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- Eroticism as a Series of Offerings
Authors: Shaawano Chad Uran
PubDate: 2024-04-15
DOI: 10.22024/UniKent/03/tm.1252
Issue No: Vol. 9, No. 1&2 (2024)
- Introduction
Authors: Ashley Caranto Morford, Tanja Grubnic, Jeffrey Ansloos
Pages: 1 - 17
Abstract: This is the Introduction to the Transmotion special issue on Indigenous social media and digital environments.
PubDate: 2024-04-15
DOI: 10.22024/UniKent/03/tm.1231
Issue No: Vol. 9, No. 1&2 (2024)
- “#Death”
Authors: Andreas Patrick Bassett
Pages: 18 - 46
Abstract: The running gag throughout Tommy Pico’s Nature Poem (2017) is that Teebs—Pico’s fictional alter ego—cannot write a traditional American Indian nature poem. This essay contends that, despite the absence of nature poetry in Nature Poem, Teebs presents an alternative take on a nature poem on pages 32–33. This untitled poem, which I refer to as “Death Poem” for the sake of convenience, consists entirely of multimedia excerpts from American television commercials and advertisements, films, songs, and poems chopped up to mimic the fast-paced, sensory-overloaded, and discombobulating features of the digital urban environment. Moreover, in this intertextual mélange, a “#death” hashtag flanks the end of each line, evoking an ominous mood. At first glance, Teebs’ bricolage poem presents a dark, hectic image of digital realms and the urban NDN experience within it. Nevertheless, this essay reveals that more sanguine interpretations lie beneath the poem’s critical surface when each line’s source, context, and cultural significance are decoded. More specifically, I believe Teebs’ invocation of prominent Black musicians in the final segment of the poem inadvertently coalesces historical Black resilience with NDN urbanization in the digital age. Ultimately, this essay argues that, through the aid of Black music, the untitled poem on pages 32–33 of Pico’s Nature Poem can be viewed as a reimaginative world- and -future-building exercise that presents new forward momentum and possibilities of meaning for a distressed Teebs—and, perhaps, by extension, the general urban NDN population—in digital landscapes.
PubDate: 2024-04-15
DOI: 10.22024/UniKent/03/tm.1132
Issue No: Vol. 9, No. 1&2 (2024)
- Refiguring Digital Landscapes
Authors: Pablo Montes, Judith Landeros, Luis Urrieta Jr.
Pages: 47 - 85
Abstract: Educational literature has long invisibilized Indigenous Latinx youth in favor of a monolithic discourse of Latinidad. For example, being grouped by nationalities (i.e. Mexican or Guatemalan) or as pan-ethnic identities (i.e. Hispanic or Latinx ) does not fully express Indigenous peoples’ cultural breadth, experiences, and languages throughout Latin America. As such, many Indigenous Latinx migrants bring with them traditions, epistemologies, and family histories that they embrace and sustain through multiple avenues. In this paper, we focus on educational spaces created on Instagram, where Indigenous Latinx youth actively engage in discourses and cultural production of indigeneity, borderlands, and colonialism. We situate the emergence of Instagram as a site of pedagogical depth that Indigenous Latinx youth deploy as co-curricular building projects. Finally, we deploy Critical Latinx Indigeneities to make sense of a post shared by a Quechua-Aymara account titled “Detribalized, Reconnecting, Indigenous: Further Debunking Attacks to ‘Latinx’ Reindigenization” and the various user responses to the post who actively participated in refiguring the conversation by nuancing, situating, and contemplating the overall premise of the post, which was mestizo/Latinx “reindigenization” through reclamation of an Indigenous identity. Users crafted responses to specifically address components of the post creating a “hub” whereby others could engage in this type of public pedagogy. Our purpose is not to center any particular narrative but more so create an opportunity to witness how Instagram has and is a generative site of pedagogical co-creation, by, in this case, the various user responses to the post who actively participated in refiguring the conversation by nuancing, situating, and contemplating the overall premise of the post, which was mestizo/Latinx “reindigenization” through reclamation of an Indigenous identity. Instagram is therefore a generative site of pedagogical co-creation, a move we call refiguring digital landscapes. We define refiguring digital landscapes as spaces of dialogue, where Indigeneity is in motion and actively being articulated and re-articulated and contested. This paper suggests three key components: 1) how youth from differing Indigenous territories can provide nuances on Latinidad and indigeneity based on their own experiences 2) complicate the way in which settler colonialism (as an ongoing process) is interpreted within multiple geographic contexts 3) map the way that CLI is enacted via online interfaces. Through refiguring digital landscapes, Indigenous youth are actively establishing robust digital worlds that, although they can be in contestation, do foster a depth of epistemological and ontological importance.
