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Inuit have been participating in the development of photo-reproductive media since at least the 19th century, and indeed much earlier if we continue on Michelle Raheja’s suggestion that there is much more behind Nanook’s smile than Robert Flaherty would have us believe. This paper examines how photographer Peter Pitseolak (1902-1973) and filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk have employed photography and film in relation to Raheja’s notion of “visual sovereignty” as a process of infiltrating media of representational control, altering their principles to visualize Indigenous ownership of their images. For camera-based media, this pertains as much to conceptions of time, continuity and “presence,” as to the broader dynamics of creative retellings. This paper will attempt to address such media-ontological shifts – in Pitseolak’s altered position as photographer and the effect this had on his images and the “presence” of his subjects, and in Kunuk’s staging of oral histories and, through the nature of film as an experience of “cinematic time,” composing time in a way that speaks to Inuit worldviews and life patterns – as radical renegotiations of the mediating properties of photography and film. In that they displace the Western camera’s hegemonic framing and time-based structures, repositioning Inuit “presence” and relations to land within the fundamental conditions of photo-reproduction, this paper will address these works from a position of decolonial media aesthetics, considering the effects of their works as opening up not only for more holistic, community-grounded representation models, but for expanding these relations to land and time directly into the expanded sensory field of media technologies.

Cette publication a été réalisée à l'occasion de l'exposition "L'Oeil Amérindien, Regards sur l'Animal au Musée de la civilisation à Québec.

Ce mémoire se penche sur la diffusion de l'art contemporain autochtone au Québec de 1967 à 2013. Grâce à un corpus constitué de 640 expositions comprenant au moins un artiste des Premières Nations, métis ou inuit s'étant tenues quelque part dans la province à l'intérieur de ces 46 années, il a été possible de dresser un portrait global raisonné de ce qui s'est fait – ou ne s'est pas fait – concrètement, au-delà des a priori maintes fois reconduits. Il démontre, par exemple, que la décennie 1990 n'a pas été si « désertique » qu'il n'y parait, mais que la période 2000-2013, malgré son apparente vigueur, cache plusieurs dynamiques à l'œuvre au Québec rendant la reconnaissance et l'intégration des artistes autochtones dans le grand réseau des arts contemporains encore difficile. Ce mémoire apporte un éclairage sur le rôle marquant joué par les réseaux parallèles dans la diffusion de l'art contemporain autochtone, celui, parfois novateur, joué par les musées d'histoire et d'ethnographie ainsi que par les musées au sein même des communautés autochtones, puis la fermeture bien visible des institutions d'art du Québec jusqu'au milieu des années 2000. Il met également en lumière la présence de solitudes existantes au Québec, c'est-à-dire celle qui opère une division entre les artistes autochtones francophones et anglophones, favorisant grandement ces derniers, ainsi qu'entre artistes autochtones versus allochtones, les deux se mélangeant encore difficilement au sein des expositions. Enfin, ce mémoire permet de constater qu'en quatre décennies, le nombre d'artistes autochtones pratiquant de manière professionnelle au Québec n'a cessé d'augmenter, que Montréal s'est inscrite de plus en plus comme une métropole pouvant attirer des artistes autochtones de calibre national et international, que certaines régions du Québec, comme le Saguenay et l'Abitibi, ont, contrairement à d'autres, fait preuve d'une ouverture certaine face à l'art autochtone, mais également qu'il y a eu – et qu'il y a peut-être encore – une corrélation entre événements festifs et expositions accrues d'art contemporain autochtone, ce qui a tendance à le garder dans le domaine du folklore au Québec, et nuire véritablement à la reconnaissance des artistes professionnels.

Cet article discute de la pertinence d’identifier les arts visuels autochtones comme tel, de maintenir une forme de distinction vis-à-vis des œuvres produites par les artistes autochtones. Il s’agit d’éclairer le débat en soutenant qu’il existe bel et bien certains éléments précis qui permettent encore de définir les arts autochtones. Est également abordé le fait que les artistes continuent d’employer la stratégie claire de l’auto-identification. Sous cet angle, cette catégorie des arts autochtones ne semble pas encore caduque

Le travail de l’artiste huron-wendat Pierre Sioui est assez méconnu au Québec. Prolifique dans les années 1980 et ayant exposé aux quatre coins du Canada ainsi qu’aux États-Unis, Sioui a ensuite totalement disparu du milieu des arts contemporains autochtones. Une relecture du travail de cet artiste permet de redécouvrir un créateur fascinant tout à fait inscrit dans les préoccupations esthétiques et politiques de sa décennie. Sioui semble surtout avoir employé sa démarche artistique au service d’une redécouverte de son identité et de ses racines. Il l’a fait par le biais de recherches à la fois théoriques, cosmologiques et esthétiques des valeurs et de la culture huronne, le conduisant vers une thématique entourant principalement le sens des rituels, la mort et le cycle de la vie. Tous ces vieillards dans ses oeuvres, ces cadavres, ces ossements et ces crânes, parlent de relations entre mort et renaissance, entre colonialisme puis réappropriation, et semblent être pour Sioui une véritable trame créatrice à renouveler sans cesse.

