Lindsey Catherine Cornum

Indigenous Futurism and Decolonial Deep Space

Lindsey Catherine Cornum

Thinking about outer space is how I came to be an Indigenous Futurist. A simultaneous experience of wonder and fear, there is an ambiguous pleasure in extending one’s imagination to outer space. It is a beautiful and ghastly void, and one which is already being colonized by corporate and military interests. There is also an occasional hopelessness in trying to capture the scale and startling novelty of worlds so voluminous that they could contain 1,000 or more of our own small Earth. Imagining at these scales helps us untangle our position in the complexity of our own world while extending that understanding to a future space-time. Questions about Indigenous people in space are not simply hypothetical musings in order to prepare for an eventual space NDN pilot program (though they are also that); they are questions to help guide us on what is left of our Earth.

I keep asking, who is the NDN in space? What motivates the NDN to go forward, through the void? How do we maintain who we are when flung into the face of the abyss, far from any semblance of a traditional home? This becomes essentially a question of how we must be compelled to find new ways of making contact. The vision of the world as terra nullius, or empty land, was the perspective of settlers in North America, Australia, and on other bloody frontiers who did not see Indigenous peoples as human, but inconvenient features of the land that needed to be civilized and contained. We must not fall into the trap of colonial visions of outer space and the future. Indigenous Futurism is an extension of already-existing relationships to time, technology, and worlds. For me, it starts from a point of always being dynamically interconnected to a vast unknown.

Past/Future

Indigenous Futurism seeks out, understands, and dwells in non-linear time. The past is always-already in the present, as is the future. Indigenous artists, authors, and thinkers constantly struggle to represent these complex, bundled times in a world dominated by a linear, forward-plodding timeline. Stephen Graham Jones is the author of speculative fiction works who calls himself a Blackfoot physicist because of his experiments with writing timelines according to a Blackfoot framework of loops, glitches, and the constant experience of Indigenous time travel: living in the past, future, and present simultaneously.

Nurturing and exploring these alternative relationships to time affects our relationships with our environment. We are always going back to the origin, our creation stories, as a starting point for moving forward, or up, or sideways. This mode of thinking can motivate us not only to consider how our actions will reverberate into the future, but also how they build on—or, as is all too often disregarded, erased or disrespected—the historical past. Stories are a technology we use to guide us through the chaos of overlapping times and spaces. Indigenous Futurism is about honing our technologies to the most liberating ends.

Survival. Adaptation. Dynamism. These are the skills of the inhabitants of the post-apocalyptic earthscape we have lived in since European expansion to Africa, the Caribbean, and Americas. Columbus’s voyages did not only destroy the worlds of Indigenous peoples in these scattered yet now connected locations; these journeys were also the birth of a monstrous new worldview, as Europe sought to twist these lands to their ends of conquest, expansion, and further conquest. In the wake of this destructive experiment of modernity, the Indigenous survivors of the globe have been increasingly severed from land, knowledge, and the relationships that sustained us prior to colonization. Perhaps more incredible than what we have all lost, however, is what we have managed to hold onto and create. One of the most powerful narratives offered by Indigenous Futurism is that we Indigenous peoples are carriers of advanced technical knowledge that can be applied in ways much more profound and generative than the extractive, destructive, life-denying processes of capitalism and Western progress.

Indigenous Futurists might find it helpful or empowering to reveal the white settler as the alien. As Grace Dillon describes in Walking the Clouds, there is a sense of victory in pulling back the benevolent face of settler colonialism to reveal the insidious, cold-blooded reptilian beneath. However, I also like to think about embracing the alien and becoming the alien. By now, it has become a racist cliché that many would rather speculate that the Egyptian pyramids, or the large mound structures of the Mississippi tribes, or any other example of the virtuoso structures of non-European groups, were made possible only by extra-terrestrial assistance. The joke’s on them, because it’s us—those perpetually-underestimated Brown people—who are the advanced race capable of large-scale works of technology, memorial, etc. In other words, we are the aliens we’ve been waiting for. We are the highly intelligent beings the government has tried to cover up. Indigenous peoples who have suffered genocide and dispossession for more than five hundred years are used to thinking in terms of global conspiracy, and that’s because we’ve been in the middle of one all of this time.

It takes only a slight shift in perspective to understand visions as traditional technologies, or storytelling as a technical knowledge. This is not an exercise in matching up to the European model of technological mastery. Rather, Indigenous Futurism is about thinking up distinctly alternate visions of progress and advanced technology. We must learn and unlearn, and learn and unlearn over and over again not to see our technologies as unsophisticated or backwards. Technology is never just about the tools themselves—it is about how we use them. How can we use our technologies differently, in the interests of non-hierarchical, non-coercive relationships with ourselves and the worlds around us?

The 6th World is a short film with lasting power. It tells the story of Tazbah Redhouse, a Navajo astronaut, spaceship captain and one half of an experimental team attempting to grow a self-sustaining genetically modified corn in space. The title of the film refers to the Navajo creation story, which tells of the first people traveling through different worlds until emerging between the four sacred mountains in the Southwestern United States. A history of movement is borne into who we are. When I first saw The 6th World, I couldn’t believe that I had found another Navajo who thought about Navajos living on Mars. A Navajo astronaut (a woman of course, because who else would you send to save the world?) uses ancestral corn to sustain humankind on Mars—this was the kind of movie I’d been waiting for ever since I could watch movies.

After I watched The 6th World, a kind of aphorism began to take shape in my mind. I now call it the Space NDN Motto: The creation story is a spaceship. The creation story is always being re-told, made anew. We are in a process of ongoing creation all around us, as well as destruction, death, and decay. The stories must grow to reflect that process. That means coming up with new words for our own social realities in our own languages. We have advanced knowledge about how not only to survive on this planet but to thrive on a cosmic level.

Origins/Diaspora

The NDN in space has helped me think about what it means to be an Indigenous person who moves or is moved far away from the homeland. Again, we do not need to travel to outer space to confront this. All over the Earth, Indigenous peoples have been displaced, dispossessed, stolen, and/or become mobile by less coercive means. Systems of apocalypse have struck at the roots of many of our previous patterns of life and left us scattered and fractured. Thus, many futurist narratives are also apocalypse stories. They record the attempts to create a world after another has been destroyed. Those who were supposed to be disposable remain, and continue creating from the ruins of a world gone very much awry.

In Australia, a group called Sovereign Apocalypse has cleverly appropriated the idea of apocalypse as the end of the current world of white domination. Their website, where one can find their zines and mixtapes, describes them as such: “Sovereign Apocalypse is an independent and autonomous collective. The concept is based on future imaginings of total Indigenous sovereignty. Our work is positioned in an apocalypse that has ended colonization and lifted the white veil to disclose inherent sovereign knowledge and return [[[to country]]].” The sense of apocalypse here is essentially a cataclysmic moment of decolonization reminiscent of the biblical sense of revelation. The apocalypse is a celebration of destruction. It brings to mind the purity of violence Fanon describes as a liberating act for colonized peoples. Sovereign apocalypse also suggests a certain self-determination to the apocalyptic moment. While Indigenous peoples have suffered since the endings of our traditional worlds and systems of relations in the wake of a post-Columbus world, we have also been capable of creating beauty and meaning on a bloody Earth.

The post-apocalyptic Indian then is not a victim and not merely a survivor. The post-apocalyptic Indian is indicative of the Indigenous drive to create. My favourite example of this post-apocalyptic Indian figure is Betonie, the medicine man in Leslie Marmon Silko’s classic of Native American literature, Ceremony. While it is Silko’s magnum opus, Almanac of the Dead, that would be rightly considered a futurist work, Ceremony has many of the trappings of an apocalyptic redemption story. Betonie, for instance, lives quite literally in a wasteland, in a dried up riverbed outside Gallup, New Mexico that is used as a dumping ground and campsite for otherwise homeless Indians. Despite the settlers’ attempts to turn his home to trash, Betonie takes the refuse and litter from his surroundings and incorporates it into his medicine bundles and ceremonial settings.

The 2014 short film Wakening, directed Danis Goulet, also portrays a bleak future shot through with Indigenous resilience and power. In the film, a lone Cree woman warrior hunts the Weetigo through an urban hellscape. In the first seconds of the film, she runs past a wall grafittied with the words: “This is Indian Land.” The apocalyptic conditions of this near-future city are redeemed through the warrior’s hunting of an ancient beast. Future, past come together. There is also an incredible shot of a tree growing inside an abandoned movie theater: the triumph of that which survives. The movie theater and the larger cityscape it exists in are shown here as vulnerable and temporary as compared to the longevity and resilience of organic forms such as the tree.

While these two narratives focus on gathering scraps of sacredness and power from the ruins of a settler-made disaster near or on the traditional territories of Betonie and the Cree warrior, I am also interested in narratives that describe what it is like when this world is so badly destroyed that there is no possibility of redemption. It seems more and more likely that this Earth will soon take its revenge for all the destruction wrought on its lands and seas. Star Waka is an epic poem by Maori poet Robert Sullivan that explores how a group of Maori space travellers navigate their search for a new home in a place they hardly understand. It asks the provocative question of how we can move our land-based traditions to alien soil. In light of these diasporic travels, we can also think of slave narratives as post-apocalyptic Indigenous stories. These narratives relate the incredible struggle of peoples stolen from their homelands and thrust into a brutal structure of oppression that has yet to fall.