PubDate: 2024-04-15
DOI: 10.22024/UniKent/03/tm.1151
Issue No: Vol. 9, No. 1&2 (2024)
- ᒫᒥᑐᓀᔨᐦᒋᑲᓂᐦᑳᐣ ᓂᒦᑭᓯᐢᑕᐦᐃᑫᐏᐣ
ᐁᑿ ᓂᒥᑐᓀᔨᐦᒋᑲᐣ / mâmitoneyihcikanihkân
nimîkisistahikêwin ekwa nimitonêyihcikan
Authors: Jon Corbett
Pages: 86 - 109
Abstract: Four Generations is a digital media installation I coded that computationally generates portraits of my Indigenous lineage using 3D generated beads. Initially exhibited in my Master of Fine Art exhibition at the University of British Columbia in the summer of 2015, this work was then curated for the Transformer: Native Art in Light and Sound exhibition at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in New York City from November 2017 through January 2019. The work now resides in the collection of the Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada (CIRNAC) Indigenous Art Centre. My original intent for Four Generations was to create a dialogue between my nehiyaw (Cree) Métis ancestry, my Indigenous art practice (beadwork), and computational media. However, it has since become a work reviewed by others to explore deeper understandings of digital representations of Indigenous culture, heritage, and identity, and peripherally as an example for critical discussions about language revitalization, Indigenous data sovereignty and computer code studies. This paper reflects on my artwork Four Generations (2015), examining its contributions to Indigenous artistic production and digital translations of Indigenous cultural praxis, including language, medicine, and ceremony, and its impacts on computer programming and computing philosophies. I explore how this work has shaped Indigenous media art through contemplations of public discussions and critiques and express how these discussions have (re)shaped my identity as an Indigenous artist and computer programmer.
PubDate: 2024-04-15
DOI: 10.22024/UniKent/03/tm.1138
Issue No: Vol. 9, No. 1&2 (2024)
- “We don’t need settler permission”
Authors: Hugh Burnam
Pages: 110 - 146
Abstract: Abstract
PubDate: 2024-04-15
DOI: 10.22024/UniKent/03/tm.1112
Issue No: Vol. 9, No. 1&2 (2024)
- #HonouringIndigenousWriters
Authors: David Gaertner
Pages: 147 - 178
Abstract: In 2017, in partnership with the UBC Longhouse and UBC Libraries,the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies and the University of British Columbia Library began the annual “Honouring Indigenous Writers Edit-athon.” Each year, building out of events such as the Art + Feminism Wikipedia Edit-athon, our team of organizers work with Indigenous authors to improve the representation of Indigenous literatures online. We build consensual relationship with authors to revise Wikipedia pages, distribute organizer kits to interested collaborators, maintain an event dashboard, and host live readings from new and established Indigenous authors in Vancouver, Kelowna, and Alberta. The event itself is inspired by Daniel Heath Justice’s hashtag #HonouringIndigneousWriters, which he began on Twitter in 2015 to draw attention to the wide range of literatures available by Indigenous authors. With Justice’s consent, we build on his good work by furthering the reach of Indigenous literatures in digital and physical spaces. In this article, I suggest that #HonouringIndigenousWriters illustrates that any attempt to squarely demarcate boundaries between offline and online communities risks eliding the nuanced facets of relationality that are core to Indigenous literary studies. Bronwyn Carlson argues that in Indigenous engagements with the digital, there is often “no distinction between online and offline worlds; they are seamlessly enmeshed”. Productively blurring the boundary between online and offline worlds informs what critical and ethical and relational engagement in the digital must look like. Via a history of #HonouringIndigenousWriters, written from my perspective as one if its co-founders, I hope to illustrate how, as scholars of Indigenous literary studies, we can draw online and offline worlds into closer proximity and, as Warren Cariou urges us, find places to visit with stories.
