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Montreal, Quebec – The Initiative for Indigenous Futures (IIF) and Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC) have partnered with Hawaii’s Kanaeokana Network to produce the fifth iteration of our acclaimed Skins Workshops on Aboriginal Storytelling and Video Game Design  [Source]. Skins 5.0 will be delivered as a free, three-week workshop for native Hawaiian participants held in Honolulu from July 17, 2017 until August 4, 2017.

IIF is a partnership of universities and community organizations dedicated to developing multiple visions of Indigenous peoples tomorrow by enabling artists, academics, youth and elders to imagine how we and our communities will look in the future. IIF was co-founded by AbTeC, a network of academics, artists, and technologists who create Aboriginally-determined territories within the webpages, online games, and virtual environments known as cyberspace. Both organizations are based at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec.

Skins is a digital media workshop for Indigenous youth offered by IIF. Participants learn different ways of using digital media and create things such as machinima – computer-generated films – and also video games.

“Skins is uniquely positioned to provide a culturally relevant, technology-based experience to Indigenous youth,” notes Jason Edward Lewis, Director of IIF and? co-director of AbTeC. “Students are guided to hold, adapt, and engage with their cultural knowledges as both recipients and creators. Our goal with the Skins workshops is to empower Indigenous youth both as individuals navigating a technology-saturated world and as members of contemporary Indigenous nations and societies.”

Skins’ curriculum first asks students to reflect on their relationship with traditional storytelling. With this knowledge, students can then imagine new ways to tell these stories, such as virtual environments and video games. Moving forward, the workshop focuses on skills that are necessary for videogame and virtual environment creation, such as game design, art direction, 3D modeling and animation, sound, and computer programming.

AbTeC has facilitated four other Skins workshops, beginning in September 2008. An interdisciplinary team including game-industry professionals, artists, support staff and Aboriginal mentors guide students through the intensive curriculum. The result of everyone’s hard work is a playable videogame, representing knowledge transmission, translation, and immersion.

Skawennati, artist and co-director of AbTeC, further notes, “we want youth to come away from this experience with a deepened understanding of themselves as co-creators of their shared identity and culture. Another aim of Skins is teaching skills such as game design and programming, which are in turn used as ways to Indigenize media that are relevant to youth. In this way, our youth are well positioned to direct their futures.”

IIF and AbTeC personnel will work with members of the Kanaeokana Network to deliver the workshop. Students will draw on a shared mo’olelo, or story, that they have chosen together. The partners intend to “facilitate workshops and similar projects in the future, with the goal of creating generational abundance,” writes Kanaeokana co-founder Kamehameha Schools [Source]. This intention will ensure that Skins 5.0 cultivates intergenerational, intracultural exchange. IIF and AbTeC are thrilled by our current collaboration and look forward to spending time with the participating youth.

For more information on Skins 5.0, visit the workshop’s blog at http://skins.abtec.org/skins5.0/. The team will be providing updates on the workshop’s progress,  course materials, and reflections on the experience.

For more information about the Initiative for Indigenous Futures and Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace, visit https://indigenousfutures.net/ and http://abtec.org/.

As part of my work I was able to attend a panel discussion at the Concordia Film Festival called “Getting there: parity & diversity in the film industry.” The event featured four panelists, Henri Pardo, actor and creator of Black Wealth Matters; Li Li, actress and council member of Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists (ACTRA); Karina Aktouf, actress with 15 years experience in the field; and Tracey Deer, writer, director and creator of the series Mohawk Girls.

The four panelists touched on myriad topics that affected them. All stressed that there are multiple conversations taking place in front of and behind the camera; Deer discussed the importance of producers, who often gate keep the path to shows being made. Many current gatekeepers operate along a different set of values than many young, racialized creators, in that they value content that does not challenge the viewer or expose them to authentically sovereign self-expression, instead upholding a number of expectations (misogyny, racism, colonialism) that in turn create caricatures of real people. Underlying this point is the responsiveness of studios to financial considerations and further to this, a reason why diversity is at times seen as a threat to profit, even though, as Li Li noted, franchises like Fast and the Furious prove otherwise.

