Category: iif_blog

Kwe kwe sewakwekon!

On Saturday, February 6th, I was thrilled to open a solo exhibition of my recent work, called Tomorrow People. After about a year of research and production, it was wonderful to see all the pieces installed in one of the most beloved artist-run centres in Montreal, Galerie OBORO. It was also very fun to get all dolled up for the vernissage, which was very well attended. There was even a reporter from APTN who followed me around with his camera half the evening! I felt like a star.

The evening was special also because it launched one year of all-Indigenous programming at OBORO. The decision to do this was the gallery’s response to the celebrations of 375 years of Montreal and 150 of Canada. It is a gesture of peace, recognizing that these numbers also represent colonization, something not so celebration-worthy for Indigenous people.

Esteemed activist and artist, Ellen Gabriel, graciously agreed to say a few words about the history of Indigenous-colonist relationships in Montreal, or Tiohtiake, as it is known in Kanienke’ha, the Mohawk language. She is a born orator and an indefatigable fighter. I am proud to call her my friend and colleague.

The exhibition was generously sponsored by the society for the celebrations of the 375th anniversary of Montreal, and its General Manager, Alain Gignac also said a few words. We shared a really nice moment during the evening when he described to me how he saw the work; he really got it!

The exhibition includes a brand new machimima, entitled She Falls For Ages, a sci-fi retelling of the Haudenosaunee creation story. 20 minutes long, it is playing on a loop in the video viewing room entered through a black curtain.

A set of production stills, taken while we rehearsed or filmed the machinima, accompany the movie. I call them “machinimagraphs”; this is a new word I believe I made up to describe a picture taken in a virtual environment. They’re different from screen shots because they are taken by an in-world camera that offers a very high resolution.

Also in the exhibition are several works featuring my Second Life avatar, xox. She Is Dancing With Herself and Dancing With Myself were made in 2015. These two works led me to create Generations of Play, a triptych that features a photograph of a corn husk doll, a photograph of a Barbie doll, and a machinimagraph of my avatar, all wearing my avatar’s costume. Birth of An Avatar (Homage to Mariko Mori) also features xox, in a pose and environment similar to Mariko Mori’s awesome image, Birth of a Star.

Finally, I have to give a shout out to the AbTeC team. Many thanks to Nancy Elizabeth Townsend, our multi-talented Associate Producer, for her wonderful dedication, amazing efficiency, and brilliant insights; and none of it would be possible without the good mind of Jason Edward Lewis. Nia:wen!

Hello everyone! I’m back from Indigenous Comic Con 2016 and ready to share my little adventure.

The weekend is prime convention time as kids are out of school and many adults have had the chance to clear their schedule. ICC was no exception as the halls filled with excited “Indiginerds”. ICC took place at the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico and welcomed around 1,000 people over the 3 days it ran.

I was most excited for the panels and talks that were scheduled. Sadly I can’t time travel or split into multiple people or else I would have gone to them all. Panels varied from actors talking about their experiences, to cosplay tips and tricks all the way to serious conversations on Indigenous representation in media and pop culture.

Guests I had the pleasure of hearing from included Suzan Harjo, Jonathan Joss, Jeffrey Veregge, Elizabeth LaPensée and Allen Turner to name a few. The panel and talks rooms were a little small as rooms could quickly fill for a popular panel like “Back to the (Indigenous) Future(isms)!”.

Artist Alley was split into two areas and featured the creations of Indigenous artists. An artist alley at a convention is generally where artists sell art, take commissions, and sell homemade products and other things at a smaller scale than a vendor booth would (like a bookstore or publisher for example). There were pieces supporting the Standing Rock and Dakota Access Pipeline water protectors, where the money made from selling them was being donated to their efforts.

Good evening! It’s pretty late here so I’m sure most people are asleep back in Montreal right now.

Today was my first day exploring the ‘first ever’ Indigenous Comic Con here in Albuquerque, New Mexico. As is the case with most conventions the first day started fairly late at 4pm for regular ticket holders (3:30 for VIP). I wanted to laugh, out of fondness, when I showed up at 4 and a lot of the preparations were not complete. Typical that a convention like this would start on Indian time.

With a first year convention things are bound to be a bit bumpy. The wifi didn’t work, and so my tweets didn’t happen, until around an hour after the start. Many vendors and artists set up late or simply didn’t show. But with day 1 I can forgive these things.

