Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing

Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing

Author: Danielle Taschereau Mamers

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2023-12-05

Total Pages: 125

ISBN-13: 153150521X

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An innovative analysis of Indigenous strategies for overcoming the settler state. How do bureaucratic documents create and reproduce a state’s capacity to see? What kinds of worlds do documents help create? Further, how might such documentary practices and settler colonial ways of seeing be refused? Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing investigates how the Canadian state has used documents, lists, and databases to generate, make visible—and invisible—Indigenous identity. With an archive of legislative documents, registration forms, identity cards, and reports, Danielle Taschereau Mamers traces the political and media history of Indian status in Canada, demonstrating how paperwork has been used by the state to materialize identity categories in the service of colonial governance. Her analysis of bureaucratic artifacts is led by the interventions of Indigenous artists, including Robert Houle, Nadia Myre, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, and Rebecca Belmore. Bringing together media theories of documentation and the strategies of these artists, Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing develops a method for identifying how bureaucratic documents mediate power relations as well as how those relations may be disobeyed and re-imagined. By integrating art-led inquiry with media theory and settler colonial studies approaches, Taschereau Mamers offers a political and media history of the documents that have reproduced Indian status. More importantly, she provides us with an innovative guide for using art as a method of theorizing decolonial political relations. This is a crucial book for any reader interested in the intersection of state archives, settler colonial studies, and visual culture in the context of Canada’s complex and violent relationship with Indigenous peoples.


Robert Houle

Robert Houle

Author: Shirley Madill

Publisher: Canadian Art Library

Published: 2021-10-18

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 9781487102647

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Saulteaux artist Robert Houle (b.1947) has claimed space and authority for Indigenous representation in contemporary art for more than fifty years. This new publication celebrates his generational influence and coincides with his exhibition Red Is Beautiful, organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario and touring to the Winnipeg Art Gallery and the National Museum of the American Indian at the Smithsonian Institution. A curator, writer, and educator as well as an artist, Houle has made a profound impact. Growing up on the Sandy Bay First Nation/Kaa-wii-kwe-tawang-kak in Manitoba, he was placed in residential school and denied access to his family and traditions. Always fiercely principled, he has dedicated his career to challenging colonialist perspectives. In 1980, he resigned from his position as the first curator of contemporary Indigenous art at the National Museum of Man (now the Canadian Museum of History) and set off on a path toward creating a remarkable body of work that spans painting, drawing, and large-scale installation. Robert Houle: Life & Work reveals how Houle's artistic output has opened critical discussion on political and cultural issues surrounding First Nations peoples, including Indigenous identity, the impact of colonialism, and land claims and residential schools. Houle has played a pivotal role in bringing contemporary Indigenous artists into the Canadian art mainstream through his writing and curating of important exhibitions, such as Land, Spirit, Power: First Nations at the National Gallery of Canada in 1992. This book also explores the artist's public art projects, critical elements of his legacy for art in Canada.


Art for an Undivided Earth

Art for an Undivided Earth

Author: Jessica L. Horton

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2017-05-18

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 0822372797

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In Art for an Undivided Earth Jessica L. Horton reveals how the spatial philosophies underlying the American Indian Movement (AIM) were refigured by a generation of artists searching for new places to stand. Upending the assumption that Jimmie Durham, James Luna, Kay WalkingStick, Robert Houle, and others were primarily concerned with identity politics, she joins them in remapping the coordinates of a widely shared yet deeply contested modernity that is defined in great part by the colonization of the Americas. She follows their installations, performances, and paintings across the ocean and back in time, as they retrace the paths of Native diplomats, scholars, performers, and objects in Europe after 1492. Along the way, Horton intervenes in a range of theories about global modernisms, Native American sovereignty, racial difference, archival logic, artistic itinerancy, and new materialisms. Writing in creative dialogue with contemporary artists, she builds a picture of a spatially, temporally, and materially interconnected world—an undivided earth.


Scissors, Paper, Stone

Scissors, Paper, Stone

Author: Martha Langford

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2007-06-27

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 077357686X

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Finalist: Raymond Klibansky Book Prize Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada (2008) Making a connection between photography and memory is almost automatic. Should it be? In Scissors, Paper, Stone Martha Langford explores the nature of memory and art. She challenges the conventional emphasis on the camera as a tool of perception by arguing that photographic works are products of the mind - picturing memory is, first and foremost, the expression of a mental process. Langford organizes the book around the conceit of the child's game scissors, paper, stone, using it to ground her discussion of the tensions between remembering and forgetting, the intersection of memory and imagination, and the relationship between memory and history. Scissors, Paper, Stone explores the great variety of photographic art produced by Canadian artists as expressions of memory. Their work, including images by Carl Beam, Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge, Donigan Cumming, Stan Denniston, Robert Houle, Robert Minden, Michael Snow, Diana Thorneycroft, Jeff Wall, and Jin-me Yoon, is presented as part of a rich interdisciplinary study of contemporary photography and how it has shaped modern memory.


Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Volume One: Summary

Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Volume One: Summary

Author: Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada

Publisher: James Lorimer & Company

Published: 2015-07-22

Total Pages: 673

ISBN-13: 1459410696

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This is the Final Report of Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its six-year investigation of the residential school system for Aboriginal youth and the legacy of these schools. This report, the summary volume, includes the history of residential schools, the legacy of that school system, and the full text of the Commission's 94 recommendations for action to address that legacy. This report lays bare a part of Canada's history that until recently was little-known to most non-Aboriginal Canadians. The Commission discusses the logic of the colonization of Canada's territories, and why and how policy and practice developed to end the existence of distinct societies of Aboriginal peoples. Using brief excerpts from the powerful testimony heard from Survivors, this report documents the residential school system which forced children into institutions where they were forbidden to speak their language, required to discard their clothing in favour of institutional wear, given inadequate food, housed in inferior and fire-prone buildings, required to work when they should have been studying, and subjected to emotional, psychological and often physical abuse. In this setting, cruel punishments were all too common, as was sexual abuse. More than 30,000 Survivors have been compensated financially by the Government of Canada for their experiences in residential schools, but the legacy of this experience is ongoing today. This report explains the links to high rates of Aboriginal children being taken from their families, abuse of drugs and alcohol, and high rates of suicide. The report documents the drastic decline in the presence of Aboriginal languages, even as Survivors and others work to maintain their distinctive cultures, traditions, and governance. The report offers 94 calls to action on the part of governments, churches, public institutions and non-Aboriginal Canadians as a path to meaningful reconciliation of Canada today with Aboriginal citizens. Even though the historical experience of residential schools constituted an act of cultural genocide by Canadian government authorities, the United Nation's declaration of the rights of aboriginal peoples and the specific recommendations of the Commission offer a path to move from apology for these events to true reconciliation that can be embraced by all Canadians.


Curatorship

Curatorship

Author: Canadian Museum of Civilization

Publisher: University of Ottawa Press

Published: 1996-01-01

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 1772824313

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Museums and cultural centres play an important role in the re-emergence of cultural autonomy in indigenous societies. The May 1994 symposium, Curatorship: Indigenous Perspectives in Post-Colonial Societies, examined the realignment of relationships between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples of the Commonwealth in the context of traditional museum practices. It supported the right of Indigenous peoples to control the management of their cultural heritage and underlined the need for redefining museum models.


Western Voices in Canadian Art

Western Voices in Canadian Art

Author: Patricia Bovey

Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press

Published: 2023-02-03

Total Pages: 662

ISBN-13: 0887550835

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The story of artists in Western Canada, and how they changed the face of Canadian art “Listen to the visual voices of artists. They tell us so poignantly who we are, what we must cherish, and what we must address as a society.” Patricia Bovey Throughout her remarkable career as a gallery director, curator, and author, Patricia Bovey has tirelessly championed the work of Western Canadian artists. Western Voices in Canadian Art brings this lifelong passion to a crescendo, delivering the most ambitious survey of Western Canadian Art to date. Beginning with the earliest European-trained artists in Western Canada, and moving up to present day, Bovey amplifies the depth, scope, and importance of the diverse artists (both settler and Indigenous) whose distinct voices have contributed to the Western Canadian artistic tradition. Bovey then adopts a thematic approach, richly informed by her knowledge and experience, connecting art and artists through time and across provincial boundaries. Insights from Bovey’s studio visits and conversations with artists enhance our understandings of the history and trajectory of, and impetus for Canadian artistic creation. Lavishly illustrated with over 250 works reproduced in full colour, Western Voices in Canadian Art is a book that needs to be seen, and its artists and art celebrated.


Land, Spirit, Power

Land, Spirit, Power

Author: Diana Nemiroff

Publisher:

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13:

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Exhibition catalogue for 'Land, Spirit, Power' at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, in 1992, a collection of contemporary art intended as a response and contribution to current discussions on questions of cultural identity, from the specific perspective of First Nations. Includes three essays, and data on each artist.