All of the panelists spoke to the weight of limited representation, and ways in which the systems that enable the production of film, television, and related media limit representational diversity in their design. Aktouf discussed her rising demand in front of the camera due to the changing political climate of Quebec; though this is exciting in terms of growing representation and deeper dialogue, she also discussed her experience of having been asked to play characters of different communities. Specifically, Aktouf referenced her lived experience as a woman with a specific and personal context and history, which informs the language she speaks, her accent, her body language; in this way, she discussed the political implications of lived experience, performance, and performativity while playing characters and people whose context is different from one’s own. Furthermore, Aktouf has found that, though there are more parts for her over the past few years, many of these parts have little or no dialogue, leaving her silent, silenced, or muted.

There is a parallel relationship to Li Li’s discussion of accent neutralization in acting and the double-bind that allophone, racialized actors are placed in, whereby there is a requirement to speak English/French without an accent and also the requirement whereby actors must be able to emulate other people’s’ accents. She identified this as a tool through which racial exclusion occurs. Similarly, Li notes that in her experience, racialized actors often play roles that, though said to be representative of their own community, are in reality the fantasies of a show maker. This process through which actors are made to play out the projections of others reveals the power that media productions have to affect the way people are viewed by others and even by themselves. More deeply, it represents a dynamic of control insofar as behaviour and reality of others are altered to match the projections of those who create representations.

What happens behind the camera affects the material that it produces and with these realities in mind, Pardo, Li and Deer all note the importance of owning the content and means of production. Bodies like the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN) were identified as ideal models, as they require Indigenous participation in all aspects of production and subject matter and thus ensure diversity in production and representation. Through this process, these organizations contribute to another important factor identified by the panelists, the need to create a new generation of show makers whose education and motivations are humanitarian and open to questions of sovereignty in self-representation. The panel identified the need for diverse writers as well, which would, in general, add to the authenticity and three-dimensionality of scripts.

Discussing his series, Black Wealth Matters, Pardo brought up the possibility of self-publishing, using platforms such as YouTube, as an option for moving forward and working around the structural inequalities present in mainstream media. Obviously, this point parallels the work of AbTeC in many ways. Similar to Pardo, who seeks to create dialogue between creators, facilitators, and consumers, AbTeC works to empower Indigenous peoples on online platforms and create Indigenously-determined online Indigenous spaces. Though the comparison may seem cumbersome given the differences in media and interaction with technology, I feel it’s important to consider if only to demonstrate the ways in which different people from diverse communities can resist power inequities together, which, in the end, represents co-implicated communities. Pardo reminded actors and showmakers of their responsibility to care for and cultivate their audience. In this way, actors and creators have a responsibility to empower their audiences through the creation of media that works against dehumanizing projections and caricaturization.

In closing, there was much material for consideration at the panel. The four panelists brought a surfeit of experience and analysis to a network of topics having to do with media, structural oppression, representation, and sovereignty.

Hello everyone! My name is Dion Smith-Dokkie and I recently joined Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC) as a research assistant and social media coordinator. Over the next few months I’ll be introducing the members AbTeC and the Initiative for Indigenous Futures (IIF) to you, learning about Indigeneity online and in virtual reality, and bringing you news about our work here!

I’m a member of West Moberly First Nations, a Treaty 8 nation located in northeastern British Columbia. My mother is Dane-zaa, Cree, Saulteaux, English, Scottish and Irish; my father is a white settler whose ancestors come from the British Isles. I’ve worked for various organizations as a researcher, administrator, and intern and I hold a degree in Women’s Studies from the University of Victoria. I’m currently pursuing a BFA in Studio Arts (soon to be Painting and Drawing) at Concordia University in Montreal!

