presence across platforms
When applying for project funding through the {Re}conciliation program, a joint initiative developed by the Canada Council for the Arts, J.W. McConnell Family Foundation, and The Circle on Philanthropy and Aboriginal Peoples in Canada, we wrote, “#callresponse focuses on reconciliation as an action that demands both talk and response,” and “#callresponse asserts the presence and work of Indigenous women as central to healing the wounds created by ongoing settler colonialism in Canada (as elsewhere) as well as building meaningful and sustainable relationships between nations, across borders, and between all living beings of the natural and spirit world.”Tarah Hogue, Maria Hupfield, Tania Willard, #callresponse {Re}conciliation grant application.The choice to centre Indigenous womenThe bracketing and collapsing enacted by the signifier(s) Indigenous women is admittedly limiting and may not align with how the individual artists choose to identify themselves. I use the term Indigenous following David Garneau’s assertion that “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.” “Migration as Territory: Performing Domain with a Non-colonial Aesthetic Attitude,” in voz-à-voz (Toronto, ON: e-fagia, 2015): ; emphasis in the original. I also acknowledge the complexity of self-identification within the context of settler colonialism as discussed by Audra Simpson: “There seemed rather to be a tripleness, a quadrupleness, to consciousness and an endless play, and it went something like this: ‘I am me, I am what you think I am and I am who this person to the right of me thinks I am and you are all full of shit and then maybe I will tell you to your face.’ There was a definite core that seemed to reveal itself at the point of refusal and that refusal was arrived at, of course, at the very limit of the discourse.” "Ethnographic Refusal," Junctures 9 (December 2007). To this end, I have retained the use of words like “Aboriginal,” “First Nations,” and “Native” in areas where the artists have chosen to use these words.recognizes how they have been unequally impacted by settler colonialism and how, as Leanne Simpson writes, their “very presence simultaneously shatters the disappearance of Indigenous women and girls from settler consciousness.”Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious Transformation,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3, no. 3 (2014): 8.What, however, does it mean to posit Indigenous women as central to healing the wounds created by settler colonialism? Is this possible in the context of an artistic project? Can art heal? Or is this an impossible burden to place upon both Indigenous women and art?
These questions arose in developing #callresponse, an artistic and curatorial collaboration led by me, Maria Hupfield, and Tania Willard. The project begins with five Indigenous women and artists whose home territories are located in the Canadian nation-state, including contributions by Hupfield and Willard, with invited artists Christi Belcourt, Ursula Johnson, and Laakkuluk Williamson-Bathory. The site-specific and socially engaged works are taking place across Canada and into the United States throughout 2016 in dialogue with various publics. A touring exhibition will open at Vancouver’s grunt gallery on October 28, 2016, with selected representations of each project. The artists will invite a respondent to consider each of their works. These responses will also be included in the exhibition.
Returning to the above questions, the idea that art heals is often found in re/conciliation I choose to use re/conciliation over reconciliation, as I wish to disrupt the recognition of the latter as it connotes the official narratives of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). I acknowledge the important work of colleagues in this area. David Garneau writes, “Re-conciliation refers to the repair of a previously existing harmonious relationship. This word choice imposes the fiction that equanimity is the status quo between Aboriginal people and Canada.” Conversely, conciliation “calls to mind the meeting of two previously separate parties. Applied to the Canadian situation, it allows the picturing of First Nations and Inuit people having an independent existence prior to contact.” “Imaginary Spaces of Conciliation and Reconciliation,” in “Reconcile This,” eds. Jonathan Dewar and Ayumi Goto, special issue, West Coast Line #74 46, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 35.discourse. In the catalogue for NET-ETH: Going Out of the Darkness (2013), an exhibition about the Indian Residential School experience that I co-curated with Rose Spahan, writer Lara Evans points to the emotional and political stakes of these works, stating, “Each artist took risks in creating this work. I will be blunt about this—taking a risk means potentially causing harm. This means the artist could find creating the work traumatic, rather than healing, although the work may be successful in evoking healing for viewers. Or a piece may be cathartic for an artist yet does not provide a similar effect for viewers.”Lara Evans, Tarah Hogue and Rose Spahan, “Curatorial Statements,” in NET-ETH: Going Out of the Darkness, exhibition catalogue (Vancouver BC: Malaspina Printmakers, September 13–30, 2013), 11. Evans unpacks the distances between the production and reception of art in general, and between making or viewing art as a kind of treatment. She points to commonly held assertions about the role of art as an agent of healing the intergenerational trauma of the Indian Residential School system, and its location within the larger structure of settler colonialism. Evans’ statements signal the ambivalent and ultimately problematic nature of using such a term within this context, despite the very real need for healing to occur.
