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 in , we are located on Treaty 6 territory, traditional homelands of the Métis and Papaschase 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 , and Assistant Professor at the . 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. picikwâs, the series is called devouring picikwâs, but so again, how do you have those hard conversations and so that's where art becomes my tool of helping to develop those skills. One of the things that happens when you're able to carry your own stories in a kind gentle loving way, you know, coming from those natural laws, or Creator’s laws, is that you are able to begin to carry the stories of others, so this is a photograph I did of my mentor and my auntie nikâwîs is from my beauty thesis work in my final doctorate project and so I was trying to, after dealing with intergenerational trauma, I wanted to look at intergenerational resilience, not have to stick in those conversations around trauma. But what happened when I wanted to focus on beauty was how every interview I did, every woman and some men actually talked about the trauma and challenges they faced before they can even talk about beauty. So my auntie wanted to before she allowed me to take a photo of her and her elements of beauty she's like can you capture me as your apple but I want to basically re-roleplay that 5 year old little girl who went to residential school and this is one of the most, oh my God, I was taking photos of my auntie, here she is as a grandmother, as a great-grandmother and she's roleplaying her 5 year old little self when she first went into residential school, and I am behind my camera with tears down my eyes, you know. So the amount of trust and honesty that happens when you are working from that place of those art practices and how transformative they could be. So I created a digital story from her beauty, which you could see on my website.

So the current work I'm doing right now of taking this work and constantly evolving is around my Kamik series and this is about reconnecting to the spirit of the language. And so this piece is called mihkokamik, which is blood lodge, and it's around looking at iskwewewin, or womanhood, but also the diverse genders within our Cree worldview and reconnecting to the medicine that we have in ourselves, of maskihkiy, being a medicine. And when you return to our languages, there's a shift in your worldview that changes so much, and you realize how much it is so important to connect to the land, to the ceremony, to you know, our words and of course our kinship systems. You know, being in relation to all of our living beings, from you know, the four- legged, the winged ones, the watered ones, and how much we have as a responsibilities of being ayisiyiniwak ohta askiy, being humans of this Earth. And some of the prophecies that come from it which is a little bit in the teachings in this painting, was around that we now shifted, for the last seven generations we've been in the time of the men's pipe, with the big dipper or the time of the men, now we’ve shifted in the time of the woman for the next seven generations. So my art practices is about reconnecting to our grandmothers, holding our grandmothers within us again and being their prayers, and being the educators that they have been. And the importance of learning to carry our own stories before we carry the stories of others. ekosi, ay- hay.

Thomas Barker: Thank you so much for your words, Lana. Our third speaker is Diane Conrad, an Associate Professor in the Department of Secondary Education with a focus on drama, theatre, education, applied theatre, curriculum studies, and arts-based research, and community-based research. We invite Professor Conrad to share her words.