I had heard of IIF and AbTeC a few years ago when I was doing some skimming on Indigenous Futurisms. My own research has focused on the creative productions of Indigenous women and 2-Spirits, using things like Indigenous literary studies and poetry, cyborg theory, and queer theory to attempt to give context to the social, political, and artistic milieux of these artists and their work.

My interests in terms of the work of IIF and AbTeC range from Indigenous presence online and in virtual platforms, gender, race and self-representation through avatars and other media, using technology to alter or extend embodiment and perception, and the material conditions of Indigenous peoples that have contributed to the development of things like the Internet, social media, and smartphones.

I’m excited to see how my time at AbTeC informs my presently new artistic practice! I am interested in exploring portraiture and embodiment, cyborg theory and Indigeneity, the relationship between the land and virtual reality, affect, cartography, love and sexuality.

Centre Never Apart’s Two-Spirit Sur-Thrivance and the Art of Interrupting Narratives, features work by Kent Monkman, Dayna Danger, Jeffrey McNeil-Seymour, Preston Buffalo, and Fallon Simard curated by Jeffrey McNeil Seymour and Michael Venus. The show’s title, Two-Spirit Sur-Thrivance references Gerald Vizenor’s survivance. Of survivance, Vizenor writes

Native survivance is an active sense of presence over absence, deracination, and oblivion; survivance is the continuance of stories, not a mere reaction, however pertinent. Survivance is greater than the right of a survivable name. Survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, detractions, obstructions, the unbearable sentiments of tragedy, and the legacy of victimry. Survivance is the heritable right of succession or reversion of an estate and, in the course of international declarations of human rights, is a narrative estate of native survivance. (Vizenor, 1)

From the outset, then, Two-Spirit Sur-Thrivance positions the works shown as continuations of Indigenous ways of knowing the world (epistemologies). The works and their creators are supported by their communities, cultures, and lands and given context by them. What interests me in this point is the interplay between hegemonic LGBTA+/QT2 (see 1) (sub)culture and culturally-embedded understandings of gender, sex and sexuality, specifically the navigations between two worlds.

What further interests me are the worlds created by the artworks. The work of the artists becomes personal cartography on embodiment and ethno-cultural belonging and negotiation; the show explicitly makes space for Two-Spirit artists to assert and narrate their existence. The space itself becomes a place of community-development or perhaps community envisioning, allowing viewers to weave threads between artists who produce work in diverse forms, who issue from different contexts and thus hold different ways of being Two-Spirited. Taken together, this dialogue provides outsiders with a space for education and gratitude; for insiders, a place to be reflected, witnessed.

Dayna Danger, a queer, Metis/Ojibwe/Polish artist, provided three pieces for the exhibition. A dual/split-screen video shows two people from the waist down, wearing antlers in harnesses around their hips, locking horns so as to emulate a caribou or deer. The second screen shows two people locked in an embrace, one holding the other. There are three beaded, wrestling masks made from black leather and beads. Danger works with land-based imagery as well as the visual language of BDSM; the intimate, tender, and tough aspects of her work ground the show wonderfully.

Kent Monkman’s work features prominently, including prints and preparatory sketches for various paintings – including The Impending Storm, located at the Montreal Musee des Beaux-Arts – the recently minted Team Miss Chief patch, and notably, Miss Chief’s Praying Hands, clasping, red silicone hands in the form of a daunting buttplug, all of which continue with the artist’s penetrating, devil-may-care exploration of Indigeneity, sexuality, camp and narrative.

Fallon Simard includes two videos made from analog photographs, Mercury Poisoning and TerraNullius5000, both which discuss human capacities to relate to the land and the effect of human intervention and relating on the land. The digital interventions in the photograph developed an intense metaphor for human mediation in nature.

Preston Buffalo’s prints offer colourful reflections on the show’s themes. For example, in Pink Blue we see two half-bodies covered in digitally manipulated faces, with tendrils reaching from each one to the other. The surplus of identity in conjunction with the cleft halves of a body creates an interesting commentary on belonging and embodied archives.