These histories of movement, shared across the African diaspora and via the movement of Indigenous peoples from their home territories in North America, challenge our conceptions Indigenous identity as based solely in a people’s sovereignty over a discrete bounded territory. If Indigenous peoples are forced or choose to leave their ancestral territories, how do they continue to know themselves as belonging to a place, a group, and/or a shared understanding of mutual relationships? Indigenous Futurism and Afrofuturism provide narratives that not only bring the past into the future but also bring that dynamism into land relations in the present.

Conversations and projects around new media and revolutionary uses of technology also probe new ways of understanding territory. According to the creators of the website Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC), an online community of Native scholars, artists, and technologists who collaborate on websites, online games, and other virtual spaces, “Even on the Internet, Native people need a self-determined place to call home.” The Internet, like outer space, is a new place where old conversations about sovereignty, self-determination, belonging, and relationship need to be reconsidered and reworked for the possibility of liberation for all. Indigenous peoples on this earthly domain have had our connections to land severed, bludgeoned, and continuously mauled by colonial machinations. These same processes can manifest in cyber and cosmic space as well. On the Internet, in outer space, we are all thrust into the position of diaspora. The Internet is also a place of movement. We link quickly from one corner of the vast “web” to another while communicating across wide stretches of material earthland. This place is not where we come from but it may be where we find ourselves.

Utopia/Change

Science fiction (SF) has long been about estrangement. For many years, SF was thought of as the genre of meeting the Other. That is, the narrative of white male explorer or protector meets exotic, primitive, mysterious, threatening alien. In Indigenous SF, authors, artists, and creators of all kinds have the ability to imagine encounters with the Other not in terms of aggression, competition, conquest, and violence but collaboration, exchange, mutual respect, and co-specificity.

As I wrote at the beginning of this essay, Indigenous Futurism is in part about imagining and cultivating relationships to land/space and each other. These texts, artworks, ideas are attempts at learning to live together within the entanglement of suffering, resilience, and creation. Indigenous Futurism illuminates the vast network of complex connections that link everything in this world, and then further on out, to everything in other worlds. In a universe that continues to collect more and more history, our lives will only become more and more entangled with one another and with the impending environmental shifts of a world that has taken too much destruction. How we deal with these loops and knots is the goal of futuristic thinking.

Nalo Hopkison once said, while referencing Octavia Butler, “Utopia is dead; dynamic tension reigns.” [1] She was riffing off of the now-famous adage from Butler’s invented future religion, Earthseed, whose motto is, “God is change.” Change, dynamic tension, and a rejection of perfection are the starting principles for a clear-eyed, engaged, and deeply empathetic attempt to make a new world. Futurist narratives are models of how different sets of relationships might develop, unravel, and emerge in unexpected ways.

Hopkinson is the author of Midnight Robber, along with many other brilliant, richly-layered speculative fiction novels that depict worlds in chaos, in which relationships are turned destructive and hurtful. She also, however, presents models of how these relationships might be healed. In Midnight Robber, a young girl named Tan-Tan comes of age in exile on a planet that exists in an alternate dimension to the planet she was born on. When she meets and then eventually lives with New Half Way Tree’s Indigenous population, the douen, Tan-Tan must renegotiate the terms of personhood she had previously understood. This is the contact story, but stripped of its usual defining whiteness. Thus, Hopkinson presents a world in which some problems have been removed, but we must still contend with our hierarchical impulses. Midnight Robber, to me, represents the aspirations of contact without conquest, the choice to live with complex interrelatedness to each other and the environments we share. Outer space becomes the literary laboratory where we can test out re-arranged models of existence and consider the possibilities they engender.

These thought experiments are being performed by more authors of colour than ever. Octavia’s Brood: Speculative Fiction from Social Justice Movements was released this year and contains story after story of political organizers and radical thinkers testing out visions of a future resistance. As the name of the collection implies, the authors are inspired by the work of Octavia Butler, a true ancestor of futurist speculation and its ensuing political theorizing. Zainab Amadahy is another speculative fiction writer who has been envisioning possible political futures for years before the current explosion of awareness and discussion around SF as a political tool of the Brown and Black Indigenous peoples of the world. Amadahy situates her writing thus: “I aspire to write in a way that views possible alternatives through the lens of a relationship framework, where I can demonstrate our connectivity to and interdependence with each other and the rest of our Relations.” [2] If there was any ambiguity about it before, speculative fiction has of late secured its position as the de facto literary genre of political resistance. With the genre’s distinctive appeal to a wide swath of demographics, speculative fiction is also poised to reach and inspire more people than other kinds of literature. Of course, science and speculative fictions are not limited to the written word alone. In many ways, these futurisms are total cultural projects, manifesting in our literary, cinematic, artistic, and personal projects.

I don’t necessarily expect that everyone will suddenly take an interest in the multiple moons of Jupiter, devote their reading schedules entirely to SF by people of colour, or obsess over the complexities of time travel—though really, why wouldn’t you? But what I hope futurism can achieve is an increased willingness to accept and develop new ways of thinking about how we relate to each other across multiple spacetimes. I call this a “cosmic consciousness,” borrowing from and building on Rob Nixon’s idea of “planetary consciousness” from his book Slow Violence and Environmentalism of the Poor. [3] Cosmic consciousness is the attempt to understand my location across multiple dimensions of possible histories and disparate locations. As a queer Diné person, I have histories of movement and migration engrained in my creation story. Indigenous Futurism and Afrofuturism have been my guiding literatures in untangling how to relate the Indigenous to the diasporic. Space travel helped me understand how our identities can be fluid and in flux without being any less valid. As an Indigenous North American, who like many, if not the majority of other Indians, has lived away from my traditional territory more than I have lived on it, I began to question why other Indigenous peoples, specifically Afro-Indigenous peoples both in the African diaspora and on the African continent, were not included in discussions of Indigeneity. Canadian scholar Rinaldo Walcott states that the “invention of Black people troubles understandings of land, place, Indigeneity, and belonging.” [4] By creating narratives of the space NDN, Indigenous authors also participate in complicating our notions of home, Indigenous identity, and shifting relationships to land and belonging. Despite the history of anti-Blackness throughout Indian country, I find hope in the converging pathways of Indigenous and Afro- futurisms. These are both movements using non-Western knowledge systems to counter the destruction of land relations, create new conceptions of the human outside the racial logics of settler colonialism and slavery, and forge expanded understandings of space/time to incorporate the vast distances of outer space into our sense of home. In these complimentary imaginings we can witness our entanglements with each other, and instead of cutting through these empathetic bonds we can trace them toward a new world free from the specter of white supremacy.

Let us build together the world we want to emerge into.

Notes

[1] Jennifer Burwell and Nancy Johnston, “A Dialogue on SF and Utopian Fiction, between Nalo Hopkinson and Elisabeth Vonarburg,” Foundation 30:81 (2011): 40-47.

[2] Grace Dillon, Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012), 172.

[3] Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

[4] Rinaldo Walcott, “The Problem of the Human: Black Ontologies and the the Coloniality of Our Being,” in Postcoloniality - Decoloniality - Black Critique: Joints and Fissures, Sabine Broeck and Carsten Junker, eds. (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2014), 95.

Francisco Fernando Granados

Francisco Fernando Granados

Those few refugees who insist upon telling the truth, even to the point of “indecency,” get in exchange for their unpopularity one priceless advantage: history is no longer a closed book to them and politics is no longer the privilege of the Gentiles.

– Hannah Arendt, We Refugees [1]

Settlers in occupied Indigenous territories have an ethical and political obligation to hold up our end of the nation-to-nation dialogue. On the part of Indigenous nations, the Idle No More Movement has highlighted the political will, creative vitality, and generous readiness for this dialogue. The energy expressed through the cultural and political manifestations of the movement is an inspiring exhortation to non-Indigenous people in Canada. It issues us the honourable challenge of correcting history by meeting First Nations in full recognition of their sovereignty to have a conversation as equals. In order to participate in this process, those of us with access to citizenship rights need to claim this dialogue on behalf of Canada. This is not a call for a generalized approach to decolonization or an appeal for reformist adherence to the nation-state. [2] It is a serious proposition for an affirmative sabotage [3] of citizenship and its political potential at its most fragile moment.

We must make use of the public agency still available to citizens now that the international fantasy of Canada as a benevolent liberal haven is evaporating under the harshness of laws like Bill C-51 [4] and Bill C-24. [5] Bill C-51 has granted the federal government unprecedented powers of surveillance, prompting the United Nations Human Rights Committee to raise concerns over the potential for human rights abuses. [6] Bill C-24 has created a hierarchy of belonging that makes it possible for Canadians of immigrant and refugee background to have our citizenship revoked. Columnist Stephen Marche laments these recent developments as “the closing of the Canadian mind.” [7] When has the Canadian mind been open to dialogue with Indigenous nations in equal terms? The erosion of rights to privacy and citizenship, to freedom of expression and freedom of thought enacted by these laws does not signal the end of a golden era of liberty and security protected by the kindness of the federal government. These and other measures taken by the Harper Government should remind non-Indigenous Canadians of all of the rights that were taken away from Indigenous people through laws like The Indian Act and the institution of residential schools.

