Indigenous New Media Decolonizing Canadian Cities

I had a conversation with Jessica Jacobson-Konefall about her research entitled Decolonizing Settler Legacies: Indigenous New Media Art in Canadian Cities. Jessica is a PhD Candidate in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University and a visiting affiliate at The Center for Globalization and Cultural Studies. Her research focuses on how First Nations new media art shapes and defies concepts of civic space and related notions of identity and community in Winnipeg.

Her research The Decolonizing Settler Legacies: Indigenous New Media Art in Canadian Cities has three objectives:

1)      to understand how notions of identity and community currently function vis-à-vis what Sherene Razack calls civic “place-images” (2002) in Canada, how these mobilize civic practices and power relations in settler society;

2)      to analyze Indigenous new media art practices (video art, digital photographs, multimedia installations) within cities: how civic “place images” interact with Indigenous epistemologies in these works, reorienting prevailing notions of urban space, identity, and community for Indigenous and settler citizens; and

3)      to look at public responses to these artworks: the ways in which these artworks allow for the building of new “place-images,” towards decolonized citizenship practices in Canadian cities.

The conversation here covers aspects of New Media art, First Nations artists, and how their work intersects with city spaces. We also discussed how civic planning and design demonstrate the ideals of settler societies and how Winnipeg and its urban design also demonstrates settler principles.

To Learn More (interview & Podcast)

http://archive.org/download/JessicaJaconson-konefallIndigneousNewmediaAndSettlerSocietiesInCanadian/JessicaJacobson-konefallIndigenousNewmediaAndSettlersMixdown.mp3   

Citations

Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance; Indigenous & Atlantic Slaveries in New France

Dr Brett Rushforth is an associate professor of history and Director of Graduate Studies at the College of William and Mary in the United States. Brett has written a new book Bonds of Alliance that reviews the interactions between the settler society of New France and the Indian tribes with whom they traded.  While generally not know to the general public, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, French colonists and their Native allies participated in a slave trade that spanned half of North America, carrying thousands of Native Americans into bondage in the Great Lakes, Canada, and the Caribbean. The book looks a vast geographic and chronological scope carefully dissects the lives of various enslaved individuals and masters, this book gives voice to those who lived through the ordeal of slavery and, along the way, shaped French and Native societies.



http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/sflarch/post-contact.htm 



Rather than telling a simple story of colonial domination and Native victimization, Brett argues that Indian slavery in New France emerged at the nexus of two very different forms of slavery based on different political needs: one indigenous to North America and the other rooted in the Atlantic world. The alliances that bound French and Natives together forced a century-long negotiation over the nature of slavery and its place in early American society. Neither fully Indian nor entirely French, slavery in New France drew upon and transformed indigenous and Atlantic cultures in complex and surprising ways.

We discussed the large slave trade that existed in Indians in New France’s territories, the ideas surrounding different types of customary adoption, sexual violence, children and slavery, the marking of bodies, the terms used to describe slave (I make you my Dog), secondary wives, the political consequences (alliances) of owning Indian slaves, the idea that Indians make for bad slaves versus Africa-American slaves etc…

The book was published by the University of North Carolina Press.


To Learn More (interview & podcast)
http://archive.org/details/BrettRushforthBondsOfAllianceIndigenousAtlanticSlaveriesInNew 

Citations

Dr Bruno Cornellier discusses settler societies, colonization, and uses the example of Quebec.

Dr Cornellier gave a talk to the Native Studies dept colloquium series at the University of Manitoba on January 13, 2012. the title of his talk was OtherSettlers/Settling Other: The Contest over Nativesness in Quebec's Intercultural Debate.

BRUNO CORNELLIER holds a PhD in Communication from Concordia University (Montréal). He is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Center for Globalization and Cultural Studies (University of Manitoba) and he teaches media, film and cultural studies in the Department of English and in the Department of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Winnipeg. He has published articles about national cinema and politics of indigenous representation in the Canadian Journal of Film Studies/Revue canadienne d'études cinématographique, Nouvelles Vues and the London Journal of Canadian Studies.

https://dianabrydon.wordpress.com/2012/01/15/other-settlers-settling-others-the-contest-over-nativeness-in-quebecs-intercultural-debate/

To Learn More (Interviews as Podcast)
Part I
http://archive.org/download/DrBrunoCornellierDiscussesSettlerSocietiesColonizationAndUsesThe/BrunoCornillerPart1.mp3 

Part II
http://archive.org/download/DrBrunoCornellierDiscussesSettlerSocietiesColonizationAndUsesThe_425/BrunoCornillierPart2.mp3