Jeffrey McNeil-Seymour’s Unsettling combines a red dress, which has become a symbol of justice for Indigenous women who have experienced violence and, at present, of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, with a fabric map of the Indigenous nations of Turtle Island. The combination of political impetus, cartography and decoloniality, and fibre practices results in a haunting work.

The current shows are up until June 16, 2017. Centre Never Apart is located at 7049 Rue St-Urbain, Montreal and is open to the public from 12:00 PM to 5:00 PM Saturdays.

1. Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Ally or Asexual + (indicates there are more/infinite ways of identifying) / Queer, Trans, 2-Spirit

Sources

Vizenor, Gerald Robert. Survivance: narratives of Native presence. Lincoln, Neb.: U of Nebraska Press, 2009. Print.

Nia:wen to AbTeC for allowing me to post here. It was a bit too long for a FaceBook post.

A couple of months ago, I was invited by Ondinnok to do a curtain raiser. In theatre, that’s a short performance before the main show. Catherine Joncas, director of Montreal’s first Indigenous theatre company, said she wanted to respond to Montreal’s 375th celebrations with some reminders that Indigenous presence in this place dates much longer than that. She organized an entire series called “5 minutes pour que je te dise” or, in English, “5 minutes so I can tell you”

As soon as I had heard that Michele Audette would be a Commissioner, I wanted to write her a letter.  I took this opportunity to do so. I simply stood in front of the audience, gave a brief introduction, and read it (slightly shortened, as I went way over 5 minutes!) in French. Merci to Karina Chagnon for her careful translation.

Skennen sewakwekon, Skawennati iontiats.

Bonsoir tout le monde, my name is Skawennati. I am a Kanienkehaka (Mohawk) of Kahnawake and am of the turtle clan. My mother is Brenda Dearhouse and my father is Luigi Fragnito. I wish to share with you a letter I have written to Michèle Audette, commissioner for the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.

Dear Michèle,

How are you? It has been many moons since we last spoke. I have seen in the news that you have been active, as usual! I was thrilled to learn that you would be one of the commissioners for the inquiry on the missing and murdered Indigenous women.

I have this great photograph of the two of us. It was taken in 1997, I think. We already had known each other for a couple of years. While working the Centre d’Amitie Autochtone, I had organized a march for the Journée National d’Action. I believe you were the president of Quebec Native Women at the time, and I asked you to be one of the speakers. Though I don’t remember what you said that day, I remember that you addressed the crowd in French, and I translated your words into English. I did not notice another friend, Jamie Riddell, taking pictures, but several weeks later, he gave me this photo. In it we are standing side by side, a team surrounded by our community. I hold a megaphone to my mouth, making sure your words reach the whole crowd.

I am writing today with my thoughts about why Indigenous women are disappearing.

Like me, you are the daughter of an Indigenous mother and a non-Native father. Like me, you understand how the Canadian government, through its legal system, has been complicit in the deaths of Indigenous women. Even us.

As you know, it was the Indian Act, enacted in 1876, that stripped Indian women of their status if they married non-Native men. The children of these marriages, likewise, did not have Indian status. (Of course, you also know that the converse was not true: Indian men who married non-Native women did not lose their status; Not only that, their wives gained status, and so did their children.)

Today we know that this law was meant to disrupt the matrilineal system, and, by extension, Native societies.

In effect, this law legally killed Native women, and their children. It sent a strong message across the land that Indigenous women needed to be eliminated in order for Canada to survive.

In 1985 Bill C-31 reinstated those women like our mothers, and their children. Finally, Michel, you and I were Indian in the eyes of the Federal government.

However, that amendment to the Indian Act was unable to change the original message: that Native women have no value, and should disappear.