Each #callresponse artist approaches re/conciliation differently, contesting what and who are being asked to do the healing, and situating their work within the identified priorities of a range of communities. For example, Michif artist Christi Belcourt, working in collaboration with traditional Anishinaabe storyteller Isaac Murdoch, begins with the land, in this case, the North Shore of Lake Huron, Ontario. The plants and animals are the community Belcourt and Murdoch engage with in a relationship-building process. Recognizing the reciprocal relationships between the human and the more-than-human—ties that were severed by histories of dispossession including the Indian Residential School system—Belcourt and Murdoch perform ceremonies in accordance with the seasons to honour and reconcile with the land. These actions mark the relationship with territory as exceeding the colonial concept of land as property. Indigenous relation to territory here includes the interrelationality of all beings and is positioned as the relationship in need of reconciling.
Belcourt and Murdoch's definition of reconciliation stands in contrast to that of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC): “The Commission hopes to guide and inspire First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples and Canadians in a process of truth and healing leading toward reconciliation and renewed relationships based on mutual understanding and respect,”Truth and Reconciliation Commission, "About Us,” accessed March 28, 2016, ; emphasis mine.which locates healing within “nation-to-nation” relations. It is not that these relationships are not in need of repair; however, the difference in emphasis has serious implications for where and how healing is located. Belcourt and Murdoch’s actions are private and ceremonial, an intimate connection with territory. They honour the responsibility of care for the lands that nourish us—a conception of healing that aligns with both self-care and environmental protection. For the exhibition portion of the project, Belcourt and Murdoch will produce a work that speaks to these issues more broadly, while preserving the integrity of the ceremonial act as a space apart from the gallery.
Moving between site-specific work, online space, and the gallery, #callresponse focuses on forms of performance, process, and translation that incite dialogue between individuals, communities, territories, and institutions. An online platform using the hashtag #callresponse on social media (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook) connects the geographically diverse sites and provides opportunities for networked exchanges. A dedicated project website will act as an online hub (to be launched Autumn 2016) with artist statements, documentation, contributions from invited respondents, and integrated social media, including a series of interviews with the lead artists and their respondents on Broken Boxes Podcast. As both a title and hashtag, #callresponse draws from activist movements and campaigns such as #IdleNoMore, #BlackLivesMatter, #MMIW, and #ReMatriate that use social media to generate awareness, discussion, and action around important cultural, economic, environmental, political, and social justice issues facing marginalized communities.
Beyond positioning Indigenous women in relation to healing, #callresponse strategically centres Indigenous women across multiple platforms, recognizing the fundamental shifts that can occur when the intersections of gender, race, and colonialism are considered seriously as the locus of systemic and symbolic violence. We use the hashtag as a device to give voice to the importance of Indigenous North American women in creating a more equitable, just, and balanced future. The intention of #callresponse is to turn many spaces, and many media, into a hashtag, to broadcast the message and to catalyze bodies. Indigenous languages, oral narratives, song, ceremony, and land-based knowledge become hashtags in how they recall and network embodied knowledge. These technologies move in ways that are intimate, attentive, specific, and responsible.
Williamson-Bathory’s project, Timiga nunalu, sikulu (My body, the land and the ice) (2016), mediates and layers multiple performances, collapsing both distance and time in order to exercise creative sovereignty over her own body, and for her Inuit community. 
The project begins with a performance for video on the sea ice outside of Iqaluit, Nunavut. The artist’s nude body, back turned to the viewer, is seen lying in the landscape, her curving figure and flesh offered for viewing. Turning suddenly toward the camera, she gnashes her teeth and stares out fiercely, her face painted black with streaks. The ferocity of her painted expression starkly contrasts her Rubenesque figure—previously languid—forcing the viewer to confront their own gaze and assumptions about viewing both the female body and the land itself.
Williamson-Bathory's face is painted as a uaajeerneq dancer; a Greenlandic mask dance that is hypersexualized, frightening, and hilarious. She contextualizes uaajeerneq within the Inuit belief of giving people control over their own decisions by showing an entire spectrum of expression. The dance is meant to prepare her community—the Inuit of Nunavut—to face difficult questions around governance and extremes of life in the north through creativity. In this way, uaajeerneq is a story linking past, present, and future. Williamson-Bathory states, “As Indigenous people we don’t own our stories unless we tell them ourselves because of the legacy of colonization. . . . Stories have been ripped out of us in so many ways and unless we tell our stories, they are not ours.”Williamson-Bathory, "Episode 46. Interview with Laakkuluk Williamson-Bathory,” Broken Boxes Podcast, April 16, 2016, , accessed April 22, 2016.