PubDate: 2024-04-15
DOI: 10.22024/UniKent/03/tm.1107
Issue No: Vol. 9, No. 1&2 (2024)
- Virtual Reconnections
Authors: Chiara Minestrelli, Patrick Mau, Alim Kamara, Despoina Zachariadou
Pages: 179 - 204
Abstract: The emergence of computer-generated technologies and their increasing affordability has been welcomed with enthusiasm and it is now reaching maturity across different sectors, from the scientific and technological field to educational and recreational contexts. With an eye on its criticalities, this paper reflects on the ways in which VR can be used to engage with Indigenous artefacts and knowledges. Primarily, this work looks at VR as a symbolic and concrete space for the reconfiguration of Indigenous storytelling and the mapping of new cartographies. It does so by reflecting on the possibilities and limitations of a collaborative project that investigates the potential of VR to tell stories through objects (through the mobilisation of strong affective responses), transmit knowledge and educate. The project is a collaborative venture between the author, an Italian scholar based in London, a Greek scholar and VR artist based in London, a London-based Sierra Leonian artist and a Torres Strait Islander artist who resides in Australia. The identities of the people involved in the project are key to understanding VR as a space for dialogue, and a place to think about the situated and subjective practices which are embodied and embedded in the narrative and structure of the VR experience itself. Therefore, we have embraced Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s approach to decolonising methodologies, together with community-based participatory research as key frameworks to understanding intercultural collaboration, the handling of Indigenous knowledges, intellectual property, data sovereignty, and the digitisation of tangible and intangible Indigenous cultural heritage. Investigations into the uses of VR in maintaining cultural heritage and Indigenous cultural artefacts have been undertaken by some scholars (see Newell, for instance), but more research needs to be done to shed light on the complexities of working with these technologies in terms of access, sustainability and effective change. This paper thus looks at VR as a platform for Indigenous communities across cultures to think about sustainable futures as old and new challenges intervene in cultural maintenance, transmission and revitalisation. Within this context, spatial elements and trajectories of Indigenous artefacts that have been removed from their original place of use to travel to the heart of the Empire have been considered. Yet, while here we are not directly engaging with the role of museums and demands of repatriation, we nevertheless argue that ‘digital/virtual reconnections’ could be the first step towards encouraging the younger generations to engage and/or re-engage with aspects of culture that may feel distant. Moving beyond the concept of digital repatriation, the term ‘reconnections’ captures the possibilities of VR in terms of agency, maintenance, revival and reintegration of important cultural objects/knowledges. The Bondo Mask in Sierra Leone and the Turtle Shell mask in the Torres Strait Islands carry with them deep transcultural and cross-cultural meanings, practices and traditions that VR technologies and environments can help revive. Thus, this work sets out to further investigate if and how immersive virtual approaches to Indigenous cultures can strengthen a sense of community and pride in cultural identity while healing transgenerational fractures and reviving deep-seated traditions so as to move confidently towards the future. Through a series of critical ethnographic methods, two of the researchers have and will continue to carry out investigations and fieldwork within their communities of origin in an effort to gather direct testimonies and guidelines from Elders and community members to shape the project in ways that are meaningful and contextual.
