This event occurred on October 14th 2020, as an Anchor project of Nocturne Halifax.

Meeting Waters: Cross-Cultural Collaborations on Environmental Racism with Ingrid Waldron was an online event centering Black and Indigenous solidarity through cross-cultural exchanges on environmental racism in Mi’kma’ki. Speakers and performers were brought together to share stories and experiences of environmental racism through storytelling, dance, spoken word, song, and graphic art. Collaborators describe their experience and presented their original creation in the form of a Zoom event followed by a panel discussion presented in partnership with Visual Arts Nova Scotia.

Featuring collaborations:
Africville – Irvine Carvery and Rebecca Thomas
Pictou Landing First Nation – Michelle Francis-Denny and Kwento
Sipekne’katik – Dorene Bernard and Liliona Quarmyne
Shelburne – Vanessa Hartley and Leelee Oluwatoysi Eko David
Design and graphic recording by Bria Miller

With support from Lindsay Dobbin & I’thandi Munro.

0:11 LINDSAY CORY

Kwé and Hello. Welcome to Meeting Waters: Cross Cultural Collaborations on Environmental Racism. My name is Lindsay Cory, I’m the director of Nocturne and before we begin I would like to acknowledge that I am an uninvited guest to K’jipuktuk here in Mi’kma’ki. While this event is taking place virtually the Nocturne: Art at Night festival takes place in K’jipuktuk, the ancestral and unceded lands of the Mi’kmaq people. This land, and the waters that surround it, are covered by the Peace and Friendship Treaties signed between the British Crown and the Mi’kmaq, Maliseet, and Passamaquoddy peoples in 1725 to 1779. The 1752 rendition of that treaty is what governs K’jipuktuk, where I am coming from today. We are all treaty people. That means that we have a shared responsibility to uphold the agreements laid out in those treaties. Furthermore, we have a responsibility to stand in solidarity when those treaty rights are in question.

I also want to acknowledge the significant foundations in infrastructure and culture that Black and African Nova Scotian communities have played in building this province and country. Nocturne stands with Mi’kmaq grandmothers, land and water protectors, and social justice seekers. As I learn more about this place I am committed to using my platform through Nocturne to amplify, connect and collaborate with the many art communities that live and work here in Mi’kma’ki.

Nocturne is also dedicated to providing safer spaces at our events and gatherings – even the virtual ones. Our aim is to host spaces that are widely accessible, amplify marginalized voices and leadership, and actively prioritize anti oppressive principles wherever we can. That said, we can’t promise a totally safe space for all tonight. If you are experiencing any difficulty or need support, you can reach out directly to me in the chat and my name is Lindsay Cory again.

We also have a technical support assistant you can access and their name in the chat is TECH SUPPORT. You can message them directly if you are having issues connecting and they can try to help. If you can’t find TECH SUPPORT, then message me and I’ll try to help you as best as I can. We are also very grateful to Karen Staples and Ayoka Junaid, our ASL interpreters, for their work this evening and prior to in preparation for this event. Let us know if there is anything else we can do to make your access to this event more barrier free. Where possible we’ll be adding text to the projects that you’ll be witnessing tonight in the chat so you can access those, all. If you want to move your chat to the side of your screen for better viewing you can do so by turning off your fullscreen if you’re using a desktop and that should move it to the side for you. If you’re looking for the chat button it’s right at the bottom in your toolbar.

Your host tonight is Dr. Ingrid Waldron. Ingrid is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Health at Dalhousie University, the Director of the Environmental Noxiousness, Racial Inequities, and Community Health and the director of The ENRICH Project. Her research, teaching, and community leadership and advocacy work in Nova Scotia are examining and addressing the health and mental health impacts of structural inequalities within health and mental health care, child welfare, and the environment in Indigenous, Black, immigrant, and refugee communities. I wanted to thank Ingrid for her leadership in this project and her guidance throughout the whole process.