It is with an awareness of history and the present situation that the self-interest of the Canadian citizen must be opened up in the direction of the nation-to-nation dialogue. Political analyst Stephanie Irlbacher-Fox addresses the limits of settler solidarity by expressing scepticism “about the willingness of settlers to support a movement in a sustained way on the basis of either moral responsibility or self-interest.” [8] I agree that sustained involvement requires settlers to “engage in personal transformation to entrench meaningful decolonization,” and that this transformation begins with the education of the young. [9] This point echoes Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s ideas on aesthetic education. She proposes affirmative sabotage as the “productive undoing” of the legacy of the European Enlightenment by claiming it as a tool and learning to use it in order to carefully undo the legacy of European colonialism. [10] I propose that the personal transformation of settlers and our sustained engagement as allies to Indigenous people within the political process requires a productive undoing of the privileges of citizenship. The position of the settler needs to be occupied and activated, if we take our cue from the social movement for economic justice.

The affirmative sabotage of the position of the settler will require deep transformation in the hearts and minds of non-Indigenous Canadians. Speaking from the colonial end of the conversation requires settlers to identify with the ongoing history of illegalities and genocidal violence the federal government has institutionalized against First Nations, Métis, and Inuit populations. This identification must certainly include the white settler populations that have inherited the resources of British and French colonialism. These communities have the benefited the longest from the economic, social, and cultural privileges that were set up at the expense of Indigenous nations, and they need to hold themselves accountable.

As a racialized first generation Canadian, I am focused here on accountability as it continues past the edges of whiteness. It must include Canadians of racialized immigrant and refugee backgrounds who also benefit from the privileges of colonial oppression, even if not in the same ways and to the extent that white populations do. Stepping up to represent the colonizing power in this conversation might seem like a counter-intuitive move, particularly for settler-citizens who have been affected by racist and anti-migration policies and attitudes, or who have a range of complex relationships to Indigeneity in the places we come from.

Many people in immigrant and refugee communities belong to Indigenous groups in their countries of origin; for some of us, the brutality of colonial violence in the places we were born has made it impossible to learn about the Indigenous roots of our mixed blood. Many of us have survived dehumanizing processes to be able to stay in this country. We have witnessed friends and loved ones deported and kept from entering the territory. We have seen our family’s and even our own mental health crumble into addiction, depression, mania, and suicide. It is in honour of this grief that we must own the position of settler. This could be a path to the healing we so desperately crave.

Claiming a space in a dialogue with Indigenous people in Canada has to move along with difficult conversations within our own communities. It should acknowledge the ways in which class formation overlaps with race to create vastly uneven levels of economic privilege and disenfranchisement among immigrants and refugees, and how this affects the ways in which people can participate in the dialogue. Double bind: how to harness the power of collectivity while understanding and trying to work against the inequalities that challenge the unity of categories like “newcomer” and “people of colour.”

This double bind generates problematic politics of representation. At its most seemingly benevolent, it promotes crass tokenism within institutions, conservative and otherwise. What kind of progressive non-profit do we have when a manager takes a youth intern to a policy meeting without explaining where they are going or why they are there, only to make sure that it is noted in the minutes that there was a representative “from the refugee community” in the room? This is not the kind of representation needed for the nation-to-nation dialogue. As Angela Davis notes, “there are no compelling arguments to be made about political progress” when “notions of multiculturalism rely on a construction of race and gender assimilation that leave existing structures intact.” [11]

The other problematic that can carry over from movements asserting the rights of immigrants and refugees in Canada towards the nation-to-nation conversation is a tendency towards the kind of radical posturing that breeds nothing but self-interested cults of personality. Radical posturing does not by itself equal lasting structural change. Those of us from racialized migrant groups who may have the resources to work towards a nation-to nation dialogue should aim to remain self-aware and self-critical. Self-aware of how our own culture, race, and class background positions us in relationship to a colonial dynamic not only in Canada, but also in the places that we come from. Self-critical of the ways in which our bodies are included when discussing the Canadian political landscape, and of the ways in which tokenized individuals are encouraged to cultivate narcissistic personalities by those in power who care more about optics than substance.

Stepping up to the dialogue on behalf of Canada does not deny the realities of racism or undermine the solidarity of settled migrants. Affirmatively sabotaging the position of the settler is a question of working within the scope of this particular colonial situation and recognizing the specificity of the nations that are occupied under the Crown.

It is a painful and shame-filled move for those of us who reject the brutal circumstances that founded and continue to shape the country. It requires re-imagining our means of criticizing, opposing, and demanding change in the government’s colonial behaviour: from a position of outsiders towards a fiercely constructive auto-critique. It is not a call for assimilation. It is a strategic shift that must compliment a range of strategies in the struggle against the hierarchies derived from white-supremacist, patriarchal, colonial domination. Assuming the Canadian side of nation-to-nation dialogue must become continuous with the struggle against anti-Black racism and police brutality, deportations and the closing of borders, transphobia and homophobia, sexism and rape culture, and ableism.

For settlers who have a level of awareness of our complicity in the colonial process, the road towards the Nation-to-Nation dialogue includes the task of consciousness-raising among the collectives we feel as our own. This task must exceed solidarity and move non-Indigenous communities towards a will to use whatever institutional agency we might have available to us in order to hold Canada accountable. Immigrants and refugees who have eventually become citizens are aware of the highly constructed protocols of the process of coming into being as citizen. Working towards the creation of a desire and determination for the Nation-to-Nation dialogue becomes especially urgent as immigrant and refugee populations become instruments in the service of socially conservative political agendas. Can racialized bodies be made visible in the national political landscape beyond practices of tokenism within political parties? Are the voices of immigrant communities listened to unless they serve as alibies for international military intervention in places like Syria and Iraq, [12] or to be paraded out en-masse during demonstrations defending backwards causes like the campaign against the Ontario Sex Ed curriculum? [13] Is it possible to have refugee protection issues gain attention from governments without having to go viral like whatever banal meme or pet video bracketing these posts on social media? Are we capable of understanding that the notoriety the semblance of a precious child can gain in death is not the same as the dignity and protection he should have been granted in life? [14]

We need to give weight and build on the sentiments voiced by Immigrants In Support of Idle No More, who declare:

As racialized migrants, immigrants, and refugees, we express our support for the Idle No More movement, a movement of Indigenous surgence/resurgence across these lands. We are allies of Indigenous peoples’ asserting their rights and sovereignty and protecting the lands and waters. The history and current reality of Canada is a racist and genocidal one, marked by the forced dispossession of Indigenous peoples’ lands and extraction of their resources, the suppression of Indigenous customs, governance, and laws, and the attempted assimilation of diverse Indigenous cultures and identities.

As racialized migrants and refugees, we came across many oceans or continents, a hundred years ago or yesterday and are being targeted by racist and exclusionary immigration policies. Enduring decades, if not centuries, of colonialism, empire, racism, impoverishment, violence, and displacement; paying a Head-Tax, growing up in internment camps, living in constant fear of deportation and denied access to basic services, unable to be reunited with our family members, working long hours for less than minimum wage in dangerous industries/sweatshops; deemed “illegal,” “undesirable,” or “terrorist” by the Canadian government (and often Canadians), many of us have struggled to find stability and to make homes here on Turtle Island. But we recognize that our homes are built on the ruins of others. We are on the lands of Indigenous peoples: lands unjustly seized, unceded lands, treaty territories.

With humility and gratitude, we affirm our solidarity and support for the sovereignty not of the illegal Canadian government or its immoral laws but of those communities whose lands we reside on. [15]

The awareness of our complicity certainly begins with the acknowledgement that “our homes are built on the ruins of others.” With the humility and gratitude with which we affirm our solidarity and support, we must also recognize that the illegal government and its immoral laws are the ones that govern us. How many of those of us who managed to stay swore allegiance to the Crown at a citizenship ceremony? Whether we liked it or not, whether we did it under family coercion, out of naïve idealism, or with absolute indifference, this is our claim to the disappearing public sphere. This is our claim to the abstract structure of the state. This is the nation Idle No More asked to be in dialogue with.

Precisely because the public sphere and its civil guarantees are in danger of being taken away, the politics of owning our deeply problematic settler-citizenship needs to be argued as reasonable. There is nothing radical about owning our shit. Indeed, this kind of reasonableness is the honourable response to the call for dialogue, the attitude that can lead us in good faith to a Nation-to-Nation discussion. The broad vision for this negotiation should entail a redistribution of resources and the healing of relationships with Indigenous communities, while safeguarding our shared ecosystems.

Colonial cruelty engineered the process of settlement as a means to create loyalty for the occupation. It is cruel not only because it divides communities that should be allies, but also because the feeling of being settled is the most needed relief for the refugee. As a teenager coming to Canada during the transition between the end of the Liberal and the beginning of the Conservative era of the early 2000s, settlement was the goal, the main aspiration of a new life. At home, it was the dream of leaving behind the trauma of the place of our birth and the hope of an arrival to a safe space. Settlement was the implied directive to “adapt to Canadian society” by going to school and volunteering. It was “Settlement Services” [16] which gave me access to public libraries, art programs in community centres, and the hope of higher education. Settlement was also the joy of finding a peer group of other immigrant and refugee youth who understood my experience. It was the possibility of discovering and exploring my queerness. For the refugee, settlement is a double bind.

As I went on to become an artist, I was fortunate to learn from women who are artists and curators what laid beyond the colonial horizons of my formal education. Rebecca Belmore taught me the name of the disappeared [17]; Cheryl L’Hirondelle taught me the names of the land; Merritt Johnson taught me cross-border solidarity; Skeena Reece taught me about humour as a political tool [18]; Wanda Nanibush taught me the term “settler accountability;” Daina Warren gave me a space to begin to write.