Diane Conrad: Good morning, thanks for the invitation to be here today, and thanks Tanya and Lana for sharing your talks. So to introduce myself, I'm a white settler Canadian, my family immigrated to Southern Ontario just before I was born, and I'm currently living here on Treaty Six territory in Edmonton. Prior to doing my graduate studies, I taught for three years in a Dene community in the Northwest Territories and I've been back there recently to do a bit of research. I've been on faculty here in Education since 2004, and my area of specialization, as Thomas mentioned, is drama theatre education. So I have a paper that will very soon be published in the journal Theater Research in Canada entitled, Youth Participatory Action Research and Applied Theatre Engagement: Supporting Indigenous Youth Survivance and Resurgence. This paper is based on three research projects that I facilitated over the years, which have involved Indigenous youth. I'll be speaking about these projects today, and I also want to talk a bit about my perspective on Indigenous-engaged research. My research program began with my graduate work, I was interested in exploring, through applied theatre, experiences of youths who are marginalized by our society. Those on the fringes, put at risk, or who have fallen between the cracks by not receiving the support or services they need or deserve in order to thrive. This interest was based on my own experiences as a youth, and later as a teacher, here in Edmonton, Alberta. As it turned out, many of the youth amongst the groups of youth that I ended up working with were Indigenous youth, which speaks to the challenges that Indigenous youth face in this region. So I never set out specifically to work with Indigenous youth, but as they became participants in my research, I of course had to engage with and respond to and make an effort to understand what they had to share. In the paper, I reflect on what I hope the projects may have offered, in the way of support for Indigenous youth survivance and resurgence. I've been reading Indigenous scholarship and really appreciate this concept and I'll speak a bit to those later. The projects used applied theatre with youth as a form of youth participatory action research or YPAR. Applied theatre uses theatre practices with participants who may or may not have any prior experience with theatre, to explore issues in which they have a vested interest. Similarly, YPAR involves youth in engaged practice through participation in researching issues relevant to their lives. So the two processes are very complimentary; they’re about analyzing situations, raising awareness, and generating change. The first project that the paper talks about was my doctoral research, it was with two drama classes at a rural Alberta high school. I was interested in exploring the notion “at-risk,” as it's commonly applied to some youth. With the youth, we created scenes about what they identified as issues in their lives, and performed the scenes in interactive forum theatre style for students, at their school in at a neighbouring school. The second project was in a young offender jail where I was invited by the native program coordinator to work with her after school program. Over three years of weekly sessions, we worked on several projects, from digital storytelling to image theatre to forum theatre, giving us opportunities to explore youth’s understandings of their life experiences, including the experiences that led to their incarceration, and to imagine possible futures. The third project was with a community-based nonprofit arts organization that served youth who experienced street involvement. The program facilitators there identified a need to educate service providers about Utes experiences so that they could better meet the youths’ needs. We created scenes portraying the youth’s common problematic interactions with various service providers, and offered workshops for service provider groups. Over two years we presented over 26 workshops, and conducted an evaluation from the perspective of the workshop participants. Then we spent another year doing an arts based evaluation with the youth of what they saw as the beneficial outcomes of the project for them.

The significance of these applied theatre and YPAR processes with Indigenous youth was in the potential these methods had for revitalizing or regenerating youths ways of being, which brings me to this vital concepts of survivance and resurgence. As I've learned, survivance and resurgence are critical analytical tools in Indigenous studies. Survivance, introduced by Gerald Vizenor in his 1994 book Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance, he defines survivance as more than, and quote, “more than survival, more than endurance, and your response.” It indicates Indigenous presence as active, vibrant, and alive, and survival as resistance to dominant discourses of disappearance. Resurgence for Jeffrey Corntassel involves quote, “courage and imagination to envision life beyond the state.” He sees resurgence in everyday acts that challenge the destructive forces of ongoing colonialism. Taiaiake Alfred describes resurgence as involving quote, “a dynamic of power generated by creative energy flowing from Indigenous peoples’ heritage through their courageous and unwavering determination to create themselves and act together to meet the challenges of their day.” The projects I described responded to ongoing settler colonial injustices that the Indigenous youth faced through opening space to give voice to their stories, their perspectives, and their desires, with a potential for empowerment for the youth and for others to see their wisdom and hope. Indigenous scholars have written about the significance of storytelling and the arts for Indigenous education and well-being. Taiaiake Alfred insists stories, ritual, and ceremony are essential for quote, “the regeneration of authentic Indigenous existences.” Carolyn Kenney suggests the arts are fundamental to life for people as ways of experiencing and expressing qualities of life. Gregory Cajete describes the role of the arts for Indigenous education and development as quote, “an integral part of learning, being, and becoming complete.” Arts processes offer youth spaces for expression of their identities, and for sustaining and revitalizing their cultures, for examining who they are, how they understand themselves, their communities, and their place in the world. As a process of recreation and celebration of self, arts offer possibilities for healing as Cajete notes, quote, “for developing and perpetuating the process of life-enhancing relationships.” Marie Batiste believes arts engagement can work against the effects of colonization to envision possible alternative futures. She suggests there is promise in youths’ quote, “self-reflective narratives that help them to understand their own situation, and reframe what has been cast as negative into more positive ways,” and this was the focus of the applied theatre research that we did together.