My habit is to pace the artist alley and vendor halls on day 1 of any convention, to scope out the merch and start adding up how much I’ll have to spend. I wasn’t prepared for the feelings I would have scouring the tables of a convention where the sellers are all Indigenous. I had a smile on my face as I saw characters that looked like me and my family, stories I had heard from a friend and so on. I didn’t realize how much I missed seeing my own people represented in the culture I adore until I actually saw them in that space. It was very, very cool.

I lost my shyness fairly fast as I realized how friendly and relaxed everyone was. I had a fun conversation with an artist who lamented her flimsy sticker badge and shared her experience going to standing rock. Although it wasn’t a complete and polished con, the warm and inviting people made up for it.

With day 1 set up complete I’m looking forward to what busy Saturday has in store for me!

She:kon! The days have been a bit gray here in Montreal the last few days.

We are happy to announce that we are entering the Twittersphere at last! If you’ve been waiting now’s your chance to follow us there. Short and sweet updates, reminders and content that we like will now be shared there, too.

With Twitter we also hope to bring alerts and notices of when we will be using Periscope. Periscope is a live video streaming app for iOS and Android. The goal is to stream events, like the upcoming lecture by Allen Turner from The Future Imaginary Series, to those in our audience that can’t be there in person. The streams can be watched live in real time, joined in late or viewed at a totally later date as the videos are saved.

The account is still fresh and we hope you will follow us as we venture into a new social space!

She:kon! The weather has taken a dive into chilling temperatures here in Montreal as November approaches.

The Future Imaginary Lecture Series is a set of public talks sharing views on the future of Indigenous people and worldwide communities from Indigenous artists, activists, scholars and technologists.

The series began recently on October 14th with Kim Tallbear’s lecture: Disrupting Settlement, Sex, and Nature an Indigenous Logic of Rationality.

One of Concordia University’s newspapers, The Link, covered the event and the article can be seen HERE.

Allen Turner is coming up next in the series on November 11, 2016 with his lecture Designing Alternative Indigenous Timelines Using Role-Playing Games.

Allen teaches game design at the Center for Digital Media at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois. He is currently focusing on game-like learning, designing for the tabletop, and exploring interactive fiction. He will be bringing his recently published Ehdrigohr: The Roleplaying Game for those interested in trying it out.

She:kon! Fall has arrived here in Montreal and the view of Mount Royal’s trees from the lab is bright and colorful.

The Initiative for Indigenous Futures had a busy summer and so we will share what we were up to in the warm months.

On June 1, 2016 we welcomed another addition to the Illustrating the Future Imaginary series. Mi’kmaq artist Ray Caplin created the piece Hunter of Altered Game.

Postcommodity returned to Montreal July 22 to 29 for their second residency. They worked intensely with the IIF team and were able to complete a working version of their virtual reality experience Global Center for Self-Realization and Liberation.

The 2nd Annual IIF Partnership Meeting took place August 4, 2016 in the University of British Columbia-Okanagan in Kelowna, British Columbia.

The 2nd Symposium on the Future Imaginary was held the following day on August 5, 2016 also at UBCO. The Symposium was an interdisciplinary conversation about where Indigenous communities see ourselves in seven, twelve, even twenty generations, and about how to develop strategies to get there. The full-day event was held during the ​O k’inadas // complicated reconciliations​ artists residency. It featured preeminent artists, academics, activists and technologists envisioning their own particular Indigenous Future Imaginary.

There were also demonstrations of the Virtual Reality projects from our residencies. Scott Benesiinaabandan showed his project Blueberry Pie Under the Martian Sky and Cristóbal Martínez represented Postcommodity as he showed their project Global Center for Self-Realization and Liberation.

Skawennati and research assistants Erica Perreault and Darian Jacobs went Vancouver to run a Machinima Workshop in August with the Contemporary Art Gallery and the Museum of Anthropology’s Native Youth Program in Vancouver.

Six urban Aboriginal youth formed teams to create two machinimas, each recounting a legend that the participants were given permission to tell. The workshop was held at Emily Carr University and ran over 4 days. Pre-production skills, production and editing skills were taught in this time. By the final day both teams had finished filming and one had even done an initial edit of their machinima!

Click here to watch The Madam

Click here to watch Tho’wxeya

A new addition to the IIF website is an interactive partnership timeline which was made over the summer. It’s a helpful tool for getting an overview of everything that IIF has been up to since the start of February 2015 and even a little into the future.

That was our summer in a nutshell!