Notes

[1] Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees,” Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile, Marc Robinson, ed. (Boston and London: Faber and Faber, 1994), 119.

[2] “Gayatri Spivak: The General Strike Is Not Reformist,” The Nation (April 27, 2012).

[3] “Gayatri Spivak on An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization,” Harvard University Press (January 20, 2012).

[4] Bill C-51, Anti-terrorism Act, 2nd sess., 41st Parliament, 2015.

[5] Bill C-42, Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act, 2nd sess., 41st Parliament, 2015.

[6] Stephanie Levitz, “Bill C-51 not in keeping with Canada’s international obligations: UN,” The Globe and Mail (July 23, 2015).

[7] Stephen Marche, “The Closing of the Canadian Mind,” The New York Times (August 14, 2015).

[8] Stephanie Irlbacher-Fox, “ #IdleNoMore: Settler Responsibility for Relationship,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society I (December 27, 2012).

[9] Ibid.

[10] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 1.

[11] Angela Y. Davis, The Meaning of Freedom and Other Dialogues (San Francisco: City Lights Publishers, 2006), 88.

[12] The Canadian Press, “Stephen Harper slams Liberal, NDP ISIL strategy as ‘dropping aid on dead people,’” The National Post (August 10, 2015).

[13] Robin Levinson King, “Fact-checking 10 claims made by parents against the Ontario sex-ed curriculum,” The Toronto Star (May 4, 2015).

[14] I can’t bear to cite this. I refuse to link to an article that will inevitably include the image.

[15] “Immigrants in Support of Idle No More” (June 15, 2013).

[16] “Settlement Services,” ISSofBC.

[17] Rebecca Belmore, Vigil (2002), video documentation of performance.

[18] Francisco-Fernando Granados, “Epic Houses: The Auntie-Hero Performances,” LIVE Biennale (December 28, 2008).

David Garneau

Performing Domain with a Non-colonial Aesthetic Attitude

David Garneau

De-, anti-, and post-colonial academic writing tend to concentrate on the political aspects of Indigenous being. While necessary work, prerequisite for our [1] survival, without the counter-balance of critical creativity, the visions produced in this mode are incomplete, limiting, and aesthetically conservative. The centring of governance and power in Indigenous academic thinking is a totalizing project. It applies simplified abstract principles to complex real beings and things. It endeavours to fix and manage, understand and control. Aesthetic creation, however, marvels in the particular, the exception, the beautiful, the sublime, the non-instrumental, the contradictory, and the imaginary. Art pictures the whole through its many real parts. It inspires and undoes grand schemes. Artists are unreliable political allies because they resist totalizing projects. While often producing political art they nevertheless refuse to be confined by non-aesthetic principles, or contained by comprehension. An Indigenous political theory that does not make room in its imaginary for unrestrained aesthetic thinking, performance, affect, and objects—does not recognize art as the embodiment of Indigenous sovereignty, rather than as a tool for political autonomy—is a system destined to repress these activities and the creative possibilities they could inspire.

Art is essential to Indigenous resurgence and we need to take it seriously as epistemology if we are to engage its inspiring potential. While many scholars of contemporary Indigeneity acknowledge the importance of art, too often what gets celebrated in their PowerPoints, or pictured in their texts, are examples of so-called traditional culture rather than contemporary art. And when contemporary Native art is evoked it typically makes a brief and mute appearance: images pressed into service as illustrations of the author’s conclusions rather than opened up as complimentary or competing offerings to the discourse by a colleague. [2]

Non-colonial, Indigenous aesthetic attitude engages art not only for its political meanings, but also for how it moves us beyond that preoccupation. Non-colonial, Indigenous aesthetic attitude is the refusal to see one’s self as always and only a subject of colonization. It recognizes art as the name we give to those actions, objects, and spaces with which we permit ourselves to produce moments of critical creative freedom. Culture is tradition. Art is something else. It is the site of cultural adaptation, of experiment, and it is the pre-figuration of change. My contention is that by expressing their experience and sharing their knowledge through aesthetic means, Native artists—especially performance artists—have come to modes of contemporary Indigenous being that are more inclusive, persuasive, and useful than those produced by political or traditional approaches alone.

Among the things I have learned from these artists is that being Indigenous is an activity rather than a state; it is a being in motion rather than a being fixed in a place; it is an exercise of domain rather than a claiming of dominion. Plains people, for instance, have always been a people in motion. Before colonial intrusion, they hunted and travelled in cycles. Now, there are powwow circuits and other forms of visiting. Indigenous territory is inscribed by these gentle passages.This way of being may have meaning for non-Natives who desire to home in these territories without trying to settle them. At some point, settlers may identify less with where they, or their ancestors, are from and feel themselves to be native to Native territory. This feeling is subjective, mostly self-serving, and a psychological necessity. If it is to be more than a feeling, then the claim has to be recognized by others. If is it to be a non-colonial feeling of being and belonging, a relationship, then those others will include the Indigenous keepers of the territory with whom they negotiate sharing these places. Such being and recognition is relational rather than a one-time pass.If there is such a thing as decolonization of the mind and body in a still colonized territory, then we—Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists, as embodied theorists—must figure what non-colonial Indigeneity and non-Indigeneity look and behave like.

De-, anti-, and post-colonial academic writing take as axiomatic that Indigenous people have a special relationship to the land. [3] This association has two broad aspects. In the legal sense, as first-comers, or always-here, Native title precedes European and Canadian land claims. [4] This assertion cannot be contested, only negotiated. [5] In addition, First Nations, Inuit, and Métis have histories, protocols of use, and communion with these territories and each other that pre-date and differ from Settler ways. This “Native American paradigm” [6] is described in terms of how (some) people (traditionally/ideally/should) live on their lands and conceptualize that relationship—with an emphasis, recently, on environmental stewardship. But it also includes metaphysical connections. In a historic and abstract sense, these descriptions are true but in the lived experience of individual Indigenous persons, they are not universally or completely so. The depth of knowledge, practices, and being ascribed to Natives by these texts are fully lived by few, partially by some, and barely by most. The claim is a deeply felt sensibility, the expression of a desire and heritage to be recovered, but not an essential quality of lived Indigeneity in our colonial period. [7] As such, contemporary Indigeneity and territory should be thought of as creative performance that exceeds traditional and colonial boundaries.

In academic and popular writing, Indigenous land is often figured as the reserve. However, most First Nations people live in cities and few Métis reside in traditional communities. As Evelyn Peters and Chris Andersen note, “for many Indigenous peoples, ancestral homelands are not contained by the small parcels of land found in reserves […] rather, they are the larger territories that include contemporary urban settlements.”[8] Landed Indigenous essentialism, the conflation of Indigeneity with certain, government-sanctioned sites, can serve to alienate off-reserve people and does not recognize the urban and adaptation as also essentially Indigenous. For instance, it forgets that many cities were once Native communities. In fact, some First Nations and Métis people did not migrate to urban centres but descend from families who were overrun by colonial dispossession. [9] Rather than frame unreserved Natives as necessarily diasporic, perhaps we should map how our travels rehearse and perform Indigenous territory.

Privileging the reserve as the authentic site of Indigeneity leads both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people to see urban Natives (ourselves) as diluted versions of the real. For non-Natives who haven’t visited reserves, Inuit, or Métis communities, the ‘authentically’ Indigenous is forever deferred and imaginary, rendering the actual Native people in front of them partial, if not invisible. This diminishment is felt in our bodies, minds and spirits, and we often perform accordingly.

Ironically, the conceptual delimitation of Indigenous territory to reserves makes these sites into something like property, or settled (First) nation states. These are occupation narratives. They contradict traditional practices of territory as negotiated—in both senses of the term: of negotiating boundaries through discussion and treaty; and in the personal, embodied sense of negotiating space, finding one’s way through, over, or around. This sense of domain is not a fixed place, but spaces and pathways animated by mobile, sovereign bodies that know their territory.

At a recent conference in Toronto, and following a panel that included discussion about land rights, an Indigenous scholar from Australia, Brian Martin, asked me, “Why is everyone talking about land? At home we talk about territory, which includes not just the land, but also air, stories, spirits, ancestors, everything.” [10] Beyond semantics, I think he was hearing a problem of emphasis, a sense that territory was being conceptually fenced off from the interconnectivity of all things and settled as land/property. Indigenous territory is a claim to what you and your ancestors traverse. Use and knowing through perpetual motion and storytelling is the claim and reclaiming of this more profound sense of territory. Indigenous domain is not a political state, in the sense of a claim of property, but a state in the sense of a condition one is in. Indigenous domain is an affective and performative state. Indigenous domain is the land claiming you, your feeling that responsibility, and the need for the collective wisdom that precedes and exceeds you.