So my thoughts on Indigenous-engaged research: to be Indigenous-engaged, I feel, research as well as working with Indigenous individuals and/or communities around Indigenous issues, it needs to be grounded in an Indigenous worldview. As much as I've experienced Indigenous culture and ceremony learned from listening to Indigenous Elders, community members and scholars, and read about and studied Indigenous history and perspectives, I can't claim an Indigenous worldview myself. In any case, there are many and more and more all the time amazing Indigenous scholars amongst us to do this work. This perspective comes to me in part from working with very smart and capable Indigenous graduate students in the courses I teach, as one Indigenous graduate student put it, “if anyone can do Indigenous research, you don't need Indigenous scholars.” So I've come to believe that as a non-Indigenous scholar, attempting to do Indigenous-engaged research would be contributing to what Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang in their 2012 article Decolonization is Not a Metaphor, along with other Indigenous scholars have talked about, as Indigenous erasure; which, of course, entirely undermines Indigenous survivance and resurgence. All this is not to say that I won't continue to read and study Indigenous scholarship; and learn from Indigenous Elders, community members and scholars; introduce my learning about Indigenous culture, history, and perspectives into my teaching; and offer my support when requested to Indigenous colleagues, students, community members and youth in the ways that I can. I think we all have a lot to learn from Indigenous ways of knowing and being, and from Indigenous-engaged research. I'll stop there and I'll put into the chat some references for the three projects that I've mentioned, thank you.

Thomas Barker: Thank you so much, Diane. Thank you. I'm going to I'm going to keep that quote about if anyone could do it we wouldn't need them. I think that's gold for me. Our fourth speaker is Selena Couture. Selena is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Arts, whose research focuses on decolonizing methodologies in theatre and performance. We invite Selena to share her words.

Selena Couture: I actually don’t have any slides, so loosely I’m going to read my thoughts because I want to make sure I stay in the in the time allotted for the presentations, okay thank you, and knowing that there's so many so many more things to talk about. Let’s just start, first I want to start by thanking the SKIPP co-leads, Florence and Kisha, and as well as you Tom, for hosting it and inviting me to be on the panel. I feel really grateful to be a member of this network and have the opportunity to share a bit about the beginnings of my research story from that position. I also really appreciate the words that have already been shared before me by Tanya, Lana, and Diane, have already started me thinking about any correlations of the work that I’m talking about, and Tanya, you spoke about the museums as a place of engagement and also opportunity but also while they have a history of cultural violence and it needs reparations, I think that theatre also has an interesting correlation into museums in that institutions. And Lana, your words on the potential of language for shifting worldviews really resonate with me and I'll explain that quite a lot because that’s really core to part of the learning that I’ve done from my position as a white settler and how to be in a respectful relationship. And then just now, Diane, you spoke about Vizenor’s concept of survivance, and I think too about theatre as a place where, when Vizenor talks about presence and creativity and the continuation of Indigenous peoples, that embodied nature of theatre pushes that even further in that Vizenor I believe was a literature scholar, in that survivance was a way he was talking about how to understand Indigenous literatures, and theatre pushes that concept even further, and Jill Carter, Anishinaabe theatre artist and scholar, has actually expanded his concept and called it, in theatre, she calls it a survivance intervention because of the nature of the public embodied dynamic that’s happening in this artform. So that’s all to briefly respond to the things that have been said before me.

And then I’ll also begin by situating myself, as the other speakers have done, in relation to these lands and to this work I’m going to share with you. So I'm in 11th generation settler, 11th generation descendant of French settlers, and a 6th generation descendant of Irish settlers, who came to the eastern area of the land that’s currently known as Canada. My family history in this land goes back for 380 years, and 134 of those years have been on lands accessed initially through treaty, specifically the Peace and Friendship Treaties, Upper Canada Treaties, Treaties number Two and number Six. I'm still exploring what this means, what the treaties’ promises and agreements mean, but also what it means, to do the math, for me to have lived in these lands for 246 years in areas that are not governed by treaty. Such as where I’m speaking to you from today, and where I spent most of my adult life, in the unceded traditional and ancestral territories of the Halkomelem-speaking Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh peoples, and the Squamish Snichum-speaking Squamish peoples, that’s currently known as , BC. Much of what I've learned about being a respectful visitor or, in a local Indigenous language, ‘one who walks alongside,’ has been from Coast Salish peoples, and I’ll share a bit of that story with you today. So taking up a position in amiskwaciwaskihikan, Treaty 6, Métis Region no. 4, at U of A, on Papaschase reserve lands, I’ve also been working to learn what it means to be in responsible relations to these lands and people and contribute to upholding treaty promises. And the work of the many people involved in SKIPP has been very instructive to me. And I thank everybody for that.