PubDate: 2024-04-15
DOI: 10.22024/UniKent/03/tm.1108
Issue No: Vol. 9, No. 1&2 (2024)
- Beyond Nostalgia
Authors: Tanja Grubnic
Pages: 205 - 230
Abstract: Paul Seesequasis, a Plains Cree writer and journalist, discusses the significance of the Indigenous Archival Photo Project with Tanja Grubnic. He addresses how the social media–based archive restores visibility to historical photographs of Indigenous people whose identities have been marginalized through photography as an extractive art form under colonialism. The project initiates a collective process of memory reconstruction and world-making as community members identify friends, family members, and places in the images shared on the internet. Their conversation concludes by discussing the profound link between land and digital space. In consultation with Seesequasis, Grubnic has selected several images from the online project that honour the rich narratives of Indigenous communities across generations past, present, and future.
PubDate: 2024-04-15
DOI: 10.22024/UniKent/03/tm.1232
Issue No: Vol. 9, No. 1&2 (2024)
- Digital and Environmental Erotics
Authors: James Mackay
Pages: 231 - 244
Abstract: The 2021 American Indian Workshop, conducted online due to the pandemic, highlighted the challenges and opportunities of virtual academic conferences. Centered on the theme of the erotic, as conceptualized by Audre Lorde, the conference grappled with maintaining meaningful engagement in a digital format. Key concerns included the environmental impact of traditional conferences, with a focus on reducing academia's carbon footprint. This shift to online events was driven by the urgent need for sustainability, especially relevant to Indigenous Studies given the disproportionate effects of global heating on Indigenous communities. The conference also addressed inclusivity issues, challenging the traditional conference model's accessibility for various groups, including those facing financial, physical, and social barriers. The conference employed innovative formats to enhance online interaction, such as shorter presentations and randomized discussion groups, fostering deeper engagement and collaboration among participants. Keynote speeches by Indigenous academics on themes like two-spirit connections and sexual liberation were especially impactful. This experience underscored the potential for virtual conferences to offer a more inclusive, environmentally sustainable alternative to traditional academic gatherings. The success of this online event serves as a model for reimagining academic conferences in ways that prioritize environmental responsibility and inclusivity.
PubDate: 2024-04-15
DOI: 10.22024/UniKent/03/tm.1229
Issue No: Vol. 9, No. 1&2 (2024)
- To Choose Responsibility
Authors: Emerson Parker Pehl
Pages: 245 - 254
Abstract: Billy-Ray Belcourt’s (Driftpile Cree) collection of intensely emotional essays in A History of My Brief Body is dedicated “to those for whom utopia is a rallying call.” While he demonstrates that his collection is filled with philosophies, theories, and narratives of freedom, joy, and love, he acknowledges that many other pages of the collection also embrace those “hard feelings” of sadness and sorrow. In this essay, I will analyze the possibilities that his ambivalent affective experiences throughout A History of My Brief Body offers for radical world re-/(kinship) making when read through Brendan Hokowhitu’s (Māori) Indigenous existentialism. I argue that Belcourt’s sadness and sorrow, not to be overdetermined as debilitating to his narratives of joy, love, and freedom, are integral aspects of his affective spectrum as he locates the immediacy of the present Indigenous condition through his own queer, Indigenous body. The intelligibility of Belcourt’s Indigenous immediacy through his ambivalent affective offers a linguistic shift away from a Hegelian dialectic of “resistance” to the settler-colonial state to one of loving “responsibility” to queer, Indigenous kin, conceivably to put us back into relation through Kim TallBear’s (Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate) notion of caretaking, which then makes Belcourt’s utopic “haven of a world” tenable to a broader audience.