The video forms the backdrop of a live sound-based performance that elicits elements of the landscape: rocks grinding, water splashing, sea ice knocking together, bird song, wind. A kettle is placed on a camp stove and set to boil. The artist shares story and movement above this soundscape. The live performance is also recorded, and the subsequent layered video will be projected in the gallery space where Williamson-Bathory will give a final performance. Her invited respondent, Inuk throat singer Tanya Tagaq, will perform an improvised response in the gallery as well. This layering of moments, places, and sounds builds a complex narrative of the interwoven relationship between the body, the land, and the self-determination of Inuit peoples.
#callresponse grew out of our discussions about the importance of Indigenous feminisms to ground our lives and work in reciprocal relations while critiquing and refusing the intersections of colonialism and patriarchy. This process includes work with other humans, more-than-humans, and territory beyond narrow definitions of land, as seen throughout the commissioned works. We desire to make art useful and make useful art without instrumentalizing it, and at the same time, to respond to re/conciliation without necessarily centering it.
Art has the potential to be problematically instrumentalized within re/conciliation when it displays Indigenous trauma for consumption by the broader public. Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill and Sophie McCall discuss the extent to which art has been viewed as a tool for reconciliation:
L'Hirondelle Hill and McCall speak to the need to “question what’s behind this impulse to promote reconciliation through the arts.” Ibid., 13. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang succinctly describe the wider—yet certainly related—drive to reconcile as one of a number of “settler moves to innocence,” which “problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity.” Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 3.
In consideration of this, and following Métis artist, academic, and activist Tannis Nielsen’s call that “our collective bodies need to enact emancipatory strategies that are separate and distinct from Canadian society,”Tannis Nielsen, “Indigeneity as Industry,” YouTube video (presentation at Cutting Copper: Indigenous Resurgent Practice, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, March 5, 2016), accessed July 27, 2016.the projects in #callresponse are situated within Indigenous praxis and remain accountable to those systems. This approach does not, however, tether Indigenous artists to their ancestral communities or traditional practices. As we have learned from Haida/Tsimshian curator and writer Marcia Crosby, “aboriginal nationhood” is “something that extends beyond the geopolitical and economic boundaries drawn by contemporary aboriginal land dispute politics and its cultural corollaries of authenticity, origins and tradition.”Marcia Crosby, “Nations in Urban Landscapes,” in Nations in Urban Landscapes, exhibition catalogue (Vancouver, BC: Contemporary Art Gallery, October 28–December 9, 1995), 12.It is instead to recognize the complexity of networks in relation, acknowledging David Garneau’s suggestion that “perhaps we should map how our travels rehearse and perform Indigenous territory.”David Garneau, “Migration as Territory.”
Ursula Johnson’s project, Nikamon Ochi Askiy (Ke'tapekiaq Ma'qimikew): The Land Sings (2016), enacts such a mapping through song. An audio-based endurance performance, the fourth “visitation” of The Land Sings was created in collaboration with Cheryl L’Hirondelle—who is also Johnson’s invited respondent for the exhibition—for FADO Performance Art Centre’s MONOMYTHS program, curated by Shannon Cochrane and Jess Dobkin. The piece offers an apology to the land for the ways in which our human impact has shaped the landscape, displacing the voices of many Indigenous peoples.
For the Toronto performance, Johnson mapped the distance from Georgina Island (the location of a Chippewa reserve) south to the performance venue in downtown Toronto, using a bar graph to plot a line based on the distance, peaks, and valleys of the landscape. Johnson gave this composition to L’Hirondelle, who wrote a song in nêhiyawin (Cree) that the two artists performed in repetition over four hours. Set within a black box theatre, the artists disrupted the space by opening all the windows and doors, projecting a large-scale image of the forest, and laying blankets around the performance area to encourage more active listening and viewing than generally associated with theatre performances. The durational nature of the performance enables the two singers to embody their relationship to the land as long-time stewards, and to recognize how this role has been disrupted by colonization and development. Circulating in the urban environment of Toronto—where L'Hirondelle is currently based—and outside of their home territories, the work also bridges these spaces, signaling the complexity of belonging and the urgency of response.