So my research is a combination of working to understand and respect the lands I live and work on, while also taking responsibility for my heritage and deconstructing whiteness. So I'm aware of discomfort as I speak about my white heritage and one level of that awkwardness comes from not wanting to be seen as claiming some kind of originary authenticity or authority, also from the violence that comes from the status of whiteness in our society. I also however understand partially through insights shared by data scholar Joan Carter I mentioned already, who says that to deny the burden of being a descendant of colonial peoples who’ve committed crimes against humanity or living off the avails of those crimes is to remain a bystander. So living, working, and researching in Canada without taking up the burden is I believe a part of settler privilege of oblivion. So I aim to reject the bystander position and instead walk alongside Indigenous people. This position is key to ways of thinking that a number of Indigenous scholars have brought to light, including some of what I think Diane was speaking about was that very difficult relationship that exists between non-Indigenous people and Indigenous people in terms of what Dylan Robinson, Stó:lō ethnomusicologist has called a hungry dynamic of extraction that’s characterized settler-Indigenous relations, and he comes to this using his language’s word for white people, which is , which literally translates to “the hungry ones” or “the starving ones.” So this is all to kind of pull together how I try and explain my position in all this research as I also express my gratitude to the keepers of lands and waterways and allies who’ve worked within over all the years to protect these and I try to shift my position in these relations from one of the bystander or hungry one to one of a visitor who walks alongside.

So Andre my mother tongue I will say I'm very happy to be here but also over there at the same time my father's language, I say je suis très heureux d'être ici et aussi là-bas. I also usually speak these words when I make an introduction in the words of the Halkomelem language of the Musqueam peoples, on whose land I learned how to decolonize my thinking and actions, but as this is being recorded and I haven't sought permission to disseminate their language in this format, I won't at this moment say that phrase aloud. And I’m also sorry that I don’t know yet the words for how to say this phrase, that I’m very happy to be here, in any of the languages that are spoken in the land that U of A sits on, this is work that I still need to do. Language, as I’ll explain further in a minute, has been very key to how I learned to build relationships and work with people in Indigenous-engaged research. And also, as this is a panel on research and research creation in the fine arts, I also want to start by clarifying that I'm not an artist, or involved in the production of artistic works, I'm a theorist and historian working in the field of performance studies or performances, defined very widely, including engagement in the speech act. So I do engage with theatre artists and productions, usually as an audience member, and sometimes as a research consultant or what's known as a janitor in theatre. And an important point to keep in mind with theatrical work of any kind, including Indigenous theatre, is that it is a dynamic and public art form. Theatre artists collaborate and bring their work to a public space, but it isn't finished until it is witnessed by others. Though unlike some other areas of research and scholarship, or Indigenous-engaged research and scholarship, where there has to be a very carefully negotiated sentence what are the terms of engagement, in theatrical work, there often is involved in it a public invitation to take part in theatrical work. Not always, of course, and some works take place in what Métis scholar and artist David Garneau has called an irreconcilable space of Aboriginality, a place where Indigenous people are privately working on their own and do not invite others in. Others happen in what Garneau has also called “an Indigenous sovereign display territory,” where what’s been chosen to be shared has been carefully considered as a way to build relationships with non-Indigenous people and indeed, instruct non-Indigenous people in how to be more respectful. So my work in this type of theatre is to be aware, involved, and responsive when invited by Indigenous theatre artists to witness their work. I also use my position as a faculty member to integrate Indigenous theatre into the history and analysis courses I teach here. so that's a bit about theatre, and how I see it fitting into this topic of fine arts.

