abusive practices about which Simpson has been concerned. Eve Tuck, in a 2009 open letter addressed to communities, researchers, and educators, calls for a reimagining of research and its central “theories of change.” She wants the intellectual community to move from what she terms “damage-centred research” to paradigms that don’t rely on the leveraging of grief, depletion, and hopelessness in order to gain resources or call attention to injustice.7 Tuck invites communities to a “re-visioning” – to suspend the idea of damage and to “consider the long-term repercussions of thinking of ourselves as broken.”8 In the fundamental 1999 text Decolonizing Methodologies: Indigenous Research, Linda Tuhiwai Smith asks readers to re-vise the tools and markers of research in order to establish a contextual and consensual research model when practising research on and around Indigenous subjects, rather than redo practices that have always already categorized and taxonomized the Indigenous subject as other and inferior.9 The violent domination of written history is also confirmed in Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire, which shows how the writing of colonial history indeed

Community Building and Refusing Trauma Porn

uses the power of historiography to erase the lived experiences, oral traditions, and performances that transmit and transfer Indigenous histories, rituals, and customs.10 It is this practice of colonial dominance through history that enables the “damage narrative” to flourish, following “salvage paradigm” and civilizationist texts in anthropology, art history, and sociology that set the stage by establishing extremely similar stories and programs of disappearance and non-adaptation. If the writing of history by colonizers took precedence over performed and oral traditions as a method of destabilizing Indigenous cultures via their traditional modes of transmission, the “rewriting and rerighting” that Tuwahi Smith cites as contemporary Indigenous practice invites multiple perspectives to the table, destabilizing in turn colonizer histories and “truth” by challenging historical domination.11 Truth telling is an essential part of Danger’s community and work: dd: When you have a name like mine, Red Eagle that Speaks Truth, you better fuckin live up to your goddamn name! You can’t just say shit. I realize in community that it’s really important that what you’re talking about is in your practice. It’s really fucking important because people will see right through that. They can, they’ll feel it and they’ll know, and they’ll tell you, so don’t doubt your voice, don’t doubt your energy, don’t doubt any of that stuff when you are working in community. Cause it is tough work to do. It is not easy work to do. By any means … For the community work that Danger engages in, it is crucial that the truth of colonial and imperial domination and violence is recognized. It is just as important that this historical violence doesn’t eclipse the transformative power and growth of community building. Tuck calls for the overturn of the theory of change that allows damage narratives to dominate research paradigms. Tuck’s appeal to turn away from damage-based research frameworks acknowledges the usefulness of data gathering that highlights the histories of inhumane treatment of Indigenous communities, often with an “implicit and sometimes explicit assurance that stories of damage pay off in material, sovereign and political wins.”12 She instead suggests that researchers turn to explorations of desire that “are concerned with understanding complexity, contradiction, and the self-determination of lived lives.”13 We assert in this chapter that, if we take this desire framework a few steps further, we can bring “not only the painful elements of social realities but also the wisdom and hope” into the realm of erotic and sexual lives, desires, and bdsm practices that call upon rich Two-Spirit and queer ways of being.14 Tuck eloquently articulates that “In many desire-based texts, there is a ghostly remnant quality to desire, it’s existence not contained to the body but still derived of the body. Desire is about longing, about a present that is enriched by both the past and the future. It is integral to our humanities.”15 It is within this bodily realm that Danger evolves their visual and community works: healing desire, eroticism, and bdsm power exchanges made visible through visual art

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can be harnessed as part of an Indigenous autonomy necessary for the resurgence of Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island. Two-Spirit people have been subjected, along with women and girls, to extreme sexual violence under colonialism, and healing sexual autonomy is indispensable to and part of the “sexual revolution” through which young Indigenous peoples are finding strength and hope. Indigenous ceremonial practice is becoming more accessible to youth and helping them heal the intergenerational trauma and devastating wounds of sexual violence that are the legacy of the residential school system.16 The same Indigenous cultural body that is subject to the ghostly longing and desire that Tuck speaks of is also subject to the intimate physical and emotional violence of the Canadian state toward the Indigenous body that Betasamosake Simpson disguises with a razor-thin metaphor in the above text. Tuck maps the bodily intimacy of colonial violence as the “finger-shaped bruises on our pulse points.”17 It is to the Two-Spirit body, specifically, that Danger brings their art and community praxis and which they engage in the desire and longing that enables a healing and powerful sexual autonomy. Two-Spirit history can be framed within the trauma of the “damage narrative.” In conversation with artist and 2019 Venice Biennale Canadian Pavilion and Isuma Collective curator Asinnajaq, I asked if she was aware of any practitioners of Two-Spirit ceremony in Tiohtiá:ke. She replied, after a moment of consideration, that when you’re trying to save your entire culture from destruction, you can’t come away with everything intact.18 It is within such a framework of survival and absence that some of the gender nonconforming culture of Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island has existed, a glowing ember that wants to spread. That Two-Spirit culture survives, despite the violence of colonization, is an undeniable fact, and as Danger stated in our interview, that destruction and scarcity of cultural practice is merely “a sliver away from our generation.”19 It is from this proximity that Two-Spirit artists are now harnessing a decolonial desire to heal the body and spirit from damage, using what Qwo-Li Driskill famously terms the sovereign erotic of Two-Spirit sexuality: “When I speak of a sovereign erotic, I’m speaking of an erotic wholeness healed and/or healing from the historical trauma that First Nations people continue to survive, rooted within the histories, traditions, and resistance struggles of our nations.”20 Healing, as Driskill directly references, is part of the practice of Two-Spirit people, and this connection to a healing practice or practices is also clear within other sources of Two-Spirit knowledges. Elder Ma Nee Chacaby, in her autobiography A Two-Spirit Journey: The Autobiography of a Lesbian Ojibwa-Cree Elder, clearly states that her journey as a Two-Spirit person has enriched her life and spiritual practice. Through her roles within her communities, she has helped to establish programs and ceremonial practice with intentions of healing and coming to wellness after the terror of residential schools, the Sixties Scoop, and the ongoing effects of intergenerational trauma. The resurgence of Two-Spirit communities and healing practices is not without controversy and detraction, just as homo- and transphobia is still seen within settler and Indigenous communities.21 The ability to promote healing begins with a desta-

Community Building and Refusing Trauma Porn

bilization of scarcity and loss that affects Indigenous communities but particularly the lives of women, girls, Two-Spirit, trans, and queer folks. One way to adequately begin this healing is to address ways in which trauma is deployed, unseated, and upended through modes of understanding and action.

Less Trauma Porn, More BDSM Don’t mistake my words for trauma porn … no, my trauma is not a commodity, but my story doesn’t always have to be uplifting, resurgent or revolutionary to be my truth, either. Jas M. Morgan22

Movement away from a damage perspective involves invoking, for this cadre of artists and writers, the current concept of what many call “trauma porn,” which, in the words of journalist Blue Telusma, is supposed to generate notoriety and buzz. Trauma porn, Telusma states, is also “particularly rampant when it is Black bodies and/or people of color who are the ones being displayed as victims.”23 Author Vivek Shraya also works to expose the effect of trauma, sensationalism, and popularity that follows her as a trans artist. She confronted the issue in a recent article in the Tkaronto|Toronto-based publication now magazine: I wonder if the demand that marginalized artists repeatedly perform trauma – becoming trauma clowns – in our art is a way to contain and oppress us, politely or indirectly, from the comfort of a seat, hands clean. What happens when the kinds of trauma I have experienced aren’t trendy or traumatic enough to “sell”?24 Shraya addresses a disturbing aspect of the ways the damage narrative displays violence against bodies that resist normative definitions. What if the work addresses a reclamation of autonomy and elides the initial trauma altogether to focus on the power of the marginalized voice’s own healing and negotiation of strength? Danger’s work moves beyond initial pain and wounds, extending into the work of healing and the robust autonomy of Indigenous bodies and communities. This work is only possible because of the artists who came before them and rallied against discrimination in the white and, as Jas M. Morgan might put it, yt cube aesthetic of museum’s blank walls, with their seemingly limitless potential and veneer of political neutrality.25 Danger is part of the avant-garde millennial generation that is grappling with the legacy of day and residential schools, and sixties and 2000s-era government “scoops” of Indigenous children and their placement into foster care. These artists, writers, and cultural critics are leading movements of self-determination and developing the ability to traverse the complex social dynamics of the institution and the resistance. Danger’s contribution to this culture of strong and self-possessed power

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contests the stereotypical hyper-sexualization (and hyper-availability) of Indigenous women, Two-Spirit, and trans bodies. They do this by placing the playful power dynamics of Two-Spirit agency directly in opposition to colonial stereotypes and the ongoing exoticization of Indigenous and peoples of colour within white settler fantasy and fetishization.26 Their series Big’Uns (2012–ongoing) features antlers in place of where a leather harness would attach a dildo or other prosthetic to the wearer (figs. 9.1–9.2). Instead of positioning the bearers of the antlers as “subjects,” Danger sees their participation as collaborations, conceiving of a lateral, instead of hierarchal power structure inherent between the picture and the one behind the camera. The collaborators are photographed in studio and are then digitally positioned against a background that matches the colour of the individual’s areola. Two-Spirit sexuality is flaunted in the face of supposed passivity and the assumed consumption of nude figures. Danger’s inspiration comes from a desire to be sexually empowered despite patriarchal dehumanization of Indigenous bodies. Using Kalof, Fitzgerald, and Baralt’s formations of parallel nonhuman and female human physical attributes as subject to misogynistic, dominant cultural frameworks: In the US cultural landscape, the language of hunting is a discourse of patriarchy. Hunters’ attitudes and actions toward social and natural objects (weapons or hunted prey) are constructed by a combination of experiences and absorbed cultural messages that validate and exacerbate white male dominance and power.27 Balancing this power and extricating the body of Two-Spirit and other nonnormative sexual orientations and bodies, Danger writes, An example is the use of “big’uns” to describe an animal’s antlers. This type of language usage plays a key role in disempowering our sexuality. Big’Uns is an ongoing photographic portrait series that explores reclaiming sexuality and our bodies. By repossessing antlers in this way, we aim to demonstrate a reclaiming of power for trans, non-binary, and women-identified individuals and how we choose to be seen.28 Danger’s work appropriates and contests the slang of misogynist hunting culture around the desirability of “big’uns” (large breasts and/or big bucks) and actively removes the colonial gaze from the composition through a direct refusal of a white, male, and heterosexual gaze. Danger said in an interview with Rosanna Deerchild on cbc Radio’s Unreserved that they want people to open up their perspective, to expand their worldview, and challenge the narrow roles into which mainstream media forces Indigenous people.29 The collaborators who wear the antlers invoke the presence of Indigenous agency, Two-Spirit power, and the animals whose “big’uns” they’re wearing. In the creation

9.1 Dayna Danger, Sky, from the series Big’Uns, 2012–ongoing.

9.2 Dayna Danger, Jaz, from the series Big’Uns, 2012–ongoing.

Community Building and Refusing Trauma Porn

of this series, Danger’s collaborators have personal and creative kinship ties that embrace partnership and expansive relations, which expressly deviates from a “Western” perspective of creative ownership or even the much-mythologized sexual artist–model relationship. In speaking about working with Danger, Huard elaborated on their extensive connections in life and art: ah: My collaborative relationship with Dayna Danger began in 2009 (I believe) when we both attended the University of Manitoba’s Fine Arts program. They asked my twin sister and I to model in one of their photographic series which was such a fun experience – it was also a brief insight into Dayna’s strange and incredible mind. It wasn’t until we re-established our relationship in 2015 when I moved to Montreal for my second undergraduate degree. I remember they picked me up from my new apartment after I spent the day building ikea furniture, and we drove out to Ottawa to pick up a caribou rack that I would eventually model for their Big’Uns series that was featured on the cover of Canadian Art magazine’s 2017 Kinship issue, guest edited by our now co-collaborator, Jas M. Morgan. By this point, we understood the power in our relationship: we became kin. We have participated in ceremonies together, spent time with each other’s families, and have grown together through our ancestral teachings that tie us together. To date, our projects have been structured non-hierarchically. We are collaborators, co-authors and siblings. The “power in the relationship” is clear in their work together, including the spectacular photograph Adrienne, which appeared on the cover of Canadian Art for the summer 2017 issue (fig. 9.3). As a collaborator, Huard was able to help gather the rack, which was then used for the photo, enabling and contributing to the artistic process and growing the relationship with Danger in a moment when their connections crystallized. The photo of Huard, reproduced here, allows us to see more clearly the subversion of the dominant cultural clutches on the female form: instead of a passive body, available for consumption, Huard’s form fills the composition (fig. 9.4). Danger’s photographs often take advantage of gallery wall space: amplifying the power of the Indigenous femme and Two-Spirit body, the antlers present a physical barrier between Huard and the viewer, blocking any easy consumption, and instead offering a steadfast gaze and stance of Huard, anchored to the caribou rack and rooted in the foreground of the photo. Tuck wants to see the end to Indigenous communities as “spaces in which underresourced health and economic infrastructures are endemic … spaces saturated in the fantasies of outsiders.”30 Danger’s collaboration with kin and chosen family asserts a sovereignty of desire, the material reality of Indigenous culture, and how consensual sexual practice and power relations can create empowerment.

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9.3 Dayna Danger, Adrienne, cover of Canadian Art, summer 2017.

In speaking about their series of beaded fetish masks titled masks (fig. 9.5), Danger says that sovereignty is one of their primary concerns as they construct objects and images that conjure autonomous sexuality and desires. dd: When I was feeling types of ways about the Big’Uns series, masks brought out a whole other ball game in terms of how I was really thinking about peoples’ sovereignty of their images, you know … it’s my truth and maybe perhaps the truth of the people who are in the images, but also, I have a lot of power in that conversation. That’s why I try to keep it as open as possible. The only fantasies they entertain and inspire are those of embodied sexual autonomy. The desire that Danger invites us into is one that destabilizes the “deeply twisted and unproductive sadism that effectively emerges from the logic of dominance,” articulated by Robyn Henderson-Espinoza as part of colonized violence against subaltern bodies.31

9.4 Dayna Danger, Adrienne, from the series Big’Uns, 2017.

9.5 Dayna Danger, Adrienne, Jas, Sasha, Kandace, photos featuring MASKS. Digital inkjet prints, 226 cm x 152.4 cm, as installed at the Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal, 2017.

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9.6 Dayna Danger, Adrienne’s Mask (left), from the series MASKS. Black leather, black nylon thread, luster and matte black beads. 2017. Installation from the Ottawa Art Gallery, 2019.

At the time of this interview, Danger was beading for an upcoming show entitled Beading Now (fig. 9.6), in which their work would be exhibited alongside experts, teachers, and contemporaries Ruth Cuthand, Judy Anderson, Nico Williams, and others at La Guilde Galerie in Montreal. Williams and Danger were also collaborating on a piece consisting of a pair of deer hide floggers, with beaded handles and copper jingle cones attached to the bottoms of the long, soft, and thick hide whips (fig. 9.7). The healing power of the erotic in Danger’s work subverts convention. The connection it fosters between hope and projections of bright Indigenous futures, such as Tuck desires, holds an action and movement toward deep desire for the claiming and critical formation of an erotic Two-Spirit life that is nourishing and imbued with the power of ritual.

Community Building and Refusing Trauma Porn

9.7 Dayna Danger and Nico Williams, Deer Hide Floggers. Deer hide, beaded handles, and copper jingle cones. 2019.

Bridging the worlds of queer bdsm practice and fine art, the beaded floggers made by Danger and Williams elude easy categorization and extend into the often messy dynamic of bringing community knowledge into prominent art practices. It could be considered controversial to bring powerful healing objects, such as jingle cones, into conversation with ostensibly contemporary practices of bdsm and other sexually powerful imagery. Danger asserts the use of jingle cones by stating, “This isn’t my first controversial rodeo, ok?” But the desire and power of the flogger isn’t just about claiming space or a bold statement about ceremony in the contemporary moment; it brings healing and powerful medicine to the contemporary; it brings powerful resurgence to sexuality, play, and autonomy in the Indigenous community. Henderson-Espinoza asserts that when kink and bdsm are used as a “mode of awareness,” in the decolonial process, they allow marginalized folks to “affectively and effectively disrupt and later dismantle power … inherent in the logic of dominance [and] then a new contour of eroticism is able to materialize.” This eroticism then locates “‘power’ as a particular birthing that stems from the margins of the margins, or bottom space.”32 What HendersonEspinoza identifies as “bottom space” in her work aims to decolonize nonconsensual violence so that “subalterns/bottoms can harness their agency, and be resurrected by

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it.”33 Danger works to localize that power in their art practice, enabling an agential statement from the standpoint of Indigenous women, Two-Spirit folk, non-binary, and transgender people who are still disproportionately affected by violence under colonial social norms. As Corrie Hammers states in “Reworking Trauma through bdsm,” there is a distinct and definite connection between trauma and a retelling or performing of a lived traumatic event that connects to “sadomasochism’s suffering pleasures, by which I mean the generative, productive affects/effects borne from these re-enactments.”34 Although Hammers is concerned with particular personal events of nonconsensual and sexual violence, we can widen this view to include the trauma suffered under colonial violence. In this light, Danger’s bdsm work, the floggers in Beading Now, and their earlier series of beaded fetish masks (two of which are also on display in Beading Now) affirm their interest in the autonomy and sovereignty of individuals in their work and healing through both ceremony and wider cultural embodiments of power and power play. According to Henderson-Espinoza, “power that stems from the margins of the margins becomes power that effectively can function or affectively become a form of topping from bottom space: this is the decolonial move.”35 Danger’s work sparks decolonization, topping from bottom space, and the desire to break open the hypersexualization stereotype into a broader category of sexual autonomy that defies and destroys the colonial sexual gaze. It is in the power of sex, gender, and identity in community practices that the power of Driskill’s sovereign erotic can be seen and recognized as integral to the community and to the re-emergence of Two-Spirit ceremony.36 Elder Ma Nee Chacaby’s role as a lesbian Two-Spirit community member allowed her to lead a healing ceremony at the 2013 Thunder Bay, Ontario, pride festival, drumming and smudging participants before leading the parade. As a lesbian Oji-Cree elder, she is often invited to participate in social and political activities, including hiv/aids outreach and educational efforts. She is, to her knowledge, the only elder to lead traditional healing ceremonies in many of the US and Canadian gatherings she participates in that bring together different communities of Two-Spirit people.37 The specificity of Two-Spirit identity and the ability to give teachings to the larger Two-Spirit community is emerging now as a restorative and communal activity. Danger’s role as an artist and community worker is vital to the transformation and hope for the futurity to which Tuck is committed and which other scholars, such as José Esteban Muñoz, conceptualize as a continuous queer becoming.38 Danger’s work around sexuality extends beyond the bedroom or the dungeon and into the community centre as well.

Community Building and Refusing Trauma Porn

The Two-Spirit Drum and Community Aspect of Praxis

In talking about the Two-Spirit drum, Danger states: It came from a dream! It came from a dream … I woke up and my body felt like, I need to drum. I need this so bad. I just woke up and I needed that. What came from this dream was a trip to the Laurentian mountains for the three collaborators in a friend’s car – it was the day when Dorian learned that drums need bear grease to keep them well cared for and content, and we inhaled the deep and pungent smell of tanned leather from a cold woodshed. We left the mountains with a black and red drum that was meant for Danger and the Two-Spirit community in Tiohtiá:ke. It was clear when we saw it – that was the one. The drum was used in the first Fierté en Hiver festival in 2018 as part of a performance and video intervention projected onto the grey-stone outer perimeter of the Grey Nuns Residence on Guy Street in Montreal. This small intervention remarked upon the legacy of residential schools and the obliteration of Two-Spirit teachings under colonial rule. dd: I like to be behind in a way to make that stuff happen, to be the Firestarter, get all the things we need to make the fire, but I’m more interested in how community starts it and keeps it going. Because I see it as I don’t really want to gather the stuff, do all that work, get the fire going, start it, keep it lighting. And even so, starting the fire, for, was us going to the Laurentians. I called for sure before we went out there, but it was Angus who drove us and y’all that came with, that’s part of the kindling. That’s part of the start. It’s nice to have people that were there to witness that, see this happening and also that are there to make a decision when we’re deciding to do this drum, or that drum. Which one speaks to the collective – when we woke that drum up, it was [with] multiple voices. That was the most important thing, I was really scared to do that by myself. I have it engrained in me about this earning, which we see a lot in our communities, and our ceremonies, you have to earn something. I’m starting to realize that it’s about the time you put in and what you give back to the community to be able to earn that. That’s always what it’s supposed to have been. You don’t just get things – when we just give people things what do they know about the labour and the time that it took to get to that place, the responsibility and the weight of that responsibility. They want to prepare people for that. I feel like I’ve been preparing myself for a very, very long time and I still don’t know all those things. In 2019, a ceremony in which the drum was awoken was held. This ceremony depended on community participation, including knowledge transmission from the

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Elder Sedalia, who was open handed and giving with her time and teachings for our feast and ritual. The ceremony remains with those who participated that night: the bridging of arts practice, ceremony, and healing, as well as the development of a thriving Two-Spirit community in Tiohtiá:ke marks an important beginning and becoming in the worlds of possibility. This becoming engages with the hope for and move toward the development of a consensual, negotiated relationship in which Two-Spirit sexuality and sovereignty is aligned with community care, kinship and interdisciplinary praxis that uses erotic, Two-Spirit desire, in conjunction with ceremony, kinship, and community work to decolonize. But beyond “de-,” or even the potential of the “re-,” Danger’s work creates worlds open to eroticism, power, and negotiation within a framework of ongoing, enthusiastic consent. ah: Where do you see the future of the drum in the community? [dd laughs] Where do you seeing it going, bud? dd: I have my own preconceived notions of what I would like to see be done with the drum. But ultimately, if you’re working in community, it’s whatever the community wants. I’ve been getting a couple messages about re-doing it again and it’s all about funding and stuff – I want to be able to pay somebody. I realize that it’s important if we get together once a month that there is somebody that can be supporting, so I talked to Sedalia about it already about being there to support, when it happens. I’m just trying to figure out the days to do that and whatnot. It’s really still in the open, but the idea is that, you know, I do think it would be amazing, if it was [just] a healing drum, you know, and that was its purpose and it helped when it needed to help people. My aunty told me that it’s probably not a good idea to do competition with it, and stuff like that and I agree with her, so … if there’s a Two-Spirit powwow, I’ll fucking be there, no problem. The generative nature of their work with the Two-Spirit drum as its keeper and as a ceremonial practitioner is part of a rebuilding of Two-Spirit worlds in urban centres, not emphasizing the subjugation of Two-Spirit bodies. In our interview, it became clear that the necessity for a Two-Spirit drum was part of Danger’s driving force to create space within the Indigenous community for healing and spiritual practice available to all, rather than only those who have access to their ancestral communities and territories. dd: I just didn’t feel comfortable drumming at the [Native Women’s] Shelter because I only knew my songs, and I didn’t want to be an authority. And I just wanted it to happen. But people always wanted me to sing and do stuff there. I just wanted to help that happen here [in Tiohtiá:ke, as part of Two-

Community Building and Refusing Trauma Porn

Spirit community practice]. Because we didn’t have it here. There’s so many places that could happen in Winnipeg, and I just felt like it was a sad thing, that we don’t have this, or that there’s no water drum teachings around, and stuff like that. Well, there are but they’re on the rez or with the community, which is important, but they don’t really have anything in the city, and as we know, not all of us even live in reserves or even outside – we live in smaller communities, or bigger city centres. It’s making that space a safer space for people to get together. I think it was just the urgency in that, it was quite urgent … things take time to brew and then it’s urgent, it just needs to happen. It’s a lot of percolating. That’s how I’ve always worked, I realize now. I know this pattern, where I sit and I think, and I think, and I gotta sit with this, I gotta sit with that, holy fuck just do it already, but I just can’t. It’s why I’ve always really struggled in institutions, because there’s a time frame and I don’t understand [chuckle]. … When those ancestors start to call to you and want to be heard … I also think about the Two-Spirit drum and how the drum for me was one thing that came … I’d never awakened a drum before, and I’d never even seen a drum being awakened before. Well, I’d seen one, but it was all guys, and it was just different, you know? And that drum, you had a group of people that came together and put their intentions into that drum. And it’s not perfect by any means … it really makes me think whether I’m equipped to do any of this work. [Community work] is not perfect by any means. It’s actually a really hard thing to maintain. You’re trying to maintain multiple relationships, and how do you do care when there’s just so much … when half your kin are trying to survive, and the other half … you know? ah: I also think that, when you’re given an opportunity to do something like wake up the drum or provide ceremony, it’s hard in this world to feel like we’re capable or that we deserve that, you know? And I feel like, Dayna, both of you, it’s something that has happened because you, it’s been on your mind, you dreamt about it, you think about it, you talk about and still continuously, to this day, you deserve to wake up that drum, and help with that ceremony, and I think that we have in our minds that there is this magical moment, where we are gifted this opportunity or this teaching, but there’s also times where you have to push yourself and do it, and I think that’s what you did – with guidance and a lot of intention. dd: Guidance and a lot of help! Making sure that that was there. There’s the time and the place of how long do we have to wait until it’s ok to do this, and that there is a lot to be learned along the way. When I was asking people about it, they asked, “Well, who are your knowledge keepers?” and I was like, I don’t

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know, do I need that? And yeah you need somebody for guidance, for all that sort of stuff. It made me really think. And I started to look for that person. I didn’t find it quite right away, but people [like Sedalia] have really shown me that she has the knowledge and that she’s supportive of it. It’s just different. [She also said that] this is your thing. It was hard to imagine anything being mine. There are points when you have to lead that but it doesn’t mean that I want to be the one that says everything. I think that’s something that I have [to] learn more – I tend to talk, a lot. I guess I have a lot to say, but at the same time, because I’m contrary, I really challenge myself to do the opposite of what it is that I do. I’m trying to listen more because there’s a time to share and a time to listen, and so I really need to practise that a bit more, personally. The future of the drum: I’m not sure what that future looks like, because it really is dependent on those who show up, but also I know that future is dependent on my taking those steps to make it open. And that’s the struggle with energy and time and all those sort of things when you’re doing so much. So many things to think about, ultimately. That’s what I wanted to say about that.