The fifth visitation of The Land Sings took place in October 2016 for the opening of #callresponse at grunt gallery. Johnson, working with her largest group of collaborators to date, will include singers from the local Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations, whose territories remain unceded (as most of British Columbia is without treaties) and on whose land Vancouver was built without permission. Johnson’s performance, a song for the land that spans coast to coast, A previous visitation mapped the distance between the artist’s home community of Eskasoni to Cape Breton University, NS, 2015. creates a powerful sense of connectivity through music and points to possible re/conciliations through collaborative and embodied practice, as it brings together Indigenous women from across vast expanses. An audio recording of the performance will be included in the exhibition, a document that connects the site of the gallery back to the land that engendered the work. Additionally, as Johnson’s respondent, L’Hirondelle will include her composition from the performance in Toronto in the exhibition.
Maria Hupfield’s hybrid performance conversations, Post Performance / Conversation Action (2016), both map and enact the domains in which artists come into relation with one another. Taking place in three locations—Toronto, Montreal, and New York—the performances appropriate the format of the public artist talk as an act of intergenerational solidarity and community building between Native women and their work in the arts.
The initial performance was also commissioned for MONOMYTHS, and took place in Toronto following Johnson and L’Hirondelle’s performance. The MONOMYTHS program was conceived as a response to Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), which posits the masculine figure of the hero as archetypal in both historical and contemporary culture. In locating the heroic within the everyday act of conversation, Hupfield with her invited guests and helpers destabilized the gendered, linear, ahistorical, and depoliticized myth of the hero’s journey and claimed the performance space as their own. The narratives arising from the performance prioritize the sophisticated complexity of Indigenous nations, culture, and community operating in the arts. This work values the body as the site of ongoing personal exchanges for in-the-moment shared encounters grounded in lived experiences.
Hupfield's second performance of the work took place during the OFFTA live art festival in Montreal, in the Indigenous Contemporary Scene program produced by ONISHKA and developed in collaboration with the curator Emilie Monnet. Her invited guest was Abenaki filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin. Through these performances, #callresponse extends its reach through decentralized institutional partnerships, paralleling the artist’s own preferencing of multiple voices across multiple sites. The role of the respondent is similarly extended in Hupfield’s project as helpers—Rosary Spence and Tamara Skubovius in Toronto and Lindsay Nixon in Montreal—acted as intermediaries between the performers and the audience, either restating the audience’s questions to the performers or transcribing the conversation. A certain number of steps were therefore involved: listening, interpreting, editing, and restating, as well as possible refusal based on the helpers’ decisions.
They mediate the space on their own terms and intervene in mainstream expectations of cultural and gendered performance by female Native bodies.
Rather than a necessarily reconciliatory gesture in which Indigenous voices are “brought into” institutional space, Hupfield’s performance is a form of occupation that asserts Indigenous presence without excluding the possibility for cross-cultural dialogue. Informed by the two projects in Toronto and Montreal, Hupfield worked towards a final performance action to take place in New York leading up to the exhibition in October. Her gallery contribution to #callresponse will function as a visual document to connect and recall the three performances across the United States / Canada colonial nation-state border.
The expressions of sovereignty-in-action, represented in the works above, stand in stark contrast to Audra Simpson’s powerful critique of reconciliation as operating within and upholding a new extractive and affective political order wherein “the cost of justice is pain and its value is set in a market of sympathy.”Audra Simpson, “Reconciliation and Its Discontents: Settler Governance in an Age of Sorrow,” YouTube video (presentation at the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, March 2016), accessed March 29, 2016. Simpson describes the impossible subject position of the claimant within the context of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, who must perform their trauma; their dispossession from land, language, culture, and family; and the violation of their body in a supposedly therapeutic process that demands “that you forgive your abuser in order to transcend to better wellbeing,” forcing the claimant (and allowing the nation-state) to “perpetually start anew.” Ibid.Simpson asks, “What is the possibility of justice or political transformation when one must take the form of a wound?” Ibid.Ultimately, she argues that this “framework seems to harmonize and balance a fundamental disjuncture: a sovereign state that was and is unwilling to rescind its false claims to Indigenous land and life, and Indigenous struggles for that land and life as sovereignty.” Ibid. In this framing of reconciliation, all First Nations, Inuit, and Métis people, including residential school survivors and their descendants, are cast in the role of the claimant. As Simpson argues, however, the resistance of Indigenous peoples exposes the precarity of settler sovereignty and opens possibilities for alternate conceptions of care and responsibility towards one another.