Lastly, I’d like to thank our curator, Lindsay Dobbin who collaborated with Ingrid to conjure up this expansive project. I also want to thank our project coordinator, I’thandi Munro, who has been a dedicated collaborator throughout the process. Each of the speakers you will hear from tonight will be introduced by Ingrid and they have brought so much grounding and passion to the process. I really just want to thank you all for working through this with us.. And with that, I am very pleased to welcome you to Meeting Waters: Cross Cultural Collaborations on Environmental Racism. I’ll pass it over to Ingrid.

5:20 INGRID WALDRON:

Good Evening everyone. I would like to welcome you to Meeting Waters: Cross-Cultural Collaborations on Environmental Racism.

I would like to begin by acknowledging that we are in Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq People. This territory is covered by the “Treaties of Peace and Friendship” which Mi’kmaq peoples first signed with the British Crown in 1725. The treaties did not deal with surrender of lands and resources but in fact recognized Mi’kmaq title and established the rules for what was to be an ongoing relationship between nations. We acknowledge this land not only in thanks to the Indigenous communities who have held relationship with this land for generations but also in recognition of the historical and ongoing legacy of colonialism.

The collaborative pieces between speakers and performers that you will see this evening ask an important question: How do we forge meaningful relationships and build solidarities across differences by listening and through self-reflection to create the necessary partnerships that allow us to challenge environmental racism and other land-based struggles that have harmed the land, our communities, and our well-being?

Over the next hour and half, we will centre Indigenous and Black solidarities through cross-cultural exchanges on environmental racism in Mi’kma’ki.

We bring together speakers and performers to share stories and experiences of environmental racism and other land-based struggles in Mi’kma’ki through storytelling, dance, spoken word, song, multimedia performances, and graphic art in four communities. These communities are: Africville, Pictou Landing First Nation, Sipekne’katik First Nation, and Shelburne.

Let’s begin with Africville. Irvine Carvery was born in Africville to a large family who were landowners and community leaders. He was the President of the Africville Genealogy Society. Under Carvery’s term, the Africville community received an apology from the city of Halifax for the razing of the area in the 1960s. The Africville church was also rebuilt.

Rebecca Thomas is an award-winning Mi’kmaw poet. She is Halifax’s former Poet Laureate (from 2016 to 2018) and has been published in multiple journals and magazines. I’m Finding My Talk is her first book. For Thomas, a Mi’kmaw woman whose father is a residential school survivor, poetry has served as a powerful tool for educating about the racism and the inequality that still haunts many Indigenous peoples in Canada. She has two books slated to be released in the fall of 2020.

I will read their piece. Their piece is called The Planning of Environmental Racism in Africville. This is a collaborative piece by Irvine and Rebecca. A fertilizer plant and city dump are just two examples of how the city of Halifax took the most harmful and unwanted pieces of infrastructure and placed them next to the vibrant community of Africville in a long legacy of environmental racism in Nova Scotia. From the chemical with water sprayed on the unpaved roads of the community to the unsafe levels of soil toxicity in 2020 from that very water, this legacy is one of Canada’s ugliest. However, the spirit of Africville lives on, its former residents and its descendants also live on. Irvine and Rebecca will deliver an oral history of and spoken word piece on Africville respectively. Welcome Irvine and Rebecca.

10:24 REBECCA THOMAS:

Hello, thank you for having me.