Conclusion: Firestarters and Futures

In the past three decades of developing knowledge around Two-Spirit histories, there has been, as Asinnajaq asserted, an understanding of the loss of ceremony and healing practices of the Two-Spirit community members. We can choose to pivot and turn away from that loss and the damage narrative that Tuck wants us to move beyond. We do not need to continually elaborate on the historical discontinuity around Indigenous practices of gender and sexuality outside of Western notions of normative behaviour. We collaborators choose to look to a framework of desire and we hope other researchers, artists, and scholars also choose hope and desire. And here is where we find ourselves now, in the midst of developing sovereign, autonomous, and erotic Indigenous artistic knowledge and community work. Danger’s praxis using bdsm and generative ceremony in which the Two-Spirit community is integral, involved, and celebrated extend beyond what many would call art and activism. It is dependent on community participation and the expansion of roles Indigenous people are shown to occupy on Turtle Island and in the larger cultural sphere. It is about survival and strength, the power of harnessing “bottom space,” and the sexual autonomy of Two-Spirit, queer, trans-identified Indigenous people taking, reclaiming, and decolonizing space through action, sex, play dynamics, and visual art. It’s a giving of intention, receiving ceremony and enriching the Two-Spirit body through visual, ritual practice and assertion of desire.

Community Building and Refusing Trauma Porn

n ote s 1 Praxis is described as action that exceeds philosophical or theoretical confinement. While theory is often behind action, praxis describes the action one can put into the world, an action that here, in the case of Dayna Danger’s combined community and art work, changes the world that it works upon. In Marxist theory, the concept becomes central to the new philosophical ideal of transforming the world through revolutionary activity. “Praxis,” Oxford Reference, https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100342205. 2 Adrienne Huard offers this personal definition of Two-Spirit for this text:

3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

I have been told by my elders that Two-Spirit, or niizh manitouwag in Anishinaabemowin, doesn’t actually translate to the gender binary of “masculine” and “feminine” energies. Instead, it accounts for the gifts that Two-Spirit people have to carry multiple perspectives. We have the responsibility to be peacemakers because of these gifts. I try to steer from essentialist narratives that homogenize Two-Spirit identities but rather embrace the knowledges that have been offered to me through my Two-Spirit journey. Yes, I identify as pansexual, and yes, Two-Spirit represents my sexual identity. However, it doesn’t only account for sexual and gender expression, it surpasses these colonial impositions of gender performative roles. For me personally, gender and sexuality remain the least important aspect of finding a partner. Instead, it’s whether that person honours my life journey and continues to walk down that good road. Tuck, “Suspending Damage,” 409. Nation-craft and Indigenous art are at odds and constantly building and taking from one another in an uneven power exchange. These relationships are inextricable from Danger’s experiences and hold multiple paradoxes within them. It is impossible to link and explain them all here. Danger’s monumental artworks serve to re-inscribe the prominence of Indigenous power through massive photographs of Indigenous collaborators that project sovereignty to the viewer, thus displaying it in the gallery space. Simpson, Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back, 21. National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, Reclaiming Power and Place, 56. Tuck, “Suspending Damage,” 409. Ibid. Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 17. Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 28. Tuck, “Suspending Damage,” 414. Ibid., 416. Ibid. Ibid., 417. See cbc Radio, “Let’s Talk about Sex, Neechi: From Art and Erotic Poetry, to Sexual Health and Tinder Profiles,” Unreserved, hosted by Rosanna Deerchild, 11 February 2018, https://www.cbc. ca/radio/unreserved/let-s-talk-about-sex-neechi-from-art-and-erotic-poetry-to-sexual-healthand-tinder-profiles-1.4410866.

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17 Tuck, “Suspending Damage,” 412. 18 This exchange was in a non-interview conversation with one of the authors. 19 This part of the interview, aside from the quotation, is redacted and would not appear in an official transcript for privacy reasons. 20 Driskill, “Stolen from Our Bodies,” 51. 21 Ibid., 54. 22 Morgan, Nitisanak, 18. 23 Blue Telusma, “Before You Share ‘Trauma Porn’ Videos or Social Media, Consider These Critical Things,” The Grio, 4 April 2019, https://thegrio.com/2019/04/04/nipsey-hussle-traumaporn-social-media-blue-telusma/. 24 Vivek Shraya, “How Did the Suffering of Marginalized Artists Become So Marketable?” Now, 1 May 2019, https://nowtoronto.com/culture/art-and-design/vivek-shraya-trauma-clown/. 25 Morgan’s millennial lexicon is part of their style, and their irreverent tone towards the yt art institution has garnered notoriety within the art world. 26 Historically, in Indigenous and other colonized communities, the sexualization of women and other-gendered people was used to disregard humanity and condone sexual violence perpetrated against these peoples. Scholarly work that addresses this is abundant. Danger’s series, Big’Uns and masks, in particular, undermine the gaze of the settler. 27 Strychacz, 1993, quoted in Kalof, Fitzgerald, and Baralt, “Animals, Women, and Weapons,” 239. 28 Dayna Danger, Artists Statement, Resilience Project, https://resilienceproject.ca/en/artists/ dayna-danger. 29 cbc Radio, “Let’s Talk About Sex, Neechi.” 30 Tuck, “Suspending Damage,” 413. 31 Henderson-Espinoza, “Decolonial Erotics,” 287. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Hammers, “Reworking Trauma through bdsm,” 492. 35 Henderson-Espinoza, “Decolonial Erotics,” 293. 36 Driskill, “Stolen from Our Bodies.” 37 Chacaby and Plummer, A Two-Spirit Journey, 206–7. 38 Muñoz’s work on queerness as horizon in his canonical text Cruising Utopia is the basis for much work on the eventual, hoped-for future in which queerness has arrived, so to speak.

10 Coming Out a l’Oriental: Diasporic Art and Colonial Wounds a n d rew g aye d The curves of my lips rewrite the history of Islam 2Fik1

Introduction

What does it mean to “come out à l’oriental”? Coming out can be seen as an epistemology for gay individuals living open and free lives, and the concept is well theorized within Western queer theory.2 But who is entitled to, and included within, the safety of living “out and proud”? The gatekeepers of Western modernity and Western gay identity regulate the parameters of what it means to live a truly gay life. For this reason, current literature engaging with Middle Eastern3 homosexuality focuses on issues of modernity, multiple modernities, and the West’s claim to modernity. Traditionally, modernity as a time period signals social, political, and historic conditions at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century.4 However, numerous scholars now question this definition as an imperial structure of power that masks how modernity colonizes social and cultural practices in the name of Western advancement. For example, the literature on Arab sexualities contends that the West created a discourse around sexuality that the Middle East never had, leading to the notion of homocolonialism or imperialist ideologies in the name of sexual tolerance. I use homocolonialism to mean the deployment of lgbtqi rights and visibility to stigmatize non-Western cultures all the while reasserting the supremacy of Western values, politics, and principles for a modern civilization.5 According to historian Khaled El-Rouayheb, the term homosexualität was coined in the late 1860s by the Austro-Hungarian writer Karl Maria Kertbeny, and the English equivalent first appeared in print some twenty years later.6 At the turn of the century, colonial governing bodies imposed Victorian and Euro-American sexual discourses on Middle Eastern cultures. As a push against colonial forces and imperialism, homosexuality in the Middle East was then made an illegal identity category, one that many argue did not exist prior to increased contact with Western explorers and travellers.

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In an effort to appeal to these travellers and lay claim to modernity, Middle Eastern governing bodies self-regulated the sexuality of their citizens along heterosexual lines in keeping with Western modernity.7 As El-Rouayheb notes, between the middle of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth the prevailing tolerance of same-sex desire was declining, likely in part due to the adoption of European and Victorian attitudes by the new, modern, educated, and Westernized elite.8 Queer theorist Momin Rahman argues that we must accept that the Muslim experience of sexual diversity politics is significantly different from the Western one and that this reality undermines any assumption that the processes of Muslim modernization will inevitably lead to the same outcomes around sexuality as those experienced in the West. Middle Eastern homosexuality will never look the same as Western homosexuality.9 He posits that the queer Muslim, intersectional in identity, challenges the monolithic, monocultural versions of queer Western identity politics. Here, the sheer existence of queer diasporic Muslims destabilizes Western queer discourse.10 This assertion of the Muslim queer subject lying outside of normative Western queer politics (and even the encouragement to be outside this Western queer politics) points to issues of genuine difference and incommensurability.11 As I have traced elsewhere,12 these ideas are steeped in issues of colonialism and imperialism, and are the hangovers of precolonial sexual scripts that make the Islamicate queer subject an outlier. Throughout this essay, I argue that there exists a strong relationship between the historical construction of colonial sexualities and contemporary expressions of diasporic sexualities. I use histories of gender, sexuality, colonialism, and their triangulation in the Middle East as a foundation for outlining a cause-and-affect dynamic that reverberates in contemporary queer diasporic subjects. In order to link late-nineteenth century colonialism to the contemporary diaspora, I focus on contemporary art that uses these historic moments as inspiration. Specifically, I investigate the performance art and photography of Montreal-based Moroccan artist 2Fik (Toufique). A Frenchborn Moroccan who migrated to the francophone province of Quebec in Canada, 2Fik uses his own diasporic identity as a subject in his work to explore the dichotomies of his Moroccan Canadian culture and his lived experience as a queer Arab.13 Using performance and photography as primary modes of art production, 2Fik invents multifaceted characters that transform and translate the different aspects of his cultural and sexual identity, performing each character in complex narratives within his photography. Oftentimes languages – Arabic, French, and English – work together in 2Fik’s artwork to bring semiotic and etymological dimension to his visual art.14 His performance art becomes an integral and inseparable part of his photography, for his characters provide a level of depth in investigating the process of cultural transformation that allows him to navigate geographic borders, geopolitics, and decolonial aesthetics. I do not wish to speak ahistorically of settler colonial contexts, as the global North certainly also criminalized homosexuality in the past. What is important here, how-

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ever, are the ways in which white settler puritanism has been used as a measuring stick to label the Other as backward and outside of modernity. This labelling was applied in the Middle East (and, it should be noted, in settler colonial contexts that labelled Indigenous peoples guilty of primitivism) first for perceived gender fluidity and then, as sexual tolerance became the new marker of Western modernity, for the very heterosexism the region had adopted in order to become modern. Thus, sexual discourses about the Middle East remain a reason the West generally excludes the region from achieving modernity. This vicious cycle of control by the West is inherently a colonial construct meant to control the very outcome it produces. In this paper, I analyze 2Fik’s contemporary art in order to illustrate the complexities of Islamicate sexualities in the diaspora.15 I use 2Fik’s visual art as a case study to investigate the historical links between queer diasporic identities, modernity, and Western imperialism. To do so, I begin by outlining epistemologies of coming out as a way of illustrating transnational queer identity16 and, in this case, coming out à l’oriental. Next, I turn to modern art to question the ways in which premodern Islamicate sexual scripts colonized by modernity might still exist within diasporic subjects today. Finally, I analyze the fictional characters that 2Fik has created in his artistic practice as a way of understanding the tensions between different dichotomies within his own diasporic identity – East versus West, traditional versus modern, and transnational versus hybrid. Throughout this discussion I draw links between settler colonialism and its intersection with the queer diaspora. Issues of modernity and progress in Canada (as well as the larger Euro-American context) are intrinsically tied to queer rights, liberal tolerance, and how these uphold whiteness and naturalize settler colonialism. This discussion illustrates the ways in which contemporary art can be used to queer kinship models as well as the ways in which queer identity can nuance theories of transnationalism and diaspora, especially how sexuality is performed in transnational contexts. I contend that queer contemporary Arab artists, not just 2Fik, provide a necessary link bridging art history and modernity and contemporary queer identity.

Coming Out à l’Oriental

2Fik speaks about his self-discovery concerning his sexuality in terms of coming out à l’oriental or a Middle Eastern style of coming out. In an interview, 2Fik defined coming out à l’oriental as an expression that makes reference to the use of eastern and Arab-Muslim cultural references in order to explain the disregard for social obligations related to heterosexuality (marriage, reproduction, etc.). The goal of this type of coming out is to take up the arguments of the culture of origin (Morocco) and not use those in the host culture (France) of the person in front of you (papa)

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hence reinforcing the thesis, encouraging comprehension of the message and avoiding any interpretation such as “victim-of-the-western-system-thatmade-you-homosexual.”17 Coming out à l’oriental calls upon local language and signifiers that 2Fik’s father and any Moroccan listener can understand. It is a method of queer self-expression that provincializes global signifiers of gay identity, such as the rainbow flag or the pride parade, to centre on a culturally local understanding of same-sex desire, kinship, and cultural practices. In the work titled Arabesque (2006) (fig. 10.1), a gender-fluid subject wearing a black two-piece bikini and a pink hijab is digitally collaged to appear numerous times in the frame. The slender figure holds a baton with a pink ribbon tied to the end of it, mirroring the pink hijab that masks their identity. In playful movements of dance and joi de vivre, the figure frolics in an open field twirling the baton so that the pink ribbon creates arabesque designs in the air. The movements of the pink ribbon resemble Arabic script, and the pink veil, its modesty juxtaposed to the black bikini, creates recognizable feminine signifiers as 2Fik situates himself within his own cultural context. As scholar Denis Provencher recounts, this image visually reinforces 2Fik’s argument that any sort of communication with his parents has to occur on and in their own terms.18 Arabesque then becomes a coming out of sorts, but the pink arabesque designs only mimic Arabic script. They create no real language and no real meaning, forming only a symbolic language that is visually recognizable but has no words. In expressing the inability of the rainbow flag to communicate his own coming out to his parents, 2Fik states, “you cannot communicate with people using your own lingo. Communication is a message that is sent and a message that comes back. You have to take into account your listener.”19 In this case, the global and arguably Western signifier of the rainbow flag becomes provincialized,20 and 2Fik insists on reverting back to a visual language that his parents can understand. The gender fluidity, the culturally arabesque performance, and the religious signifiers of Islam present in this work all point to another way of expressing one’s sexual identity in a local and culturally specific way.21 To better illustrate what the incommensurability between Western and nonWestern signifiers look like, queer theorist Martin Mansalang writes in his seminal study on the queer Filipino diaspora that visibility and identity models based on individual proclamations of the self are historically and geographically specific to Western centres.22 Reconceptualizing narratives such as coming out points to possibilities of negotiating and reconciling transnational diasporic sensibilities with transnational queer identification. For the bakla, a homosexual or effeminate person, undisclosed homosexuality is not synonymous with being “in hiding” or “inside the closet.” Many Filipino gay men believe that silence is a part of the discourse of sexuality. This difference in identity formation relates to an individual identifying with a family unit

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and community in the Philippines versus the individualistic model of identity in North America. The process of coming out and the notion of the “closet” are not constituted for Filipino gay men in the same way as they are for the mainstream gay community in North America, where they are crucial to gay self-formation. Therefore, coming out does not translate to a meaningful category of identity formation for bakla, showing how queer identity is constructed differently outside the West. 2Fik’s refashioning of queer subjectivity as coming out à l’oriental demonstrates the “Queers’ struggle towards finding, building, remembering, and settling into a home to create the sphere called diasporic intimacy.”23 This refashioning of what gay identity and coming out can mean for a racialized postcolonial queer shows the incommensurability between how a diasporic subject may be socialized as a queer subject in the

10.1 2Fik, Arabesque, 2006. Digital collage and photograph.

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West and the values and understandings of their own sexual desires from a cultural perspective.24 Within the context of the diaspora, it is important to question the truism of Canada as a gay-friendly nation, which tends to render racist discourses invisible within queer organizing and ignores past and ongoing processes of colonialism. The works of Indigenous, queer, feminist, and Two-Spirit activists and scholars demonstrate the ways in which gender and sexuality are centred in colonial processes.25 Just as the bakla becomes both identity and linguistic tool, the non-Western sexuality scripts colonized by Western gay identity shape and transform how the diasporic subject becomes queer or learns to be a queer person of colour. The metaphor of “coming out” present in Arabesque poses certain incommensurable differences with the Western notion of freeing one’s self from the confines of the closet. The work represents the myriad ways Middle Eastern subjects in the diaspora express and live their sexual identities in meaningful ways. Psychologist Sekneh Hammoud-Beckett offers the notion of “letting in” as an alternative to normative models of “coming out.” This term refers to the conscious and selective invitation of people into one’s “club of life.”26 “Letting in” is a process that is highly relevant to the diaspora because it provides an alternative to the Western need to become more visible in order to be complete and thus alters perceptions of what it means to live a “truly” gay life. In its visual ambiguity and cultural specificity, 2Fik’s Arabesque can be seen as a letting in and, I argue, a crucial part of what it means to come out à l’oriental. These methods and visual strategies link the experiences of gay subjects in the Middle East to those of members of the diaspora and complicate narratives of superiority and queer acceptance upheld in the global North. The link between cultural differences and sexual discourses is important and is reiterated in the writing of diaspora scholar Nadine Naber. In her book Arab America, Naber argues that the diaspora can intensify its culture in North America, becoming even more culturally and religiously strict than in the homeland.27 The result is a very complicated space for diasporic sexuality because, while the judicial system may support queer subjects in the West, the cultural community and family unit can be the site of abuse, trauma, disownment, and danger. The process of subjectification for the diasporic individual, and the complexities of becoming a queer subject, are in part related to the pressures that Western discourse puts on other cultures to reproduce a queer identity that is often times hegemonic in and incommensurable with local settings. Theorist Joseph Massad’s “Gay International” framework explains this process as an incitement to discourse, creating a mission of homocolonialism and Western exceptionalism that seeks to export Western models of homosexuality to places where it did not previously exist, effectively erasing local sexual identity scripts.28 The imposition of a seemingly universal “gay” identity that is inherently Western is, according to Massad, fundamentally linked to colonialism and colonizing discourses. Most non-Western civilizations, including Muslim and Arab civilizations, have not historically subscribed to binary categories of gender and sexuality, and their imposition produces harmful effects. Neither did such binaries exist in the Indigenous Americas prior to colonization and slavery as reflected in gen-

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der variant or Two-Spirited individuals within Indigenous cultures and ceremonies.29 This incitement to discourse, I argue, is illustrated in 2Fik’s own navigation of language and cultural specificity as a way of rejecting the colonial notion of homosexuality as existing in the global North (and the white settler state context of North America in particular) and instead creating an alternative existence based on his own lived experience, showing the ways in which diasporic subjects can exist outside of such rigid parameters of identity formation.

Identification Photography and Performing Diaspora

How does a diasporic subject perform Islamicate sexuality? What does the performance of sexuality say about the historical construction of race and its relationship to colonialism? To explore these questions, I analyze a series of photographs by 2Fik, all of which resemble passport or identification photographs, asking how diasporic subjects construct and negotiate their individual identities within the inherited structures of modern sexuality. This section highlights several of 2Fik’s performed characters (fig. 10.2), which demonstrate his alternative kinship model of affiliation and belonging. To date, 2Fik has created fifteen characters that comprise his imagined family unit, and he performs and masquerades as each family member in his photographs. With backstories for each character, including migration or diasporic connections to either Morocco, France, or Canada, 2Fik’s performative photography reimagines familial kinship and notions of national identity. Some characters centre tradition, strong ties to homeland, and strict cultural values. These characters are linked to modernity as a colonial and modernizing project in the Middle East. Other characters that evoke a notion of cultural hybridity are linked to diaspora as a contemporary, Westernized subject.30 I analyze the characters and their headshots as photographic identities in their own right. These characters appear as subjects within every one of 2Fik’s photographs, regardless of series, comprising the world he has created for himself in his art.31 The interactions between the characters and their development in storylines is seen throughout the entirety of his photographic oeuvre and not within just one particular series. Traditional characters like Abdel, a Moroccan-born man who is solely committed to his wife and to following Islam, contrast with more liberal characters like Soufian, Abdel’s younger brother, who prides himself on rejecting religiosity as he works in the hip hop scene in Tiohtià:ke|Montreal, Quebec. In Abdel’s identification photograph (fig. 10.3), which has the aesthetic and composition of a traditional passport photo, the subject sits up straight and is dressed simply but maturely in a red jacket over a plain white button-up shirt. He wears a serious expression, gazing directly at the viewer with his fully-grown beard and a black prayer cap sitting firmly atop his head. His younger brother, Soufian, however, presents himself very differently (fig. 10.4).

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10.2 2Fik, family portraits. Digital collage and photograph.

Soufian’s body language is more casual in this youthful snapshot as he sits with his shoulder and head tilted to one side, gives a half smile to the viewer with his mouth open, and sticks out his tongue. Unlike the more honourable older brother, Soufian is photographed with no markers of Islam or signs of religiosity. His beard is both trimmed down and heavily shaved on the sides in a trendy, youthful style rather than in the style of a cultural signifier of an observant Muslim. He wears a bright yellow T-shirt and a red sweatshirt both embossed with the logo of his favourite soccer team, and a graffitied baseball cap sits defiantly in place of his brother’s prayer cap. As both Abdel and Soufian were born and raised in Casablanca, these identification photographs provide a glimpse of the ways in which culture and heritage are not heterogenous or reducible to geography. In this case, the brothers’ shared birthplace and upbringing contrast with their nearly opposite personalities, and their own cultural and religious identities do not mirror each other despite belonging to the same diasporic community and even family. Similar passport photographs provide background stories for all of 2Fik’s characters. 2Fik’s solo exhibition, 2Fik: His and Other Stories, at the Koffler Gallery (spring 2017), provides a glimpse of how central these characters, family, and kinship are to 2Fik’s art practice. Upon entering the exhibition, these photographs and biographies line the wall so viewers can get to know his constructed family before viewing his other photographs.32 The tensions between the two Moroccan-born brothers currently living in Montreal speak to ideas of tradition/modern and local/diaspora and the ways in which navigating cultural tradition within the parameters of Western modernity creates both isolation and seemingly incompatible values. White settler colonialism was

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10.3 Abdel.

10.4 Soufian.

and still is intricately and intimately connected to the advance of gender binaries and imperial sexual discourses, and these logics further add to the complexities of a queered, racialized, and religious diaspora.33

Visualizing Diasporic Sexuality

The ostensibly oppositional traits that are a constant tension between the two characters of Abdel and Soufian are also seen in other members of the family.34 Characters like Ludmilla-Mary (fig. 10.5) complicate reductive readings of such binaries by embodying these contrasts and contradictions. Her passport photograph shows a fully bearded Muslim man wearing a woman’s head covering and lists her origins as unknown. Her characteristic traits include “her big beard, her veil and her huge personality.” While the artist uses female pronouns in her biography, the wide-eyed figure is sexually ambiguous as her large black beard and brown skin are intensified by her white hijab and white backdrop. The contrast between the veil and the large beard compromise her stable identity. Simultaneously presenting as both an observant Muslim man and a modest Muslim woman, Ludmilla-Mary directly addresses Islamophobia and homophobia through a complex portrayal of gender nonconformity and cultural hybridity. She embodies the fear and discomfort that the brown-Middle-Eastern-Arab-Other instils,35 manifesting these qualities visually. Personifying the racialized Other, this gender-queer representation is absent of all identifying traits such as origin story, occupation, love status, ambitions, and personality – all qualities that are

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10.5 Ludmilla-Mary.