I’ve also been asked to speak about what’s the beginning of my journey as a researcher, so I’ll finish by explaining that. So I started my journey by responding to a call for volunteers to support the annual Talking Stick Festival, an Indigenous-led performance festival featuring emerging and established Indigenous artists, put on by Cree/Saulteaux theatre artist Margot Kane’s company, Full Circle First Nations Performance in Vancouver. Through the experience of being welcomed as a volunteer, despite my lack of knowledge or experience, and then Kane’s willingness to speak with me about her work as a performer and arts administrator for my Master’s thesis in 2010, I began to learn how to work alongside Indigenous artists, scholars, and activists, as a researcher. I then continued my research journey during my doctorate at UBC, where my question, my overarching question, was how had Indigenous lands been maintained through performance in Coast Salish territories. I learned how significant knowledge held within an Indigenous language is to understanding land and good relations. The University had signed a memorandum of affiliation with the Musqueam Nation, on whose unceded land it sits, in 2006, which declared Musqueam’s interest in maintaining the land as a teaching and training area, building a long-term relationship with UBC, and protection and enhancement of their culture and language. There was also already a joint Musqueam/UBC language program that had begun in 1997. So through this already established program, I was able to study Halkomelem with the Musqueam teachers, Larry Grant, Jill Campbell, and Marny Point, as well as UBC Anthropological Linguistics Professor Patricia Shaw. At the beginning of the study, it was made very clear that the Musqueam retained ownership and intellectual property rights over all language and culture, in addition to satisfying any UBC research ethics protocols, I also was expected to adhere to the Musqueam Nation's agreements and seek permission to use any knowledge gained through this relationship. As I learned this severely-endangered language, my relationship to land and understanding its history significantly changed. Knowledge held within the language regarding place names, methods of orientation in space and time and conceptions of leadership and respectful visiting became part of a theoretical frame, with which I wrote my book, Against the Current and Into the Light: Performing History and Land in Coast Salish territories in Vancouver’s Stanley Park. And as that worked developed from a dissertation to a monograph, I sought and was given permission to share the knowledge in each format. And I'm very very grateful for their trust in me and my work, and that permission. So I’ll end my comments here and as you can see my research journey is a bit of a winding path, and one that I’m still walking and I look forward to our conversation. Thank you.

Thomas Barker: Thank you so much Selena, and thank you to all our presenters for their words and their insights into the paths that they're taking. And I've noticed too, as I'm listening and taking a few notes for myself and trying to soak it all up, the importance of pathways, and the importance of pathways as symbols that Professor Whiskeyjack showing us, and how pathways can lead in so many different directions. Also the tracings of language, I think the emphasis on language that we've seen and heard about in our talks today is so instructive to me, and also like that the grey road takes you back to identity and people, that’s a wonderful thing to hear for me, and I'm doing my best to process that.

I would like now to turn our attention to questions, and as I've indicated in the chat, you can ask a question by raising your hand in the participant list. That never worked for me but you can try it. You can put your question in the chat string, or you can send a message to Rebecca Gray if you prefer your question to be anonymous, some people would like that. So let's see if we have any questions in our chat, I would like to thank people who have put resources in there that are so that are so useful to us and it will go into a resource compilation that we're preparing, that will cover the whole series. We don't have any questions in the chat just yet so I'm imagining people are preparing them. Here is a question of…

Kisha Supernant: Tom, the person who asked this question actually had to leave the meeting so unfortunately I'm not sure she'd be able to provide any additional context for us.

Selena Couture: I could provide context because it was Melanie Dreyer-Lude, the chair of the Drama Department, who asked the question. As she's not here, I don't know if we need to go into too much detail about it, it’s just that in the Drama Department, coming up next season there’s a scheduled play by Algonquin-Irish playwright Yvette Nolan, and as theatre is an embodied art form, and the BFA acting class are not all Indigenous students, there is this very complicated tension that needs to be explored. How to use the resources of the Department to support Indigenous artists, even while the department is not yet in the ideal form to do that thing, to do that work. So as she’s not here, perhaps this isn’t the place for that discussion, but it is a really important discussion that I hope at some point the scholars at SKIPP and everybody who's here might be able to engage with the drama department to think through the best way to engage in such a thing.