Le présent document est un rapport sur la série de consultations tenues en 2007 avec des artistes, des administrateurs des arts, des aînés, des jeunes et d’autres membres de la communauté autochtone. Cette série de consultations a eu lieu dans le cadre de l’initiative de recherche sur les arts autochtones, mise sur pied dans le but de planifier et d’entreprendre les travaux de recherche nécessaires pour appuyer et orienter le plan d’action sur les arts autochtones du Conseil des arts du Canada.

"Native Studies Keywords explores selected concepts in Native studies and the words commonly used to describe them, words whose meanings have been insufficiently examined. This edited volume focuses on the following eight concepts : sovereignty, land, indigeneity, nation, blood, tradition, colonialism, and indigenous knowledge. Each section includes three or four essays and provides definitions, meanings, and significance to the concept, lending a historical, social, and political context. Take sovereignty, for example. The word has served as the battle cry for social justice in Indian Country. But what is the meaning of sovereignty? Native peoples with diverse political beliefs all might say they support sovereignty-without understanding fully the meaning and implications packed in the word. The field of Native studies is filled with many such words whose meanings are presumed, rather than articulated or debated. Consequently, the foundational terms within Native studies always have multiple and conflicting meanings. These terms carry the colonial baggage that has accrued from centuries of contested words. Native Studies Keywords is a genealogical project that looks at the history of words that claim to have no history. It is the first book to examine the foundational concepts of Native American studies, offering multiple perspectives and opening a critical new conversation"--Résumé du site web de l'éditeur

Whose Land Is It Anyway? A Manual for Decolonization provides a variety of Indigenous perspectives on the history of colonialism, current Indigenous activism and resistance, and outlines the path forward to reconciliation. This audio version features renowned Indigenous writers Taiaiake Alfred, Glen Coulthard, Russell Diabo, Beverly Jacobs, Melina Laboucan-Massimo, Kanahus Manuel, Jeffrey McNeil-Seymour, Pamela Palmater, Shiri Pasternak, Nicole Schabus, Senator Murray Sinclair, and Sharon Venne. The late Arthur Manuel’s writings are read by his grandson, Mahekan Anderson.

Catalogue d'exposition. Du 14 janvier au 25 février 2012 à Art Mûr (Montréal. Titre : Baliser le territoire : Manifestation d’art contemporain autochtone / A Stake in the Ground: Contemporary Native Art Manifestation. Commissaire : Nadia Myre Sonny Assu, Jason Baerg, Carl Beam, Rebecca Belmore, Kevin Lee Burton, Hannah Claus, Bonnie Devine, Raymond Dupuis, Edgar Heap of Birds, Vanessa Dion Fletcher, Nicholas Galanin, Greg Hill, Robert Houle, Maria Hupfield, Rita Letendre, Glenna Matoush, Alan Michelson, Nadia Myre, Marianne Nicolson, Michael Patten, Arthur Renwick, Sonia Robertson, Greg Staats, Tania Willard, Will Wils

This paper discusses the visuality processes in Latin America since the called «decolonial turn» approach. It analyzes the structural relationship between visual practices and global power arising in the context of the modern world system. It seeks to study the relationship between visual technologies, discourses and practices and the analytics of the coloniality of power, knowledge and being. It addresses the different types of hierarchies produced through a visual dispositive in the context of the international division of technology labor, the racialization of the population, and the global economy of images.

As a teenager during my first internship at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a diversity initiative for inner-city youth, the education curator enthusiastically asked, “Who here would like to be an art historian!?” Like all the other Black and Brown inner-city kids, I laughed inside. My response was not due to a lack of art appreciation; I grew up in a family of refugees who were all self-taught artists back home in El Salvador, who taught me to draw before I learned to read. Nor was my response rooted in apathy for creative expression, for I was involved in art and theater from my elementary through my high school years. Art was such a natural part of my life that the idea of studying it seemed wasteful to me. The truth was, the internship was one of two jobs I was working to financially help my family and pay for my first year of community college. Hidden even deeper, though, I believed the museum world was not my world. I was a guanaca (the appellative given to people from El Salvador) whose family fled war and remained invisible in mainstream US Latinx history and culture. I was also from the hood—in my case Compton, California, a city made notorious by gangsta rap and police brutality. I believed that people like me guarded the art on the museum walls, cleaned the floors and bathrooms for visitors, and served the food at the high-priced café. People who looked like me, who came from where I did, did not determine what art could be, nor could we afford to buy it. We certainly did not write the history of art, for if we had, we would see ourselves represented on the walls.