Landed Indigenous essentialism creates a hierarchy of Indigeneity in which bodies are marked as more or less Native depending on their proximity to reserves, which may not be the margins of this land known as Canada but centres of, say, Tahltanness. Traditional Indigenous identities are mobile, not nomadic but not fixed in place either. Peters and Andersen recognize the quality of bodies in motion over territory as essential to Indigenous being. They describe, for example, contemporary urbanites who make “frequent returns or [perform] circular migrations” to homelands. However, they caution that “privileging connections to ancestral homelands as a marker of Indigenous identities reinforces dominant visions of Indigenous peoples as authentic only if they live in remote areas and engage in the ‘traditional’ lifestyles.” [11] Indigenous territories are spaces traversed by travellers and places animated by visiting. [12] Trappers, hunters, and fishers; truckers and traders; medicine gatherers and bottle collectors; powwow dancers; storytellers; hitch-hiking cousins; drop-in elders; musicians; performance artists, and even academics are not nomads but migrators who follow and produce a circuit of embodied relations and meanings. Their paths thread places into territory, and persons into peoples.

The centring of Native territory as rural, reserved, and settled, tends to confine thinking about Indigenous persons as political beings, subjects of legislation, protocols, agency or not, and so on. This conceptual habit positions First Nations, Inuit, and Métis always in relation to the state, which in turn shapes our academic work as reactive de-, anti-, and post-colonial labour.

Non-colonial practices, while inseparable from land and the political, are not confined by concepts as fashioned within, or in reaction to, colonial thinking. Non-colonial practices are thinking, feeling, and making that focus on the body, on people in communion with each other and territory, on the objects of culture and art—especially those worn and carried, mobile, in display and in dialogue with others—rather than on settled or landed Indigeneity and political subjectivities. It is a matter of emphasis and meaning, on knowing ourselves, for instance, as aesthetically sovereign rather than only aspiring to be politically so.

The shift is from nouns to verbs. Leroy Little Bear explains that while European languages “center on nouns and are concerned with naming things, ascribing traits, and making judgements,” Indigenous languages “are structured on verbs; they communicate through descriptions of movement and activity.” [13] Non-colonial aesthetic attitude is a shift from claiming land to the maintaining of territory, from persons in places to bodies in motion, and from political agents to unreliable creators—affective actors who do not always conform to political agendas or reason, and do not replicate culture but express the Indigenous in unexpected ways.

Non-colonial refers to pre-colonial knowledge and the right ways of doing things in our various territories that persist into the present. It also includes warming up traditional Indigenous practices that froze in reaction to domination, or re-conditioning practices that were, in their revival, re-constructed within colonial (and Christian) terms. However, a non-colonial aesthetic attitude also includes efforts of active ignorance: thinking and behaving as if not colonized; acting outside of domination; imaginative being and creating aside from empire; engaging in, for example, relationships with migrants apart from those defined by the state; being creatively ignorant of conventional boundaries and restrictions, including the designation of what is animate and what is not; acting the contrary [14]—and waiting to see if these transgressions attract repression or if your territorial claims to aesthetic space go uncontested.

Cheryl L’Hirondelle climbs buildings without touching the stairs [15] and creates tipis from flashlights, smouldering sage, and a ring of singers. Many of her activities seem odd, inventive, and pleasurable, but they are also serious performances of the Nêhiyawak (Cree) worldview. She refreshes the traditional to make it useful for the present. For her performance, Cistemaw Iyiniw Ohci (2001), she ran the length of the Makwa Sahgaiehcan reserve in Northern Saskatchewan following the path of Cistemaw Iyiniw, a traditional messenger of two generations earlier. He ran from community to community with tobacco and invitations to ceremony even though he could have taken a horse or car. [16] Cheryl’s twenty-five km run was, from a practical point of view, like Cistemaw’s, archaic, absurd, and powerful. I doubt hers was a political gesture, a call, say, to revive the moccasin telegraph, but perhaps it was a teaching disguised as an artwork. Following traditional Nêhiyawin pedagogy, her action is a non-dialogic lesson—a memorable doing and showing rather than an invitation to debate or to be followed by an explanation. She did not give a speech; coaxing people back to their traditional ways. She ran. Community members could do with the gift what they would. While unfamiliar with running as art, they knew the story Cheryl told with her body. Many were awakened to protocol. Once the marathon began, people understood their obligations. They provided water, food, and places to rest, as is customary. They also told stories of past runners and how they linked communities. Perhaps L’Hirondelle wanted them to feel what was lost in the adoption of modern, disembodied forms of communication.

For Vigil (2002), Rebecca Belmore scrubbed part of a Downtown Eastside (Vancouver) sidewalk, making that space sacred or acknowledging that everyplace is already sacred and just needs to be brought to notice, attention, attended to. She lit votive candles, nailed her dress to a telephone pole and struggled to free her body. She shouted out the names of Native women who went missing from that area, names written on her body. Between shouts, she stripped roses of their leaves and petals with her teeth. Rather than appealing to the state, the police, even Aboriginal authorities to help find these women and those yet to be lost, she took it to the street, calling for them herself. She occupied this space with her body—as had the missing women who preceded her—as if to say, this territory, too, is Indigenous territory.

Belmore’s performance is political both in that every artwork made by minoritized peoples can be read this way, and in the sense that it has the capacity to shift political consciousness. That being said, the success of a work of art should never be determined by its effectiveness in a realm outside of the aesthetic and the affective moment of reception. Yes, it is a political work; but it is not only this. Both L’Hirondelle’s and Belmore’s performances are poignantly absurd. They breach routine and upend pragmatic action. They inhabit our imagination and do their affective work on our minds, hearts, and bodies even when we are unaware of their operations. They move and persuade us through feeling rather than reason. And we are helpless before their power. Art is not politics by other means but a means of feeling our way beyond the political. Belmore’s actions are not political in that they are not telling anyone what to do. They have no plan or ideology but rage and care, frustration and love—a deep sense of humanity, violated.

An unfamiliar and moving act: Tahltan artist Peter Morin and his new friends from Regina spend the day washing books. [17] The several dozen volumes contain stories about Indigenous people by non-Indigenous authors—fictional and non-fictional accounts that misrepresent and misshape real people. Eight children, women, and men cleanse each page with wet medicine. The tone is serious, mournful, joyful, loving, meditative, communal, and filled with song and drumming.

Rather than destroy the books, or engage their contents by reading and writing corrections, Morin and his friends take aesthetic action, moving themselves and observers through physical care to awareness and symbolic restoration. They embody and display a non-colonial [18] imaginary, one that is respectful of others and their objects, of work and being, but does not engage the colonial as expected—on and with their terms. The action honours the authors’ work as human labour; a search for meaning, however limited and inadvertently harmful; and it honours the books as things, as once-were-trees. Each volume is carried to a large blanket in the gallery, left to dry, and their transfigured meanings to be contemplated by visitors. Two months later, the texts are collected, removed and buried in sites scattered across the land.

While Peter Morin is Tahltan, and Decolonize My Heart is informed by his nation’s world-view and some of its practices, the performance is a work of art; it is not primarily a work of (his) culture. It includes and exceeds both customary Tahltan cultural practices and dominant art world practices. Significantly, Decolonize My Heart was not performed on Tahltan land but in Southern Saskatchewan, in Treaty Four territory. We don’t yet have a name for this sort of work. Because it is produced by an Aboriginal person, is in-formed but not limited by his customary culture, and is presented in places other than his home territory, we can begin to understand it by recognizing it as Indigenous art.

Indigenous is not a synonym for Aboriginal. The word refers to a separate political category of persons who find they have more in common with Native peoples in other territories than they do with their colonizing neighbours. As a result, they network with each other across time zones, they produce relationships, thought, and work within a discourse that both emerges from and exceeds the imaginaries of both their individual nations and the settler states that surround them. The word art is inadequate but convenient. I use the word here to refer to creative production that in its making or display belongs to an inter-national contemporary aesthetic discourse. These objects and actions, their use and meanings, include and exceed their cultures. They are designed to express and shape thought, feeling, sensation, and intuition in persons both inside and outside their home culture’s world-view. In this sense, both Indigenous and art, and especially Indigenous art, are not land-based or primarily political; they are mobile, contingent, discursive, even virtual. [19]

I would like to conclude by considering what these Indigenous performance artists and this larger, more active sense of territory could mean for non-Indigenous co-habitants and future possibilities for non-colonial performance. On January 16, 2013, seven young men walked 1,600 km from Whapmagoostui, their northern Quebec reserve, to Ottawa in support of Idle No More and Chief Theresa Spence’s hunger strike. They reached their destination on March 25. Later that year, in homage to the Nishiyuu walkers, Ayumi Goto performed in sonorous shadows of Nishiyuu. For 105 days, she ran 1568.5 km through places in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Ontario. The work might have hardly looked like art at all, just looked like a runner running, if it were not for the fact that she had a sound system strapped to her body which broadcast Indigenous singers singing, including Cheryl L’Hirondelle.

The mythology of settlement is of agents coming to tame a wild place: settling the West. Those who identify with this story—Canadians who take an unproblematized pride in their ancestors’ participation in ‘nation-building’—can rightly be called settlers. But what of recent migrants, folks who adopt the burden of Canadian citizenship; are they settlers in the same sense? If they accept and inhabit the Canadian myth and assume the benefits of Indigenous dispossession, then, yes, they are settlers. Are there alternatives? At least from the Indigenous perspective, the point of the treaties was to share territory. The Indigenous signers could not have anticipated that the colonists had such a radically different sense of territory as property. To be a settler is to see and use land as commodity. To embody territory as Indigenous people do, to co-habit space in our ways with us, is not to settle the land, to impose a will upon it that does not arise from territory or the customs of its Indigenous stewards, it is to settle oneself, accommodating one’s self to territory not your own.