PubDate: 2024-04-15
DOI: 10.22024/UniKent/03/tm.1079
Issue No: Vol. 9, No. 1&2 (2024)
- Erotic Art as A Material Cultural Representation of Indigenous Decolonial
Sexuality
Authors: Deanne Grant
Pages: 255 - 270
PubDate: 2024-04-15
DOI: 10.22024/UniKent/03/tm.1101
Issue No: Vol. 9, No. 1&2 (2024)
- “I want to taste your language”
Authors: Malou Brouwer
Pages: 271 - 300
Abstract: This paper builds on an extensive pool of Indigenous women’s artistic and intellectual expressions to explore Indigenous women’s erotic poetry as a decolonizing intervention that challenges and transcends linguistic boundaries. Indigenous women are often regarded as keepers of knowledge and language in their communities. They contribute to “the well-being of the community and the nation as a whole” (Maracle 41), they are “caretakers of this land” (42), and they are resurgence (Simpson 27-37). Indigenous women are disproportionately impacted by settler colonialism, which makes their critiques of heteropatriarchy, racism, and settler colonialism as interlocking systems even more telling. Linguistic borders across Turtle Island are multiple and involve colonial languages such as French, Spanish and English, as well as the more than 150 Indigenous languages spoken across these lands. Indigenous women’s poetry – and more generally Indigenous literatures in Turtle Island – know a rich linguistic variety: while some texts are written in one of the colonial languages (English, French, Spanish), others are composed in an Indigenous language (e.g. Inuktitut, Cree, Innu), and perhaps most include an array of languages. Particularly, in what is now called Canada, the colonially-imposed English/French divide is being challenged by Indigenous writers, scholars, and translators. In this paper, I argue that one way that Indigenous women poets do so is through the erotic which contests and transcends the colonial languages and connects to and takes root in Indigenous languages. I analyze selected poems by Melissa Begay (Dine), Tiffany Midge (Hunkapapa Sioux), Chrystos (Menominee), Tenille Campbell (Dene and Métis), Janet Rogers (Mohawk/Tuscarora), and Natasha Kanapé Fontaine (Innu) to see how the erotic and language are interrelated. This paper thus examines the potential of an Indigenous sovereign erotics across languages in Indigenous women’s erotica.
PubDate: 2024-04-15
DOI: 10.22024/UniKent/03/tm.1099
Issue No: Vol. 9, No. 1&2 (2024)
- Alternative Indigenous Narratives and Gender Constructions in Sydney
Freeland’s Drunktown’s Finest (2014)
Authors: Georges De Medts
Pages: 301 - 317
Abstract: In this article, I will examine how alternative narratives of gender and sexuality update and diversify the catalog of images of Indigenous people through the 2014 drama Drunktown’s Finest, written and directed by the Navajo filmmaker Sydney Freeland, and how this film interrogates the possibility to assume a Two-Spirit identity on and off the reservation. Sydney Freeland’s film achieves to remind the audience of the tribal tradition of deep respect that has characterized relationships with Two-Spirit people for a long time through the story of one of its characters, transgender woman Felixia. Living with her traditional grandparents – a medicine man and his wife, she is completely accepted by them, because the concept of third and fourth genders is part of the Navajo/Diné culture, whereas the younger generation does not seem so tolerant. This pattern allows Freeland to participate in a larger project which is the fight against homophobia that replicates the dominant cultural norm and penetrates Indigenous communities. Ultimately, Felixia learns from her grandfather about Navajo nádleeh and finds her inner balance. Therefore, in this artwork, the enactment of what Qwo-Li Driskill calls “sovereign erotic” becomes a trope for Indigenous survivance.