This thesis argues that photography is tainted with ingrained racist ideologies that have been present since its earliest inception in 1839. It considers the act of photographing the Other as a site of Western violence, myth, fantasy and disavowal. It examines archival images through the prism of race, representation and human rights with the aim of extracting new meanings that bring the Other into focus. This is done by reading the images both against the politics of the time in which they were made and as contemporary objects at work in the political and cultural present. The thesis makes the case that photography is burdened with ideological fault-lines concerning race and rights. The fault-lines have been forged by cultural and colonial violence resulting in Western scopic regimes that have dominated and fixed the Other within an inescapable set of Western epistemologies that have been used to serve and enhance imperial perspectives on race. I argue that these perspectives are still active within the Western mindset manifest as benign acts of photographic empathy that work to ultimately bolster Western hegemonies and economies. This thesis is based on 25 years of experience as a researcher and curator of international photography exhibitions, direct research into archives in different continental settings, the presentation of papers in a variety of national and international contexts, and interviews withphotographers, curators and academics. My hypothesis is that the history of photography can only be complete if the voice of the subaltern is made critically present within it, so allowing us to engage with important political racial memory work that can help us re-read the past and reconfigure different meanings concerning history, race, rights and human recognition in the present. I argue that photography requires decolonising work to be carried out on its history. I propose that if we do not recognise the historical and political conjunctures of racial politics at work within photography and the effects on those that have been culturally erased, made invisible or less than human by such images, then we remain hemmed within established orthodoxies of colonial thought concerning the racialised body, the subaltern and the politics of human recognition.

L’article part de la notion wendat d’ohtehra’ pour développer une approche de l’art contemporain autochtone comme processus de « ré-ensauvagement » à l’œuvre, entre autres, chez les artistes Kent Monkman (Cri-Irlandais) et Caroline Monnet (Anishinaabe-Française). L’auteur, en s’appuyant sur les théoriciens Deborah Doxtator (Kanien’kehá:ka), Georges Emery Sioui (Wendat) et Taiaiake Alfred (Kanien’kehá:ka) propose également une analyse de l’autochtonie en Amérique du Nord comme un fait glocal d’Américité.

Sakahàn' celebrates a growing international commitment to the collection, study and exhibition of indigenous art. Featuring more than 75 artists from around the world, this remarkable project places indigenous art squarely at the centre of contemporary art produced today.

On parle beaucoup au Québec, comme dans le reste du Canada, de réconciliation avec les Premières Nations. Mais pour qu'un rapprochement fécond puisse avoir lieu, qu'une nouvelle ère, égalitaire et respectueuse, s'ouvre, le cadre constitutionnel canadien ne peut à lui seul en définir les règles. Toute entente devra aussi tenir compte des traditions autochtones. C'est dans ce contexte que le livre de Leanne Simpson trouve toute sa pertinence. L'auteure s'y demande comment redonner force, consistance et valeur à un héritage politique, juridique et culturel mis à mal par le processus colonial. D'une façon aussi concrète que tonique et audacieuse, elle y explore la langue, les mythes, les coutumes et les expériences de sa culture ancestrale afin de recouvrer et révéler cette manière singulière et originale d'être au monde trop longtemps méprisée. Si l'entreprise est inspirante pour toute communauté issue des Premières Nations, elle l'est également pour quiconque s'intéresse aux contradictions de la modernité occidentale. -- [Renaud-Bray]

In this deeply engaging account, Michelle H. Raheja offers the first book-length study of the Indigenous actors, directors, and spectators who helped shape Hollywood's representation of Indigenous peoples. Since the era of silent films, Hollywood movies and visual culture generally have provided the primary representational field on which Indigenous images have been displayed to non-Native audiences. These films have been highly influential in shaping perceptions of Indigenous peoples as, for example, a dying race or as inherently unable or unwilling to adapt to change. However, films with Ind

Indigenous Art New Media and the Digital convenes leading scholars, curators, and artists from the Indigenous territories in Canada, the United States of America, Australia, and Aotearoa (New Zealand). It brings forth urgent conversations about resistance to colonial modernism, and highlights the historic and ongoing use of technology by Indigenous communities and artists as vehicles of resilience and cultural continuity. This issue ignites productive dialogue around the definitions of new and digital media art and practice-based work within the framework of Indigenous art and theory