10.6 Kathryn.

10.7 Marco.

present for the majority of the other family members. This absence of identifying traits coupled with the undisclosed gender identity of this racialized character together reveal the very process of racial and sexual identity formation of diasporic subjects. Following Islamophobic rhetoric that marks her body as Other and illegible, perceived aggressive masculinity and subservient and victimized femininity are tested when combined in a non-binary character whose sexual desire cannot be deciphered. As Provencher states, “creating these characters and taking pictures of them allows [2Fik]

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to critique stable identities and also to establish a critical distance from himself where he can conduct an analysis of himself and his family.”36 Furthermore, I argue, Ludmilla-Mary’s visually unreadable gender and undetermined sexual identity are a part of the incommensurability between Arab-local and Western sexual desires that 2Fik alludes to in his photography, pointing to histories of conflict between Arab sexual discourses and modern Western notions of gay identity. Between the hyper-masculine Abdel and a hyper-feminine character like Kathryn (fig. 10.6), gender nonconforming characters like Ludmilla-Mary destabilize binaries that have become normalized within discussions of modernity and tradition. Some characters are immigrants from Morocco while others were born in Canada. The notions of cultural hybridity and authenticity are put to the test in characters like Marco (fig. 10.7), who was born in Rome but spent several years in Marrakech and lived in Paris before moving to Canada. As a closeted gay man, Marco is quite macho and according to the artist he is “straight-acting.” His background in Rome and Paris creates inconstancies with Western concepts of freedom and sexual liberation as he demonstrates a lack of freedom and openness despite living in liberal Europe. Being European, Maghrebi, and also diasporic, he does not allow for questions of tradition versus modernity to be easily deduced from the experiences of his brown body. Instead, this racialized figure holds the tensions of transnational sexual identity within his diasporic identity, tensions that resist any easy reduction of sexuality to a binary between queer progress in the West and the lack thereof in the Middle East.

Queering Modernity

In his practice, 2Fik also restages and recreates historical paintings that often correspond to time periods of Western modernity in order to locate contemporary racialization and contemporary sexual identity. Links to a colonial past are present within his reinventions of art history and, oftentimes, modern art as he subverts the racialized subjectification of the diasporic body. His pastiche of canonical artworks includes Le déjeuner sur l’herbe (1862) by Édouard Manet (fig. 10.8); The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632) by Rembrandt van Rijn (fig. 10.9); Les Ménines (1656) by Diego Velázquez; The Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife (1854) by Daniel Maclise (fig. 10.10); and The Death of General Wolfe (1770) by Benjamin West (fig. 10.11).37 French artist Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres painted La Grande Odalisque in 1814 (fig. 10.12) at a time when France was expanding its colonial empire. This oil painting depicts an odalisque or concubine in a style heralded for its exotic romanticism. In this scene a fair-skinned nude woman reclines with her back facing the viewer and her face slightly turned to meet our gaze. The orientalism of this painting is inescapable; due to the setting of rich silk, jewels, and a hookah pipe the viewer is meant to believe that this scene takes place in the “Near East.”

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10.8 2Fik, Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, 2010 (based on Édouard Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, 1863).

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10.9 2Fik, La leçon de folie de Ludmilla-Mary, 2012 (based on Rembrandt van Rijn, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, 1632).

The fair-skinned woman is racialized by her attributes, and French viewers would have presumed her to be a sexual slave to an Arab man. Since odalisques were not actually courtesans or slaves, the woman depicted here is a French sexual myth that suited the colonial myth of sexual deviance and Arab barbarism. In the mind of an early nineteenth-century French male viewer, the sort of person for whom this image was made, the odalisque would have conjured up not just a harem slave – itself a misconception – but a set of fears and desires linked to the long history of aggression between Christian Europe and Islamic Asia and North Africa.38 2Fik’s photograph, La Grande Intendante (2012) (fig. 10.13), provides a subversive intervention into Ingres’s painting that confronts cultural privilege and links colonial history to diasporic identity. In this work, 2Fik’s gender non-binary character LudillaMary poses as the odalisque, but her jewels and pearls have been replaced with Windex and rubber gloves. Though she is still adorned with a turban, many markers of the Orient are replaced with household cleaning supplies, like a vacuum cleaner and washrags.

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10.10 2Fik, The Marriage of Abdel and Fatima, 2014 (based on Daniel Maclise, The Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife, 1854).

While this work can be read as a feminist critique of domestic labour and the misogyny that still exerts control over women’s bodies,39 it also speaks to modernity and diaspora. 2Fik has replaced the odalisque – a woman meant to satisfy the carnal pleasures of the sultan – with his own brown, diasporic, and queer body. His large beard, traditionally associated with Islam,40 is juxtaposed with the feminine pose of the odalisque, a pose historically saved for women in Western artistic tradition. His painted red lips add to the gender ambiguity, queering his sexual identity but also his role as concubine. Who is 2Fik in service to in this image? Domestic labour is connected to migrant women who often come to Canada through temporary foreign worker programs such as the Live-in Caregiver Program (lcp).41 The image therefore depicts a colonially gendered history of labour and enslavement that is tied to racialized migrant women, indentured labour, and enslaved women. Moreover, the settler colonial state historically uses racialized bodies to maintain and support white settler domestic spaces, with immigrants inadvertently par-

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ticipating in active Indigenous elimination and erasure. As literary scholar Lisa Lowe explains, “these distinct yet connected racial logics constitute parts of what was in the nineteenth century an emergent Anglo-American settler imperial imaginary, which continues to be elaborated today.”42 The connection between labour and migration creates an undeniably diasporic reading of this image, as transnational migrant labour is oftentimes associated with a loss of homeland and separation of families. Given France’s colonial empire in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and much of North Africa when Ingres painted the original image, orientalism adds another dimension of coloniality that 2Fik reclaims from the scene. The original painting was in fact commissioned by Caroline Murat, Napoleon’s sister and the Queen of Naples, and it is clear that colonial politics played a role in the myth of the barbarian, a myth that served the French who could then claim a moral imperative as they colonized and conquered Africa and the Near East. 2Fik’s brown, sexualized, but also ambiguously gendered body plays the role of the colonized body. Illustrating the absurdity of orientalist traditions depicting the Middle East as backward and unmodern, 2Fik satirizes an aesthetic tradition that renders his own body as unmodern and deficient.43 With deficiency comes a lack, accounting for the incommensurability of Islam with homosexuality. This is unlike the West and its progressive, modern relationship to queer

10.11 2Fik, The Death of Dishonest Abdel, 2017 (based on Benjamin West, The Death of General Wolfe, 1770).

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10.12 Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, La Grande Odalisque. Oil on canvas, 1814.

identity. In Homosexualities, Muslim Cultures and Modernity, queer theorist Momin Rahman critiques the assumed mutual exclusivity between queerness and Middle Eastern and/or Asian cultures.44 Rahman aims to illuminate the intersections and complexities of current binaries within Muslim communities and families, gay communities and culture, and wider Western political culture and discourses. His central argument is that the West has created a discourse of Islamic otherness that positions Islam against homosexuality, meaning homosexuality is deployed as a marker of the superiority of Western modernity. In this way, a queer culture always existed in the Middle East, even if it was not termed as such, but the West attempted to criminalize it, confine it, define it, and ultimately suppress it. Even though homosexuality is not accepted universally in the West, when sexual diversity arises in civilizational debates it is cast as a defining feature of Western exceptionalism and superiority, thus drawing queerness into the core of definitions of Muslim incompatibility with modernity. Using queer subjectivity as a defining feature of modern nation-states is what feminist theorist Jasbir Puar calls homonationalism, “an analytic to apprehend state formation and a structure of modernity … an assemblage of geopolitical and historical forces, neoliberal interests in capitalist accumulation both cultural and material, biopolitical state practices of population control, and affective investments in discourses of freedom, liberation, and rights.”45 Building on the idea that homonationalism has become one of the key logics of modernity, postcolonial scholar Nishant Upadhyay argues that race must be seen as central to processes of homonationalism because within the homona-

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10.13 2Fik, La Grande Intendante, 2012 (based on Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, La Grande Odalisque, 1814).

tionalist project non-Indigenous queers of colour who were historically colonized and marginalized over time can be included within the settler state by claiming heteronormative sexual citizenship.46 In 2Fik’s La Grande Intendante, the viewer is meant to confront the absurdity not only of orientalist depictions of the Other but also of the long history of sexuality and gender norms in Europe that contributed to the making of the original painting by Ingres. The red lips of the bearded Muslim subject in the photograph are not only gender-bending but also call on a long history of colonial tradition that created the very conception of homosexuality in the European settler colonial context (and throughout the global North) and its assumed non-progressive counterparts in the

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global South.47 These East/West, modern/unmodern binaries are historically unstable and have always been reliant on one another. European visual tropes of Romantic Orientalism enabled Euro-American same-sex desire and provided a safe space for colonial Europeans to behave homosocially in the Middle East. For instance, historian Luke Gartlan examines the significance of outdoor photography in Cairo by AustroHungarian Orientalists as expressive of male bonding within the traveller-artist circle. Gartlan argues for the importance of same-sex intimacy in the travels of Orientalist artists and photographers. The perceived tension between prudish Victorian sexual discourse and “sexually litigious” behaviours in the Middle East in the nineteenth century naturally allowed for European travellers to explore a greater range of acceptable codes of behaviour. Thus, these generally male colonial tourists raised questions about a perceived Ottoman homosociality and a Euro-American heterosexuality; namely, why was there not a two-way exchange between colonial morality and colonial fantasy? In this artistic intervention by 2Fik, tradition and modernity are interrogated and the fixity of their binary construction is destabilized.48

Provincializing Modernity and Colonial Rule

What does it mean to provincialize Western modernity? What could identity narratives in the Middle East, and their sexual scripts, look like outside the purview of Western modernity? Taking a step backward in order to better evaluate the role of race and empire in premodern contexts, Italian artist Gentile Bellini’s painting, The Sultan Mehmet II (1480) (fig. 10.14), provides another rich source for 2Fik to explore themes of Islam, masculinity, and transnational encounter. The subject of the painting, Mehmet II (the Conqueror), brought an end to the Eastern Christian world of the Byzantine Empire in 1453 when he seized Constantinople. Mehmet marked the conquest by turning the greatest Byzantine church, Hagia Sophia, into a mosque. According to Tursun Beg, a historian of the fifteenth century, Mehmet built a great mosque, “which not only encompassed all the arts of Haghia Sophia, but modern features constituting a fresh new idiom unequalled in beauty.”49 At the time Bellini painted his work, the Turks posed a major threat to European powers, particularly in Italy. Poised on the threshold between East and West, Venice especially not only benefited financially from trade with Islamic leaders but also found itself facing incursions by ambitious Ottoman leaders. For sixteen years, Venice was able to hold its own in a war with the Turks but ultimately was forced to conclude peace in 1479. As a part of this peace settlement, Bellini worked in Constantinople primarily for Mehmet II (r. 1444– 46; 1451–81), painting the sultan’s portrait and producing bronze medals bearing his likeness, which made the image of the Ottoman ruler increasingly famous in Europe.50 In fact, Bellini’s portraiture of Sultan Mehmet II “has become emblematic of cultural exchange between Venice and the Ottomans”51 – and a general argument can be made that Mehmet is painted as a representative of Islamic power. The sultan wears a deep

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10.14 Gentile Bellini, The Sultan Mehmet II. Oil on canvas, 1480.

10.15 2Fik, Le Sultan Abdel, 2012. Digital photograph.

red caftan and a luxurious brown fur mantle, donning a wrapped turban over a red taj, a headdress indicative of his rank as well as his identity as a Muslim. In a way, this portrait associates Mehmet the Conqueror and Islam with progress and power. This late medieval context of global colonialism, which will compound and lead to early Western modernity, shows the complex ways in which empire and colonization overlap, and for the diasporic experience it is noteworthy to evaluate the ways in which sexual discourses are a part of and often central to entangled colonialisms. 2Fik’s reimagining of The Sultan Mehmet II in his photograph Le Sultan Abdel (2012) (fig. 10.15) provides an interesting commentary on colonialism, power, and diasporic representation in the twenty-first century. In this work, 2Fik’s culturally conservative and highly religious character Abdel plays the role of Sultan Mehmet. Abdel sits in a conventional three-quarter portrait pose wearing a modern red dressshirt and black tie. More traditionally, and as in the Bellini painting, Abdel also wears a brown fur mantle over his shoulders and a white turban on his head with a yellow prayer hat showing underneath. Playing the role of sultan, Abdel is a fully sovereign leader and has no dependence on a higher ruler. The title of sultan carries with it

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meanings restricted to Muslim countries and a religious significance in contrast to the more secular “king,” which is used in both Muslim and non-Muslim countries. In this photograph, 2Fik reimagines himself as a sovereign ruler not governed by any colonial power and reimagines kinship relations as he queers his own family history. While Bellini painted six golden crowns hovering over Mehmet’s head, 2Fik’s photographic portrayal instead has six glowing portraits of his own face. The significance of the crowns in Bellini’s portrait is unclear.52 Art historians Paul Wood and Carol M. Richardson have suggested that they represent the six previous Ottoman sultans, “with Mehmet himself symbolized by the seventh crown made of pearls at the bottom centre of the jewelled textile at the front of the painting.”53 2Fik’s portrait, however, has little opulence and no jewelled marker representing the subject’s own importance. Instead, the viewer looks at the proud and prominent Abdel as he sits in solitude surrounded by the heads of his ancestors (or even current family members), each face looking down upon him. 2Fik uses his fictional characters as a way of queering kinship dynamics by reimagining familial relations across various diasporic imaginaries and also by performing each character himself. He sits at the nucleus of this familial unit, depicting the religious and Islamic figure wearing modern Western clothing surrounded by the symbols of his cultural past. Here, the miniature portraits allow the viewer to move between both time and place, as the diasporic figure is not only linked to his cultural geography but also to temporal framings of modernity and tradition. In the vein of José Esteban Muñoz, this work provides a futurity for queer belonging, and, I argue, 2Fik also rethinks a queer present. As Muñoz powerfully states, “the present is not enough. It is impoverished and toxic for queers and other people who do not feel the privilege of majoritarian belonging, normative tastes, and ‘rational’ expectations.”54 In this way, the diasporic and culturally hybrid character of Abdel “is not enough.” I argue that 2Fik queers and reimagines the present of one of his more culturally conservative family members by nostalgically locating him within a history of power and dominance but also reimagines and reinvents his own past as he shapes Abdel’s own subject position.55 This rethinking of the present for queer diasporic subjects exposes the mythology of liberal tolerance for queer belonging in settler states in order to push queer politics into a local imaginary that resonates with 2Fik’s own experiences and beyond the privilege of heteronormative Western gay citizenship that is predicated on recognizing same-sex marriages, permitting legal adoption for queer citizens, and allowing gays to serve in the military. This work imagines a past and present fraught with colonial domination in order to contextualize the diasporic present. It is through the formation of the diasporic character Abdel, and 2Fik’s own identity, that the artwork provides a reading of queer futurity, a queer present, and another way of reimagining identity formation in the Middle East. How then does 2Fik’s reimagining of Western modernity speak to queering the past and, more importantly, the queering of Arab modernity? How does the portrayal and subversion of racialized subjects in colonial spaces, as in racist and orientalist paintings, speak to sexual constructs at the time and modern understanding of sex-

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uality as experienced by diasporic subjects today? To better think about these queries, I draw on the ways in which Vimalassery, Hu Pegues, and Goldstein conceive of decolonization as a process of both becoming and unravelling beyond just moving past or healing historical violence. Decolonization has to move past the possibility of an endpoint, or a historical or finished process (whether achieved already or at some future date), to productively grapple with practice.56 For example, thinking of anticolonial survival and resistance as a visual and artistic practice allows for the inclusion of the study of historic sexual discourses in the Middle East in relation to contemporary diasporic artists, which provides a way of bridging the disciplinary gap between queer theory and visual culture in order to more productively link a colonial past to a diasporic present.

Colonial Trauma and Contemporary Art

I would like to conclude by coming back to 2Fik’s own character (fig. 10.16) created in his photographic body of work. In his passport photograph, the self-named, black shell of a figure has absolutely no visual identity. Described as having no origins, his occupation is to play different characters and his ambition is to be a blank canvas that does its best to portray those characters. Under personality traits, 2Fik’s character is said to have none, and he only exists through the other characters he enacts. I argue that the absence of a visual identity, mirrored in the lack of identifying characteristics, represents what 2Fik nihilistically illustrates as his own queer diasporic identity. As I have traced throughout this analysis, Islamicate sexualities in the diaspora are fraught with tensions of coloniality, visuality, and citizenship. I began by outlining how Western epistemologies of queerness are not always conducive to understanding queer, diasporic, and transnational sexual identities, and 2Fik’s notion of coming out á l’oriental provides a reprieve from, and an alternative form of, sexual and artistic expression. From here, I analyzed 2Fik’s passport photos as a way of zeroing in on diasporic subjectivity and the formation of diasporic identity. I then framed these sexual discourses historically, questioning the types of colonial relationships present within discourses of sexuality. Especially important are the imperial connections that have existed between the West and Islamicate regions, which have created a framework of difference that defines Arab sexualities as perpetually unmodern. Here, the colonial traumas that I identified at the start of this analysis are seen as repercussions of, and linked to, contemporary ways of being both diasporic and queer. That is, past colonial trauma is closely linked to the diasporic present and informs visual tropes like coming out á l’oriental in methods of artistic creation that involve queering kinship and imagining visual processes that involve rewriting history in order to offer powerful reclamations of colonial domination and culturally impacted sexual discourses experienced in the Middle East. Diasporic artists such as 2Fik use tropes such as performance, character creation, humour, pastiche, and satire productively and affirmatively as a way of

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10.16 2Fik.

laying bare colonial traumas that are often buried and rendered invisible through normative Western queer discourses and the civilizing missions of modernity, which always favour the West. The traumas that the diasporic subject carries are intrinsically tied to settler colonial histories as immigration is a component of Canada’s national imaginary and can be used by the state to reproduce colonial amnesia through the active denial of present-day colonial projects.57 Overall, in creating a visual description of colonial trauma, contemporary diasporic art exists outside of its own contemporaneity and is removed from a present moment of subjectivity. Instead, the queer diasporic individual both creates and develops methods to mediate their own relationships to the local and the global, the traditional and the modern, and most importantly, the self and the other.

10.17 2Fik, Huitte Facette, 2009. Digital collage and photograph.

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n ote s 1 Quoted in Provencher, Queer Maghrebi French, 105. 2 See Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet; Somerville, “Feminism, Queer Theory, and the Racial Closet,” 191–200; Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place; Eribon and Lucey, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self; Edelman No Future; and Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? 3 I define the Middle East loosely as the geopolitical designation of western Asia and northeast Africa that includes the nations on the Arabian Peninsula, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey. Even though some of these regions, like Iran and Turkey, are not technically a part of the Middle East, a historiographical emphasis makes it integral to include regions that were connected by empire, culture, and language. 4 Modernity is not to be confused with modernism, which points to the cultural trends that responded to the conditions of modernity in myriad ways, such as modern art. 5 In Rahman Momin’s core argument homocolonialism is an actor in the specific understanding of modernity that underpins the sources of oppression between Muslim cultures and sexual diversity. See Rahman, Homosexualities. 6 El-Rouayheb, Before Homosexuality, 5. 7 Premodern same-sex desire is well documented in the Middle East. El-Rouayheb outlines numerous biographic accounts, poetic anthologies, and belletristic writings openly dedicated to same-sex relations, such as poems about a man’s passion for a teenage boy. See Before Homosexuality, 1–42. Historians also cite the travel journals of Europeans who visited various regions of the Ottoman Empire, noting their astonishment and disgust with same-sex tradition and local men openly flaunting their relations with other men and adolescent boys. It should be noted that these travel journals were often translated into Arabic and local languages in order to be circulated to cause shame and embarrassment, thus making them a part of irreparable acts of repression and sexual imperialism. See Dror Ze evi, Producing Desire; and Boone, The Homoerotics of Orientalism. 8 El-Rouayheb, Before Homosexuality, 156. 9 Rahman, Homosexualities. 10 Intersectionality is a framework designed to explore the dynamic between co-existing identities (e.g., woman, Black) and connected systems of oppression (e.g., patriarchy, white supremacy). The term was coined by Black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw to challenge the assumption that continues to undermine the feminist movement: that women are a homogeneous group, equally positioned by structures of power. In a feminist context, it allows for a fully developed understanding of how factors such as race and class shape women’s lived experiences; how they interact with gender. See Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins,” 1241–300. 11 Instead of using the term “incompatibility” to discuss these genuine differences, I turn to Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s thinking about decolonization for more precise language. In their text “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Tuck and Yang outline an “ethic of incommensurability, which recognizes what is distinct [and] what is sovereign for project(s) of decolonization in relation to human and civil rights based social justice projects (“Decolonization,” 28). Their use of “incommensurability” instead of “incompatibility” draws on Frantz Fanon who argued

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that incommensurability is an acknowledgment that decolonization will require a change in the order of the world. See The Wretched of the Earth, 69. See Gayed, “Queering Middle Eastern Contemporary Art,” 140–55; Gayed, “Islamicate Sexualities.” It should be noted that in his interviews with Denis Provencher, 2Fik used the term Arab to refer to his own cultural experience and also to identify his own performative characters. Provencher, Queer Maghrebi French. See Provencher, Queer Maghrebi French, for an in-depth analysis of the languages used by queer Maghrebi-French artists, writers, and filmmakers. In 1974, Marshall Hodgson coined the term Islamicate as a way of opening up the borders of modern scholarship. Hodgson objects to using the terms “Islam” and “Islamic” in unspecific ways, arguing that the more we speak of Islamic art, Islamic literature, or Islamic sexuality, the less we are actually speaking about Islam as a faith. Islamicate does not refer directly to the religion of Islam but to the social and cultural complexities historically associated with Islam. It is therefore inclusive of non-Muslims living within majority Muslim regions. Geographically, the term opens up the limits of studying places such as “Middle East” to encompass other geographic regions where Islam is dominant both religiously and culturally, such as Iran and parts of Asia. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, 57–9. I use “transnational queer identity” to speak of a non-Western way of being a queer subject, most often referring to sexual norms of the global South. A transnational queer identity is necessarily diasporic and involves different global, local, and multinational negotiations in order to form queer subjectivity in the diaspora. Provencher, Queer Maghrebi French, 57. Ibid., 81. Ibid., 80. Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe points to Eurocentrism within the study of historical modernity and the centrality that Europe takes in histories of civilization, industrialization, and progress. Chakrabarty begins by outlining how conventional theoretical models have been based on European history, with key themes like the development of capitalism and modernity being central to these narratives. He argues that Europe provides the template of modernity and a body of scholarship that defines how academics view the world and not just a geographic region. Provincializing Europe entails returning Europe to its rightful place as one world region amongst many, decentred as a way of thinking through the experiences of political modernity in non-Western nations. Islamicate gender fluidity is seen in surviving Middle Eastern and later Islamic literature from the fourth to thirteenth centuries, which narrates examples of homosocial relations and gay desire but not “gay” as a stable identity. For instance, homoerotic relationships between the Mamluk elite in late-medieval Egypt and Syria show that the public expression of homoeroticism (especially in poetry) was fully permitted by Islamic societies both before and during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. See Rowson, “Two Homoerotic Narratives from Mamluk Literature,” 158–91. Likewise, premodern Arab-Islamic texts speak frequently of the androgy-

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nous beauty of beardless boys, and poetry and other texts are explicit about anal intercourse and fellatio. Traub, Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns, 24. Manalansan, Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora. Ibid., 91. It is important to note the medium specificity and circulation of 2Fik’s photographic oeuvre. How does the choice to use photography and/or performance change the viewer’s relationship to these images, their audience, and temporality? Photography’s transnational, virtually disseminated, and easily circulated nature at times echoes the transregional narratives within 2Fik’s artwork. The photograph Arabesque (2006) for instance was made just two years after France passed “the veil law” (or law 2004–28 of 15 March 2004) banning the use of religious garments and symbols such as the Muslim hijab. Born in Paris to a Moroccan Muslim family, 2Fik moved to Montreal in 2003, finding himself in an environment that inspired him to examine identity and its socio-political ramifications. Quebec, however, has had a similar history of attempting to impose racist laws that remove freedom and civil liberties to Quebec’s Muslim population, especially Muslim women. In 2013 the xenophobic Charter of Quebec Values, or Bill 60, was introduced to likewise ban the use of religious garments like the hijab before the bill died the following year. Later, in 2019, Quebec passed Bill 21, a ban on religious symbols such as the hijab that mandates having one’s face uncovered to give or receive specific public services. While some of these laws and provisions came after Arabesque was made, it is safe to say that these issues have been public discussion in France and Quebec during 2Fik’s immigration to Canada and coinciding with the year he produced the artwork. 2Fik’s photograph Arabesque within this context is simultaneously entangled with his French homeland, his immigration to Quebec, and his experience of his Moroccan heritage in Canada. In this way, 2Fik’s Arabesque resonates with audiences transnationally, and the easily disseminated photograph becomes an act of resistance and protest to a decades-long struggle to fight racism and xenophobia in the diaspora. See for example Smith, Conquest; Smith, “Queer Theory and Native Studies,” 43–65; Morgensen, “Settler Homonationalism,” 105–32; Morgensen, “Queer Settler Colonialism,” 167–90. Hammound-Beckett, “Azima Ila Hayati,” 29–39. Naber, Arab America. See also, Abdulhadi, Alsultany, and Naber, Arab and Arab American Feminisms. Massad, Desiring Arabs, 188. For scholarship on queer settler colonialism see Morgensen, “The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism,” 52–76; Morgensen, “Settler Homonationalism”; Andrea Smith, “Queer Theory and Native Studies,” 41–68; Greensmith and Giwa, “Challenging Settler Colonialism,” 129–48. 2Fik’s Huitte Facette (fig. 10.17) portrays the characters in a way that highlights their national identity. In a clockwise order starting in the top left-hand corner: Marco (Italian Moroccan); Alice (French Lebanese); Soufian (Moroccan); Fatima (Moroccan); Benjamin (Arab Quebecker); Manon (100 per cent Quebecois); Abdel (Morrocan); and Francine (Anglo-Canadian). Like in the Marriage of Abdel and Fatima (fig. 10.10). See exhibition shot: Filip, “2Fik: His and Other Stories,” http://kofflerarts.org/publication/2017/ 07/17/2fik-his-and-other-stories-2/.