In the moments of her performance, in the space of art, Goto is unsettled, migrating Indigenous territory, performing domain with a non-colonial aesthetic attitude. Does she find something of and for herself there; does she discover herself disconnected; does she lose herself in the passage? We can only imagine. As art, it is a lesson whose definitive meaning is unknown to the viewer and performer alike. However, the attempt to home without settling, to find a route for one’s self without exploiting the territory, to run with Indigenous accompaniment, all suggest an empathetic relationship.

A difference in Goto’s and L’Hirondelle’s running concerns community. Goto takes on the Nishiyuu run as a necessary, personal burden, and she wears the songs of Native others, not to become them but to enact alliance. The act is empathetic, literally putting her self in the place of others. Of course, the danger is in displacing those others with your more privileged self. To avoid this, Goto’s gentle passage was nearly invisible; she ran as a “sonorous shadow” that did not displace those she honoured, or disturb the peace. The work’s fuller meanings come when illuminated in artist talks or texts, when it becomes contextualized, legible, and poignant in those (mostly non-Indigenous) safer spaces. This is primarily an interior work, a novel and therapeutic necessity. Goto’s run is a solo act; an obsessive performance she felt compelled to do—and its meanings are deeply personal. We are welcomed to consider this interior complexity but not to pretend to know it from the inside. A side-effect of this interiority is that her relation to the communities she ran through was incidental, if not alienated, and her relation to Indigenous communities was symbolic and virtual. [20]

L’Hirondelle’s run is also novel and therapeutic, but the address was extra-personal. She used her moving body to engage First Nations community directly, in their territory and in their way. The poignancy of her work is its simplicity, the elegance of her research deployed, and in the reception by her participating audience. I marvel at the confidence to go into a place not her own and to make herself at home by offering a gift to the community of some thing that was theirs all along. She embodied an aspect of their history and revived a long buried response. She gave them what they didn’t know they needed.

Both performances are non-colonial aesthetic actions. And, eventually, each will be reproduced, re-presented under the protection of the predominantly non-Indigenous art and academic worlds, and do their important symbolic work there and beyond. Not all of us need to do socially engaged work. (Academic and virtual territories can also include Indigenous domains!) But we do need to acknowledge that there is an important difference between having as a primary goal the circulation of representations of our work in academic circles, and seeing such circulation as a necessary byproduct of our aesthetic labour. In L’Hirondelle’s performance the people living on the Makwa Sahgaiehcan reserve were the audience, participants, and critics of the work—their critical aesthetic engagement was the goal and meaning of the performance.

Following my earlier argument concerning the essentializing of the reserve as the prime locus of the authentically Indigenous, I am not advocating that artists descend on these communities with their art. But perhaps the future of non-colonial aesthetic work will shift from looking to the non-Indigenous academy and colonial galleries as the primary sites of Indigenous discourse and legitimation, and instead turn to Indigenous audiences, partners, and domains for non-colonial critical aesthetic engagement. Instead of taking everything upon our individual selves we can share the burden, but also our gifts and pleasures, with our Indigenous communities wherever we find them.

Notes

[1] I am Métis.

[2] In writing this essay, I am deeply indebted to conversations with Sherry Farrell Racette, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Sylvia Ziemann, Dylan Miner, Cathy Mattes, Tanya Harnett, Ayumi Goto, Jolene Richard, and Cecily Nicholson. This doesn’t mean they agree with what I’ve written, but they were instrumental in asking questions and telling stories that occasioned some of these thoughts.

[3] For example: “…we must force the Settlers to acknowledge our existence and the integrity of our connection to the land.” Taiaiake Alfred, Wasáse: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 19.

[4] Michael Asch, On Being Here to Stay: Treaties and Aboriginal Rights in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2014).

[5] It shouldn’t be contested, but of course it frequently is. Thomas Isaac, Aboriginal Law: Cases. Materials and Commentary, 2^nd edition (Saskatoon: Purlich Publishing, 1999), 1.

[6] Leroy Little Bear, “Foreword” to Taiaiake Alfred, Wasáse: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 9.

[7] Evelyn Peters and Chris Andersen, “Canada: A Half Century in Review,” Indigenous in the City: Contemporary Identities and Cultural Innovation (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2013), 29.

[8] Evelyn Peters and Chris Andersen, “Introduction,” Indigenous in the City: Contemporary Identities and Cultural Innovation (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2013), 8.

[9] This is so for my family. The “Garneau” district in Edmonton and the “Garneau” section of St. Paul both acknowledge my great, great grand-father Laurent and his family. Settlers who eventually took over both properties made the designations.

[10] Personal recollection of a conversation with Brian Martin, Deputy Director of the Institute of Koorie Education, Geelong Waurn Ponds Campus, Victoria, Australia, at the Universities Art Association of Canada, Toronto, OCAD University, 2014.

[11] Peters and Andersen 2013, 8.

[12] I am indebted to conversations with Dylan Miner and his performances of visiting as an Indigenous way of knowing.

[13] Cited in Alfred 2009, 32.

[14] Much art, particularly performance art, is as if. Peter Morin, Adrian Stimson, and I, in our individual performances with imperialist statues, perform as if these metal and stone objects have a form of life, and that they are perturbed by our communion with them.

[15] In her performance ka amaciwet piwapisko waciya: climbing the iron mountains(2002, 2008).

[16] Candice Hopkins, “Interventions in Traditional Territories: ‘Cistemaw Iyiniw Ohci,’ A Performance by Cheryl L’Hirondelle,” Aboriginal Performance 2:1 (Spring 2005).

[17] The performance, entitled Decolonize My Heart, was part of the exhibition Moving Forward, Never Forgetting at the Mackenzie Art Gallery, curated by Michelle LaVallee and David Garneau (February 28–April 19, 2015), in Regina, Saskatchewan.

[18] As opposed to de-, anti- or post-colonial engagement, non-colonial refers to pre-colonial knowledge, culture, etc. that persists into the present, but also to any other attempts of active ignorance of the colonial—to behave and create otherwise.

[19] This way of thinking encourages Indigenous articulation of non-land-based exploration and construction of virtual territories. Especially check out the art and thought of Jason Lewis & Skawennati Fragnito.

[20] It is important to note that most of Goto’s recent performances are collaborative, often with Indigenous participation. She is a gentle but fearless explorer whose performances embody the complexity of non-settling.

Wanda Nanibush

Survivance in Indigenous Media Arts

Wanda Nanibush

Indigenous media art encompasses a large field of activity, including performative and experimental video, sound and radio art, media-integrated performance art, [1] and new media installations. Artists working in these mediums are often practicing what Gerald Vizenor calls survivance, a neologism which combines “survival, resistance and presence.” [2] This term describes practices that rewrite colonial histories from the perspective of Indigenous experience, visual culture, and oral history. In a media arts context, survivance also incorporates experimentation with medium in order to represent Indigenous worldviews which often favour non-linear narrative; visual abstractions of historical events; interconnectedness of body and mind, nature and culture; the politics of space; as well as cyclical and geological philosophies of time. Additionally, it can refer to practices that challenge stereotypes and molar identifications [3] based on colonial understandings of who and what Indigenous means.

Indigenous media artists have to contend with over 500 years of colonial representations that have reduced their subjectivity, histories, and cultural continuity to an absence. Indigenous people just don’t count in the flow of time because our authenticity and identity were defined by our culture before contact with Europeans. We just don’t count in the configuration of space except as a necessary obstacle to progress. We just don’t count in the narratives of the present except as a statistical embarrassment to modern democracies. Media artists are part of the resistance to the colonial frame, and part of the processes of decolonization that root out internalized colonialism in ourselves. With profound determination and active imaginations, they create new ways of being Indigenous today.

Some media artists use or commune with technology as a way to communicate with the spiritual realm of ancestors and manitous. [4] Media artist and theorist Victor Masayesva defines the Indigenous aesthetic as “the language of intercession through which we are heard by and commune with the Ancients.” [5] Visual artist and theorist Robert Houle seconds this formulation in his seminal essay “The Spiritual Legacy of the Ancient Ones,” in which he describes contemporary Indigenous art as being continuous with the ancient traditions of our peoples. In his words, “Land, spirit, power—those gifts left us by the ancients, the ‘antiquity’ of this hemisphere—are the cornerstones upon which their descendants, the artists [...] have built a monument to those benefactors.” [6] These theoretical approaches to dealing with colonialism’s interruption of Indigenous temporal, spatial, and cultural flow here on Turtle Island shift the discourse from one of loss to cultural continuity and survivance. Media allows for Indigenous voices and ways of being to become present within contemporary art worlds and yet also challenge its very boundaries. Additional boundaries challenged by this presence are the West’s definition of Indigenous pre-contact tradition, and any internally colonized positions that don’t allow for cultural change. The challenge lies in articulating the concepts of change, chance, and transformation at the heart of Indigenous traditions without resorting to an apolitical position where culture is completely up to the (post-modern) individual’s creative prerogative. Tradition in this sense becomes an ever-changing process (rather than static information transferred generationally) that is checked against actual living individuals with historical and cultural memory. Artists need freedom from rule-bounded understandings of culture, and knowledge keepers within the culture need verification of what artists call tradition. Ultimately this push and pull with tradition, and colonialism’s interference in it, is part of the creation process for artists, and it influences some of the most exciting work being made today. A complete history of this growing field is necessary, but is impossible for the scope of this essay. Nor can I give a complete index of media artists; rather, I will concentrate on some of the artists whose work I have seen, worked with, curated, and been inspired by. [7]