Tania Willard’s project Only Available Light (2016) exposes and refuses a similar history of impossible subjecthood forced upon Indigenous bodies: the anthropological curiosity for “vanishing” cultures wherein Aboriginal cultures were consumed and romanticized while simultaneously being banned, outlawed, and erased. Drawing from ethnographic studies in the 1880s–1920s on Interior Salish peoples, Willard reflects on loss represented by plaster life casts taken of her Secwe̓pemc ancestors by the anthropologist Harlan I. Smith as part of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition (1897–1902). “Jesup North Pacific Expedition,” Wikipedia, accessed July 19, 2016. During the expedition, Smith collected both human remains and belongings taken from gravesites.
Smith also directed the 1928 silent film The Shuswap Indians of British Columbia. The film was one in a series produced by the Geological Survey of Canada (now the Canadian Museum of History) created for a children’s education program, screened to non-Native students during the same years when attendance at the residential schools was compulsory for children between the ages of six and fifteen. Screenings of the Smith film accompanied by a live performance of a contemporary hand drum composition with Secwepemcstin lyrics will take place in the artist’s territory as well as in Kamloops during the Luminocity Festival organized by the Kamloops Art Gallery. 
The artist plans to distribute the full collection of Smith films (which profile nine Indigenous communities in Western Canada) through social media to create access to the material through Indigenous peer-to-peer networks. This redresses the fact that the films were not made for or shared with Indigenous audiences, and reveals the “fundamental disjuncture” in the impetus of the films’ making.
While speaking to and from the specifics of Secwe̓pemc experience, Willard’s project simultaneously builds dialogue and learning informed by the forced removal and loss of language stemming from the Indian Residential School system. The project is situated within her extended work with BUSH gallery, an artist “rezidency” located in Secwe̓pemc territory that “re-territorializes the customs of contemporary art education, production, curation and exhibition, with the principles of the bush.”Amy Kazymerchyk in conversation with Jeneen Frei Njootli, Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Peter Morin, and Tania Willard, “#BUSH_Gallery,” (presentation, Wood Land School Symposium, Or Gallery, Vancouver, BC, March 2016). #callresponse builds upon the structure of BUSH gallery and bushed theory Jeneen Frei Njootli describes bushed theory as “the transportation and embodiment of a mentality necessary for land-based survival in one’s ancestral territory, to other socio/geo-political, typically urban spaces.” “Pulling Knowledge through the Body, through Another’s Body, What Is Left Unsaid: What Is the Residue? Where Is the Work? G’ashondai’kwa” (MA roundtable presentation, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, November 2015).as it decentres the institutional structure of the art gallery while aligning Indigenous embodied theories “‘Theory’ is generated and regenerated continually through embodied practice and within each family, community and generation of people. ‘Theory’ isn’t just an intellectual pursuit—it is woven within kinetics, spiritual presence and emotion, it is contextual and relational. It is intimate and personal, with individuals themselves holding the responsibilities for finding and generating meaning within their own lives.” L. Simpson, “Land as Pedagogy,” 7. with artistic praxis across specific sites.
For the exhibition, Willard will approach the history of Smith's films and the experience of residential schools through the elemental materials used to make the life casts (selenite) and to deliver the film (light). Selenite crystals are a mineral form of gypsum, the main ingredient found in plaster. With a consistency similar to glass, selenite is both transparent and not, functioning to obscure the view of images passing through it as light. 
Within the institutional space, the anthropological video is not consumable by the broader Canadian public for which it was initially intended. It comes to us as the only available light, a meditation on loss and resilience transposed through time.
Each of the artists in #callresponse takes up the question of their practice’s relationship to healing on their own terms. Positioning Indigenous women and/or art as central to healing the wounds of settler colonialism is an impossible burden. Each artist, and indeed each separate project, responds to the need for healing and the impetus to reconcile or to concile within their own context and from their own sense of necessity. As a complex whole, #callresponse does not privilege healing or re/conciliation as central to the work and lives of Indigenous women. Rather, it centres Indigenous women's self-determination in privileging their work and lives as vital presences. The exhibition acknowledges how artists are already working to complicate and unsettle, following Audra Simpson’s call that our “day to day lives be critically engaged” with an “ongoing, active attention to what is before us and a continuing care and vigilance over each other.” The artists’ works are grounded across the communities of significance through which they move, urban and rural, online and in person, where they live and work, as well as those places they traverse in their various roles and responsibilities. Beginning on a localized level, models for creative conciliations with others are not predicated on responding to external pressure to “heal” or to “reconcile,” but on a complex web of relations and the varied contingent situations that Indigenous peoples circulate within.
The author express her gratitude for the support and contributions of Christi Belcourt, Maria Hupfield, Ursula Johnson, Tania Willard, and Laakkuluk Williamson-Bathory.