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33 Puar, Terrorist Assemblages. 34 2Fik’s character Alice (French Lebanese), for example, could act as a bridge between his characters Fatima (Morrocan) and Manon (born in Quebec). According to the artist, Alice stands in as a sort of transition from the East to the West on all levels: religious, cultural, social, educational, etc. Provencher, Queer Maghrebi French, 63. 35 This term is inspired by the work of critical race theorist Sherene Razack who cites the term “Muslim-looking” as part of a resurgence of old Orientalism that “provides the scaffold for the making of an empire dominated by the United States and the white nations who are its allies.” Razack, Casting Out, 5. Furthermore, this terms is part of what Razack identifies as “race thinking,” which she defines as the denial of a common bond of humanity between people of European descent and those who are not. Race thinking is the belief that there are two levels of humanity and two corresponding legal regimes. It is a structure of thought that divides up the world between the deserving and the undeserving according to descent, developing into racism through its use as a political weapon (6, 8, 179). 36 Provencher, Queer Maghrebi French, 66. 37 Other artist like Yasumasa Morimura and Mickalene Thomas have found this act of restaging and reinterpreting images from the European canon to be a productive method of decolonizing visual representation. Japanese contemporary photographer Yasumasa Morimura (b. 1951) appropriates Western imagery from art history, film, and media, recreating iconic scenes by inserting his own male Asian body into them. Ambiguously representing his gender as fluid and queer, in his photographs Morimura alternates between playing female characters such as da Vinci’s Mona Lisa to assuming the masculine roles of historical figures such as Mao Zedong and Vladimir Lenin. Mickalene Thomas on the other hand uses painting and collage to create monumental pictures that explore and challenge the representation and objectification of Black women. Drawing inspiration from images of iconic African American women and emblems of the Black Power Movement, Thomas restages canonical imagery to create an updated version of established sexist and racist visual archetypes found within Western art history. 38 Beth Harris and Steven Zucker, “Painting Colonial Culture: Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque,” Khan Academy, 2018, https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-history/later-europeand-americas/enlightenment-revolution/a/ingres-la-grand-odalisque. 39 Mona Filip, “2Fik: His and Other Stories,” Koffler Centre of the Arts, Toronto, Canada, 2017, http://kofflerarts.org/publication/2017/07/17/2fik-his-and-other-stories-2/. 40 Muslims learn about the Prophet’s views on facial hair not from the Koran but through hadith or sayings attributed to Muhammad. One such hadith, in a collection compiled centuries ago by Muslim scholar Muhammad al-Bukhari, stipulates, “Cut the moustaches short and leave the beard.” The Prophet Muhammad is believed to have had a beard, and those who insist that devout Muslims grow beards argue that they are doing no more than asking the faithful to emulate the Prophet’s actions. There are schools of Islamic law – Hanafi, Maliki, Hanbali, and Shafi – which, among many other things, hold strong positions on beard length and the act of shaving. For more see Farmanfarmaian, “Fear of the Beard,” 48–69; Delaney, “Untangling the Meanings of Hair in Turkish Society,” 159–72; and bbc News, “Are Beards Obligatory for De-

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vout Muslim Men?,” bbc.com, 27 June 2010, https://www.bbc.com/news/10369726. Shaving one’s beard could thus be a sign of modernity. Feminist theorist Afsenah Najmabadi outlines the importance of facial hair in her book Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards. The Live-In Caregiver program was established in order to support middle and upper-class families in Canada as adults balance work and care for family members including children and elderly parents. The lcp makes available the opportunity for nannies and domestics to become permanent residents and citizens of Canada and facilitates the immigration of spouses and children and the reconsolidation of families in the diaspora. See Diaz, Largo, and Pino, Diasporic Intimacies, 15. For more on nonnormative and queer intimacies in transnational feminist writing about gender and labour within the lcp see Catungal, “Toward Queer(er) Futures,” 23–40. Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents, 8. Orientalism is defined as the West’s patronizing representations of “The East” and the overall exoticization of the societies and peoples who inhabit countries in Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East. According to Edward Said, orientalism is inextricably tied to the imperialist societies who produced it, which makes much Orientalist work inherently political and central to power (Said, Orientalism). Rahman, Homosexualities. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 337. Nishant Upadhyay argues that homonationalism has become one of the key logics of modernity, whereby certain queer bodies are reconstituted as worthy of recognition and protection by nation-states. These queer subjects become indispensable to the maintenance and continuance of the nation-state, while others are excluded through logics of white supremacy, racism, Islamophobia, heteropatriarchy, neoliberalism, and settler colonialism. See Jackman and Upadhyay, “Pinkwatching Israel, Whitewashing Canada,” 201. For Gatlan’s study see Behdad and Gartlan, Photography’s Orientalism. Colonial fantasies often lie at the crux of these binaries. While European tourists shamed the Middle East for displays of same-sex intimacy, Romantic Orientalist European paintings, such as portraits of poet Lord Byron (1788–1824) in fancy Oriental dress, expressed a homoeroticism and can be read as clearly flamboyant. Bey and Inalcık, The History of Mehmed the Conqueror; Jonathan Jones, “The Sultan Mehmet II, Attributed to Gentile Bellini (1480),” The Guardian, 26 April 2003, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2003/apr/26/art. Alan Chong, “The Sultan Mehmet II,” Learner.org, 2017, https://www.learner.org/courses/ globalart/work/80/index.html (accessed 11 December 2018). Antonia Gatward Cevizli, “Bellini, Bronze and Bombards.” The crowns also appear in a banner depicted in the Saint Ursula cycle of paintings by Carpaccio. Historian Mary L. Pixley writes, “The series of three crowns refers to the three kingdoms of Asia, Greece and Trebizond which were controlled by the Ottoman Turkish empire.” “Islamic Artifacts and Cultural Currents in the Art of Carpaccio,” 9. Art historian Paul Wood has also noted, “On the reverse of Bellini’s portrait medal there are three of them, usually taken to refer to the three components of the Ottoman Empire: the original territories in Asia, Greece (in-

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cluding Constantinople), and Trebizond (the Black Sea port and gateway to the Silk Route into central Asia, captured by Mehmet from Venetian control within a decade of the end of Byzantium, in 1461).” “Art in Renaissance Venice: A Portrait,” OpenLearn Course at The Open University, https://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/culture/visual-art/artrenaissance-venice/content-section-1.4 (accessed 11 December 2018). Pedani Fabris, cited by Bagci, “Catalogue Entry no. 226,” 434. Also, Wood, “Art in Renaissance Venice.” Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 27. I use the term “conservative” in relation to the narrative and backstory the artist has given the character of Abdel. The artist developed a group of recurring, full-fledged characters stemming from his own life experiences and inner tensions. According to the artist, “Abdel was born in a middle-class neighbourhood of Casablanca and later moved to Montréal where he now works as a low-paid property manager. The love of his good wife, Fatima, helps his self-esteem, though they married under family pressure and he was never attracted to her. Turning to religion for a sense of belonging, his practice of Islam became strict yet deeply hypocritical. He allows Fatima to work for Alice so they can make ends meet.” (See Filip, “2Fik: His and Other Stories.”) Vimalassery, Hu Pegues, and Goldstein, “On Colonial Unknowing.” Jackman and Upadhyay, “Pinkwatching Israel, Whitewashing Canada,” 201.

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11 Indian Americans Engulfing “American Indian”: Marking the “Dot Indians’” Indianness through Genocide and Casteism in Diaspora shaista pate l

Introduction

In this chapter I contend that it is urgent to talk about the participation of non-Black, non-Indigenous people of colour in upholding structures of violence, such as white settler colonialism, anti-Blackness, and casteism in order to challenge the epistemology of “colonial unknowing” in critical theory.1 I am particularly invested in thinking about this urgency in relation to the participation by South Asians in various systems of domination in North America (specifically Canada and the US).2 While I focus more on colonialism and casteism in this chapter, I want the reader to continue doing their work of researching and writing about relationalities among these three structures of violence because for South Asians with caste privilege, conversations on antiBlackness without centring caste are not only simply performative rhetoric but also casteist and, therefore, harmful. As Dalit activist, performer, and writer Thenmozhi Soundarajan noted in her recent article on South Asians willing to be in solidarity with Black people in America, “We must remember that before a single South Asian person interacted with Europeans, we were already participating in colorism, segregation, and religiously informed caste slavery through caste apartheid. This violent anti-Dalitness and casteism is what informs and feeds South Asian anti-Blackness.”3 Anti-Blackness is global but takes specific forms in different contexts and for South Asians caste and Blackness are indivisible in conversations about Black Lives Matter, defunding of police, and all talks on abolition and decolonization. While the site of my inquiry here is limited to a couple of photographs by a Syrian Christian Indian photographer in the American diaspora, my discussion here contributes to broader conversations in fields such as ethnic studies, Asian American studies, South Asian studies, and adjacent fields about the co-ordinates along which we,

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differentially placed and racialized people of colour, must trace our complicity in structures of domination and violence.4 Theorizing white settler colonialism as a closed structure, separate from (other) histories of empire, imperialism, slavery, indentureship, and intermingled processes of racialization, is embedded in epistemologies of colonial unknowing because it cannot account for how Black people and other people of colour from Asia and Africa came or were brought to settle (in) Canada or the US in the first place. To be accountable to the global requires attending to relational modes of analysis that splinter categories such as people of colour as I argue below. I will focus on non-Black South Asians, particularly Indians, in this chapter, more specifically, Indians with caste privilege. I want my readers to know that while the term “Indian” is a misnomer when used to refer to Indigenous peoples of the Americas, this term is also not an accurate label for the heterogeneous populations of the country we know as India. Many people(s) in India live under occupied conditions, such as in Kashmir Valley, Jammu, and Ladakh, and in the northeast (of) colonial India, including Assam, Nagaland, Manipur and Tripura, and Chhattisgarh. The Indigenous peoples of India, known as Adivasis, who according to the 2011 census account for at least 104.3 million distinct Indigenous people(s), actively resist being referred to as Indians while continuing to fight against constant colonial encroachment upon their lands and lives.5 Similarly, Dalit-Bahujan people have often refused to identify with the nation-state that is structured on a 2,500-year-old genocidal system of casteism.6 I understand India in this context as a predominantly Brahmanical and therefore casteist, anti-religious minority (including Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Ravidassia, Buddhist amongst others) tyrannical occupant nation-state that is only as much of a democracy as any occupier/colonial nation-state can ever possibly be. I will discuss caste and casteism later in the chapter, but the main point I want to return to now is that examining the place of people of colour in relation to white settler colonialism in North America demands that we think about the global imperial and colonial entanglements of race, caste, religion, gender, tribal, and labour migration politics that brought us here. In other words, we cannot afford to tell a selective story that does not allow for the critical intellectual and other political work needed to account for horizontal relations of violence amongst Indigenous, Black, and other (heterogeneously) racialized people.7 This careful attention to relational and transnational workings of power is needed because challenging colonial unknowing requires that racialized scholars are able to trace both the wilful complicity and situational complicity of non-Black people of colour produced through interlocking systems of domination and exploitation. Wilful participation is often easier to see, trace, and explain than situational complicity. The former often comes from people in positions of dominance, of power (in terms of gender, class, caste, religion, and citizenship among other factors) who collude with the white settler state to find a place and strengthen their own positions

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through strategically condoning Indigenous dispossession, anti-Black violence, xenophobia, and so many other structural violences. Here, whiteness is definitely not a condition for collusion. More difficult and complicated to account for is structurally produced complicity; for example, the ways in which immigrants of colour, often as displaced people ourselves, are either invited to, brought to, or arrive on occupied lands where the dispossession of Indigenous peoples is ongoing and the ways in which we are positioned to fight amongst ourselves for the limited resources available. For racialized, class-oppressed people of colour, finding a small place of life and hope for ourselves within the workings of the racial state often comes at the expense of the ongoing disposability of Indigenous lives and sovereignty in states that are foremost colonial and white supremacist. It is difficult to ethically account for the ways in which non-Indigenous, non-Black people of colour continue to benefit from the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Both wilful and situational complicity work in imbricated ways and are often indivisible. For example, the two very popular cases of upper-caste Indian men such as Akshay Kumar Mozumdar and Bhagat Singh Thind who, during the early twentieth-century immigration laws requiring whiteness as a prerequisite for immigration to the United States, argued that they passed the whiteness test because they were “high caste Hindu of pure blood” and members of the Aryan race which made them white or, as popular Aryan supremacy primer goes, “whiter than whites.”8 Both Mozumdar and Thind were clearly casteist and racist but their complicity in forming a desire for national membership in the United States should be evaluated within the framework of the white supremacist state as well as transnational connections across the oceans to British Raj in India. My investment is not in redeeming these histories of South Asian complicity but a demand that an unflinching focus must always be maintained on the global and local heteropatriarchal, masculinist, white supremacist (with attendant characteristics of white [or not] settler colonialism, anti-Blackness, Islamophobia, casteism and other) structures of violence so that complicity can be theorized within these multiple, complicated, and differently formed horizontal and vertical networks of power. White settler colonialism, therefore, needs to be brought into conversation with other, seemingly disconnected, colonial and imperial forces to be genuinely attentive to the place of non-Indigenous, non-Black people of colour in upholding violence in a way goes beyond the “I am a settler of colour” admission to include the politics of intentionality in questions of complicity, accountability, and strategies for solidarity. To think about complicity of caste South Asians I examine part of a photographic series called An Indian from India (2001–07) by Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, an Indian American photographer. Matthew, an Indian Syrian Christian woman, was born in England, raised in India, and is now professor of arts (photography) at the University of Rhode Island. Her exhibitions in North America, Europe, and Asia have been covered in numerous Indian American online and print diaspora magazines and newspapers and have received patronage from around the world. Her work allows me

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to show and prove this complicity, which is everyday for caste South Asians. I treat An Indian from India as an important site of inquiry into the complicity of (particular kinds of) South Asians in the daily workings of the white settler colonial nation-state. My discussion is in conversation with Matthew’s work but also with other scholars/ theorists, artists, and activists of colour – all of us who are invested in (un)learning about our place as non-Black people of colour in white settler colonial context(s) attendant to asymmetrical (and) transnational workings of power.

On (Un)becoming through Presenting Violence

Before I discuss Matthew’s photographs, however, I would like to pause and reflect on how researching and writing about her work has challenged me to think about audience and about my readers. As I have tried to provoke a meaningful engagement with these images in conference presentations, I thought little about what Indigenous audience members in particular must see and feel encountering them. This is not because colonial violence is not a daily part of their lives but because I do not wish to suggest that it ever becomes any easier, especially, to see non-Indigenous brown women colluding with the colonizer in the name of solidarity with Indigenous peoples. This, indeed, was part of my own colonial mentality and practice where I failed to critically engage with questions of Indigenous peoples’ reception of these images and also of my critiques. I did not ethically think about how the juxtapositions Matthew presents exceed the scope of violence that I have been able to translate and critique through words. In presenting works, especially images such as those produced by Matthew, often white settler and racialized scholars like me forget that Indigenous peoples are here, as our colleagues, friends, teachers, critics, and audience members. We forget that these colonial photographs, these archives, the people in these staged poses can be part of “family photo album[s]” for so many Indigenous peoples.9 We also often forget the harm we continue to inflict even through seemingly anticolonial and decolonial critiques. This realization for me, despite my intentions, my politics, and my work, came only when Unangaˆx feminist scholar Eve Tuck, in her usual generosity, pointed out to me the violence of these photographs for Indigenous viewers. In talking about South Asian complicity, my complicity, I would be remiss if I did not admit that I am still not comfortable with how to engage with these photographs in an ethical manner that does not reproduce the colonial script of the “dying Indian” in some form. I keep thinking about the continuity of violence in such re-presentations and re-productions. Therefore, a question I want to attend to with my readers is, How can we, all non-Indigenous, non-Black scholars, effectively and ethically attend to the harm which our critiques of colonial violence might cause to Indigenous peoples’ lives and self-determination? This, I argue, is an important way of continuing to track our ongoing complicity, sometimes produced through even our critiques of colonialism. It

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also demands that we attend to messy, complicated, contradictory, and horizontal workings of power relations, what Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd calls the “cacophony of empire.”10 Talking about complicity should also be risky for us. I understand the repercussions of talking about complicity of racialized people especially in academia where white supremacy reigns. However, it is also incumbent on us to make a constant effort to be honest and accountable to the people whose lands we live on. For me, it should mean being able to really listen when told that my work is harmful despite intentions. It is not about confessing that you/I are/am a settler, upper-caste, white, brown, hetero-cis, conventionally human person. Talking about complicity demands that we explore our investments in both anti-Indigeneity and also how we engage with Indigenous peoples for (our version of) decolonizing purposes. In her very important article, “Off littorality (Shoal 1.0),” Black scholar Tiffany Lethabo King writes: [T]he exercise of situating oneself in the vein of “I acknowledge that I am a white-cis-queer-male-settler-scholar working on yada …” has become an inane exercise. I want to know how it feels to acknowledge arousal – and or other sensations – at the sight of Black bodies in pain, rebellion, movement, ecstasy, and make that feeling – your feeling – an object for study. This kind of empathetic disclosure interrupts the violence of politeness and its performance of “pure” and anti-racist intent on the part of the white/non-black researcher.11 King demands that we talk about our investments in anti-Blackness and in how we encounter Blackness through proximity to Black bodies and other texts. While King’s focus is on white and non-Black researchers who write about Blackness and Black people, I am taking her words to become more aware of how I feel in my body writing about Indigeneity and Indigenous peoples. In all our (non-Indigenous, non-Black) encounters with Indigeneity and Blackness both are laid open and vulnerable to us, in front of us, because we treat their bodies, lives, histories, presents, and futures as open archives we give ourselves access to. But what does that do to our bodies and senses? Drawing upon King’s instructions, I know that I will be more attentive to the kinds of erotic “tinglings” of placemaking these photographs generate in my body. I want to make it my lifetime work to keep thinking about how colonial scriptures of “dying Indian” allow me to feel properly Canadian. I am going to continue thinking about how complicity must also become an important pedagogical site for unbecoming and not only unlearning. Talking complicity means disintegrating into so many pieces that no rhetoric, no metaphors, no set of smart words strung together for publications or teaching, can put me back together again. “Settler of colour” then stops being my refuge as a more aware person performing her radicality as I stand in front of my Indigenous students, audience members, and readers and say that I don’t know how to not continue the harm, that I am continuing to sincerely think about what to do and how to do it. I should not be able to stand there whole and in control of the narrative

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about myself and my place in Canada. In light of the discussion above, I know the reader will understand why I have not reproduced Matthew’s images. Instead, I have tried to describe them in words.

On Matthew’s Photographs

Two “Indians” are juxtaposed in each of Matthew’s sepia photographs. The first image in every diptych is the colonial photograph and the second is her mimicry of it. She copies the poses of the subjects and also the backgrounds. In an interview with an online photography magazine, Matthew stated, “Through my portfolio of selfportraits paired with portraits from the 19th century, I join hands with the Native Americans to reverse the gaze and to expand the viewer’s assumptions, definition and stereotypes of who is different” (emphasis added). This metaphorical joining of hands between two “Indians” with markedly different historical trajectories and presents happens because she wants to “draw parallels between the imaging of Indians and the imaging of American Indians.”12 She employs vintage colonial photographs by nineteenth- and twentieth-century photographers such as Edward S. Curtis, John N. Coate, and Frank Rinehart, among others, and pairs them with her own mimicry of the poses of the Indigenous subjects. Several scholars of postcolonial studies such as Edward Said, Malek Alloula, and Bernard Cohn have noted that colonial authority is enforced not only through military, economic, and legal means but also through various technologies of knowledge production.13 Colonial and imperial cultural photography has always played an integral role in (re)producing the colonial and racial Other in their “savagery” in order to legitimize colonizers’ narratives of gently (or not so gently) assisting the colonized into (colonial) modernity to “save” them from themselves.14 It has consistently captured Indigenous peoples as ethnographic objects to be probed. In the case of North America, colonial photographs were an important empire-building and consolidating site, reflective of white settler anxiety about the disappearing “Indian” and the quest for a pure, authentic “Indian” who fulfills white colonizers’ fantasies. Capturing dying “real” (reel) “Indians” on film legitimized white settlers as modern citizen subjects who had to keep doing the hard work of necropolitical management of racialized and colonized life. Likewise, the British Raj in India was also underpinned by ideas of European racial superiority and the uninhibited quest for the land, resources, life, and labour of the colonized. While there is a difference between white settler colonialism in North America and the British Raj, what remains true for both is that colonial knowledge production facilitates the transformation of the colonized into children and savages always in need of the colonizers’ benevolence and modernity.15 For instance, in North America Edward Curtis began his famous work taking more than 40,000 photographs of Indigenous peoples from more than eighty nations in a period spanning more than

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thirty years, while in the British subcontinent an eight-volume photographic ethnographic survey of “Indian types” edited by John Forbes Watson and John William Kaye was produced between 1868 to 1875 to record “the peculiarities of Indian life.”16 And, just as Curtis photographed his subjects in studios in all their abstractness and constructed particularities to reflect settler desires, the people of India too were constructed in abstraction through Orientalist generalizations of race, caste, gender, and other social factors. The goal was “to represent the different varieties of the ‘Indian races’” for the imperialists to take back to England as souvenirs as well as for presentation to Queen Victoria, the so-called Empress of India, who never set foot in the colony.17 Therefore, a comparison between the two colonized peoples appears to be logical and important for making connections between two seemingly disconnected colonized territories and different kinds of colonialisms even if Matthew does not present or include the work of colonial photographers of the British Raj. To make comparisons and connections between the two colonial situations, the second contrasting photograph in each pair in Matthew’s series shows her replicating the poses of Indigenous subjects in the first.18 In a statement accompanying the photographs, Matthew notes, As an immigrant, I am often questioned about where I am “really from.” When I say that I am Indian, I often have to clarify that I am an Indian from India. It seems strange that all this confusion started because Christopher Columbus thought he had found the Indies and called the native people of America collectively as Indians. In this portfolio, I look at the other “Indian.” I play on my own “otherness,” using photographs of Native Americans from the Nineteenth and early Twentieth century that perpetuated and reinforced stereotypes. I find similarities in how Nineteenth and early Twentieth century photographers of Native Americans looked at what they called the primitive natives, similar to the colonial gaze of the Nineteenth Century British photographers working in India.19 Matthew’s anxiety at identifying herself as the “Indian from India” is not unique. The discourse of “dot Indian” (often underpinned by rationalities of Indian Hindu nationalism and model minority complex) versus “feather Indian” (always mobilized as vestigial, as remnant of a distant past) is not uncommon in the so-called meltingpot context of America. Matthew’s work, of course, is not based on such crude taxonomies of the “Indian.” I want to be careful to acknowledge Matthew’s intent to challenge white colonizers’ staged photographs of Indigenous peoples. At the same time, what I am interested in thinking about is how the figure of the “American Indian” allows Matthew to play on her own otherness as an Indian American. What allows Matthew to produce these photographs of Indigenous bodies as an object of inquiry? What work does placing herself in these photographs do? Is this a decolonial inter-

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ruption? Or merely an anticolonial effort by people of colour in a North America that is still underwritten by Indigenous disappearance and dispossession?

