SKIPP Virtual Colloquium Event Transcript Friday June 12, 2020 - Connecting with Indigenous-Engaged Research, Research Creation, and Scholarship in the Fine Arts
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SKIPP Virtual Colloquium Event Transcript Friday June 12, 2020 - Connecting with Indigenous-engaged Research, Research Creation, and Scholarship in the Fine Arts Thomas Barker: Hello everyone, welcome to the Virtual Colloquium on Indigenous-engaged Research, my name is Tom Barker and I'm a professor in the Communication and Technology Master's Program. I will be your host today. Just as a reminder, we will be recording those presenters today who have given us their permission to do so. For our participants, please keep your video off and your microphones muted, we have a lot of participants we find that that practice works best for us. If you have any trouble viewing any of the PowerPoint presentations today, simply click the “view options” at the top of your screen and select “fit to screen,” that will ensure that your presentation is properly sized for your screen. Our technical moderator today is Rebecca Gray, so if you have any technical questions, please send her a message in the chat. You can click on Rebecca's name in the chat window and privately to her. Our format today is to invite our speakers to share their stories and then we will open it up for discussion. So if you don't mind, hold all your questions until the presentations are complete. Before we move on to our first presenter I would like to remind you that this colloquium is coming from the University of Alberta in Edmonton, we are located on Treaty 6 territory, traditional homelands of the Métis and Papaschase Cree people. Some of you may be located on other Treaty territories or on other unceded lands, and I encourage you to reflect on your physical location and relationships that such a location entails. Our presentations today are the third in a series of recorded gatherings looking at the topic of Indigenous-engaged research by the Situated Knowledges: Indigenous Peoples and Place Signature Area. My co-hosts are SKIPP Co-Leads Dr. Kisha Supernant, Associate Professor in Anthropology, and Dr. Florence Glanfield, Vice-Provost for Indigenous Programming and Research. I would also like to thank the Kule Institute for Advanced Study for their support for our colloquium. As the University continues to grow its signature ability to cultivate Indigenous-engaged research and scholarship, questions like the following become important guideposts: how might we build relationships with Indigenous scholars, communities, and knowledge keepers in our areas of study? What are our ethical and social responsibilities in doing Indigenous-engaged research and scholarship? The purpose of this colloquium is to create a learning environment for researchers from multiple disciplines who wish to enter the space of Indigenous-engaged research and scholarship. This colloquium series will support the learning outcomes of the SKIPP Signature Area. The first outcome is listening; as scholars, we hope to gain an understanding of Indigenous scholarship practices broadly and in our specific disciplines, with an emphasis on key concepts, like Indigenous-engaged research, situated knowledges, identity, reciprocity, land, settler colonialism, decolonization, positioning, respect, and relationality. The second outcome is connecting; we gather, as we are here, to share stories of beginnings, opportunities, challenges, and rewards of Indigenous-engaged research and scholarship. And the focus for our thoughts today will be those beginnings and how scholars started and can get started. The third outcome is building; we hope to continue to establish a broad network of scholars who pursue a strong and clear vision about Indigenous-engaged research and scholarship. Previous sessions in this series focused on broad issues in Indigenous-engaged research in social sciences. The future sessions will focus on humanities, education, health, science and engineering, and Indigenous community-engaged research. Our focus today is on Indigenous- engaged research in the fine arts. We are fortunate to have four speakers on our panel today: Tanya Harnett, Lana Whiskeyjack, Diane Conrad, and Selena Couture. Our second speaker is Lana Whiskeyjack, a multidisciplinary Treaty nehiyaw (Cree) artist from Saddle Lake Cree Nation, and Assistant Professor at the University of Alberta. We invite Professor Whiskeyjack to share her words. Lana Whiskeyjack: tan’si, kahkiyaw niwahkamakanak Lana Whiskeyjack nitisiyihkâson, thank you Tom for the introduction. I’m just looking at my screen here as well, hopefully it works. I titled my PowerPoint as “Art is Ceremony” and that’s how my engagement with my creative practices is my time in ceremony, and so I’ll go a bit more into that with this presentation. First I wanted to share two significant events and relations that had a great impact on me. The first one of course being the Indian residential school era and the outlaw of our ceremonies and so on the photo of this Indian residential school, is actually Blue Quills Residential School and that's where two generations of my matriarchs went to school there. On the picture, the photograph is my câpân Edward Cardinal, and nohkom, his daughter, my grandmother Caroline Whiskeyjack. So Indian residential school was disconnected how it impact me is not being fluent in my language not learning those songs, those ceremonies, not being completely engaged and a part of, you know, our ancestral ways of being and thinking and knowing and doing. And so when the ceremonies were outlawed, it was my câpân was one of the old man who took the ceremonies underground hid it way in the bush in Saddle Lake and he had many sons but he taught a lot of that to my grandmother and I always think of it is because my grandmother had such a strong warrior energy. You know she was a hunter like she would ride a horse and have a 22 and hunt while riding a horse, and so she was the strong warrior woman and so I think because of that he passed a lot of those songs and knowledge down to her. She was her dad's oskâpêwis, a helper in those ceremonies. So those relationships, that era, greatly impact my life and so you know in the residential school, in every classroom this pictorial catechism Father Lacombe’s pictorial catechism and it kind of shows like how powerful art was as a tool of assimilation but also art being such a powerful communicator especially between you know, IRS and the children in those classes like my family. So this image was used to indoctrinate children you know, you have the road to evil and you have the road to heaven and this was used whenever they spoke their language, whenever they talked about their ceremonies, sang songs, you know if you do any of that you're going to be on this road to evil. And so you know on that pictoral catechism you see a lot of the Indigenous people to that fiery pits of hell. And my family would say like how that just burned in their head and their minds and their worldviews and you know part of the reason why I don't know my language is because of this image and the fear that it instilled in the children in my family. And so one of my mentors, Alex Janvier, actually went to Blue Quills and Blue Quills is where I graduated my doctorate program and so to be in that same space that you know killed the spirits of so many children and now was the space where I'm connecting to nehiyawewin, you know, our Cree language, our Cree worldviews, our stories our songs and ceremonies and of course connecting to my mentors. So when I started the doctorate program we began in a law lodge and it was so powerful that basically all my prayers were answered and I wanted clarity in the research and scholarship that I wanted to get to, like clarity and guidance of what to focus on. Anyways the first thing that happened with I had to confront well, intergenerational trauma, you know all the trauma that I inherit and that I experienced, I had to deal with that. And so I went into this kind of cocoon and quietness and depression of dealing and confronting trauma, and so when I started painting this series of looking at that intergenerational trauma, I remember the words of Alex who would say, “if you want to paint something ugly, make it beautiful.” So that was that was what my series was about transitioning that trauma into a story white rewriting my story, so I didn't have to carry that heaviness, that guilt, that shame and did a whole series on that. And of course at Blue Quills, we often worked in circle practices, and a lot of our educators there also work from Maria Yellow Horse Braveheart’s Confronting Trauma as well. So one of the things when you are confronting trauma, you know, decolonizing and unpacking is art is such a powerful tool of helping to rewrite that story, but it's also a way of sharing with others. When you step out and start speaking about the things you were silent on for so long, you’ll often get attacked for stepping up and speaking about the unsilence. And because I was talking about you know this trauma, I created digital stories from my artworks to share more broadly as educational tools. I also had to confront the lateral trauma, “you shouldn’t be speaking about those things, if you don't speak the language you're not nehiyaw, you're not Cree,” like all of these different you know elements that come from that era. So this is a collaborative piece I did with my best friend, who's a photographer, of a really deconstructing and decolonizing apple.