In Kahnawake, where I was born, the Band Council refused to put my mother, myself and my siblings, on their membership list, stating that the Mohawk tradition is “Marry Out, Get Out.” But Mohawks, like the other five nations of the Iroquois confederacy, are supposedly a matrilineal society. Traditionally, when an Iroquois man and woman married, the husband would go and live in the wife’s longhouse, with her mother and sisters. Still today, clans are passed on through the mother. That tradition of “Marry Out, Get Out” started with the Indian Act.

In 48+ years since her wedding, my mother has witnessed families turning their backs on their daughters, sisters and aunties. She, and women like her, were told by their community that they were no longer wanted nor welcome in the community they had belonged to since birth. One band councilor even had the nerve to say to her group that if they wanted their status back, they should kill their husbands! Words and actions like these, have communicated to my mother, and me, that we were expendable, disposable, worthless.

Michèle, there is no doubt in my mind that this behaviour is connected to the crisis of the missing and murdered Indigenous women in this country. It is a direct legacy of Canada’s deliberate attempts to target Indigenous women in their goal of “killing the Indian”.

My old friend, fellow warrior, now you have the megaphone. And I am still right beside you, as I was 20 years ago. Nia:wen. Thank you for taking up this fight. I know you will make sure my words are heard.

With love and respect,
Skawennati

She:kon! The weather is starting to even out here in Montreal. With the start of a new season it feels like a good time to give a look into what’s been happening in the lab and a peek at what’s being planned.

The 2167 VR Projects that IIF produced were delivered on time to TIFF thanks to the hard work of the artists and our team. Look forward to seeing Scott Benesiinaabandan’s Blueberry Pie Under The Martian Sky and Postcommodity’s Each Branch Determined in the summer. Keep an eye on this space as well as our social media, where we will announce the details about the exhibition.

There are going to be some new faces around the lab. This spring, AbTeC will host Hannah Claus,artist and friend, for a short artist residency. Michelle Brown, PhD student at U Hawaii in Indigenous Politics and Future Studies, will have a residency for several weeks early this summer. Michelle will be in the studio to learn the ins and outs of what AbTeC does as she is covering our projects for her dissertation.

Jasmin Winter is an MA student from the University of Winnipeg who will be joining us from April into June. She won the best paper award from the International Conference on Sustainable Development 2016. In additions to coordinating IIF’s Symposium of the Future Imaginary, Jasmin will be taking over the social media coordinator responsibilities while we continue to look for someone to take the job on more permanently.

A warm welcome to all!

Skawennati has a team together and is beginning pre-production on a new machinima project exploring another significant Iroquois story. New tools and methods are being considered, so it’s an exciting time.

Some fun plans are in the works for a movie night. Research Assistant Roxanne Sirois suggested that we have an internal movie night to watch Indigenous films and other flicks that match up with AbTeC related themes like sci-fi. It will hopefully be a good opportunity to socialize and add to our knowledge base.

We’re saying goodbye to our social media coordinator Emilee Gilpin as she leaves for an internship in Vancouver. She did some great work taking care of our social media accounts and we wish her the best.

We’re gearing up for another productive summer and hope that you’ll keep an eye out for updates going forward!

She:kon! Spring has arrived here in Montreal and is re-energizing everyone.

March 31st, 2017 was the final Future Imaginary Lecture PRAIRIE FISH FUTURES: Métis Legal Traditions and Refracting Extinction. Zoe Todd spoke vibrantly about fish, weaving stories and making connections to current issues with nature and politics.

The lecture opened with Skawennati welcoming Zoe to the territory and Jason introducing her. Zoe Todd is Métis from Amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton) in the Treaty Six Area of Alberta, Canada. She writes about Indigeneity, art, architecture, decolonization and healing in urban contexts. She also studies human-animal relations, colonialism and environmental change in northern Canada.

She started with a “speculative fish-ction” story starring the Ness Namew, an energetic and driven character who carries stories and documents that support her global “anti-colonial journey.” Fish have been witness to all actions taken by humans and have their own ideas about human actions and politics. The story is delivered with enthusiasm and is a delight to listen to in full.