A constant source of inspiration for contemporary artists is the work of Mi’kmaq, Beothuck, and Euro-Canadian artist, Mike MacDonald (1941–2006), from Nova Scotia. He was the first Indigenous artist working in media arts in the country now called Canada. MacDonald experimented with television monitors and used them to create a Gitxsan Wetsuwet’en-style totem pole in Electronic Totem (1987). Marie Morgan described the work from her point of view as follows:

Mountains, an old woman drumming and sing-speaking stories, totem poles, longhouses, the living animals depicted on the totems, and lots of clean, clear water; a simple memorable piece which omits the painful side—the material poverty, scarred forests, and inferior land on which most Natives live. The political goal is to build a sense of self-worth which people do not get if the places in which they live are continually reflected to them in the negativity of mass media. [8]

The video playing on the monitors shows community members and the animal life of their lands. In 1977 the Gitxsan declaration stated that:

Since time immemorial, we, the Gitxsan and Carrier People of Kitwanga, Kitseguecla, Gitanmaax, Sikadoak, Kispiox, Hagwilget, and Moricetown, have exercised Sovereignty over our land. We have used and conserved the resources of our land with care and respect. We have governed ourselves. We have governed the land, the waters, the fish, and the animals. This is written on our totem poles. It is recounted in our songs and dances. It is present in our language and in our spiritual beliefs. Our Sovereignty is our Culture. [9]

MacDonald portrays the viewpoint carved onto the poles in a beautiful visual language rendered via video and monitor. In other words, the totem pole is one example of the Gitxsan Wetsuwet’en people of British Columbia’s relationship with their land and how that land structures their relationship with each other. When the land is threatened their sovereignty is threatened.

MacDonald’s interest in using technology as a conduit for examining our relationship with the earth and non-human beings is accomplished through sculptural metaphors. In Seven Sisters (1989) seven monitors of various heights are placed in a row on the floor. The installation of monitors simulates the elevation of the Seven Sisters mountain range, which also gives its name to the work. Videos of the life found in the mountains, from animals to plants, is accompanied by the songs of Gitxsan elder Mary Johnson. The land, Gitxsan lifeblood, is also shown following the clearcutting of its forests. The installation is a strange coalescence of nature and technology. Much of Macdonald’s work deals with the destruction of the Earth facilitated by a human-centred worldview, which is also the purview of environmentalism. However, he goes further than the environmental movement typically does because he shows how Indigenous cultures are attacked along with the land from which they spring. Colonialism in its contemporary form is still about land.

MacDonald’s work is often described as being concerned with nature and the environment, but this misses the fact that he expresses a worldview in which humans are not separate from the environment, or nature from culture. His concerns are the interdependence and interconnectedness of living things—be they human, animal, or the Earth—and the destruction of the biosphere. As an urban artist, he sees the loss of this worldview or its absence in modern cities and uses art to communicate a different way of being. Like media artists Ahasiw Maskegon-Iskwew (1958–2006) and Cheryl L’Hirondelle, he attended bush school and learned by listening to elders’ stories and teachings. One of his most famous works, The Butterfly Garden, came from his acquired knowledge of Indigenous medicines. He discovered that butterfly nectar plants often have medicinal value, and created a series of butterfly gardens in urban centres starting in the 1990s. MacDonald said of this work, “You know with these new gardens, I am hopefully providing a space where people can focus on and think about questions that I feel we need to think about so as to come up with some better alternatives. Our cities are becoming pretty ugly in terms of what happens there.” [10] He actively exhibits the applicability of Indigenous knowledge for the present. His media installations, like his gardens, create environments where audiences can contemplate nature more in depth. In 1994, he created a single channel work, Touched by the Tears of a Butterfly, in which visitors could sit in a rocking chair and watch a video of the lifecycle of a butterfly, from chrysalis to flight, as well as a group of butterflies feeding. In 2001, the work was installed with seven rocking chairs painted according to the video colour bar, drawing attention to the ideas of reference and reproduction in re-presented life via technology.

Cree media and performance artist Archer Pechawis honoured MacDonald in a media-integrated performance, For Mike, in 2010. I had invited Pechawis to create a new work in response to the twentieth anniversary of the Kahnesatake resistance of 1990 (the Oka Crisis) as part of a larger curatorial project, Mapping Resistances. On a base of synthetic golf green, he set up four TVs playing a segment from Alanis Obomsawin’s Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance in which non-Native Quebecers threw rocks at the Mohawk people crossing the Mercer Bridge, near Kahnawake. It was an instance of violent hatred against Indigenous People which the police did not nothing to suppress. All the violence was for a golf course, which dramatically underscores our vulnerability and invisibility to Canadian society. Pechawis proceeded to smash the screens with a golf club in a moment of intense response and cathartic release. Afterwards, the audience was led into a dark room where the same video clip was played in reverse so that the rocks flew back into the hands of the throwers, and were then placed on the ground. This image of peace was heartbreaking for its very unreality.

Performance art and video have been bedfellows ever since Nam June Paik videotaped the pope in 1965. [11] The use of performance in media art brings the body into play, and often makes visible the repercussions of the past within the present. In the case of Archer Pechawis’s work, it can also go further and speak to the future, or even from the future. In For Mike, the future could be defined by an end to the violence against Indigenous peoples and the suppression of our sovereignty. In 2012, Pechawis created Our Beautiful Future for another large performance art curatorial project I did in Toronto called House of Wayward Spirits. In this work, he chose to speak from the future. The audience watched a live feed of small plants growing in a desolate landscape. Pechawis appeared as the voice of the live feed, the one controlling the camera, showing us the new world. The premise was that he had left us all behind in order to travel to the future and was telling us how it was there. This future comes after the destruction that MacDonald’s work speaks to. In a utopian spirit, Pechawis says “I’m calling you from the future, and the news is good. All the trouble with colonialism is over.” (At this the audience laughed). “We got our land back.” (Again much laughter). Pechawis shows that even if the future doesn’t look good, “this meagre garden is a miracle.” The poignancy of the performance came through a lot of laughter by drawing attention to the deep desire for a “beautiful future” where colonialism was over and “the future is green.” The beauty of technology is this very ability to time travel in the present, to collapse the distances between people and places, and in so doing, make desire visible.

The trauma of colonialism that lives in the body of the colonized and is passed down generationally has been the subject of many artists’ work, starting with one our best theorists of Indigenous new media, Ahasiw Maskegon-Iskwew. Maskegon-Iskwew also uses the image of the 1990 Kahnawake stoning in his media-integrated performance White Shame (1992). After reading aloud a long prose work on the history of colonial violence, he smears mud on a projected picture of the Quebec police who allowed the stoning to take place. It’s important that he uses the word shame and not guilt, because as many Indigenous and artists of colour have pointed out, guilt leads to inaction whereas shame requires a certain taking up of responsibility for the event. After the cataloguing of events that should give rise to “white shame,” he goes into a more ceremonial mode, crushing charcoal between stones, painting his body, and finally literally sewing feathers into the flesh of his chest. Symbols wrought in pain are used to suture the images and words from the first half of the performance onto his body, and by empathetic extension those of the audience members as well. [12] Marcia Crosby, in her review of the performance, concludes that:

Through the self-consciousness of performance, spectators grasp that a particular history is being told and remembered by someone in a particular time and place for a reason. This work is, among other things, an anti-celebration of Columbus’ “discovery.” Thus Ahasiw contributes to a multi-vocal history, where no single, overarching meaning emerges unchallenged. [13]

Throughout the performance, Ahasiw repeats the word free, which stands out as a call to action, an ironic remembrance, and a plea. The feathers in his chest speak to the strength and resilience expressed by our efforts to attain a freedom we always had prior to colonialism. Decolonization requires the very unearthing of that freedom from within the bodies that carry its loss.

In an art world that still marginalizes Indigenous production of and ways of conceptualizing art, Indigenous artists write their own art history by theorizing, contextualizing and reviewing each other’s work in the written form, and also by citing and remaking each other’s work. For instance, one of the next generation of artists, Siksika artist Adrian Stimson, has returned to Ahasiw’s work by re-performing and re-contextualizing it for the twenty-first century, specifically in the work White Shame Re-visited (2012). Stimson re-presented elements from the original performance in which Ahasiw worked with clay, wrote over images, and pierced his flesh. I saw the installation version in Elwood Jimmy’s exhibition Lovesick Child, produced by imagineNative Media Arts Festival and A Space Gallery in 2015. For Stimson, “This gentle yet visceral performance struck a cord, it spoke to shame, our combined histories, the church, intergenerational pain, conflicts such as Oka, it spoke to acts of sacrifice for the greater good, the idea of transcendence, the seven generations, it was an act of revealing, regeneration and renewal.” [14] Stimson is an artist who understands the connections between our bodies and the destruction of the land and way of life. For instance, he has worked extensively with the spirit and history of the buffalo, creating an awareness of the relationship between their destruction and the destruction of the Blackfoot people.