• Location: Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver, BC
• Date: August 8th – 12th, 2016
• Duration: 4.5 days
• Instructors: Skawennati, Darian Jacobs, Erica Perreault

Overview: The Initiative for Indigenous Futures, in partnership with the Contemporary Art Gallery, held a Skins Machinima Workshop for the 2016 Native Youth Program in August. Skawennati and Research Assistants Erica Perreault and Darian Jacobs traveled to Vancouver to teach and aide six Native youth to create their own machinima depicting stories from their cultures.

Tho’wxeya. 2016.

The Madam. 2016.

Kim Tallbear’s rigorous and meticulous approach defies research trends and epistemological categorization. She may not identify with the language of the Indigenous future, but her work greatly lends to the analysis of one. Tallbear’s experience in the field of genomics has been the foundation of her feminist and Indigenous interventions into the sciences in order to resist objectifying colonial logics within its disciplines. Tallbear calls for an integration of Indigenous peoples within the sciences, and science within Indigenous communities, to produce self-determined subjects and collaborators, rather than objects. Tallbear often speaks to histories of colonial exploitation within the sciences, the treatment of Indigenous bodies as biological resources, raw materials, and locations of experiment. Science has been, and continues to be, central to the colonial project. As such, Indigenous researchers and communities must endeavour to influence science. Hearing Tallbear speak to these harrowing realities is almost always a reminder that history repeats itself; that empowering Indigenous communities within the sciences is essential to our resistance as peoples.  

While not explicitly within the field of genetic science, some of her most engaging theory has been done in this space, wherein she imagines ways of defining cellular life, animacy, and relationality outside the constructs of Western thought. Kim Tallbear’s is a theory that has thought through queer inhumanisms, imaging ourselves away from the bounds of human and non-human binaries, pointing to relationship-based futures. She has questioned the limits of settler love, asserting, “I live and work in pursuit of new ways of loving, lusting, and losing amidst the ruins and survivals together of my ancestors’ ways of relating (The Critical Polyamorist),” borrowing from Eben S. Kirksey to describe our relationships, our bodies, and our resurgence as sites of biocultural hope. Tallbear’s work articulates both new and remembered ways of relating meant to emancipate us into this future imaginary of care, a future that centres Indigenous ways of relating, kinship, and love ways as embodied peoplehood. Kim Tallbear’s upcoming lecture for the Future Imaginary Lecture Series at Concordia University will speak to the current academic buzzword “anthropocene,” an era marked by the human consumption of human and non-human kin. Tallbear will apply these new ways of relating she speaks so eloquently of throughout her work to this space, warning us that the alternative is the demise of all our relations. 

Text by Lindsay Nixon

She:kon! It’s a bright and sunny day here in Montreal.

There is a new addition to IIF’s Illustrating the Future Imaginary series. IIF commissions artists to illustrate themselves or their indigenous communities seven, ten or twenty generations from now – thinking within science fiction territory.

The piece was created by Elizabeth LaPensée, Ph.D. She expresses herself through writing, design, and art in games, comics, and animation. She is Anishinaabe, Métis, and Irish, living near the Great Lakes.

She:kon! It’s finally warming up here in Montreal this week.

Recently, Ana Serrano of the CFC (Canadian Film Centre) reached out to Skawennati to see if she would be interested in having AbTeC Island shown at Toronto’s Hot Docs Festival. As an IIF and CFC co-production, tours would be given using Virtual Reality headsets and mics so that people could walk through sets and chat with tour guides in real time; a totally new way to experience the world!

Skawennati responded with “Let’s try it!”. She felt the idea dovetailed nicely with our Activating AbTeC Island initiative. From 12-5pm April 29 to May 8, we gave guided tours of sets from TimeTraveller™. The first day was special, as voice actors Thomasina Phillips and Nicholas Fragnito wore the avatars of the two protagonists, Karahkwenhawi and Hunter, and led tours in character. Skawennati also led a tour.

Saturday and onward the tours were given by research assistants Erica Perreault and Darian Jacobs.

A lot of questions came up through the use of the experimental process, touching on issues like motion sickness, sound and graphics hurdles. Happily, quick thinking and problem-solving skills were abundant on both sides and solutions were found. One solution led to focusing the tours in the Art Museum, where people were invited to question the art, Second Life and TimeTraveller™.

Most visitors shared that they had never used VR before and were amazed to be walking through the world. Others were fascinated to be chatting with their tour guide in real time, despite being miles away from each other. There was even a few people who didn’t quite believe that they were really talking to a human. A few TimeTraveller™ fans even made an appearance!

It was certainly a new and fun experience for many!