10:27 IRVINE CARVERY:
It’s a pleasure to be here indeed. Rebecca and I have worked together on this and I’ve agreed to go first. First of all I want to acknowledge the ongoing struggle of my brothers and sisters in the Mi’kmaq community. Tonight as we speak, they are exercising their rights for self government in declaring their own fishery and the establishment continued to deny their rights. We stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters. It’s going to be a long struggle, but we will stay in the struggle with them, until self governance has been fully achieved by my brothers and sisters. The topic of Africville environmental racism and the reason why we use the title ‘The Planning of Environmental Racism’ is because that’s exactly what it was. In the mid 19^th Century, <inaudible> of slavery, there began a new type of discrimination and it was called scientific racism in which science was used to downgrade people of African descent to be less than white people. Planning became the focus point for, or it should have been the focus point for, the betterment of lives of people in Halifax in planning institutions, play spaces, recreational spaces. But because of this scientific racism, Africville was not considered to be important enough – or we were not considered to be on the same par as white people here in Halifax – so when planning for the unwanted services for the greater society, the placement of those services was put in and around Africville. Beginning in 1870, with the siting of an infectious disease hospital directly above Africville with its sewer line running down to the shores of the Bedford Basin in Africville, emptying at the high water mark. That was the beginning. The railroad went through Africville, dividing our community and taking our land, and all of the smoke and the filth coming from the railroad going through your community was inflicted upon the people of Africville. Slaughter plants. Fertilizer plants. And we know fertilizer is detrimental to the environment, all we have to do is look at the bombing with fertilizer being used as an explosive. There was a quarry built in and around Africville. The dumping of human waste was done above Africville, in Africville I say. All of these unwanted services for the city of Halifax, by the planning department, the planning department looked in their planning to better the lives of the citizens of Halifax. The planning department looked around the city of Halifax and many locations were rejected because of health concerns. Those same concerns were not afforded the people of Africville. They were placed in Africville. 1950. 1955. The city of Halifax had to relocate its open dump and again, once again, sites were looked at and rejected because of health concerns. That dump was placed in Africville 300 yards from the nearest home in Africville. People in Africville became sick from that dump. People from Africville died because of that dump. All of the toxic waste in Halifax, waste coming from not just residential areas but all of the industries, all of the hospitals, was dumped on that site 300 yards from the nearest home in Africville. My oldest brother was killed by a truck going to that dump in Africville. He was 12 years old. If the dump wasn’t there, my brother may still be alive today. Poison was brought to the dump in Africville and given to the men who worked on the dump. Those men took that poison home and mixed it with their seed beer and three of them died because it was poison. There was an inquiry held as to found out what happened. The inquiry concluded that it was not the makers of the poison who was at blame, it was not the deliverers who was to blame, but instead it was the victims who were to blame because there was a bylaw in Halifax that stated that people were not allowed on the dump. That was the findings of the inquiry. We’re talking about the 1960s, we’re not talking about the 1700s or the 1800s, we’re talking about the 1960s. You see, we as people of African descent in this city have always been treated as lesser than. The destruction of our community began, or the planning of the destruction of our community began, in 1915. Not in 1960 when they came in and destroyed it, but in 1915 with the planning of the destruction of our community. But it was not enacted until the 1960s. So we had to live with all of this industrial waste, all of this pollution. Ingrid in introducing us talked about the road systems in Africville. Where the pavement ended, Africville began. And they used to come out in the summer time to spray down the roads to keep the dust down. They sprayed it with some kind of a mixture. Now we’re talking about the 1960s. We did an environmental study in 2010 to find out if the land was environmentally friendly, and in 2010 the remnants of that poison that was poured on our roads was still present to the point that it was recommended that no one live there over a 24 hour period because the land was still polluted. That’s what we had to put up with. And the reason why? Because they didn’t see us as equal. We were less than. We were no longer slaves, but we were still treated as slaves, as chattel. We were disposable. Our land was disposable. The city of Halifax and their planning department felt that our land was underutilized, so therefore the value in the land wasn’t there for the city of Halifax, so they had to get us out of there so that they could get the true value of that land for the coffers in the city of Halifax. But still, the land sits empty and it will still stand empty until it is returned to the people of Africville. Thank you very much.

19:30 REBECCA THOMAS:

We’lalin, and thank you so much, Irvine, for that, and I hope that my poem honours what you said, honours you, and honours the descendants of Africville. So with that, I’ll begin.

This is isn’t my story.

But I’ve been placed in a position.

I have the honour to tell it.

And I implore that you listen.

This isn’t my story.

But I feel a connection.

Don’t miss this chance to be taught a lesson.

It’s about resilience and lineage.

Unbroken by those born into privilege.

Let’s set the scene.

Paint a picture of a little place, east on the continental map.

Where we have a vibrant Black community and city council fat cats.

Because of their Loyalty to the crown,

Because their melanin was on the other side of brown,

Because they had escaped to freedom and would never go back.

Because they were Black,

The city of Halifax planned it’s attack.

In order to control a race,

You need to control a space.

