Plant Stories are Love Stories Too: Moss + Curation

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

A Bounded Land: Reflections on Settler Colonialism in Canada, Cole Harris, (Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 2020), 344 pages

Review of: A Bounded Land: Reflections on Settler Colonialism in Canada Cole Harris (Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 2020), 344 pages In A Bounded Land: Reflections on Settler Colonialism in Canada, distinguished Canadian geographer Cole Harris republishes a selection of his many writings and thereby reframes his interrogation of the meaning of the term “settler” in “settler colonialism.” Through an exploration of various immigrant experiences at specific locations, Harris lays out a broad architecture of settler colonialism through an analysis of the organization of immigrant space and the contraction of Indigenous space since settler colonialism began in Canada some 500 years ago.

Conspicuous Consumption: economies of virtue and the commodification of Indigeneity

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

Surfacing, Voicing and Signalling Freedom in Relational Performance: Cheryl L’Hirondelle and Camille Turner’s Freedom Tours

The marking of colonial narratives mapped as histories onto Canada are reinforced on almost every boat, train, or rail tour in Canada. In Freedom Tours (2017) for LandMarks2017/Répéres2017, by artists Cheryl L’Hirondelle and Camille Turner the artists disrupted these entrenched histories hosting two sailings with tour narration. Thes narrated tours featured narratives that stemmed from Cree worldview and Caribbean diasporic perspectives. In L’Hirondelle and Turner’s work they built an architecture of songs unsung and stories untold in a temporal space- a boat tour in the waters in and around the Thousand Islands National Park. In this text I revisit the process of working with these artists to reveal the ways in which their work while being joyous also signaled the ways in which colonial histories drown out Indigenous, Black and People of Colour narratives in Canada. The historic settler alteration of waterways and borders within the Thousand Islands National Park has meant that some islands, previously visited by Indigenous people to harvest maple sap, are no longer above water. In this paper I want to be that island resurfacing sweet syrup, rising in these unstable waters to offer truths to Canada’s colonial narrative.

Mnemonic Fakery and Other Interpretive Strategies: Reclaiming Shingwauk Hall through Ethical Spectacle

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

Curating the Living Room: A Queer Feminist Decolonial Intervention in Public and Private Spaces

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

Towards a Poetics of Conspiracy

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

Peaceful Weapons: The “Voices for the Wilderness” Festivals and the Stein Valley Nlaka’pamux Heritage Park

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

A letter to Agnes McCausland Richardson Etherington (1880-1854)

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

Slow Disturbance: Infrastructural Mediation on the Settler Colonial Resource Frontier

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