PubDate: 2024-04-15
DOI: 10.22024/UniKent/03/tm.1164
Issue No: Vol. 9, No. 1&2 (2024)
- In the Name of Love
Authors: Elena Cortés Farrujia
Pages: 318 - 335
Abstract: Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots (1991), written by the Kuna-Rappahannock author Monique Mojica, constitutes a palimpsestic performance wherein the playwright recuperates the voices of well-known figures like Pocahontas or La Malinche, questioning the European imaginations and decolonizing their stories. The transnational polyphonic space created by Mojica allows not only exposes the long-lasting and broad impact that these European narratives have on Indigenous Women; but it also enables the configuration of a genealogical anthology of Indigenous Feminist, Queer and Two-Spirit knowledge by sewing into her comedic yet utterly angry tapestry the works of other Indigenous -mainly Queer- authors, like Gloria Anzaldúa, Chrystos and Beth Brant, among others. This paper aims to explore the queer potential of Mojica’s play by reading it as in conversation with Beth Brant’s work, whose discourse provides new and unexplored insights into the performance. On the one hand, such a frame uncovers the mechanisms on display of the European romances, which have instrumentalized the name/idea of ‘love’ as a colonial apparatus to articulate and impose Western heteronormative models upon Indigenous communities, justifying withal European sexual relations with Indigenous women, especially rapes, by creating the stereotype of them as willing for their colonial desire. Whereas, on the other hand, by applying Brant’s A Gathering of Spirit, Mojica’s text reveals a turning towards queer kinship as an alternative to heteronormative relationships, by retrieving the erotic potential of appointed female elements, such as the moon, the water, or even oranges; as well as by gathering the multiplicity of female voices that create this Third Space for the healing of Indigenous women in the name of love.
PubDate: 2024-04-15
DOI: 10.22024/UniKent/03/tm.1131
Issue No: Vol. 9, No. 1&2 (2024)
- Indigenous Peoples Rise Up: The Global Ascendency of Social Media Activism
( Bronwyn Carlson and Jeff Berglund, eds.)
Authors: Ashley Caranto Morford
Pages: 336 - 339
PubDate: 2024-04-15
DOI: 10.22024/UniKent/03/tm.1111
Issue No: Vol. 9, No. 1&2 (2024)
- Sámi Media and Indigenous Agency in the Arctic North (Coppélie
Cocq and Thomas A. Dubois)
Authors: Camilla Holm Soelseth
Pages: 340 - 344
PubDate: 2024-04-15
DOI: 10.22024/UniKent/03/tm.1103
Issue No: Vol. 9, No. 1&2 (2024)
- Indigenous Women’s Theatre in Canada: A Mechanism of Decolonization
(Sarah MacKenzie)
Authors: Jacqueline Petropoulos
Pages: 345 - 348
PubDate: 2024-04-15
DOI: 10.22024/UniKent/03/tm.1207
Issue No: Vol. 9, No. 1&2 (2024)
- An Anthology of Monsters: How Story Saves Us from Anxiety (Cherie
Dimaline)
Authors: June Scudeler
Pages: 349 - 350
PubDate: 2024-04-15
DOI: 10.22024/UniKent/03/tm.1206
Issue No: Vol. 9, No. 1&2 (2024)
- Autobiography as Indigenous Intellectual Tradition: Cree and Métis
âcimisowina (Deanna Reder)
Authors: Erin Akerman
Pages: 351 - 354
PubDate: 2024-04-15
DOI: 10.22024/UniKent/03/tm.1202
Issue No: Vol. 9, No. 1&2 (2024)
- A Light to Do Shellwork By (Georgiana Valoyce-Sanchez)
Authors: David Carlson
Pages: 355 - 358
Abstract: Book review by David J Carlson, California State University San Bernardino
PubDate: 2024-04-15
DOI: 10.22024/UniKent/03/tm.1190
Issue No: Vol. 9, No. 1&2 (2024)
- Making Love with the Land (Joshua Whitehead)
Authors: Geoffrey MacDonald
Pages: 359 - 361
PubDate: 2024-04-15
DOI: 10.22024/UniKent/03/tm.1204
Issue No: Vol. 9, No. 1&2 (2024)
- Ghost Lake (Nathan Niigan Noodin Adler)
Authors: Léna Remy-Kovach
Pages: 362 - 364
PubDate: 2024-04-15
DOI: 10.22024/UniKent/03/tm.1153
Issue No: Vol. 9, No. 1&2 (2024)
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