And control the space they did.

They began by denying services.

They viewed the community as nothing but squatters.

The year the Baptist church went up, the mayor of the time went on to found Halifax Water.

Ensuring Halifax residents a safe drinking supply was the mission,

For this newly established commission.

Who wilfully ignored the Campbell Road Settlement’s petitions.

If only running water was the soul denial.

But Halifax had plans that were much more vile.

A railway bisected Africville’s streets.

Who was responsible?

Raise a glass for the Mayor of the time, Mr. Alexander Keith.

Next came the hospital full of infectious disease.

That filled the community with a sense of unease.

Then a prison to overlook the residents.

That left a correctional legacy rooted in prejudice.

Where decedents are carded and harassed

Because their homes were razed from the grass.

With Africville continuing to grow,

The city calculated it’s next blow.

While toxic chemicals were sprayed on the unpaved streets,

Children followed along on their bikes at top speed.

Into the earth those chemicals leached.

In 2020 can still cause disease.

Decision after decision,

Cut the teeth of politicians,

These transgressions were targeted,

The harm was marketed,

As though it were benevolent help.

Toasted with water from poisoned wells.

This was methodical.

This was logical.

It’s a matter of historical fact!

The evidence is stacked.

They went from self-sufficiency to government dependency.

A people’s humanity was reduced to policy.

White council members voted no on Black survival,

A throwback reference with modern day revival.

Sewer pits and a slaughterhouse

A city dump and future freeway routes.

No amount of engineering could bridge the gap

Between was what taken and what can never be given back.

Their taxes paid for the garbage trucks that moved them.

To where white neighbours angrily refused them.

Broken promises of relocation funds.

Calling their home the city’s worst slum.

Halifax thought they were nothing but weeds.

And it might of damaged the tree when it cut off the leaves,

But Black roots are known to grow deep.

Whole communities sprung forth from the scattered seeds.

No amount of racism could quell the uprising,

At this point, Black success shouldn’t be surprising.

Because Halifax poisoned, destroyed, isolated and denied everything they could.

But the spirit of Africville lives on in neighbourhoods.

The square and the park are full of laughter.

Descendants are writing the next chapter.

Through professing and politics.

In their athletics and kinetics.

Speaking their truth in Scripture.

Blowing minds in art and literature.

Are you now finally getting the picture?

You can move the people and take away their things.

And I’ll point to 1000 examples of how they were and will always be amazing.

But this isn’t my story

And even though there are tales of glory

Of success and triumph,

We can never forget what was done.

To a community that committed no crime.

Whose land was eroded, taken and razed over time.

This isn’t my story but I’ve been asked to tell it.

About a community whose descendants will never forget it.

The colonial beast may have sharpened it’s teeth on our hides.

But from an L’nu to a Scotian, I see that twinkle in your eye.

Because we wrote the books on how to survive.

Then delivered a masterclass on how to thrive.

So from the pen of a Mi’kmaw poet, I put forth a motion.

That Africville be remembered and paid it’s due by every single Nova Scotian.

Thank you. I hope you liked that, Irvine.

24:08 IRVINE CARVERY:

Oh my God. You’ve got to send that to me. That is <inaudible>. Thank you, Rebecca. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

24:16 REBECCA THOMAS:

We’lalin. Thank you so much.

24:18 IRVINE CARVERY:

We’lalin.

24:19 INGRID WALDRON:

Wow. Thank you, Irvine and Rebecca, that was wonderful. So let’s move on to Pictou Landing First Nation.

Michelle Francis-Denny is the Community Liaison with Boat Harbour Remediation Project but first and foremost she is a Pictou Landing First Nation community member. Pictou Landing First Nation has suffered from decades of pollution and most recently worked with various allies to pressure the Nova Scotia government to pass the Boat Harbour Act, which put an end to the Northern Pulp mill in Pictou County using Boat Harbour as an effluent treatment facility.