“Indian” — Engulfing Indian American

In this section I will discuss two photographs from Matthew’s series to think about what the juxtaposing of the two “Indians” does. While I do not analyze every single photograph in her series, my reading of the couple I focus on reflects my analysis of the entire series. The first photograph I study, which comes from her portfolio I titled “Red ‘Indian’/Brown ‘Indian,’” juxtaposes a Curtis photograph of an elderly Indigenous man looking sideways with one in which Matthew mimics his pose.20 The sepia photograph shows a date stamp of 1914. The exhibit photo is labelled “Red Indian.” The shot shows a wrinkled face wearing the effects of a life of struggles and of a life of struggles during the “Indian Wars.” While Matthew does not tell us the subject’s name, some quick research shows that he was Alchise (or more accurately, William Alchesay), an Apache chief of the White Mountain Apache tribe and a central figure in the Indian Wars of the nineteenth century. His portrait in the archive of the Arizona Memory Project has the following description: Chief of the White Mountain Apache. A well-known character, having been a scout with General Crook. Colonel Cooley, who was chief of scouts under Crook, says a braver man than Alchise never lived. He was about twenty-two when Fort Apache, then Camp Ord, was established in 1870, making the year of his birth about 1848. This portrait was made at Alchise’s camp on White river in the spring of 1903.21 In some ways, the US empire’s photographer knew his subjects in ways that Matthew perhaps doesn’t. Though I noted earlier that Curtis’s photographs reproduce the colonial gaze, I do not wish to dismiss his work as simply colonial because, while the gaze was indeed colonial, reducing Indigenous peoples of sovereign nations to the racial category of “Indian,” the work also exceeded the colonial gaze. Margot Francis warns against the move to simply dismiss Curtis’s work, noting, “[T]he people who sat for Curtis were not themselves simply passive victims caught unawares by the camera that ‘steals the soul.’”22 She discusses his subjects as agents who, despite the violent colonial constraints, still challenged their colonizers. Contemporary Haudenosaunee photographer Jeffrey Thomas agrees. In a note discussing his own work, Thomas writes, Although Curtis’s work is often vilified, I wanted to find a way to engage with historical images without either romanticizing or dismissing them. His images

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make me long to hear the subjects’ voices. I search for these “outtakes” and use my own work to suggest what they may have looked like.23 In comparison with Thomas’s approach that seeks the voices of his historical subjects, Matthew’s work becomes an example of seemingly anticolonial work that reproduces the genocidal logic of Indigenous erasure and dispossession. Next to old Alchise’s portrait from early twentieth century Matthew’s self-portrait stamped 2001 shows a taut and much younger face looking out sideways and labelled “Brown Indian.” Other photographs in the series are titled “Noble Savage–Savage Noble”; “Navajo smile–Malayalee smile”; “American Indian with Dot on Face–Indian American with Dot on Face”; and “Feather Indian–Dot Indian,” among others.24 In her commendatory reading of this particular pair in the series, South Asian visual culture scholar Gita Rajan writes, [B]y placing them side by side, Matthew provokes the viewer to think about two questions: one, if the name Red “Indian” is a misnomer, how meaningful is the history of America? And, two if the Red “Indian” as the original inhabitant still bears the mark of violent oppressions, what is the hope for the Brown “Indian” as a new immigrant? By placing the two faces next to each other, Matthew uses the implied authenticity of the photographic medium to mediate between her own body and the body politic of the nation. The image stands in for history, just as history banks upon the represented image. Consequently, in putting herself into the picture, that is working her face into that of the Brown “Indian,” Matthew dialogically connects old racisms with new ones, links past injustices with contemporary atrocities, and makes her viewer bear witness to the ongoing systemic and systematic violence in the nation.25 There is a lot to say about the making of Indigenous peoples into “Indians” and similar misnomers that do productive (always genocidal) work.26 Nevertheless, while I sincerely appreciate Rajan’s questioning of the validity of the history of America (and, relatedly, Canada), it does not challenge the legitimacy of the very existence of these white settler states. Misnaming colonial violence, both historic and ongoing, as “racism” erases violence against Indigenous peoples. Rajan performs a critique of the racial state and the violence done to racialized people (Matthew’s brown Indians). The figure of the “Brown Indian” occupies the position of the victim of “contemporary atrocities” with a vague sense that the “Red Indian” too remains the subject of some “past injustices.” What remains profoundly troubling about both Matthew’s photograph and Rajan’s reading of it is that while positing the term “Red Indian” as a misnomer, the focus still falls on the place and futurity of the “Brown Indian.” That Indigenous peoples are reduced to Indians as an act of violence is clear, but what is also apparent is the space-clearing act that centres South Asians as subjects whose racial grief needs addressing. The disruption to the idea of “Red Indian” as an authentic

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historical figure happens through thinking about the constructedness of the racial imagination invested in the making of the “Brown Indian.” What is the significance of primarily challenging the “colonial gaze” on “Brown Indians” when it racialized and not colonized subjects here in North America? While Matthew seemingly centres the colonial gaze as the object of her disruptions, it is British colonial rule over the Indian subcontinent that ultimately gets challenged, and as a result what should have been a critique of colonialism in America is subsumed by a critique of racialization. Rajan’s comment on race as an essential foundation of America, rather than colonialism and the genocide of Indigenous peoples and enslavement of Black people, perfectly puts into words the logic upholding Matthew’s project. These analogies and comparisons happen at the expense of understanding Curtis’s “Indians” according to the same logic of Manifest Destiny that white settler colonizers used as the basis for legitimizing their presence here. How do we examine the processes of racialization in North American white settler states without ethically foregrounding the actual grounds and lands upon which these racial hierarchies have been established and upheld? The old and withered face of the “Red Indian” next to Matthew’s face makes his death seem imminent and inevitable. There is nothing that can be done to prevent nature from taking its course, while the younger face of the “Brown Indian” woman (who presumably has the potential to reproduce) can still hold onto some hope. That William Alchesay led a life of resistance to colonial violence is completely disregarded, indeed actively erased, as the focus falls on Matthew. Rajan points to this hope in the diptych very clearly even if it comes in the form of a question. Hope can only ever exist for the living. Since, by the logic of the settler state, Indigenous peoples are not supposed to exist, their deaths are always perfectly timely, especially if this death comes in the mother’s womb. Here, there is no hope attached to Indigenous lives; rather hope is invested in settler and even in non-Black, non-Indigenous peoples’ futurities through continual Indigenous death. In both Canada and the US, the white settler nationalist trope of multiculturalism extends the dystopian space of hope to all non-Indigenous and non-Black people.

Killing Indigenous Women

The second photograph I study here made me gasp when I first saw it. It held my attention the longest of any of Matthew’s photographs because, while my initial reaction warned me that what I was looking at was something irreverent, I wasn’t sure how to read the coordinates for theorizing coloniality through this mimicry. This photographic juxtaposition pairs “Traditional American Indian Mother and Child” with “Contemporary Indian American Mother and Stepchild.” The first photograph in the pair dates from the early twentieth century and portrays an Indigenous woman sitting in a chair with a little Indigenous girl referred to as her daughter sitting to one side,

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both looking straight into the camera. The mother seems to be wearing a shirtwaist dress – a two-piece blouse and skirt ensemble. She is also wearing layers of a bead necklace. The little girl at her side appears in what I assume is a calico dress. Calico refers to a weight of cotton fabric that was cheap and often had printed patterns on it. This cotton material was popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and was imported from India. The juxtaposed photograph shows Matthew posing as the “contemporary” Indian American mother with her real life white stepchild attired in a Banarasi sari, bangles, and anklet sitting to her side, both staring into the camera. Banarasi saris are expensive and known for their finely woven silk and opulent embroidery in the subcontinent. Matthew is dressed in clothes similar to those of the Indigenous mother in the picture, but the pattern and layers are different. It is not that Matthew delves into her own Malayali background to look for clothing for these poses. Edward Curtis and other photographers of empire mixed and matched clothing and accessories from different nations to make their subjects appear exotic. Similarly, Matthew’s attires are also “made up” in order to bring attention to the lack of authenticity in these images, and to how the subjects and their environments were staged.27 Reading this juxtaposition, it becomes clear that the distance from “traditional” to “contemporary” for Matthew can only be traversed through marking white settler colonialism as past and liberal multicultural democracy in which racial, colonial, spatial, and temporal boundaries are made to seem obsolete as present, even if this present has come about through the racial reduction of Indigenous peoples to “Indians.” Matthew can then pose herself as the contemporary, alive, thriving, actual Indian. How else are we to understand a non-Indigenous, non-Black woman of colour and a white child posing as “contemporary,” replacing the so-called “traditional” Indigenous mother and child? We have to ask, have Indigenous peoples in North America died or disappeared so that Matthew and her white stepchild can literally step into their place? This replacement of a colonized mother–daughter by a racialized mother–white child naturalizes colonial violence against Indigenous peoples and reconfirms the logic of Manifest Destiny, which hinges upon the belief that Indigenous peoples of the “New World” were always supposed to die out as primitive people in an earlier stage of civilization than Europeans and were not resilient enough to survive the New World order that white settlers were destined to impose. White settlers were obsessed with the “dying Indian” as the groundwork needed for the process of settling. This figure of the “dying Indian” thus necessarily inflects all settler ventures, including but not limited to law, politics, arts, and education. In her book Firsting and Lasting Jean O’Brien, a White Earth Ojibwe scholar of history, examines the strategies of writing the Indigenous peoples of New England out of existence in various white settler narratives. She argues that imagining “Indians” as extinct took insurmountable conviction and work by white settlers:

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Even though non-Indians had Indian neighbors throughout the region, and even when they acknowledged that these neighbors were of Indian descent, they still denied that they were authentic Indians. A toxic brew of racial thinking – steeped in their understanding of history and culture – led them to deny the Indianness of Indians.28 Propelled by nineteenth-century ideas of racism such as lines of blood purity and the racial superiority of Europeans, white settlers disavowed the Indigenous peoples who lived among them and had intermarried with them as impure, inauthentic, and hence not “Indian” enough to challenge settler narratives of the “dying Indian.” Matthew seems to take up the Indian-playing fantasies that violent white settlers needed for the erasure and disavowal of Indigeneity. It is like Matthew and her white stepchild actually ate up and happily digested the two “Indians” in the original photograph. This eating–replacing of Indigenous mother and child by a racialized woman and her white stepdaughter erases the reality of conquest on the bodies of Indigenous women and the land. As Sarah Deer, a Mvskoke attorney and scholar, reminds us, we must never fail to “acknowledge that the United States was founded, in part, through the use of sexual violence as a tool, that were it not for the widespread rape of Native American women, many of our towns, counties, and states might not exist.”29 What began with Christopher Columbus’s raping of a Carib woman to mark his “discovery” of what was already a well-organized world order of hundreds of Indigenous nations, continues as white men continue to rape and pillage Native women’s bodies and lands.30 These rapes, while carried out by individual men (white or not), need to be understood as a systemic form of colonial violence that increases the power of the white settler state. In this regard, Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson characterizes Canada as a heteropatriarchal white cis-man. She writes, “The state that I seek to name has a character, it has a male character, it is more than likely white, or aspiring to an unmarked center of whiteness, and definitely heteropatriarchal.” The presence of Indigenous women’s bodies can never be tolerated, and in fact remain an “anomaly,” for they remind the white settler state that the project of settler colonialism, hinged upon the genocide of Indigenous peoples and Indigenous world orders, is not complete.31 Hatred for actual Indigenous people hinges on the threat that Indigenous women’s bodies signify. As several Indigenous scholars have shown, Indigenous women carried and continue to carry political sovereignty in their bodies; unlike European women, they had control over their bodies, their land, and their lives, and the men in their communities were bound to listen to them.32 These matriarchal, or at least nonantagonistic-toward-women, political orders posed a challenge to the vile, inherently antiwomen world order that white settlers brought with them to these lands, and therefore it was urgent for settler possession that Indigenous dispossession first happen through targeting women. Simpson writes:

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An Indian woman’s body in settler regimes such as the US, in Canada is loaded with meaning – signifying other political orders, land itself, of the dangerous possibility of reproducing Indian life and most dangerously, other political orders. Other life forms, other sovereignties, other forms of political will.33 As Indigenous women were killed or dispossessed through other technologies of violence such as the Indian Act, which remains active and governs Indigenous peoples’ lives to date in Canada, settler governance increasingly began to take hold. Ines Hernandez-Avila, a Tejana and Nimipu (Nez Perce) feminist scholar of Native American studies, notes that “it is because of a Native American woman’s sex that she is hunted down and slaughtered – in fact, singled out – because she has the potential through childbirth to assure the continuance of the people.”34 In fact, she argues, by being raped by colonizers and forced to give birth to their rapists’ children, Indigenous women have been made to go through an “ethnic cleansing [of] themselves.”35 When Indigenous women live and thrive, it is an act of resurgent and resilient Indigenous political sovereignty, hence the deeply racist, toxic, heteropatriarchal, and misogynist reactions of the white settler (man) state and its ordinary white settler citizens. This is the order into which we South Asians have entered as refugees, migrants, and citizens, and we pledge to take on the work of the state for our comfort, security, life, and futurity. Literally and symbolically disappearing Indigenous women is a project of “settler futurity”36 in which Indigeneity and Indigenous peoples are continually being removed to a different temporal horizon: to a past that once was. The settler and Indigenous person can never occupy the same time period and writing about Indigenous peoples in present or future tenses threatens to poke holes in the process of settling. The Indigenous person, mobilized as the settler state’s “Indian,” left forever to live in a genealogical mode of social belonging, lives in the past perfect social order regardless of the struggle for (and in) life. This subject is understood as permanently attached to the premodern, to the cultural, and even the antimodern, because “Indian” life can never be reconciled within a white-settler-now-multicultural, liberal nation-state. Because “Indians” cannot be afforded any place in the present or future, they stay as a ghostly presence, as a “haunting,” and even when actual Indigenous people continue to live and thrive, the autological settler subject willingly or surprisingly invokes this ghost again and again in its own imagining of present and future.37 But this is about the resilience, the agency, and thriving of Indigenous past, present, and future. As Tiffany Lethabo King astutely points out, “Haunting lies precisely in its refusal to stop. Alien (to settlers) and generative for (ghosts), this refusal to stop is its own form of resolving. For ghosts, the haunting is the resolving, it is not what needs to be resolved.”38 Any struggles for racial justice without reflection on the lives, lands, and sovereignty of Indigenous peoples is ultimately a move that strengthens the white settler state, an

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empire also actively engaged in war and death making in the lands racialized migrants are often escaping from. Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernandez rightly note that “Anything that seeks to recuperate and not interrupt settler colonialism, to reform the settlement and incorporate Indigenous peoples into the multicultural settler colonial nation state is fettered to settler futurity.”39 And this is a settler futurity that is seemingly open to embracing non-Black people of colour, even if only in appearance, so that Matthew too can hope for a future along with the white child sitting next to her. In a classic space-clearing act, the white child seemingly engulfs not only the bodies of the “traditional Indian” mother and child, their hopes and futurity (re/dis/placing the vestigial Indigenous womb by the womb that will conceive the next generation of white or “mixed-race” settlers), signalling that their genocide is complete, but indeed also marks the complete assimilation of Matthew’s body and future. The sari-and-anklet-wearing white girl child is America; she is open to embracing certain aspects of other people’s cultures, casteist Hindu ones in this case, while making sure that whiteness always has a protected futurity. The white child eats up the unruliness of Matthew’s own racialized settling body. This is the façade of the seemingly multicultural but white-to-the-core settler state. Racialized people think that our futures here are secure if we continue to do the white state’s dirty work, but we forget that we are expendable, disposable people in the long run. Matthew’s mimicry lets this reality slip, and what a massive slip it is.

The White Girl-Child, Sari, and Caste

In examining South Asian complicity, I find it impossible to not centre caste. No complicity talk can be ethical in this particular context without also thinking about the structural work of caste. For thousands of years, caste hierarchies have decided who can live and how, and also who must die. The Indian caste system, based on Hindu scriptures, has divided people into political and social groups where humanity is determined by birth. Like race, caste is constructed as innate, fixed, and hereditary. Brahmins (priests), Shatriyas (soldiers), Vaishyas (traders), and Shudras (servants) inform the caste system. Dalits (pejoratively known as the Untouchables) fall outside of the traditional four-tier caste system and as a result live with extreme forms of everyday physical, mental, and emotional violence and can be punished by death for even touching leftover food and water belonging to caste people. The organizing principles of the caste system are based on hierarchical arrangements of duties and hereditary occupations and on strict notions of purity and pollution, and policing the rigid boundaries between the castes has been constant throughout the centuries (predating colonial encounters between the people of South Asia and European colonizers). Caste continues to be an organizing principle of humanity for us South Asians wherever we go both spatially and temporally. According to the prophet, scholar, jurist, writer, architect of the Indian Constitution, and champion of Dalit rights Dr B.R. Ambedkar,

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“If Hindus migrate to other regions on earth, Caste would become a world problem.”40 And he was right because Hindus, in particular, but also Muslims and Christians, have taken their/our casteism wherever they have gone.41 I want to focus on the little white girl’s sari here. In his now-classic book, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, Bernard Cohn, the late American anthropologist of British colonialism in India, notes that the “two most enduring representations” of Indians in iconography of colonial India were that of the “naked fakir” or beggar and “graceful sari-clad women.”42 Cohn discusses how the (Hindu) Indian woman was Orientalized in British literature and paintings. The sari excited Europeans. They considered it sensual despite their quest to liberate the Indian woman from the tyranny of Indian male patriarchy, of which the sari was a symbol. While women’s clothing in colonial and anticolonial India became a site of patriarchal control over women’s bodies by both British and nationalist Indian men and while the sari symbolized tropes of Indian femininity, tradition, and spirituality, it also signified caste on the bodies of women. Indian femininity, tradition, and even spirituality are all sites for policing caste. As Nandi Bhatia notes, “Identified as existing in the ancient period, the sari through the centuries has emerged as the dominant piece of clothing for Hindu women with varying degrees of modification depending upon the caste, religious sect, regional affiliation or social status of the wearer as well as ongoing changes in fashion.”43 Even though we cannot tell the colour of the sari in Matthew’s sepia photograph, it is important to note that colour and caste have an intimate link. Only Brahmin women wore white, while Kshatriya women wore red, and blue and black colours, considered to bring forth an ill omen, were worn by lower caste women only. But more than that, it is the sari blouse that signified caste relations. For instance, in nineteenth-century Travancore, a kingdom covering present day central and south Kerala and some parts of Tamil Nadu in India, men and women from the Nadar caste were prohibited from covering their upper bodies. This restriction came with others such as remaining barefoot, always keeping a distance of some paces from upper-caste people, and a prohibition against wearing gold jewellery. People of the Nadar caste fell somewhere between Shudra and Dalit people.44 The bodies of low-caste people had to be exhibited as a semiotic entity announcing caste affiliation, and clothes were an important site and technology for enacting casteist violence. The Chanar (also known as Shanar) Revolt between 1822 and 1859 was a popular anticaste revolt by Nadar people in which women’s choice to cover their upper bodies was an important part. Sheeju N.V. (2015), professor of South Asian studies in Kerala, notes that most of these women were Christian by then. They, like other lowercaste and Dalit people, converted to Christianity to try to escape the tyranny of casteism in Hinduism. When Nadar women began to appear with their breasts covered in public, caste Hindus were angry and launched a series of attacks on them, including tearing off their clothes.45 Though the colonial government announced that Nadars who had converted to Christianity could cover their bodies, “this order was quickly

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rescinded when the pidakakars, members of the raja’s ruling council, complained that such an order would eliminate the differences among castes and everything would become polluted in the state.”46 The government modified its orders by forbidding Nadar women to wear upper body clothing like the dominant caste Nair woman’s loose scarf but allowing them to wear the kuppayam, the jacket worn by Syrian Christians and Moplahs (Muslim merchants who also supplied troops).47 Though Nadar women were eventually granted the right to cover their upper bodies, the rapes and killings attached to a blouse or covering make it difficult not to take account of casteist violence against Dalit-Bahujan people connected to clothing. Such histories of the sari blouse, of which I have presented only a very brief and incomplete account here, includes casteist violence but also the resistance of Dalit-Bahujan women. To not think about it in this discussion of Matthew’s seemingly anticolonial and even decolonial act of solidarity would be to leave the violence of casteist hierarchies intact. Matthew mobilizes the sari as a covert symbol of resistance; she might have decided to put her stepdaughter in a sari because of Orientalist obsessions with it. This might have been a clever gesture toward critiquing the white colonial gaze. However, such an act of critiquing one form of violence while not attending to other structures of dispossession and death in which one is structurally complicit (and wilfully too, by erasing accountability) leaves marginalized and oppressed people as dead, disposable, and vestigial. Kuffir Nalgundwar, a caste-oppressed theorist from the very popular anticasteist online forum, Round Table India, points out that a sari, while seen as a symbol of revolutionary Indian women’s reclamation of their bodies during the anticolonial resistance to the British in Gandhi’s India, is always about caste. He notes that there is no attention paid to how the women weaving saris, the caste-oppressed women, themselves could not afford saris and had a life expectancy of only fifty years because of the terrible conditions they laboured in.48 Despite the industrial revolution, which could have provided better machinery to Dalit-Bahujan sari-weaving women, caste hierarchies were strictly maintained, keeping alive professions such as manual scavenging and toddy tapping, which are passed down through generations. Nalgundwar states that the Indian weaver’s average income ranks lower than India’s average national income, and average daily earnings are much lower than most minimum wages. Furthermore, the average suicide rate among weavers is much higher than among average Indians. And yet, the sari is often held as an emblem of some pure, authentic Indian culture that is open to everybody. To begin to hold onto caste would compel upper-caste scholars and Western (white or not) scholars to criticize anti-Orientalist critiques, which often leave caste hierarchies intact. There is no decolonial work by South Asians in North America, Britain, South Asia, or anywhere else unless it is also clearly anticasteist. Matthew’s work, therefore, remains colonial because it remains casteist, and as I have discussed elsewhere, it is also anti-Black.49 Matthew identifies as Syrian Christian and so occupies the top of the Christian caste hierarchy.50 As Sonja Thomas notes in her book on the subject,

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Privileged Minorities, Syrian Christians are caste, race, and class privileged and benefit economically and socially from their position.51 Matthew’s sari-clad white stepchild not only maintains the markers of her culture but also of her caste. Therefore, I argue that this picture of the sari-clad white girl, with her potential to give birth someday, signifies that both caste and white settlerhood have a formidable future.52 Even while Matthew’s racialized body might be devoured by the whiteness of the child in her lap, her caste position makes her access to whiteness formidable. After all, who are these South Asian model minority people? They are the upper-caste people who ascribe their skills, talents, and life stories to their birth and caste. It’s actually the same colonial master logic of Manifest Destiny, which white people invented to claim that they were ordained by God to remake and own the world. As Anu Ramdas, a Dalit theorist, discusses, for the upper caste Indian to feel a sense of belonging, to feel a sense of superiority, she must institute caste as a global order.53 And this has been an increasingly successful project by caste South Asians in diasporas around the world.

Ethical Comparisons

The issue with Matthew’s project is not simply one of comparison. We need to attend to the multiplicities, incoherencies, inconsistencies, constellations, overlaps, and instabilities underlining the workings of empire(s). European and American colonies were not discrete and enclosed units. There were intimate connections, continuities, and overlaps bringing the colonizers, the colonized, and colonizing spaces of the “Old World” into constant encounters with those of the “New World.” Making comparisons between the two “Indians,” as Matthew sets out to do, therefore, is a conceivable project. I want to briefly discuss what I consider to be a more commendable example of this type of artistic production for forging solidarity with Indigenous peoples, one that is multilayered, complex, and does not stage another uprooting or further displacement. Indo-Canadian filmmaker, Ali Kazimi’s 1997 documentary Shooting Indians follows the work of Haudenosaunee photographer Jeffrey Thomas, who, like Matthew, examines Edward Curtis’s work and recreates his iconic images but in a way that disrupts the colonial gaze and reclaims Indigenous peoples as living, thriving people and not the “Indians” that settlers and non-Black racialized people of colour are educated to believe in.54 As a young boy in grade school, when he first saw a painting of a nineteenth-century Plains Indian man in a history book, Thomas recalls that he immediately thought about the man’s “facial resemblance to men in my family.”55 There was a certain familiarity there for him as an Indigenous man. For Thomas, the stereotypical images of Indigenous peoples, along with more careful and complicated but nevertheless colonial ones like Curtis’s, were about the people he knew and who looked like the people in his family and community. Hearing Thomas speak of these images in Kazimi’s film made me pause and think about how I was presenting Matthew’s images to my conference audiences, something which I discuss above.