Thomas Barker: That's very good, thank you, and anticipating further conversations is what we're all about here. We have a question also from Fiona Nicoll, I've asked her if she would like to ask that in person but I'll just read it and then we'll see how it goes, “thank you so much Tanya, Lana, and Diane, and Selena for sharing your work with us, how do others try to explain to those in other disciplines that Indigenous art is not cordoned-off area of culture, but linked to knowledge, history, ceremony, science, and politics?” What a great question that is. “I'm working on an invited project by Indigenous youth and which arts are used to generate knowledge and I struggle to explain this to researchers in the broad area of public health policy.” So the question there is, how is the relationship of art to these broader kinds of questions, how can that relationship be articulated? Any of our panelists are welcome to address that question.

Lana Whiskeyjack: Okay, I'll bite, thanks for that question Fiona. I think about like, how we still need to build so much visual literacy within the academy, because it has been a language and discipline that is so underutilized by lot of other disciplines, as well as just not, people not understanding the language that is shared in the different concepts. So I feel that one way of sharing it would actually be by bringing those other researchers into a space of engaging art with youth, or giving them, of course research, I talk about the importance of Art in Lana Gets Her Talk documentary, I could share that while I hopefully you seen it and yes I'll just stop there in case there’s other, thank you.

Thomas Barker: Thank you Fiona.

Fiona Nicoll: Yes, thanks so much Lana. I think that point about visual literacy and what you showed with the catechism was such, and then putting that beside your art was a fantastically powerful way to do that, and yeah, thanks for that idea of visual literacy, it's really useful, thanks.

Selena Couture: I could also speak briefly to this question, Fiona, and hello. I think that that struggle that you're talking about has to do with the colonial nature of the organization of the western academy into these, the disciplining into the disciplines, the idea that all these things are separate in the first place, and certainly as I read, as I said I'm coming from a performance studies background, it’s a very interdisciplinary mode. I work a lot of political scientists and we're working in Indigenous studies because these separations don’t make sense. One piece I recently read, it was Refusing Research by Tuck and Yang, and was having to do with ideas of research methodologies and the refusals of research, and a very interesting mode at the end of that piece they use as an example of how to effectively refuse, they use an artwork. They use an artwork that is, I can’t remember the name of them right now, but it is a photographer who's taking an image of lynchings and cut out all the dead bodies and instead left the image of the people staring at the empty spaces. And they talk about refusal and actually art, excellent method of both communicating and also refusing to communicate at the same time, the complexity and the nuances that can be put forward through artwork, I think can be incredibly powerful in any of the disciplines we end up in.

Thomas Barker: Yes, Tanya? Unmute yourself.

Tanya Harnett: I’m terrible for that. I'd like to think that I go through life as an artist by accident, I run into things run into history, run into something that interests me, as a question, I produce the work. I think Joan Cardinal-Schubert's language, what she used, she says I worked in circles I work in circles of circles and circles. Which I think is fabulous because it is in response to a whole, but it also responds to everybody, and all our contexts in which we work, and how intersees of the circle cross. I don't have a one-way track of doing things, and I'll work with people in law, or in medicine, and they have questions. They have questions I’ll answer as much as I could, we just do what we can to help.

Fiona Nicolll: Thanks so much.

Thomas Barker: So those questions surrounding artifacts, and as you were talking, material culture, those questions can often lead to broader inquiries into these topics that are on our minds all the time and especially now, and so very important. There's been some observations, I'm coming back up here, “I agree with Selena on that the organization of our universities, the disciplining of disciplines.” Oh we're getting some more questions in there, “so grateful to Tanya.” Let's see, those are more observations, so would any of the other panelists Diane that relation to art, in particular drama, connecting those things with youth? Do you find that that the kind of performance art that you work with, is it is an easy stepping off place to those broader conversations?

Diane Conrad: Absolutely, I mean I think performance comes very naturally to us. We're performing beings, and so if you open a space for youth to perform their stories, it does come very naturally and opens that space for them to express themselves and talk back to the challenges they face.