Along with this story Zoe has made illustrations of various fish including the Ness Namew that she showed her captive audience. The images were loose and fun and each fish had their name and a brief background to go with them.

She spoke about sturgeon and how they can live up to 150 years if they’re healthy and what that timeline could encompass. They are now nearly gone from the North Saskatchewan river where she grew up and many other fish are at risk in Alberta and across the globe. With the possible threat of a sixth mass extinction event, what can be learned from the fish that have survived numerous extinction events?

Much like the trunk of a tree can show how many years it lived, the ear bone of a fish can tell the story of that fish it came from. She suggested looking at sturgeon as temporal travelers and to think about the different ways that time can be measured that may not have been considered before.

She spoke about Blackfoot philosopher and scholar Leroy Little Bear and explained that he is a big influence in her work. She also took time to share a friend’s video of fish peacefully swimming below ice and told personal stories that made the audience laugh with her.

Zoe summed up her intentions wonderfully with this quote: “Mostly I want a world where we pay attention to one another and where we pay attention to the water and fish. Where we care for one another and where we disrupt the ways that we’ve normalized violence against lands and waters and humans and more-than-humans. […] The core of my message is that we need to care for one another and we need to care about the fish and we need to think about the way that they’ve inhabited the world because they know so much.”

It was a lively and thought provoking lecture and wrapped up the series nicely. Please take the time to watch the video to hear Zoe’s words in her own voice and to get more in depth with her presentation.

AbTeC is part of the Milieux Institute here at Concordia University and one of the other clusters included is Technoculture, Art and Games (TAG). This year TAG held the 4th Arcade 11 event from March 8 to 10. A selection of video games were chosen and then displayed for the public to check out and try. This year the theme was about showing natural environment.

None of the games shown had guns or shooting and focused more on indie games with fun and experimental twists. The goal was to show the public a different side of games that they may not have encountered. The 8 games on display explored landscapes, relationships, teamwork and strange creatures.

Games like Overcooked and Break Up Squad had great party game vibes where groups could sit down and work together, or against each other.

One area of the arcade also presented the nature vibes in its decor. The game Firewatch was set up in free-roam mode and projected for people who could choose a seat around a faux campfire and carpet grass patch. A tent was a fun addition that was enjoyed by many as the gorgeous environment was explored.

Alea is a rhythm game where the goal is to get lost in the music while sticking to the beat. It was found underneath a large leaf and had a special plant-decorated controller to use. With all the flashy, fun game and plant life, players might be confused with fairies.

The setting meant students, employees and other people you might expect in a university stopped by the area while throngs of children also made appearances over the three-day period. Arcade 11 is open to anyone who loves games or is just feeling curious and this year was another success.

For more information on all of the games shown and for links to those games please stop by the official Arcade 11 page.

AbTeC/Obx Labs is the proud owner of an HTC VIVE Virtual Reality system! We are currently diving in and researching what type of original environments can be created and experienced within this innovative, new technology. AbTeC co-director Jason Edward Lewis, whose practice incorporates poetry and writing, has put together a small research group of six undergraduate students to imagine text in an immersive environment and produce a few experimental prototypes. Lab Coordinator Lianne Maritzer has been working closely with our lead programmer Julian Glass-Pilon to implement her conceptual ideas for texts in virtual reality and test the VIVE’s limits. Lianne’s piece will be an immersive experience in a world constructed by a poem.

When players enter the game, they are standing in an all black room. The only items visible are the two VIVE controllers which are each holding a white paintball. Players can throw these paintballs to illuminate the world by holding the trigger, moving their arm in a throwing motion, and releasing the trigger to release the paintball. When the paintball hits an object or text, it splatters and the splatter reveals the object’s colour.  For example, if the paint splatters on a tree trunk, the player now see brown; if it splatters on the leaves, she sees green. If it hits multiple objects, each object touching the splatter will illuminate. If it hits text, the words start to become revealed. As players walk through the environment, short segments of the poem appear, which not only combine to make up a full poem but describe the changing environment around them.