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Like Matthew, Kazimi challenges the notion of objectivity or truth in the ethnographic making of “Indians.” And, like Matthew’s photographic series, Kazimi’s documentary, to an extent, is also grounded in the “Indian from India” logic. But unlike Matthew, he very clearly articulates a difference between himself as Indian and the “Indians” of white settlers. His work is auto-ethnographic in that he talks about his complicity, playing with (bad) Indian and (good, heroic) cowboy toys as a child growing up in early-1960s India, thus disrupting any idea of his innocence as a racialized newcomer to Canada. Like many of us people of colour who immigrated to North America or to other white settler colonies, Kazimi came with ideas about the “Indian” here. He is transparent about his colonial assumptions. In one scene, he and Thomas go to Six Nations (acknowledged by the settler state) territory where Kazimi begins to look for totem poles and is quickly embarrassed when Thomas patiently explains that those belong to West Coast Indigenous nations. In one voiceover narration, Kazimi states, “These [other] Indians do exist, but they have no India to return to!” This, to me, shows an awareness and an understanding on Kazimi’s part that he and other “Indians” are not of the same kind, that possessing an insatiable quest for more land is an integral modality for ongoing white settler violence against Indigenous peoples in Canada, and that it is only through grounding his journey in Thomas’s work that he can talk about the two very different “Indians.” In one powerful scene in the film, Kazimi and Thomas cross the colonial border into the US in order to visit some of Thomas’s people on the other side in Buffalo where Thomas was born. The immigration officer asks each about their nationality while looking at their documents of identification. Kazimi narrates the exchange: “Nationality?” asks the American border guard. “Six Nations,” says Jeff showing him his identity card. I hand him my passport and say, “Indian.”56 In my reading of this scene, Kazimi has no way of getting across the border except to identify himself with the two settler nation-states of Canada and the US and thus as an occupier of Thomas’s people and land, and with India, which is under Hindu nationalist and Brahmin occupation. This is a scene where his acknowledgment of complicity is grounded in the structural. No matter how much he befriends Thomas or becomes invested in the project of decolonization, he is forced to acknowledge and identify with colonial boundary making practices. In another beautiful and powerful scene in the film we see Kazimi and Thomas discussing the set of violence(s) that embed their presence in white Canada. They do so without Kazimi trying to take on the skin of Thomas, without erasing his presence, without any façade of “joining hands” with him. There is a limit to Kazimi’s protest of, and refusal to become complicit with, the colonial project. The limits of the colonial borders are territorial but also present in other ways through ongoing colonial and racial violences. There are contradictions and power differentials in this meeting between, or rather encounter

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of, the two “Indians.” Both Kazimi and Thomas know and recognize the limits of refusals to the colonial (and racial) state. The issue with comparative colonialism projects like Matthew’s is that it eschews the complexities that brought Indians from India into encounter with Indigenous peoples of the Americas and other people such as the enslaved Africans brought in chains to the “New World.” The term encounter, rather than a meeting or joining of hands, reflects the asymmetrical relations of power that brought these different people into contact with each other, something which Kazimi’s film does a much better job of depicting. Hierarchies of power have been cemented by the ways the colonized (Indigenous peoples) were “differently racialized,” and how the “racialized distribution of freedom and humanity” is an integral aspect of these processes of racialization.57 In her ground breaking examination of colonial intimacies among Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas, and how these connections were crucial to ideologies of modern liberalism including the notions of freedoms, rights, and humanity, Lowe stresses the need to focus on “relation across differences rather than equivalence, on the convergence of asymmetries rather than the imperatives of identity” in our understanding of the connections that were formed all across the world with the advent of “New World” colonialism.58 This is a difficult project, especially when white settler colonialism is reduced to binaries of white settler/native and people of colour remain as always-immigrants, indicating a late arrival or newness in their relationship to the lands and Indigenous peoples of North America regardless of our long presence and histories of both complicity and resistance here. One difficulty with holding onto connections across the four continents is certainly how colonial archives are arranged in a way to discourage making links between the different people(s), histories, and systems of domination that inform/ed the rise of white supremacy globally. But these connections are also difficult to trace because “the selection of a single historical actor may be precisely a modality of ‘forgetting’ these crucial connections.”59 Uncovering connections and relations among differently racialized and colonized peoples and their colonizers is a difficult project, especially in a single photographic series. I believe it is productive to think through Matthew’s photographs for what is being actively forgotten, buried, suppressed, and for what is actively at work in terms of the complicity of South Asians in white supremacy and its logics of settler colonialism, anti-Blackness, and casteism. Whereas caste is not usually theorized as one of the logics of white supremacy, I would argue that to understand the settling of South Asians in North America, caste must be critically centred and read alongside other logics such as gender and class that have allowed South Asians to come to this land and make it our home.

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Conclusion

I end with words from Eve Tuck and C. Ree’s article that presents a glossary of haunting. They write, “I don’t trust you very much. You are not always aware of how you can be dangerous to me, and this makes me dangerous to you. I am using my arm to determine the length of the gaze.”60 “Staying away” at an arm’s length, understanding how I am actively and structurally causing harm, is more important than the metaphorical joining of hands that Matthew does. Without a doubt, it is more important than playing “Indian” (of any kind).

n ote s 1 Vimalassery, Hu Pegues, and Goldstein, “Introduction: On Colonial Unknowing.” 2 I understand that South Asian is not a homogeneous category. The term is mired in power relations, organized along the axes of gender, caste, class, religion, sexuality, histories of indentureship, and the country one hails from. While taking caution from the works of Islam, “In the Belly of the Multicultural Beast I am Named South Asian”; Bhattacharjee, “The Public/ Private Mirage,” 308–229; Gopinath, Impossible Desires; Gupta, Unruly Immigrants; and others, I see South Asia as a space from which some claims about common experiences of racial violence (in all its manifestations) can be made and strategized against. I also want to add that we are the fastest-growing major racial group in North America, with more than 4.3 million South Asians in the US and more than 1.9 million in Canada at present. 3 Thenmozhi Soundarajan, “South Asians for Black Lives: A Call for Action, Accountability, and Introspection,” Wear Your Voice, 3 June 2020, https://wearyourvoicemag.com/south-asiansfor-black-lives-a-call-for-action/. 4 The way anti-Blackness allows Matthew to stage her critiques is beyond the scope of this chapter. If the reader is interested in such an analysis, and also in my reading of other photographs, please see Patel, “Complicating the ‘Tale of Two Indians.’” I also bring together my analysis of Islamophobia, anti-Blackness, white settler colonialism, and casteism in reading an image of the “Indian Queen” in a later piece. Please see Patel, “The ‘Indian Queen’ of the Four Continents.” 5 Please see Human Rights Council, “Joint Stakeholders’ Submission on the Situation of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in India,” Report, April–May 2017, https://www.uprinfo.org/ sites/default/files/document/india/session_27_-_may_2017/js46_upr27_ind_e_main.pdf. 6 I use the term Dalit-Bahujan with a hyphen following Kamala Visweswaran’s practice. She notes that the hyphen signifies a “tentative alliance of thought and political mobilization.” The hyphen keeps our attention drawn to the caste hierarchies so that Dalits and Bahujans (other backward castes) are not used interchangeably and also to allow for the fact that in some parts of India, Dalits have expressed that Bahujans, while themselves being the targets of casteist violence, have also participated in anti-Dalit violence. See Viswesvaran, Un/common Cultures, 257. 7 Byrd, Transit of Empire. 8 Please see United States v. Akshay Kumar Mozumdar, 296F.173 (S.D. Cal.1923) and United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind 261 U.S. 204 (1923). For a detailed analysis of relational racialization of

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15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31

Shaista Patel

South Asians in early twentieth century US and Canada, see Nayan Shah, Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality, and the Law in the North American West (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011). Shah, however, does not consider caste in his analysis. Carol Payne and Jeffrey Thomas, “Aboriginal Interventions into The Photographic Archives: A Dialogue between Carol Payne and Jeffrey Thomas,” Visual Resources 18 (2011): 123. Byrd, Transit of Empire, xvii. King, “Off Littorality (Shoal 1.0),” 47–8. Matthew, “An Indian from India.” Said, Orientalism; Said, Culture and Imperialism; Alloula, The Colonial Harem; and Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge. For some notable examinations of the manifestation of colonial fantasies/desires underlining production of neo/colonial imagery see, Coombes, “Museums and the Formation of National and Cultural Identities,” 57–68; Crosby, “Construction of the Imaginary Indian,” 488; Dewan, We’ll Take Your Artifacts but Not Your People; Dewan, “The Body at Work,” 118–33; Francis, Creative Subversions; Pinney, “Classification and Fantasy,” 259–88. See Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge, for discussion of the production of colonial knowledge in India. Watson and Kaye, The People of India, preface. See Stanners, “The People of India,” 72–98. “Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, an Indian from India,” Luminous-Lint, http://www.luminouslint.com/app/vexhibit/_PHOTOGRAPHER_Annu_Palakunnathu__Matthew_01/2/0/0/. “apm: Annu Palakunnathu Matthew,” https://www.annumatthew.com/gallery/an-indianfrom-india/. Ibid. Arizona Memory Project, “Alchise – Apache, Portfolio 1, Plate 5,” image from the Edward Curtis Collection at the Arizona Capital Museum, https://azmemory.azlibrary.gov/digital/collection/ acmcurtis/id/103/. Francis, “Reading the Autoethnographic Perspectives,” 12. Jeffrey Thomas, “My North American Indian Volume 21,” jeff-thomas.ca, https://jeff-thomas. ca/2014/04/my-north-american-indian-v21/. To examine other photographs, see https://www.annumatthew.com/gallery/an-indianfrom-india/. Gita Rajan, “Painted Selves,” 259. Emphasis added. See Patel, “Complicating the Tale of “Two Indians;” and Patel, “The ‘Indian’ of Four Continents.” Priya Chhaya, “Going Beyond: Annu Palakannathu Matthew, Artist,” Now: Live from the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, 20 March 2014, http://smithsonianapa.org/now/goingbeyond-annu-palakunnathu-matthew-artist/. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting, xv. Deer, “Sovereignty of the Soul,” 459. Sarah Deer reports that while most rapes are intraracial, in 70 per cent of cases involving Indigenous women the rapist is white. Ibid., 457. Simpson, “The State Is a Man.”

Indian Americans Engulfing “American Indian”

32 For example, see ibid.; Audra Simpson, “Captivating Eunice,” 105–29; Simpson, As We Have Always Done; Deer, “Sovereignty of the Soul”; Green, Making Space for Indigenous Feminism; Baldy, We Are Dancing for You; Suzack, Huhndorf, Perreault, and Barman, Indigenous Women and Feminism. 33 Simpson, “The State Is a Man.” 34 Hernandez-Avila, “In Praise of Insubordination,” 386. 35 Ibid., 333. 36 Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández, “Curriculum, Replacement, and Settler Futurity.” 37 Tuck and Ree, “A Glossary of Haunting.” 38 King, The Black Shoals, x. 39 Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández, “Curriculum, Replacement, and Settler Futurity,” 80. 40 Ambedkar, “Castes in India.” 41 If the reader is interested in a full report on how casteism is brought to the United States and how it continues to thrive, I strongly recommend Equality Labs’ “Caste in the United States: A Survey of Caste Among South Asian Americans” (2018), https://www.equalitylabs.org/1132018caste-press-release. 42 Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, 136. 43 Bhatia, “Fashioning Women in Colonial India,” 331. 44 Sheeju, “The Shanar Revolts,” 299. 45 Ibid., 304; also Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, 140. 46 Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, 140. Emphasis added. 47 Nair ranked lower than Brahmins, and Nair women too had to expose their chests in the company of Brahmins, royalty, or in temples. 48 Kuffir Nalgundwar, “Caste and the Sari,” Round Table India, 29 December 2013, https://round tableindia.co.in/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=7138:caste-in-a-sari&catid =119:feature&Itemid=132. 49 See Patel, “Complicating the Tale of ‘Two Indians,’” and Patel, “The ‘Indian’ of Four Continents.” 50 Shobhana, “Caste in the Name of Christ.” 51 Thomas, Privileged Minorities. 52 Chandra, “Whiteness on the Margins of Native Patriarchy,” 127–53. 53 Ramdas, “The Brahmin Problem.” 54 Kazimi, Shooting Indians. 55 Thomas, “About the Conversation.” 56 Kazimi, Shooting Indians. 57 Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents, 36. 58 Ibid., 11. 59 Ibid., 38. 60 Tuck and Ree, “A Glossary of Haunting,” 640.

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Figures

0.1 The author’s mother’s album of photographs from the World’s Tall Ships Festival, Halifax, 2000 2 0.2 James Andersen, Sliding on a Seal Skin, 1954. Slide transparency. The Nunatsiavut Government, Andersen Collection, The Rooms 17 1.1 Michael J. Martin, map of Mi’kma’ki. Native Council of Nova Scotia’s Micmac Language Program, po Box 1320, Truro, ns, b2n 5n2; phone (902) 895-1523; email [email protected] 44 1.2 Horatio Walker, Oxen Drinking, 1899. Oil on canvas. Collection of the National Gallery of Canada 50 1.3 Clarence Gagnon, Oxen Ploughing, 1902. Ink on paper. Collection of the National Gallery of Canada 51 1.4 Painted single ox yoke, Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia, ca 1920s. Photograph by Elisa Snair. Collection of Scott Higgins, Upper LaHave, Nova Scotia 51 1.5 Alex Colville, French Cross, 1988. Acrylic on hardboard. Copyright A.C. Fine Art Inc. 53 2.1 Norval Morrisseau with painting, Mother Earth, 1975. Acrylic on canvas, 203.2 cm x 104 cm, Globe and Mail photograph reprinted with permission courtesy of cp Images 68 2.2 Kent Monkman, Iron Horse, 2015. Acrylic on canvas, 213.4 cm x 320 cm. Image courtesy of the artist 72 2.3 Norval Morrisseau painting at Tom Thomson shack, 1979. Globe and Mail photograph reprinted with permission courtesy of cp Images 79 2.4 Photograph of Norval Morrisseau, Androgyny, 1983. Acrylic on plywood, 366cm x 610 cm. Taken during installation in the ballroom at Rideau Hall, 18 September 2008. Adrian Wyld reprinted with permission courtesy of cp Images 81 2.5 Dylan Miner, No Pipelines on Indigenous Land, 2016. Open access screen print 84 3.1–3.4 Installation views, Wood Land School: Kahatenhstánion tsi na’tetiatere ne Iotohrkó:wa tánon Iotohrha / Drawing Lines from January to December, Second Gesture, 2017. Courtesy of Wood Land School/sbc Gallery of Contemporary Art, Montreal. Photo: Paul Litherland 96–7

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4.1 Ray Ward as an rcmp constable in Igluligaarjuk (Chesterfield Inlet), 1932, from her silent life, 2012 114 4.2 Ray Ward as an rcmp constable, Winnipeg, 1931 116 4.3 Ukkusiksalik rcmp patrol house, prefabricated building, 1910. Image courtesy of the Glenbow Museum 117 4.4 though she never spoke, this is where her voice would have been, 2008 120 4.5 Marguerite’s hands, her silent life, 2012 121 4.6 where she stood in the first place, 2010 123 4.7 Kumaa’naaq in front of the rcmp servants’ residences in Qamani’tuaq, date unknown/ earliest known photo 124 4.8 her silent life, 2012. Marguerite’s birth certificate, dated 8 May 1932 126 4.9 where she stood in the first place, 2010. The lake from the settlement in Qamani’tuaq 128 4.10 where no one knew her name, 2005 129 4.11 Preparing caribou meat. her silent life, 2012 134 5.1 Iris Häussler’s He Named Her Amber, 2007. Copyright Iris Häussler/socan (2021) 140 5.2 Camille Turner and Outerregion, BlackGrange, 2018 143 5.3 Robert Houle, Garrison Creek Project, 1996 (detail) 144 5.4 Camille Turner, documentation of Peggy Pompadour from Jane’s Walk, 2011 149 5.5 Camille Turner as “Miss Canadiana,” Hidden Black Histories of the Grange (part of Jane’s Walk), 2011 151 5.6 Robert Houle, Garrison Creek Project, 1996. Detail, roundel set into the sidewalk 155 6.1 J. Joseph, “run away From the Subscriber in the Night of the 13th Instant.” Quebec Gazette, 28 July 1791, vol. 1358, p. 4; Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec 164 6.2 Anonymous, “To be sold, By public auction.” Nova Scotia Gazette and Weekly Chronicle, Tuesday, 23 March 1773, vol. 3, no. 134, p. 4; nsa Newspaper Collection, reel 8155. Nova Scotia Archives 166 6.3 John Rock, “Ran away from her Master John Rock.” Nova Scotia Gazette and Weekly Chronicle, Tuesday, 1 September 1772, vol. 3, no. 105, p. 3; (repeated 8, 22 September 1772); pans mfm #8155, reel 8155, Nova Scotia Archives (1772–74) 169 6.4 John Rock, estate inventory, 25 September 1776, pans mfm #(19)420, RG48 Reel 420, #61, Nova Scotia Archives 170 6.5 John Turner, “fourteen dollars Reward. runaway, on Sunday Night last.” Quebec Gazette, 11 March 1784, vol. 968, p. 3; Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec 172 7.1 Native North America Vol. 1: Aboriginal Folk, Rock, and Country 1966–1985, album cover art, 2014 180 7.2 Khu.éex’, They Forgot They Survived, album cover art, 2017. Cover design by Maurice Caldwell and Brian Williamson 189 7.3 Jeremy Dutcher, Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa, album cover art, 2018 190 8.1 Installation view, The Ledger and Naming Names 196 8.2 Naming Names, preparing to install Excavation: Memory Work 205 8.3 Excavation: Memory Work with view of Freedom Runners, background, with On Saturday Next and Slave Collars in foreground 206

Figures

8.4 Excavation: Memory Work, Slave Collars, detail 207 8.5 Excavation: Memory Work, Nova Scotia–New Brunswick Family Quilts, Nova Scotia 209 8.6 Excavation: Memory Work, Nova Scotia–New Brunswick Family Quilts, New Brunswick 209 9.1 Dayna Danger, Sky, from the series Big’Uns, 2012–ongoing. Image courtesy of the artist 225 9.2 Dayna Danger, Jaz, from the series Big’Uns, 2012–ongoing. Image courtesy of the artist 226 9.3 Dayna Danger, Adrienne, cover of Canadian Art, summer 2017. Image courtesy of the artist 228 9.4 Dayna Danger, Adrienne, from the series Big’Uns, 2017. Image courtesy of the artist 229 9.5 Dayna Danger, Adrienne, Jas, Sasha, Kandace, photos featuring masks. Digital inkjet prints, 226 cm x 152.4 cm, as installed at the Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal, 2017. Image courtesy of the artist 230–1 9.6 Dayna Danger, Adrienne’s Mask (left), from the series masks. Black leather, black nylon thread, luster and matte black beads, 2017. Installation from the Ottawa Art Gallery, 2019. Image courtesy of the artist 232 9.7 Dayna Danger and Nico Williams, Deer Hide Floggers. Deer hide, beaded handles, and copper jingle cones. 2019. Image courtesy of the artists 233 10.1 2Fik, Arabesque, 2006. Digital collage and photograph. Image courtesy of the artist 245 10.2 2Fik, family portraits. Digital collage and photograph. Image courtesy of the artist 248 10.3 Abdel. Image courtesy of the artist 249 10.4 Soufian. Image courtesy of the artist 249 10.5 Ludmilla-Mary. Image courtesy of the artist 250 10.6 Kathryn. Image courtesy of the artist 250 10.7 Marco. Image courtesy of the artist 250 10.8 2Fik, Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, 2010 (based on Édouard Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, 1863). Image courtesy of the artist 252 10.9 2Fik, La leçon de folie de Ludmilla-Mary, 2012 (based on Rembrandt van Rijn, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, 1632). Image courtesy of the artist 253 10.10 2Fik, The Marriage of Abdel and Fatima, 2014 (based on Daniel Maclise, The Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife, 1854). Image courtesy of the artist 254 10.11 2Fik, The Death of Dishonest Abdel, 2017 (based on Benjamin West, The Death of General Wolfe, 1770). Image courtesy of the artist 255 10.12 Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, La Grande Odalisque. Oil on canvas, 1814. Collection of the Louvre Museum 256 10.13 2Fik, La Grande Intendante, 2012 (based on Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, La Grande Odalisque, 1814). Image courtesy of the artist 257 10.14 Gentile Bellini, The Sultan Mehmet II. Oil on canvas, 1480. Collection of the National Gallery, uk 259 10.15 2Fik, Le Sultan Abdel, 2012. Digital photograph. Image courtesy of the artist 259

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10.16 2Fik. Image courtesy of the artist 262 10.17 2Fik, Huitte Facette, 2009. Digital collage and photograph. Image courtesy of the artist 263

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Contributors

mark a. cheetham is the author of books, volumes, and articles on topics from Immanuel Kant and art history to abstract art to postmodernism in Canada. He is a professor of art history at the University of Toronto. dayna danger (they/them) is a Two-Spirit, Indigiqueer, Métis-Saulteaux-Polish visual artist raised in Miiskwaagamiwiziibiing|Winnpeg, Treaty 1 territory. Their practice questions the line between empowerment and objectification by claiming space with their larger-thanlife-scale work. leah decter is a white settler artist and scholar, Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in creative technologies at nscad University, and founding co-director of the Centre for Inter-media Arts and Decolonial Expression (cimade). dorian j. fraser is a doctoral candidate at Concordia University in Tiohtiá:ke| Montreal, and an instructor at MacEwan University on Amiskwacîwâskahikan|Edmonton. They curate and write along the margins of art historical inquiry, living and teaching between Tiohtiá:ke and Treaty 6 territories. dr andrew gayed is assistant professor of art history and visual culture at ocad University. An Egyptian Canadian art historian, Dr Gayed has an academic background in diasporic art, queer visual culture, and Middle Eastern art histories. sylvia d. hamilton is a Nova Scotian filmmaker, writer, and artist who is known for her award-winning documentary films about the history, lives, and experiences of African Canadians. She is an Inglis professor at the University of King’s College in Halifax and the 2019 recipient of the Governor General’s History Award for Popular Media.

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Contributors

adrienne huard is a Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer Anishinaabe curator, writer, scholar, and performer. They are a citizen of Couchiching First Nation, Ontario, and born and raised in Winnipeg, mb. Currently, they are enrolled in the PhD-level program in Indigenous studies at University of Manitoba. lindsay mcintyre is a filmmaker, artist, and associate professor in Film + Screen Arts at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. She is of Inuk and settler Scottish descent and practises on unceded Coast Salish territories. erin morton is a white settler professor of visual culture in the Department of History at the University of New Brunswick in Ekwpahak|Fredericton. She writes on visual and material culture, settler colonialism, and critical assessments of whiteness. charmaine a. nelson is a professor of art history and a Tier I Canada Research Chair in transatlantic Black diasporic art and community engagement at nscad University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She is also the director of the Institute for the Study of Canadian Slavery, which she founded in 2020. shaista aziz patel identifies as a Pakistani Muslim feminist scholar. She works as assistant professor of critical Muslim studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at University of California, San Diego. carmen robertson is a Scots-Lakota art historian and holds the Canada Research Chair in North American Indigenous art history and material culture at Carleton University in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. carla taunton is an art historian and associate professor in the Division of Art History and Contemporary Culture at nscad University. She is a founding member of the glam Collective and an independent curator. henry adam svec is the author of American Folk Music as Tactical Media and Life Is Like Canadian Football and Other Authentic Folk Songs. He teaches at the University of Waterloo. travis wysote is a Listuguj Mi’gmaw researcher, artist, podcaster, and social critic with interests in history and political science. He is currently a doctoral student at Concordia University.