Thomas Barker: So it’s a great way to open youth up. There's a question we have, “Tanya, what is the name of the book with your family's history in it?”

Tanya Harnett: Recollections of an Assinioboine Chief. My great-grandfather wrote it it's Dan Kennedy and his Assiniboine name is Ochankugahe.

Thomas Barker: Thank you, thank you so much.

Diane Conrad: I’ll also speak briefly to that first question. You know, it’s not only the universities that categorize or fracture the disciplines, I think it's all of western sort of worldview that does that and it's also in the hierarchy, so the arts always land at the very bottom, right? They're insignificant compared to science. So the health scientist, the person who asked the question was referring to, would have a sense of this hierarchy. I think that artists know that arts always relate to culture and science, it's not just Indigenous art, but all arts, are embedded in the rest of what we experience. So I don't know how to make people who have this western worldview understand that, or this scientific worldview understand that.

Thomas Barker: I think we all struggle with that, we've been trained in those ways and it's difficult to break out of those, in some ways. Now, when Lana was speaking she mentioned the transformative nature of art and certainly transformative learning and its relations to other trends in higher education are so important, could you speak to that maybe for a moment Lana, how is, let’s say land- based education or art-based education a transformative experience for some people?

Lana Whiskeyjack: Where do I start? The other week, I travelled to my adopted brother Dr. Kevin Lewis where I graduated from, Blue Quills, he started a culture camp, land-based, also a Cree immersion school from K to 12 and we're learning, my husband and I are in the process of learning birch bark canoe building, and the amount of science and learning you have to do and of course in the language, of like when to go harvest birch bark, how to cut the tree, like there's so much element of how to connect to the land and communicating with those relatives, you know, those tree relatives. And of course, all the medicine that goes around it has become that other part of learning about the land and so it's really, the transformative part and Fiona, you were part of that group too, of transformative scenario work with Dr. Fay Fletcher, around learning about going canoeing, and maybe you could even speak a little bit about that since you have that experience.

Fiona Nicoll: Yeah, absolutely Lana, I think the land is absolutely fundamental to that, and I think without that, it's words, it's abstractions, it's models it's of course, politics. But I think that for me, absolutely, was where Indigenous art and science comes together and yeah I think your art in terms of representing the intergenerational residential school impacts but also resurgence is incredible and also I’m thinking about the art of Stewart Steinhauer as well, that art for me has also been really transformative so yes, it is transformative yes, the land, and not the way in which we have a white possessive understanding of the land which is the everyday life in settler colonial context.

Thomas Barker: Thank you Fiona. There's a kind of another question, a kind of comment from Debbie, “I think everything being like a web, visually connected with people, languages, disciplines, technology, everything, this inspires me to work with the web visual.” So an inspiration there from that. But then there's a question from Lindsey, “could the panel speak to the role of photography and how it has impacted your research in terms of memory and visual knowledge?” We certainly have seen some of that here, “photography,” she notes, “has a history of being a privileged medium, especially in the archive and the family archive work, could you speak more to photography and your relationship with the medium in terms of storytelling and history and further, its relationship with the land on Treaty 6?” That's a big one. Yes, Tanya?

Tanya Hubbard: A lot of my work is on photography. I did a series of contaminated waters on reserves, a series of six images, and it was looking at how do we look at the wounds in the water bodies? I had to seek permission for sure before I go on to anybody's territory, cuz my territory’s in Saskatchewan and asked if I could use pictures of the land from the people of the land, and so that was really important. A great deal of my work is in photography.

Selena Couture: I can also respond, as a historian working with archives, photographs that exist in archives, have been incredibly useful to me, but not just from what I can understand from what has been chosen to be in an archive, but also the kinds of refusals that have happened. Certain things are documented to denote they happened, but also Indigenous people have refused to allow themselves to be photographed and documented and have those things captured in an archive. The photograph doesn’t exist, but photography is very key and important to understanding the knowledge at the same time. It's a short small answer to a complicated concept that I'd be happy to talk about more in relation to my book. Thanks.