Anishinaabe multidisciplinary artist Rebecca Belmore creates single and multiple channel media installations in which her body becomes a presence and force against the erasure of Indigenous bodies in general. She uses her body like earth, as a tool of creation and transformation. In Apparition (2013), she stares at the viewer through the video screen with her mouth duct-taped. This enactment of silencing speaks to her own loss of her mother tongue, which takes place for many us because of the incarceration of generations of First Nations people in residential schools. The looped video shows Belmore moving from a cross-legged seated pose to a prostrated prayer pose, which implies the violent imposition of Christianity. Residential schools were one such place this imposition took place. The forcing of the body out of its Indigenous state, seated cross-legged on the floor, into Christian prayer viscerally renders colonialism written on the body. Belmore uses her body in a deeply personal way, as a site of trauma, memory, and witnessing. Violence is not an abstraction; colonial violence is concretized in names, bodies, objects, colors, and actions. However, the looping video allows for the narrative to also run in the opposite direction, so that the prayer pose is shifted back into cross-legged state, implying that the Indigenous body also contains resistance and knowledge, not just violence and loss.

As a philosophy student and a former Anishnaabemowin speaker who had her language stolen, I have always understood the loss of languages to be the loss of alternative worlds. Mixed-blood Cree Métis media artist Cheryl L’Hirondelle works from within a Nêhiyawin perspective (Cree worldview) which she learned from elders in Northern Saskatchewan and by delving into the language. L’Hirondelle’s work opens up the complexity of her culture’s conceptual universe to an audience or participant through combining song, cultural symbols, her own body, and technology. In an eloquent and moving essay, “Codetalkers Recounting Signals of Survival,” L’Hirondelle connects ancient Indigenous practices (some still practiced today) to technologies like the web. An example she uses is the fact that the physical makeup of the first telephone lines used for the Internet were placed along roads that were in turn old colonial trade routes that were in turn pre-contact survival and communication routes for Indigenous nations. She takes this further, into the conceptual realm, by showing these routes to be modes of communication and connection like the web that they gave birth to. In her own words, “The World Wide Web continues to be a place where we act out age-old ways and protocols as much embedded in that source code as in our own genetic make-up.” [15] And as Jason Lewis and Skawannati Fragnito point out in their work with AbTeC: Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace, [16] it is important for Indigenous people to be the creators not just of content but also of the technology itself, and every link between the two, because the worldview of the creator will determine the boundaries of what a technology can do. [17]

L’Hirondelle’s essay belongs to a collection edited by Steve Loft and Kerry Swanson that contains a number of essays theorizing media art from artists’ perspectives. In fact, this field has largely been theorized by the artists themselves. The artists Jackson 2Bears, Pechawis, and L’Hirondelle have raised the question of whether technology has a spirit or not. In most Indigenous languages, the world is divided into animate and inmate. In general, the animate are those things with spirit (I understand this from within an Anishinaabe point of view and can not pretend to know all the many nations’ ways of understanding this idea). The concept of inanimate things having spirit poses a problem for western theorists that is best summed up by Elder Basil Johnson:

Perhaps, instead of regarding “Indians” as superstitious for positing “spirits” in trees or in other inanimate or insensate objects, they might have credited them with insight for having perceived a vital substance or essence that imparted life, form, growth, healing, and strength in all things, beings, and places. They might have understood that the expression “manitouwan” meant that an object possessed or was infused with an element or a feature that was beyond human ken; they might have understood that “w’manitouwih” meant that he or she was endowed with extraordinary talents, and that it did not mean that he or she was a spirit. [18]

Jackson 2Bears, speaking from a Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) perspective, looks at the way False Face masks created by hand can take on spirit. “To my ancestors, these masks were considered to be living entities, animate artifacts, and sacred technologies that we used to access the spirit world for the purpose of healing and to ask for guidance.” [19] Colonial thought often assigned our inferiority based on a denigration, and in some cases fear, of the way we speak of inanimate things as having a spirit. As quantum physics has come closer to an Indigenous understanding of the universe, it becomes possible for artists to bring aspects of their practice that do not fit western rationalism or Christian perspectives to the fore. Blackfoot thinker Leroy Little Bear has a unique place speaking between science and Blackfoot thought and has had a strong influence on the contemporary validation of Indigenous knowledge and ways of knowing. Ironically, the more we destroy the Earth the more science turns to Indigenous people for knowledge of it. Science was used to argue that Indigenous people were uncivilized and not fully human, which aided in the dispossession of Indigenous lands. As peoples who are completely comfortable with the unknown, the mysterious, the invisible, the bodily, and do not want to separate themselves from it, but understand it as intrinsic to our own survival, the idea that life is sacred in all of its manifestations may save us all. It’s old technology but it may be better than waiting around for new technology to clean up the mess we made. Can we decolonize how technology itself is framed?

Technology is not a thing but a potentiality activated by what it is in relation to, such as the body of the artist or a spirit derived from a specific context and location, like the tree that lends its spirit to the mask in 2Bears’s story. Part of the discourse on modernity has been technology’s ever-increasing reordering of human bodies, capabilities, and perceptions as well as its role in mediating (disconnecting) relationships. The techno-lovers speak to its utopian capacities to unite people across distance and difference, its potential to clean up the mess it creates. However, the development of technology and its uses are driven by market forces and new discoveries. The users only come into play once the technology is developed. A devastating example is nuclear energy, which produced both the atom bomb and supposedly clean energy. That so-called clean energy produces the most indestructible and toxic waste ever known to humans, not to mention the threat it poses to our water supply if/when the nuclear plants break down. The use of the technology wasn’t questioned before the drive to split the atom. Seventy percent of uranium deposits worldwide are on Indigenous lands, which is a direct threat to our bodies and our cultures. Indigenous communities suffering from cancer, birth defects, and destruction of their traditional food sources caused by uranium mining and nuclear waste disposal feel a kinship with the Japanese survivors of the atomic bomb, and now of the Fukushima reactor meltdown. If progress, profit, and discovery (colonial approaches) were not the driving forces, would we have split the atom? Indigenous peoples have always been early adapters to technology, but with cultural survivance and the value of life at the forefront. It is not the technology itself that is important but what kind of life it facilitates. Whether the tech is wood, metal, analogue, digital, a network, a computer, a pipe, etc, the Indigenous worldviews that animates it will continue. The technology in this way becomes the conduit for an Indigenous future. Hopefully, it’s green and we get our land back.

Notes

[1] This is a term I use to describe a performance which incorporates time- or screen-based media as an essential element.

[2] “Up Close with Gerald Vizenor,” Legacy Magazine (University of Minnesota: Summer 2015). See also Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance, (Hanover; London: Wesleyan University Press, 1994) and Fugitive Poses: Native American Scenes of Absence and Presence (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998).

[3] For a discussion of molar identification in Gilles Deleuze see Arun Saldanha and Jason Michael Adams, Deleuze and Race (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 146.

[4] Manitou is a word in Anishinaabemowin (Ojibway language) and other Algonquian languages for spirit. It is hard to translate into English. Anishinaabe elder Basil Johnston says it could mean “Mystery, essence, substance, matter, supernatural spirit, anima, quiddity, attribute, property, God, deity, godlike, mystical, incorporeal, transcendental, invisible reality.” Basil Johnston, The Manitous: The Supernatural World of the Ojibway (Toronto: Harper Collins, 1995), 242.

[5] Victor Masayesva, “Indigenous Experimentalism,” Magnetic North: Canadian Experimental Video, Jenny Lion, ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 232.

[6] Written as a catalogue essay for the first major exhibition of contemporary Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Canada, Land, Spirit, Power. Robert Houle, “The Spiritual Legacy of the Ancient Ones,” Land, Spirit, Power (Ottawa: The National Gallery of Canada, 1992).

[7] I started curating/programming media arts in 2001 in festivals and galleries.

[8] Marie Morgan, “Revisions,” Vanguard 17:2 (April/May 1988): 18-19. Quoted in MacDonald’s biography.

[9] Karen Wonders, “Skeena River Totem Poles,” Cathedral Grove (October 2010).

[10] John Grande, “Mike MacDonald: Healing Garden,” Landviews Online Journal of Landscape, Art and Design.

[11] Tom Sherman points out the myth of this origin story in “The Premature Birth of Video Art,” Experimental Television Center (2 January 2007).

[12] See Archer Pechawis, “New Traditions: Post-Oka Aboriginal Performance Art in Vancouver” Live At the End of the Century: Aspects of Performance Art in Vancouver, Bryce Canyon, ed. (Vancouver: Visible Art Society, 2000).

[13] Marcia Crosby, “Ahasiw K. Makegon-Iskew: White Shame (1992),” Ghostkeeper.

[14] “Ghost Keeper,” On Main Gallery.

[15] Cheryl L’Hirondelle, “Codetalkers Recounting Signals of Survival,” Coded Territories: Tracing Indigenous Pathways in New Media Art, Steve Loft and Kerry Swanson, eds. (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2014), 153.

[16] Jason Lewis and Skawannati Fragnito, AbTeC: Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace.

[17] Jason Edward Lewis, “A Better Dance and Better Prayers: Systems, Structures, and the Future Imaginary in Aboriginal Media,” Coded Territories: Tracing Indigenous Pathways in New Media Art, Steve Loft and Kerry Swanson, eds. (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2014), 55–77.

[18] Basil Johnston, “One Generation from Extinction,” Native Writers and Canadian Writing W.H. New, ed. (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1990), 11–12.

[19] Jackson 2Bears, “My Post-Indian Technological Autobiography,” Coded Territories: Tracing Indigenous Pathways in New Media Art, Steve Loft and Kerry Swanson, eds. (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2014), 17.