Index

Abbott, Anderson Ruffin, 149 abolition of slavery, 63n23, 158n33, 165, 200, 207, 270. See also enslaved; enslavement; slavery Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTec), 215 Acadia, 46–8, 52–61, 63n23, 63n31 accomplices, 29–30, 87, 104, 108. See also coconspiracy activism, 6, 92–3, 215–16, 238, 273; Black, 149; Indigenous, 67, 73, 76, 90, 94, 101, 105; on sexuality, 246 Adivasis, 271 aesthetics, 25, 216, 223; colonial, 34, 255; decolonial, 88, 242; Indigenous, 73–4, 82–3; in music, 182, 187; and truth, 31, 142, 144–5 Africa, 4, 7, 158n32, 161–2, 172–3, 204, 271; return to, 48, 199, 208, 212n21. See also Africans; North Africa African Americans, 161–2, 165, 183, 198, 267n37 African Canadian art histories, 21–2, 24. See also Black art; Black diaspora; Black people Africans: archives of, 197; and the colonial order, 11, 21, 46, 58, 160; enslaved, 163, 165–8, 172, 174, 176n24, 202, 204; as fugitives, 61n9. See also Black diaspora; Black people; freedom runners/seekers African United Baptist Association (auba), 197–8 AfroFuturism, 142, 149, 151, 158n32, 188, 200. See also Afronautic Research Lab; Black people; Turner, Camille Afronautic Research Lab, 158n32 agriculture, 46–9, 52, 56–8, 64n39. See also colonization; Indigenous land; oxen and plough; settler colonialism

Ahmed, Sara, 3, 7–9, 92; on colonial violence, 57; the “double turn,” 99, 101, 108 Alchesay, William (Alchise), 277–9 Allakariallak, 118 Ambedkar, B.R., 283 American Indian Movement (aim), 69 Americas: colonial migrations to, 62n21, 156n4; diseases in, 77, 172–3; settler colonialism in, 12–13, 21, 25, 56, 152; slavery in, 6–7, 11, 163, 165, 174; treaties in, 102. See also North America; “Turtle Island” Andersen, James, 17–18 And I Alone Escaped to Tell You (Hamilton), 202 Androgyny (Morrisseau), 73, 76, 80–3 animals. See other-than-human animals Anishinaabeg, 67, 73–7, 79–80, 102. See also mino bimaadiziwin; Morrisseau, Norval Anishinaabemowin, 74, 239n2 Anthology of American Folk Music (Smith), 182, 184 Anthropocene, 66, 83–4 anthropology. See salvage anthropology anti-Blackness, x, xi, 11, 62n21, 150, 207; complicity in, 270, 272, 274, 285, 288. See also racism anti-racism, ix–xii, 6–7, 13; in art history, 18, 20; methodologies of, 24, 26; and “refusal,” 23; scholarship in, 12, 274 Aoteroa|New Zealand, 12 Apache, 277 Apollos, The (Hamilton), 199 Arabesque (2Fik), 244–6, 266n24 Arabs, 24, 241, 251, 253, 260, 265n13; diaspora of, 34, 242–3, 246, 249. See also Islamicate; Middle East; Muslims Archive of American Folk Song, 183

330

Index

archives, ix–xi, 9, 14; Black presence in, 197–9, 204, 211n3; colonial, 15, 166–7, 174, 176n23, 288; decentring of, 32–3; decolonizing of, 30–1, 273– 4; interrogation of, 211; personal, 201, 210. See also Nova Scotia Archives; “unlikely archive” Arctic, 116, 118, 128, 130, 183 “arrivants,” 12–13, 24–5, 62n21, 156n4; Asian, 55– 6, 58, 62n22; Black, 142–3. See also enslaved; immigrants; migrants; refugees Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, 196 Art Gallery of Ontario, 72, 91, 106–7, 141–2, 147– 9, 152. See also Grange, The; He Named Her Amber (Häussler) Asia, 253, 271. See also South Asians Asian Canadians, 25, 46, 58. See also “arrivants”; indentured servitude; South Asians Asinnajaq, 222, 238 Atlantic Canada, 183, 204 Atlas Group, 144 Australia, 12 Baker Lake. See Qamani’tuaq bakla, 244–5 Baldwin, James, 203, 208, 210, 212n16 Barbeau, Marius, 183, 187 Barbizon school, 49 bdsm, 216–18, 221, 232–4, 238 Beading Now (Danger), 232, 234 Bellini, Gentile, 258–60, 268n52 Biard, Pierre, 47 Bierstadt, Albert, 71 Big’Uns (Danger), 224–9 Bingwi Neyaashi Anishinaabek First Nation, 73 Black art, ix, xii, 19, 24, 91, 142. See also African Canadian art histories; AfroFuturism; BlackGrange (Turner); Turner, Camille Black Canadian histories, xi, 21, 31, 149–51. See also And I Alone Escaped to Tell You (Hamilton); BlackGrange (Turner); Black people; enslavement; Excavation: Memory Work (Hamilton) Black diaspora, 4, 6, 36, 61n9; in Nova Scotia, 31–2, 195, 197–8 “black dolls,” 201 BlackGrange (Turner), 31, 142–3, 145, 149, 151–3, 155–6, 158n32. See also Afro Futurism; Black Canadian histories Black Lives Matter, 30, 270 Black Loyalists, 48, 197, 199, 204, 208, 212n21. See

also Black Refugee Survivors of the War of 1812 Blackness, 12–13, 21, 270, 274 Black people, 4, 12; archives of, 197; in art history, 19; in colonized lands, 62n21, 92–3, 271; complicity against, 35; and decolonization, 100; and disease, 172; dispossession of, 152; enslavement of, 11, 58, 63n36, 150, 161, 177n48, 279; erasure of, 26, 142, 146, 167; futurity of, 151; policing of, 29, 163, 207; and racism, 22, 267n37; radical imagination of, 48; research on, 274; resistance of, 21, 55; sexualizing of, 164, 175n14–15; violence against, 88. See also Africa; Africans; AfroFuturism; archives; Black art; Black Canadian histories; Black Loyalists; enslaved; enslavement; freedom runners/seekers; slavery Black Power Movement, 267n37 Black Refugee Survivors of the War of 1812, 200, 202, 204, 211n10 Bloodline (McIntyre), 119, 121. See also her silent life (McIntyre); though she never spoke, this is where her voice would have been (McIntyre); where no one knew her name (McIntyre); where she stood in the first place (McIntyre) blood memory, 118–19. See also intergenerational knowledge; intergenerational trauma; memory Boas, Franz, 117 “Book of Negroes” (Carleton), 197 Boulton, D’Arcy, Jr, 141, 148, 153–4. See also Grange, The Boulton, D’Arcy, Sr, 152–3 Boyd, William, 144 British Columbia, 70 British Empire, 14–15, 46, 48–9; in India, 272, 275–6, 279, 284; possessiveness of, 65, 153; racism of, 55; slavery in, 62n22, 161, 163, 200. See also colonialism; imperialism; settler colonialism British Loyalists, 15. See also Black Loyalists Brookbank, C.R., 198 Bureau of American Ethnology, 182–3 Burnt Church. See Esgenoôpetitj|Burnt Church Buxton Historical Site and Museum, 203, 208, 212n15 Byrd, Jodi, 12–13, 20, 24, 62n21, 92, 156n4 Canada, ix, xii, xiin1; authority of, 25–6, 130;

Index

colonial violence of, 4, 30, 185, 279, 281–2; diasporas in, 247, 251, 274–5; history of, 21–2, 72, 158n32, 221, 278; immigration to, 8, 246, 254–5, 262, 266n24, 268n41, 287, 289n2; and Indigenous treaties, 102–3; land rights in, 67, 69, 94–5; and modernity, 243; relationship with Indigenous peoples, 219–20, 223; as a settler state, 12–13, 15, 18, 29, 34–5, 49, 65–6, 79; slavery in, 21, 161–3, 167, 174, 200, 202, 204; systemic whiteness of, 88–9, 93, 137n38; visual depiction of, 70. See also Asian Canadians; Black Canadian histories; Canadian Empire; Indian Act; nation-state; settler colonialism; settler states Canada Council, 110n32 Canadian art history, 10–11, 14, 16, 141; as colonial agent, 94, 221; decentring of, 24–6, 29, 71, 216; hierarchies in, 23; and land, 49, 70; methodologies of, ix, 18–20; and race, 21–2. See also African Canadian art histories; Indigenous art histories; Inuit art; landscape art; “settler artists”; settler Canadian art; whiteness Canadian Art magazine, 20, 39n33, 218–19, 227 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 181, 186, 224 Canadian Empire, 46, 49 Canadian Handicrafts Guild, 117 Cape Breton, 161 capitalism, x, 12–13, 19, 67, 162, 256. See also property carcerality. See prisons Caribbean, 160–1, 204 Carr, Emily, 19, 70 Cartier, Jacques, 58, 64n38 caste, 13–14, 33–5, 276, 283–6, 289n6, 291n47; in North America, 288; privilege, 270–2; writing about, 41n88, 274. See also Dalit-Bahujans Catlin, George, 71 Chacaby, Ma Nee, 217, 222, 234 Cheechoo, Lloyd, 187 Chesterfield Inlet. See Igluligaarjuk Child, James, 182–3 Christianity, 46–7, 77, 284–6 citizenship, 257, 260–1, 271 Clarkson, John, 199, 212n21 class, 142, 152, 163, 264n10, 286, 288. See also caste Coastal Gaslink Pipeline, 66–7, 76, 83 co-conspiracy, 30. See also accomplices Cold Fact (Rodriguez), 184

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 144–5, 147–8 colonialism, x–xi, 6–7, 25, 83, 288; in art history, 18, 70, 142, 145; beneficiaries of, 29, 87, 92–3; cacophony of, 12–13; celebration of, 4–5; complicity with, 35, 37, 100, 271, 273; experience of, 67, 77–8; gaze of, 224, 277–9, 285; in India, 271; lies of, 113, 121, 146; and sexuality, 242–3, 246–7, 253, 259; and technology, 275–6; unlearning of, 84, 130; violence of, 62n21, 222, 228, 240n26; visibility of, 8–9, 38n7. See also coloniality; “colonial unknowing”; colonization; homocolonialism; modernity; North America; settler colonialism; settler states; white settlers coloniality, xi, 11, 14, 18, 255, 261; deconstructing, 28, 98, 100, 279; global, 23, 25, 35; of land, 57. See also colonialism; colonization; orientalism; settler colonialism “colonial unknowing,” 5, 9, 26, 28, 70, 119; in critical theory, 38n7, 270–1; systemic, 131, 146 colonization, 16, 28, 30, 46, 55, 130; and art, 70; legalities of, 56–7, 74; of the north, 116, 118; of North America, 152; settler, 93; through agriculture, 48, 58. See also colonialism; settler colonialism; settler states; white settlers Colville, Alex, 53–6. See also French Cross (Colville) Coming In from Reality (Rodriguez), 184 conciliation. See (re)conciliation Concordia University, 41n98, 215, 218–19 contemporary art, 31–3, 75, 106, 145, 147, 243. See also performance art; photography coureurs des bois, 52, 62n14 covid-19, 36 Cree. See Nîhiyaw Creighton, Helen, 183, 212n18 critical Indigenous studies, 10, 13 critical race studies, 3, 7, 13, 267n35 critical whiteness studies, 7, 88 cultural institutions, x–xi, 18, 20–1; authority of, 148; decolonization of, 26, 29, 71, 87–91, 95–6, 98, 102, 104; dismantling of, 23; inclusion in, 94, 105–6; settler-centric orientations of, 39n33, 40n75, 66, 70, 83. See also Art Gallery of Ontario; curatorial practice; “embodying treaty”; galleries; Indigenization; museums; National Gallery of Canada; relationality; universities; “unsettling depremacy”; Winnipeg Art Gallery curatorial practice, 26, 29, 32; as collection,

331

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Index

181–2, 184, 187; decolonizing of, 88, 91–2, 104, 108; Indigenous, 89–91; in music, 32; site-based installations, 195. See also cultural institutions; “embodying treaty”; Excavation: Memory Work (Hamilton); Native North America, Vol. 1; salvage anthropology; “unsettling depremacy” Curtis, Edward, 275–7, 280, 286 Cushing, Franklin Hamilton, 183 Dakota Access Pipeline, 66–7, 76, 83 Dalhousie Art Gallery, 201 Dalhousie University, 211n9 Dalit-Bahujans, 270–1, 283–5, 289n6 Danger, Dayna, 20, 23, 33–4, 215–16, 218, 229; artwork of, 223, 225–8, 230–4, 239n4; community work of, 221, 235–7; praxis of, 239n1. See also Beading Now (Danger); Big’Uns (Danger); Dear Hide Floggers (Danger and Williams); MASKS (Danger); Two-Spiritness Dear Hide Floggers (Danger and Williams), 233 Death of Dishonest Abel, The (2Fik), 255 Death of General Wolfe, The (West), 255 decolonization, ix–xii, 7, 10, 94–5; as action, 83, 105, 110n30, 130–1, 261, 264n11; of the arts, 26, 71, 87–9; and caste, 285; of land, 49, 287; in music, 188; partners in, 98, 101, 107, 270, 276; and “refusal,” 23; and sexuality, 233–4, 236; through film, 122. See also accomplices; cultural institutions; decolonizing methodologies; sovereignty decolonizing methodologies, xii, 4, 6–7, 9–10, 13, 36; in art history, 18, 20, 71, 267n37, 273–4; collaboration, 24, 33–4; in the cultural sector, 87–92, 95, 98–9, 102–4, 107; Indigenous, 28, 92, 215–16, 220–1; self-reflexivity in, 105; storytelling, 26, 74–6. See also African Canadian art histories; anti-racism; critical race studies; “embodying treaty”; feminism; feminist standpoint theory; Indigenous art histories; Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit; kinship; mino bimaadiziwin; “positionality”; queerness; queer theory; “situated knowledges” (Haraway); storytelling; Tuck, Eve; Two-Spiritness; “unsettling depremacy” Densmore, Frances, 183, 188–90 d’Entremont, Chris, 61 Department of Fisheries and Oceans, 60 diaspora, ix–xi, 12, 36, 242–3, 268n41; in art,

19–20, 22, 24; Filipino, 244; and identity, 247– 9, 251, 253, 260–1; Indian, 270, 272, 286; and sexuality, 245–6, 250, 254, 261–2, 265n16. See also Black diaspora; racialization Dick, Gordon, Sr, 187 disability, xi, 8–9, 27, 39n31 Dish With One Spoon, 102 Doctrine of Discovery, 70, 85n17, 94. See also terra nullius Dundas, Henry, 158n33 Dunn, Willie, 32, 179, 186, 191n5 Dutcher, Jeremy, 32, 189–90 “dying Indian.” See vanishing Indian Eckankar, 73, 76, 78, 80 Ekwpahak|Fredericton, New Brunswick, 196, 199, 208 Epekwitk|Prince Edward Island, 161 Emancipation (US), 199 embodied knowledges, 6 “embodying treaty,” 88, 92, 98, 102, 104–8, 109n3 Enbridge, 83 enslaved, 13, 163–7, 176n24, 176n25, 176n35; as commodities, 202; and disease, 171–3, 175n8; in fugitive advertisements, 161–71, 173–4, 197; sexualization of, 175n15, 177n40. See also Africans; “arrivants”; freedom runners/ seekers; property enslavement, 4–5, 11–12, 136n21; afterlife of, 6, 40n58; in Canada, ix–xii, 21–2, 31–2, 254; and colonialism, 16, 46, 49, 279; resistance of, 162– 3; violence of, 165. See also abolition of slavery; enslaved; freedom runners/seekers; slavery Esgenoôpetitj|Burnt Church, 60 Eurocentricism, 10–11, 24, 65, 265n20 Excavation: Memory Work (Hamilton), 195–6, 199, 201, 203–9 exoticism, 75, 224, 251, 268n43, 280. See also orientalism Family Compact, 152 Fanon, Frantz, 264n11 feminism, 6–7, 26–7, 218, 246, 264n10 feminist standpoint theory, 6–9, 35 Fewkes, Jesse Walter, 183 Fierté en Hiver festival, 215–16, 235 film, 121–2 Final Frontier, The (Turner), 158n32 First Nations, 66, 74, 76–7, 80, 82, 222

Index

Flaherty, Robert, 118, 136n15 folk culture, 182 folklore, 183, 198 Folkway Records, 184 Fowke, Edith, 183 France, 243, 247, 266n24. See also French Empire Fraser, Andrea, 144 Fredericton, New Brunswick. See Ekwpahak|Fredericton freedom runners/seekers, 32, 48–9, 61n9, 176n20, 199–200, 202; advertisements for, 161–71, 173–4, 197, 204; from the US, 212n15. See also enslaved; Underground Railroad French Cross (Colville), 53, 55 French Empire, 15, 46, 48–9, 54, 251, 255; racism of, 55; slavery in, 161. See also New France “Frenchification,” 47 Freud, Sigmund, 152–3 fugitive slaves. See freedom runners/seekers Gagnon, Clarence, 49, 51 galleries, 87–8, 94, 195. See also Art Gallery of Ontario; cultural institutions; curatorial practice; museums Garrison Creek Project (Houle), 31, 142, 144, 153–6 Garza, Alicia, 30 Gehry, Frank, 142 gender, 133, 137n38, 145, 152, 218, 264n10; and colonialism, 242–3, 246, 257, 271, 276, 288; fluidity, 244, 249–51, 254, 265n21; Indigenous practices of, 238, 239n2. See also class; heteropatriarchy; homosexuality; Indigiqueer; lgbtqi; patriarchy; queerness; sexism; sexuality; transgender; Two-Spiritness genealogy, 60, 216, 282 genocide, 4–5, 11, 14, 93, 218, 278–9; and caste, 271; rape as, 281–2; and settlement, 15–16, 18, 110n21. See also colonialism; settler colonialism; settler states Geological Survey of Canada, 183, 187 Gift, The (Morrisseau), 77–8 Grand Dérangement. See Acadia Grand Pré, Nova Scotia, 52–4 Grange, The, 141, 143, 146–8, 152–4; neighbourhood of, 149–51, 158n33. See also Art Gallery of Ontario Great Tree of Peace, 102 Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, 182 Group of Seven, 19, 70, 72

Guswenta, 102 Haiti, 161–2 Halifax, Nova Scotia. See Kjipuktuk|Halifax Haraway, Donna, 6, 35 Harper, Jason, 199 Harper, Stephen, 80 Haudenosaunee, 31, 102, 142 Häussler, Iris, 31, 140–8, 152–3, 155, 157n26. See also He Named Her Amber (Häussler); Legacy of Joseph Wagenbach, The (Häussler); Ou Topos (Häussler) He Named Her Amber (Häussler), 31, 140–2, 145–8, 151–3, 155–6, 156n2 Henry, Frances, 198 Herbin, John Frederic, 54 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 182 Here We Are Here: Black Canadian Contemporary Art (rom), 196–7, 201 her silent life (McIntyre), 112–13, 119–22, 126, 131–4 heteropatriarchy, 137n38, 149, 268n46, 272, 281–2. See also patriarchy; settler states heterosexism, 243, 258, 268n46 Hidden Black Histories of The Grange (Turner), 150 Hinduism, 283–4 Hindu nationalism, 276, 287 homocolonialism, 241, 246, 264n5, 268n46. See also homosexuality homonationalism, 33, 256–7, 268n46 homophobia, 249 homosexuality, 241–2, 246–7, 255–7, 264n7; coming out as, 243–4. See also bakla; queerness; sexuality Houle, Robert, 31, 142, 144, 153–5, 158n43. See also Garrison Creek Project (Houle) Houston, James, 117, 130 Howes, Kevin “Sipreano,” 179, 181, 184–6, 191n8, 192n42. See also Jamaica to Toronto: Soul Funk and Reggae, 1967–1974; Native North America, Vol. 1 Huard, Adrienne, 20, 33, 215–16, 218–19, 227–8, 237 Hudson’s Bay, 118. See also Ukkusiksalik Hudson’s Bay Company (hbc), 118, 125, 136n21 Huitte Facette (2Fik), 263, 266n30 “hungry listening” (Robinson), 101, 111n48, 181 Hush Harbour (Turner), 158n31

333

334

Index

identity politics, 242 Idle No More, 67, 76, 94 Igluligaarjuk, 114, 123 Illuminations (Sainte-Marie), 188 immigrants, 10, 15, 150, 251, 254, 272, 288. See also “arrivants”; Asian Canadians; diaspora; migrants; people of colour; refugees immigration, 254, 262, 268n41, 272. See also Canada; immigrants imperialism, 5, 11, 14, 271; archives of, 166; in art history, 15, 18, 71; “cacophony of,” 274; complicity with, 35; and disease, 173; and gender, 249, 261, 264n7; and land, 56, 65–6; modernity as, 241–3; and slavery, 162; unlearning of, 28, 221; violence of, 62n21. See also British Empire; Canadian Empire; colonialism; French Empire; orientalism; sovereignty indentured servitude, 13, 31, 46, 55, 58, 62n22, 271; of migrants, 142, 148, 254; runaways from, 173. See also labour India, 271–2, 275–6, 279–80, 287; caste system of, 283–5, 289n6. See also Hindu nationalism Indian Act, 76, 282 Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, 82 Indian from India, An (Matthew), 272–3 “Indian Group of Seven.” See Professional Native Indian Artists Incorporated Indian Jesus Christ (Morrisseau), 77–8 Indian Residential Schools, 71, 73, 76, 80, 133, 185, 222–3; legacy of, 235 Indigeneity, 12–13, 60, 95, 162, 188; anti-, x, 274; disavowal of, 281–2 Indigenization, 90, 94, 130 Indigenous art, ix, xi, xii, 22, 72–3, 218; aesthetics of, 74; and Canadian art history, 24; consumption of, 181, 186; exhibiting of, 75, 89–92, 106–7; reclamation of, 188; understandings of, 29, 155, 188, 239n4 Indigenous art histories, 21, 24, 142; methodologies of, 28, 220–1. See also decolonizing methodologies; Tuck, Eve Indigenous land: appropriation of, 45, 48, 52, 56, 93, 103, 287; decolonizing of, 29, 49, 95, 110n30; expropriation of, 28, 148, 150; invasion of, 3, 281; occupation of, 25, 88, 102, 106, 153; relationship to, 66, 69. See also sovereignty; treaties Indigenous peoples, 12, 36; assimilation of, 130– 1; autonomy of, 223–4; communities of, 236;

complicity against, 35, 89, 274; dispossession of, 12–15, 17, 19, 46, 65, 76, 80, 152; enslavement of, 161, 172, 177n48; erasure of, 4, 11, 26, 55, 63n36, 92–3, 142, 255, 280; extraction from, 37, 183; futurity of, 87, 98–9, 222, 232, 282–3; and land, 66–7, 150; music of, 32; policing of, 42n116, 180; presence of, 155, 286; and racism, 22, 61, 288; research of, 215; resistance of, 21, 179; and settlers, 70, 100, 146, 217, 220, 243, 273– 8; and sexuality, 246–7; and treaties, 103; violence against, 88, 218, 240n26, 287, 290n30. See also decolonizing methodologies; Indigenous land; (re)conciliation; resurgence; sovereignty; treaties; Two-Spiritness Indigiqueer, 218–19 individualism, x, 70, 244 Ingres, Jean Auguste Dominique, 251, 253, 255, 257 Initiatives for Indigenous Futurisms, 215 Innu, 16 intergenerational knowledge, 75. See also blood memory intergenerational trauma, 113, 130–2, 135, 222. See also blood memory intersectionality, xi, 14, 26, 242, 256, 264n10 Inuit, 30, 115–18, 123, 125, 129–33, 137n34 Inuit art, 16, 19, 116–17 Inuit Art Centre (wag), 106 Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, 118, 133, 136n20, 137n22 “I Pity the Country” (Dunn), 179 Iron Horse (Monkman), 71–2 Islam, 244, 247–8, 255–6, 259–60, 265n21, 267n40, 269n55. See also Islamophobia; Muslims Islamicate, 242–3, 247, 261, 265n15. See also Arabs Islamophobia, 249–50, 272 Jamaica, 160–1, 163, 165, 167–8, 173–4, 177n40, 178n64 Jamaica to Toronto: Soul Funk and Reggae, 1967– 1974, 184–5 James Bay Cree, 67, 76 James Bay Hydroelectric project, 67, 73, 76 Jane’s Walk, 151 Jesuits, 47 “Kanata,” xiin1 Kane, Paul, 70–1 Kaye, John William, 276 Kazimi, Ali, 286–8