Thomas Barker: It’s a very complicated question, thank you so much for that response. I'm sure the rest of you could talk more about the role of photography, but we have a question from Skyler, “I would echo Fiona's question, grounding our work in the interconnectedness of everything is a worthwhile challenge and seeking funding is a whole other challenge, any experiences when it comes to grant applications or decolonizing grant writing?” There's a large topic for someone to begin to open up for us.

Tanya Hubbard: It's huge who knows, I don’t work pre-thinking about what I'm going to make, you know, I don't say, “okay, I'm going to be making a series on this completely,” sometimes I'm fighting my way in and so applying for a grant to do work I'm just thinking about doesn't make sense. I have a problem with the whole grant writing thing, I don’t know if anybody else does.

Thomas Barker: Frustration by Tanya. Anyone else like to express that or talk about that?

Diane Conrad: I think funding bodies are very open to Indigenous-engaged research right now. I think as long as there’s Integrity in the grant application and that if you’re introducing a topic that it's sort of integral within itself I think and evidence that you have consulted with the communities that you want to work with, or the topics that you want to work with, right. As long as there's integrity I think it makes sense.

Selena Couture: I would also add that I think the work that SKIPP is doing I'm in terms of having these larger conversations on what is Indigenous-engaged research, what is ethical work, what are methodologies that have been shown to produce good outcomes for all people involved. When this kind of conversations have happened, that could then influence the ways that the infrastructures of funding bodies, how they set up, what their expectations are, and then who ends up on those juries because the people who read the applications need to be able to understand the language and the knowledge that's gone into some of the very deep applications. Like why is it that somebody in a grant application is, you know, giving an extensive explanation of their family lineage? Well that's actually really key, and it's not a throwaway that's a key part of the why this is justified. That has to be read with understanding by the people reading them and that’s, I think, in process, but I think it's not quite there yet.

Thomas Barker: So there’s an educational mission as well as just explanation. Lana, do you have anything you’d like to add?

Lana Whiskeyjack: One of the things that I definitely have been putting in grants is learning the language and where that Cree worldview fits within the English language is definitely challenging, but I like that with knowledge mobilization of bringing art into that place and knowledge translation, you know, art practices, being part of that. And so I find it definitely a lot more easier writing grants and bringing in those art disciplines and practices as a way of decolonizing the whole experience, the tedious experience of grant writing, and it helps that working with a team of people who can speak those diverse languages and all collaborating and talking about it helps with evolving the language.

Thomas Barker: Okay, thank you. Something for us to think about. Any other observations or questions, because we're nearing the end of this presentation, and so is there anything that our speakers would like to end with?

Tanya Hubbard: I'm currently working on something that was having to do with research in creation of a piece, I just put it in, its going to be in ociciwan, that's a new gallery that’s opening downtown it's going to be an artist-run centre and it's going to be huge, it’s going to be great, so watch out for it. It’s coming. It's going to be fantastic, three floors, brand new, Aboriginal artist-run centre, so I'm looking forward to that but I just dropped off a painting, it's actually salon style, like salon size, graphite on watercolor. I had done a lot of looking in records and then put that work into a painting on the smallpox that went up to the Missouri, and that took a lot of time. That is something I feel is a beneficial aspect of us being scholars, that normally the people in our families would not have access to, unless, well, we're privileged. We're privileged to be in a University and have the skill-set to be able to access this information and not everybody, most people, far majority of people don't have access to this, and skillset, and be able to bring it back home.

Thomas Barker: Okay well it certainly sounds like an opportunity for engagement that could then lead to other questions and possible exploration and knowledge building activities. “Art as translating scholarship in communities at home,” notes Fiona. Thank you so much for that comment and someone else, “Selena, thank you for posting the Musqueam UBC First Nations Endangered Language Programs,” and there are certainly a number of Cree language programs and opportunities that I must say I've been exploring myself a little bit just because of an interest in language, as well as art. So thank you. So as we reach the end of our time, I would like us all to thank our presenters, and you can do that down in the reactions, and also just by thanking them so much for their contributions today, we want to thank them again and are all of our participants are invited to join us in future presentations. Thank you and goodbye.