At the moment, the game is just a prototype. There are only two segments of the poem (highlighted below) included and the game is static, meaning that the player cannot move beyond the box space. When the players throw the paintball, it colors the entire object rather than a paint splatter. This was the simplest way to get the player to understand what they are doing right away and how the paintballs work.

Poem: Walk through the Forest

by JupiterGodess

Green moss

Green light

Green grass

A bird’s flight

Shadows lurking

The air so fresh and sweet

Tree after tree you’re passing

Stones crunch beneath your feet

Bushes wherever you go

Above you the leaves rustle sublime

Your gaze is jumping to and fro

Longing to see ev’rything at the same time

In the trees the bird’s song sounds

What a melody so nice!

The lynx stalks its prey in silence

The shy deer is watching you

Squirrels chatter, jumping around

on paths impossible to get through

in the trees, not on the ground

Needles cover the forest’s floor

Out oft he green maze with its magic smell

step back through the door

to where the humans dwell

This piece was inspired by coloring books and digital paint-by-numbers sets as well as the famous Tilt Brush VR game by Google and the video game The Unfinished Swan.

AbTeC is excited to continue this line of text-based, VR research and exploring new dimensions of artistic possibility.

On February 10th, 2017, Jolene Rickard, P.h.D. came to Concordia University to speak as part of the Future Imaginary Lectures. 

Jolene is a visual historian, artist and curator interested in the issues of Indigeneity within a global context. She is from the Tuscarora Nation (Haudenosaunee), is the director of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program and Associate Professor in the History of Art and Art Departments at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. She and Skawennati have known each other since 1999, when Jolene contributed an essay for CyberPowWow 2. 

The evening started off with warm welcomes from Skawennati, Martha Langford representing the Speaking of Photography series, Heather Igloliorte and an introduction from Jason Edward Lewis who agreed with Jolene’s self-identification as someone who is “always looking for the window left unlatched.”

The lecture touched on various connected topics, such as the relationship between memory and photography, beadwork, cosmology, the concepts of resurgence and sovereignty and the creation story.

Photographs can share information and keep history. The importance of beadwork and its economic, political and cultural significance to the Haudenosaunee people could be seen in the images Jolene showed. The photo of Seneca woman Caroline Parker in her intricately beaded outfit and Jolene’s own works in exhibitions like Across Borders: Beadwork in Iroquois Life were excellent examples. Photographs are also important because communities can collect them if they cannot get access to the physical items they represent.

Jolene noted that she is very interested in when specific articles appear in Indigenous expression. Why do certain artists focus on certain objects and topics at certain times? For example she spoke about the need to create work about the recovery peace after a violent period in time. She considered the concept of resurgence emerging in Indigenous intellectual landscape as a strategy for empowerment and action. The desire to represent ceremony in space and in a future context was also explored.

She mentioned that at one point she was discouraged from going back and forth between making, critiquing, writing, thinking and doing but now more people understand that “we’re idea makers and we find the best way to locate the idea.” Originally, knowledge and stories were shared orally until new tools were discovered. Over time, various alternative forms of expression have been used; such as, carving, beadwork, photography and more.  

This transformation continues happening as projects like Skawennati’s machinimas showcase stories in a form that could not have been imagined generations ago. Jolene spoke about Skawennati’s new machinima She Falls for Ages, saying that it generates a new way to understand the Haudenosaunee creation story in current times. In her opinion, it also celebrates women’s bodies and claims the arrival of Indigenous people to Turtle Island as an act of empowerment.\

The Q&A session after her lecture brought up some interesting discussion. She clarified that she isn’t suggesting that the present be ignored, but wondered instead how much information can be shared and how the creative process can help to open new possibilities.

There was a lot of great imagery and topics explored in-depth during this talk. Jolene is a charismatic speaker and best explains her work and the pieces she has chosen to present.

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter to hear about all our upcoming Future Imaginary Lectures.