Index

Kébec|Quebec City, 163–5, 168–9, 171, 173, 178n64 Khu.éex’, 188–9 Kinew, Wab, 186 King, Tiffany Lethabo, 12, 21, 63n36, 274 Kings Landing, 199, 207–8 kinship, 20, 23, 29–30, 33–4, 57, 133; and identity, 247–8; and knowledge, 218; and land, 66, 70, 82; between peoples, 220; and sexuality, 243–4, 260–1; through art, 215–17, 227 Kite, 20 Kitteridge, George Lyman, 182 Kjipuktuk|Halifax, 3, 163, 165 Kleege, Georgina, 8–9 Ktaqmkuk|Newfoundland, 3–4, 16, 18, 80, 161 labour: in art, 142; in community work, 235; of decolonization, 90–1, 101, 104–5, 108; enslaved, 12, 21; indentured, 13, 55, 62n22; migrant, 254– 5, 271; settler, 56–8, 165; slave, 162, 167, 171, 174; theory of, 14 Labrador. See Nunatsiavut Labrador Inuit. See Nunastsiavummiut La Grande Intendante (2Fik), 253–4, 257 La Grande Odalisque (Ingres), 251, 253, 255–6 La leçon de foile de Ludmilla-Mary (2Fik), 253 land claims, 111n51 Land (Rights) (Morrisseau), 67, 69, 73, 76, 78, 83 landscape art, 31, 46, 66, 70, 141; decolonization of, 71–3, 76, 83 Le déjeuner sur l’herbe (2Fik), 252 Legacy of Joseph Wagenbach, The (Häussler), 147, 157n26 Legends of My People (Morrisseau), 77 Lescarbot, Marc, 46–9, 58, 64n39 Le Sultan Abdel (2Fik), 259–60 lgbtqi, 220, 241. See also homosexuality; transgender liberalism, x, 243, 260, 280, 282, 288 Light in the Attic Records, 179, 184, 186–8, 191n8 Line 5, 83 Linklater, Duane, 96 Live-in Caregiver Program, 254, 268n41 lobster fishery, 59–60 Lomax, John and Alan, 183 Lucki, Brenda, 29, 42n116. See also Royal Canadian Mounted Police (rcmp) Lukin-Linklater, Tanya, 96 Mackenzie Pipeline, 67

Madawaska Maliseet First Nation, 111n51 Maliseet. See W last kokewiyik Manet, Éduard, 251–2 Manifest Destiny, 279–80, 286 Maracle, Lee, 135 Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, 196, 201–2 Marriage of Abdel and Fatima, The (2Fik), 254 masculinity, 133, 250–1, 258, 272 masks (Danger), 228, 230–2, 234 Matthew, Annu Palakunnathu, 35, 272–3, 275–81, 283, 285–9. See also Indian from India, An (Matthew) McCarthy, Mary, 208 memory, 24, 31, 33, 144, 154–5, 195; loss of, 132, 135; and presence, 204; of settlers, 3–4, 57, 102–3; value of, 197; work of, 208–10. See also blood memory; Excavation: Memory Work (Hamilton) Menahkwesk|Saint John, New Brunswick, 199 Métis, 61 Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), 72 Middle East, 144, 173, 241–3, 246–7, 251, 264n3; and identity, 260; queer cultures of, 255–6, 258, 261, 264n7, 265n21, 268n48. See also Islamicate Middle Passage, 6, 48, 174, 200, 203. See also slave trade migrants, 12, 152, 254, 282. See also “arrivants”; labour; refugees migration, xi–xii, 12–13, 24–5, 142, 247, 254–5. See also “arrivants”; diaspora; immigration Mi’kma’ki|Nova Scotia, 3, 31, 45–7, 61n6, 169; African diaspora in, 32, 48, 195, 198, 200, 208, 211n10; colonization of, 28, 52, 54; Indigenous treaties of, 102–3; landscape of, 55, 57–8; settler government of, 53, 168; settler narratives of, 49; slavery in, 161, 167, 173–4, 203–4. See also Acadia; Mi’gmaq/w and Mi’kmaq/w; Nova Scotia Archives; Peace and Friendship Treaties Mi’gmaq/w and Mi’kmaq/w, 14–16, 45; erasure of, 55–6; identity, 63n23; relations with settlers, 47–8, 56–7, 61, 61n11; treaty rights of, 59–60. See also Peace and Friendship Treaties; Sipekne’katik First Nation Miner, Dylan, 83–4 mino bimaadiziwin, 74, 78 miscegenation, 47 misogyny, 220, 224, 282 “Miss Canadiana” (Turner), 142, 150–1 missionaries, 115, 118, 123

335

336

Index

Mississauga, 102, 153 Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation, 153, 158n41 Mitchell, Willy, 180, 187 modernism, 251, 254, 264n4 modernity, 34, 184–5, 241–3, 264n4; and colonialism, 247–8, 254, 258–60, 262, 265n20, 275; and sexuality, 251, 256, 268n46; and technology, 187 Monkman, Kent, 71–2. See also Iron Horse (Monkman); Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience (Monkman) Montreal. See Tiohtiá:ke|Montreal Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 196 Moreton-Robinson, Aileen, 45, 65–6, 92. See also “white possessive” (Moreton-Robinson) Morgan, Jas M., 20–1, 23, 39n33, 217, 223, 227, 240n25 Morimura, Yasumasa, 267n37 Morocco, 243, 247–8, 255 Morrison, Toni, 199 Morrisseau, Norval, 29, 66–7, 69–70, 73, 75–84, 85n10. See also Androgyny (Morrisseau); Gift, The (Morrisseau); Indian Jesus Christ (Morrisseau); Land (Rights) (Morrisseau); Legends of My People (Morrisseau); Mother Earth (Morrisseau); Storyteller, The: The Artist and His Grandfather (Morrisseau) Moses Nanakonagos, 76–80 Mother Earth (Morrisseau), 67–8, 75 multiculturalism, 279–80, 282–3 Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk (Fraser), 144 museums, 8, 18, 20, 148, 199; “mining” of, 200–1, 203–4. See also cultural institutions; galleries Muslims, 34–5, 242–3, 246, 248–9, 259; in India, 271; racism against, 266n24. See also Islam Nanook of the North (Flaherty), 118, 136n15 National Film Board of Canada, 70 National Gallery of Canada, 72–3, 218 National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, 220 nation-state, 65, 67, 83, 256, 268n46, 271, 282–3. See also settler states Native North America, Vol. 1, 32, 179–82, 185–8, 192n42 Native Youth Sexual Health Network, 217, 236 Nelson, Mike, 144 neoliberalism, 256, 268n46

New Brunswick, 49, 61n6, 161, 203–4, 208; archives of, 199, 211n3 Newfoundland and Labrador. See Ktaqmkuk|Newfoundland New France, 47–9, 56, 177n48. See also Acadia; French Empire; Quebec Nîhiyaw, 74. See also James Bay Cree “noble savage,” 48 No Pipelines on Indigenous Land (Miner), 84 North Africa, 253, 255 North America: diasporas in, 34–5, 246, 277, 279, 288, 289n2; folk cultures of, 182–3; gay community of, 245, 247; music as, 187; settler colonialism in, 16, 48, 62n21, 156n4, 179, 270–1, 275, 280; slavery in, 31. See also Americas; Native North America, Vol. 1; “Turtle Island” Nova Scotia. See Mi’kma’ki|Nova Scotia Nova Scotia Archives, 197, 199, 211n3, 211n10, 212n18 Nuit Blanche Toronto, 147 numbered treaties, 16 Nunastsiavummiut, 16–18 Nunatsiavut, 16 NunatuKavut, 16 Nunavik, 16–17 Nunavut, 16–17, 112, 127, 136n20 Oceti Sakowin, 74 Ogima Mikana, xiin1 Ontario, 73, 149, 161, 183, 211n3. See also Upper Canada orientalism, 251, 255, 258, 267n35, 268n43, 268n48; in photography, 276; representations of, 284–5 other-than-human animals, 10, 47, 49, 54, 57–8, 100, 155; relations with, 66, 69, 73, 80–2, 84. See also oxen and plough Ottoman Empire, 258, 260, 264n7, 268n52 Outerregion (Turner), 142–3 Ou Topos (Häussler), 157n26 oxen and plough, 45–9, 52, 58 Papigatuk, Tayara, 193n58 parafiction, 30, 141–2, 145–6, 148, 151–2, 155; alter egos in, 150, 156n10; as hoax, 156n2. See also BlackGrange (Turner); Häussler, Iris; He Named Her Amber (Häussler); Turner, Camille Passage, The (Hamilton), 202

Index

patriarchy, 27, 30, 113, 224, 264n10, 284; and class, 152; and the state, 65, 83, 131, 137n38. See also heteropatriarchy Peace and Friendship Treaties, 16, 49, 59, 61n11, 102. See also Mi’gmaq/w and Mi’kmaq/w people of colour, 13, 19, 88–9, 92, 223–4; artists, 91; and decolonization, 98, 100, 270–1; as immigrants, 92–3, 272, 288; and racism, 22, 286–7. See also “arrivants”; diaspora; racialization performance art, 242, 261 Peskotomuhkati/Passamaquoddy, 14–16, 64n39 Peters, Thomas, 197, 199, 208 Philippines, 244–5 photography, 242, 266n24, 275–6; and the colonial gaze, 277–8, 280 “pioneer lie,” 28, 45–6, 48, 52, 55–61, 66, 181; about slavery, 161; belief in, 118. See also settler tautologies police, 163, 180, 270. See also Black people; Indigenous peoples; Royal Canadian Mounted Police (rcmp) politics of care, 6, 9, 27, 30, 36–7, 237 Pollock Gallery, 75, 77 Pompadour, Peggy and Jupiter, 149, 152, 158n31 Port Royal, 56, 64n39 “positionality,” 5, 7–11, 18, 23–4, 27, 36; unsettling of, 71, 91–2, 107 postcolonialism, xii, 19–20, 245, 275 Postell, Mary, 206 Prada, 201 primitivism, 75, 183, 243 Prince Edward Island. See Epekwitk prisons, 77, 174, 179, 183 Professional Native Indian Artists Incorporated, 72–3 property: humans as, 11–12, 21, 63n36, 163–4, 202, 204; normalization of, 29, 45–6, 56, 58; origin stories of, 52, 54; theory of, 14. See also enslavement; settler colonialism; white settlers Public Archives of Nova Scotia. See Nova Scotia Archives Qamani’tuaq, 122–4, 127–8 Quebec, 52, 61n6, 67, 242, 266n24; folk culture of, 183; slavery in, 161, 168, 174 Quebec City. See Kébec|Quebec City Québécois, 63n23 queerness, 4, 6, 8–10, 29–30, 33–5, 215–16; and

colonialism, 243–6, 249, 251, 254, 261; futurity of, 234, 240n38, 260; politics of, 242, 265n16; and the state, 268n46; ways of being of, 221, 238, 255. See also homosexuality; Indigiqueer; lgbtqi; Two-Spiritness queer theory, 6–7, 27, 33–4, 241–2, 244, 255, 261. See also lgbtqi; queerness Raad, Walid, 144 race, 13, 145, 163, 264n10; in art history, 18, 142; and gender, 256; and imperialism, 271, 275–6; privilege of, 286. See also critical race studies; racialization; racism “race thinking,” 267n35 racialization, 7, 35, 87, 92–3, 99, 131; and colonialism, 271, 274, 278–9, 288; and gender, 249–51. See also diaspora; race racism, x, 9, 102, 131, 267n35; anti-Black, 203, 207; in art history, 19, 260; in Canada, 21–2, 266n24; and dispossession, 31, 150, 268n46, 272, 281–2; imagery of, 201, 278; imperial, 55; systemic, 29, 220; violence of, 163, 289n2. See also antiBlackness Rancière, Jacques, 144–5, 151 Rasmussen, Knud, 117, 127 (re)conciliation, 18, 39n33, 90, 94, 104, 188; limits of, 96, 219–20. See also Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada Redbird, Duke, 187 “Red Power,” 69 refugees, 5, 13, 200, 202, 282. See also “arrivants”; migrants “refusal,” 22–3, 32, 89–90, 92 relationality, 11, 20, 30, 82, 92, 99–102; discomfort in, 108; and Indigenous sovereignty, 95; through alliance, 105–6. See also accomplices; co-conspiracy religion, 198, 265n15, 269n55, 271. See also Christianity; Islam; Muslims resurgence, 24, 87, 90, 93–5, 282; and futurity, 98–9; and sexuality, 222, 233; and sovereignty, 104 Robinson, Dylan, 101, 111n48, 181 Rodriguez, Sixto, 184 Royal Canadian Mounted Police (rcmp), 29–30, 42n116, 113–18, 123–5, 136n3 Royal Ontario Museum (rom), 196, 201 Royal Proclamation (1763), 102, 111n51

337

338

Index

Russell, Peter, 149 Saddleback, Linda, 187 Saint-Domingue, 161–2 Sainte-Marie, Buffy, 187–8 Saint John, New Brunswick. See Menahkwesk salvage anthropology, 70, 117, 179, 181–4, 186, 190, 221. See also vanishing Indian Sand Point First Nation. See Bingwi Neyaashi Anishinaabek First Nation Sawyer, Carol, 144 sbc Gallery, 96 Schomburg, Arthur A., 211 Scott, Walter, 96 Scream (Monkman), 72 Secret Life of Cornelia Lumsden: A Remarkable Story, The (Sawyer), 144 self-determination, 87, 93–5, 98, 104, 107, 223. See also resurgence; sovereignty “settler artists,” 21, 46, 49, 53 settler Canadian art, 15, 18–19, 28–9, 31; in the gallery, 106–7; and land, 46, 49, 52–3. See also Canadian art history; landscape art “settler-centrism,” 7, 23, 27, 33–4, 37 settler colonialism, ix–xii, 11–12, 31–2, 92–3, 275– 6; and art, 19, 141, 144; beneficiaries of, 55, 57– 8, 88–9, 100; as a closed practice, 35, 268n46, 271, 288; complicity in, 62n21, 271–3, 283; and consumption, 181; and decolonization, 49, 87, 221; and gender, 242–3, 248; histories of, 91, 110n21, 150, 154–5, 179; and indentured labour, 62n22, 254; and land, 65–6, 281; and religion, 77; replication of, 104, 152, 280; resistance of, 21, 102, 105; texts of, 4, 45; trauma of, 262. See also Canada; colonialism; colonization; “hungry listening” (Robinson); “pioneer lie”; property; salvage anthropology; settler colonial violence; settler states; settler tautologies; slavery; “white possessive” (Moreton-Robinson); white settlers settler colonial studies, x, 11–13, 19 settler colonial violence, ix–x, 4–5, 8–9, 11, 22; of academic disciplines, 20, 273; and art, 15, 18, 67, 71; complicity in, 102, 179, 270–1; disruption of, 29, 104, 221; on land, 66, 78, 287; rape as, 281; seeming neutrality of, 28, 30, 45, 82, 87, 278, 280; and sexuality, 220, 222, 228, 234, 240n26; of slavery, 161–3, 165; through agricul-

ture, 52, 55, 57–8. See also genocide; settler states; slavery “settler moves to innocence,” 7–8, 48, 53, 62n21, 89, 109n8, 181; undoing, 99 settler states, 4–5, 8; art history of, 19–20; collusion with, 271, 273, 278–9; construction of, 11– 14, 18, 25, 46, 49; decentring of, 26, 34, 69, 80, 83–4, 87–8; inclusion in, 10, 257, 260; and land, 65; as a man, 137n38, 281–2; relationship with Indigenous peoples, 219–20; resistance of, 93– 4, 247; and treaties, 102–3. See also Canada; heteropatriarchy; Manifest Destiny; nationstate; “settler-centrism”; settler colonialism; settler colonial violence; “white possessive” (Moreton-Robinson) settler tautologies, 45–9, 53–4, 57–8, 61, 152. See also “pioneer lie” sexism, 9, 188 sexuality, 33–4, 164, 218, 224; Arab, 241–3, 260–1; autonomy of, 228, 234, 236, 238; Black female, 175n15; discourses of, 244, 247, 251, 257. See also bdsm; gender; homosexuality; Indigiqueer; lgbtqi; queerness; Two-Spiritness Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience (Monkman), 71 Sharp, Cecil, 182 Shooting Indians (Kazimi), 286–7 Sierra Leone, 199, 208, 212n21 Simcoe, John Graves, 153 Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake, 73–4, 86n28, 89–90, 92, 98; on settler relations, 216, 219–20, 222 Sipekne’katik First Nation, 47, 59 “situated knowledges” (Haraway), 6, 10 Six Nations, 287 Sixties Scoop, 222–3 slavery, 11–13, 61n9, 141–2, 271; in Canada, 21–2, 32, 150, 156n7, 158n32, 162, 174; caste, 270; chattel, 46, 55, 63n36; and colonialism, 16, 144, 156n4, 200; and indentureship, 62n22; and memory, 210–11; and racism, 164; resistance of, 163; transatlantic, 7, 62n21, 160–1, 204; violence of, 165–8. See also abolition of slavery; Africans; Black diaspora; Canada; enslaved; enslavement; freedom runners/seekers; Mi’kma’ki|Nova Scotia; settler colonial violence; slave trade slaves. See enslaved

Index

slave trade, 158n33, 161, 172, 174, 176n24, 200, 202; connections of, 204. See also Africans; Middle Passage; slavery smallpox, 171, 173 Smith, Harry, 182, 184, 192n33 South Asians, 13–14, 34, 270–3, 278; and caste, 283, 285–6; in North America, 282, 288, 289n2 sovereignty: artistic, 71, 239n4; bodily, 281–2; colonial, 131; community, 236; denial of, 272; of desire, 227–8; imperial, 48, 52, 65; Indigenous, 11, 29, 87, 89–95, 99, 102–6, 219; individual, 215, 217–18, 234; over land, 66, 83, 110n30; sacred, 74. See also Indigenous land; treaties Stó:lō, 101 Storyteller: The Artist and His Grandfather, The (Morrisseau), 73, 76–80, 83 storytelling: of the colonial state, 4–5, 8, 10–11, 15, 18–19, 28; of family, 112–13, 118–19, 126, 131–5; and fiction, 145; Indigenous, 75, 77–8; settler, 52, 57. See also decolonizing methodologies; white settlers Sultan Mehmet II, The (Bellini), 258–9 Supreme Court of Canada, 59 surveillance, 20, 163, 165, 174, 178n64 survivance (Vizenor), 75, 83 terra nullius, 52, 56, 70, 85n17, 94. See also Doctrine of Discovery; vanishing Indian terrorism, 15, 18–20, 22, 59 Thames Art Gallery (Chatham, Ontario), 196, 201, 203, 208 They Forgot They Survived (Khu.éex’), 188–9 Thomas, Jeffrey, 277–8, 286, 288 Thomas, Mickalene, 267n37 though she never spoke, this is where her voice would have been (McIntyre), 119–20 Thrasher, Willie, 180, 187 Thunder Bay, Ontario, 234 Tiohtiá:ke|Montreal, 163, 165, 178n64, 215–16, 222, 235–6; diasporic communities in, 247–8 Tkaronto|Toronto, 31, 70, 75, 102, 141–2, 146; art community of, 147; Black citizens of, 149–50, 158n31; history of, 154; settler society of, 152 Toronto Purchase, 153, 158n41 Toronto WalkingLab, 142 transgender, 23, 33, 35, 223–4, 234, 238 Trans Mountain Pipeline, 83 transnationalism, 243

trans theory, 6–7 trauma, 234, 246, 262. See also intergenerational trauma “trauma porn,” 223 treaties, 61n11, 66, 69, 98, 102–4, 106. See also Dish With One Spoon; Great Tree of Peace; Guswenta; Indigenous land; numbered treaties; Peace and Friendship Treaties; sovereignty; Toronto Purchase; Treaty of Niagara Treaty of Niagara, 102 Trudeau, Justin, 80 Trudeau, Pierre, 67, 80–2 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 85n17, 90, 94, 101 Tuck, Eve, 7, 11–12, 34, 36–7, 49, 94, 264n11; and Indigenous research frameworks, 215–16, 220–2, 273 turions, cheyanne, 96, 110n32 Turner, Camille, 31, 142–4, 146, 149–51, 153, 155, 158n31–158n32. See also Hidden Black Histories of The Grange (Turner); “Miss Canadiana” (Turner) “Turtle Island,” 61n6, 117, xiin1. See also North America Twist, Arielle, 20 2Fik, 34, 242–5, 247–8, 250–1, 253–5, 260–2; identities of, 266n24, 269n55. See also Arabesque (2Fik); Death of Dishonest Abel, The (2Fik); Huitte Facette (2Fik); La Grande Intendante (2Fik); La leçon de foile de Ludmilla-Mary (2Fik); Le déjeuner sur l’herbe (2Fik); Le Sultan Abdel (2Fik); Marriage of Abdel and Fatima, The (2Fik) Two Row wampum, 102 Two-Spirit, 6–7, 33–5, 215–17, 219, 238, 239n2, 247; activism, 246; drum of, 235–7; ways of being of, 221–4, 232, 234. See also Danger, Dayna Ukkusiksalik, 115, 117–18 Underground Railroad, 21, 32, 161, 163, 202, 212n15 United Nations International Decade for People of African Descent, 203, 212n17 United States, 12, 21, 35, 287; colonial violence of, 281–2; folk culture of, 182; immigration to, 272, 276, 289n2; imperialism of, 267n35, 278–9; “Indian Wars” of, 277; slavery in, 161, 204, 212n15; and treaties, 102. See also African Americans

339

340

Index

universities, 8, 18, 87–8 University of New Brunswick Art Centre, 196, 199, 202, 204 “unlikely archive,” 33 “unsettling depremacy,” 88, 92, 98–102, 105–8, 109n3 Upper Canada, 149, 152 Vancouver Folk Festival, 187 vanishing Indian, 94, 186, 193n48, 273–5, 280. See also Manifest Destiny; salvage anthropology; terra nullius van Rijn, Rembrandt, 251, 253 Veracini, Lorenzo, 11–12 violence. See settler colonial violence visual and material culture, x; colonialism of, 46, 49, 52, 261; methodologies in, 24; racialized, 19. See also Canadian art history; landscape art Wabanaki, 48, 59, 61n6, 61n11 Walker, Horatio, 49, 50 Walker, James W. St. G., 199 walking methodology, 142 WalkingStick, Kay, 76 wampum, 102 War of 1812, 200, 202 water keepers, 67, 76 Watson, John Forbes, 276 Wǝlastǝkokewiyik, 14–16, 18 West, Benjamin, 251, 255 Wet’suwet’en, 66–7, 76, 83–4 whaling, 115, 118, 123, 136n3 where no one knew her name (McIntyre), 119, 128–9 where she stood in the first place (McIntyre), 119, 122, 128 white fragility, 87, 104 whiteness, 3, 8, 12; in Canadian art history, 10, 19, 21–3; decentring of, 95, 98–100, 105–7; and erasure, 26; privilege of, 174, 283, 286; seeming neutrality of, 28, 243, 281; and the state, 137n38, 272; systemic, 89–90, 92–3. See also Canada; critical whiteness studies; white settlers

White Paper on Indian policy (1969), 67, 73 “white possessive” (Moreton-Robinson), 45, 48–9, 52, 56, 58; in art, 70; and land, 65–6 white settlers, 12, xiin1; accountability of, 105, 107–8, 274; appropriations of, 55, 65, 93; as collectors/saviours, 182, 186–90, 193n48, 275–6; and decolonization, 29–30, 87–8, 95, 98–101; gaze of, 224; indigeneity of, 60; and land, 67; and miscegenation, 47; nativism of, 45–6, 48– 9, 52–5, 59, 61, 62n21; and place, 143; and race, 22; relationship with Indigenous peoples, 92, 220; as slave owners, 161, 163, 166–8, 173–4, 175n8; stories of, 3–5, 7, 9–11, 16, 28, 56–8, 279; as treaty people, 103–4; violence of, 280–2. See also agriculture; colonization; “pioneer lie”; settler states; settler tautologies; “white possessive” (Moreton-Robinson); white supremacy white supremacy, xi, 7, 13, 28, 89, 92, 94; in academia, 274; complicity in, 288; exclusions of, 268n46; resistance of, 218; undoing of, 30, 87, 98–100, 103, 264n10, 272 Whitney Biennial 2019, 20–1 Williams, Nico, 232–3 Wilson, Ellen Gibson, 199 Wilson, Fred, 33, 200–1 Winnicott, D.W., 145, 148, 155 Winnipeg Art Gallery, 106 Wolastoqiyik, 189 Wolfe, Patrick, 11–12 Wood Land School, 95–8 xenophobia, 272 Yang, K. Wayne, 7, 11–12, 49, 94, 264n11