Dancing the Waterways in Leanne Simpson’s she sang them home

This essay engages collaborative art projects in a field of settler/indigenous relations: drumming and performances of self at a Michigan language revitalization symposium, Native Women Language Keepers; Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore’s iconic video performance work at the Canadian pavilion of the Venice Biennial; and the Australian community cultural development project Ghost Nets, which emphasizes relationships while cleaning up fishing debris off beaches. The essay argues for reading strategies that acknowledge relational living, in the flow of history, speaking from webs of more than one voice, and attending to gaps.

International Journal of Recent Technology and Engineering (IJRTE), 2019

Barry Wayne McCovey, a Yurok member of the Tribal Fisheries Department writes “civilization will come and go, but the river will remain” (Barry, 2018) adding to the many voices that surged against the rotting images of Salmon on the Klamath river - the fish kills of 2002. The Klamath River forms an indispensable part of the native life, and for McCovey and all others in his community, the Klamath defines their origin, identity, sustenance and a spiritual connection. The tragedy of 2002 fish kills not only killed thousands of Salmons but also marked an inconceivable damage to the indigenous lives. Theresa May, a theatre artist and scholar, along with a group of committed collaborators created a community-based play named Salmon is Everything. This issue-engaged play speaks from the perspective of natives, the ones often overlooked in mainstream literature. Salmon is Everything (2014) is an attempt to create an alternative written documentation in order to preserve the Traditional Eco...

This paper traces the changing relationship between family, water, and fish through the lives of five generations of Indigenous women. We reveal the ways that Indigenous women's connections have transformed and persisted despite generations of omissions and erasures. We juxtapose interviews, academic research, and the settler colonial archive with the lived experiences and histories that exceed it. Weaving together what we know of the lives of Rosemary's great great grandmother Sar-Augh-Ta-Naogh (Sophie) and great grandmother Tlahoholt (Emma) with stories of water and fish from their territories, we ask how settler colonial commissions, archives, and urban policies have sought, and failed, to control and erase Indigenous women's relationships to water, land, and family. Crucially, this article draws on stories that have been passed down to Rosemary and knowledge that she has accumulated through her lifetime working as a commercial fisherman. These stories about water and where people were from, why they left, or why they never went back—and how they continue to be connected to each other while being disconnected from place—are at the center of this article. Re-presencing Indigenous women and these connections raises essential questions about Indigenous resurgence in a context of settler colonial control, scarcity, and disappearance, emphasizing the importance of ancestral reconnection to Indigenous futurities.

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2023

TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 2023

This essay analyses Jennifer Dysart’s 2014 documentary film Kewekapawetan: Return After the Flood, which tells the past and present-day story of the Northern Manitoba Ithinew (Cree) community South Indian Lake and its entanglement with Manitoba Hydro. Dysart documents the history of colonial hydro policy by showcasing rare archival footage from the late 1960s and reclaims this material for the community she has roots in. At the same time, she records her search to learn about her father’s life and her efforts to reconnect with family by spending time on the land. Discussion between author and filmmaker throughout the research and writing process engages “visiting” as a methodology for studying Indigenous narrative arts. Ultimately, Dysart’s visual storytelling is a critical site of knowledge-making about the dislocation caused by large-scale resource extraction that foregrounds reconnection to family, community and land.

2002

Water History, 2016

This special issue attempts to shed new light on salient but neglected aspects of water history, ''Indigenous water histories.'' In this first of two journal issues dedicated to this topic, we present five articles that are pertinent to three themes that Water History has not entirely or substantially dealt with before: the use of oral history, the interpretation of indigenous perspectives, and the emphasis on the hybrid/divergent aspects of waterscapes. Readers, however, will see that these new themes are largely complementary to the most popular topics this journal has explored before, such as the histories of reclamation projects, water distribution, management, pollution, and politics. Geographically, this collection offers a broad coverage of Indigenous water issues by encompassing cases from the United States (U.S.), Mesoamerica, eastern Timor Leste, and northern and western Australia. Valoree S. Gagnon traces the changes and continuity of Ojibwe Gichigami (Ojibwa's Great Sea) water narratives and fishing rights among the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community in Michigan, the U.S. Teresa Cavazos Cohn and her coauthors discuss changes in riparian plants and landscapes in the Wind River watershed of Wyoming, the U.S., and the implications of these changes for the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho Tribes. The focus of these two articles on water history germane to fish and plants should be new for readers of Water History.

Journal of Public Pedagogies, 2019

The singing and dancing of Darug peoples once echoed throughout the Hawkesbury Nepean riverlands in ceremony. A long and challenging walk through bushland along the Nepean River, from Emu Green to Yarramundi on the Hawkesbury River, invites the walker to meditate on the presences and absences of these river places. Yarramundi is an important site for Darug people today, as it holds the history and cultural memories of singing the rivers in song and ceremony. Walking contemporary Indigenous songlines asks how we can come to know the river through walking the contemporary songlines of Darug songwriters and artists that sing the country of the riverlands today, and what is produced when this is enacted as public pedagogy. The paper explores a process of walking the Nepean River Trail, from my home at Emu Green to the Shaws Creek and Yellomundee Aboriginal cultural trails. The walk is reproduced as public pedagogy with collaborators Leanne and Jacinta Tobin, who have deep family connect...

Journal of Transnational American Studies, 2012

Recently, scholars and artists have queried the relationship between indigenous places—defined by their unique histories and meanings—and abstract spatial metaphors attending a current period of globalization. In this essay, Horton revisits two well-known works of digital video by Native North American artists to consider how they resolve an apparent tension between the indigenous lands they depict and the global networks in which they circulate: the internationally popular feature-length film Atanarjuat, the Fast Runner (2001), directed by Inuit artist Zacharias Kunuk, and the short video work Fountain (2005), created by Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore for the Canadian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Both works feature human bodies interacting with tactile substances like ice and water, spiritual forces at work in the environment, and landscapes that fade in and out of abstraction. Their creative approaches to sound, montage, and projection techniques set in motion dialectics of displacement and emplacement. Atanarjuat and Fountain contribute to an expansive notion of indigenous places, one that values the historical and cultural specificity of locales as the starting point for unraveling the complexities of their relationships to distant people and places.