With a unique sound crossing Neo Soul and Experimental R&B, singer-songwriter Kwento embodies empowerment through presenting an honest ode to her femininity and Afrocentricity. Kwento receives the energy of her audiences and returns it tenfold – through her soulful vocals, effortless performances and vibrant aura. As her talents take her across the globe, Kwento is collaborating with producers in South Africa, writers in Germany and musicians and producers in Toronto and will release her second EP entitled ‘abbrv.’ (abbreviation) this year. 

Kwento and Michelle’s piece is titled Purple Tides. Purple Tides is a presentation about the community members of Pictou Landing First Nation who have fought tirelessly for more than 5 decades to stop toxic pulp mill effluent from being dumped into their backyard. One of the major visual impacts of the mill operations since it began in 1967, was the presence of foamy effluent washing up on the once pristine beach turning the tides purple. Boat Harbour or A’se’k (the other room) the elders called it, was no longer a place they could rely on for their resources and a void was created in the lives of community members. The Boat Harbour act ordered the effluent treatment facility to close in January 2020 and a new chapter began. Michelle and Kwento have come together to highlight the depth of the impact of this atrocity. Through a speech and a performance of an original song, they will shed light on the healing journey ahead for the community. Welcome Michelle and Kwento.

28:02 MICHELLE FRANCIS-DENNY:

I want to thank you so much for inviting Kwento and I to collaborate on this project for this very worthwhile event. It’s going to be an amazing week. I’m a very proud member of Pictou Landing First Nation and it just so happens that my very personal ancestral connection to the Boat Harbour crisis was highlighted in the film There’s Something In the Water. Our community is very proud to have had this story elevated on such a level that it has resonated with people all over the world and we’re able to help bring awareness to environmental racism. It’s very important for me to acknowledge that every single person in our community and our leaders, those that are here now and those who have passed, each have a story and every single one of those stories matter. Our stories are each a little bit different but connected by the fibres of our being and our strong sense of community. We’re bound by our resilience and our bodies are filled with ranges of valid emotions and trauma. The pulp and paper waste treatment facility has definitely impacted us and those impacts run exceedingly deep. As you can tell in the film, our elders tell many stories and they talk about how the impacts of 1967 were immediate. And how fish immediately died and washed up on the banks and the water turned brown and the stench in the air where, even if you were to venture inside, you couldn’t escape from it. The chemicals in the air and the elders talk about the houses, the paint on the houses, turning black. You think about all those things, but you really need to think about what lies beneath the surface of what you can see. How much anger and sorrow and resentment and sadness our elders must have felt to witness that and how they carry that with them through their lives. The inter-generational impacts that are being carried on. The loss of our Mi’kmaq culture and our pride essentially being washed away with those purple tides. It is quite upsetting how the water authority was very intentful in provincial government. They knew exactly what they were doing. Preying on a vulnerable and marginalized group, using such lies and deceit. Our leaders fought for this case of environmental racism to be recognized, just to be seen, and corrected for many decades. To tell you the truth, the last five years have been a true testament to our strength. Being tossed into this whirlwind and we’re still suffering the effects, but in the pursuit of environmental and social justice it was well worth it. This year, in 2020, we’re finally able to rejoice and celebrate with the closure of the effluent treatment facility that was piped across Indian Cross Point and right into our back yard at Boat Harbour which the elders once called A’se’k. I think about the lengthy battle that’s coming to an end and after the dust settles, a solemn battle within ourselves and within our community needs to be recognized because something new is beginning. Now we’re being tasked with creating a new legacy and a new beginning for future generations. So we look ahead, we talk about our healing journeys a lot, but we’re reminded of the medicine wheel. As Indigenous people we want to strive to achieve balance in our lives and we want to heal from the trauma we’ve endured. So we think about the physical, the spiritual, the mental, and the emotional well-being, but there’s still uncertainty for us that’s in the back of our minds. So we’re not so certain what the way forward is. So many questions alone. I’ve heard from the community: ‘What does healing look like? How am I supposed to feel? Will the fish come back? Who will teach me to hunt?’ We’ve lost that skill, in some sense of passing it down to our generations. ‘Will I be able to dip my toe in the water without fear? Who can I trust?’ Only time will tell.

33:27 KWENTO’S PRESENTATION:
Waves of change keep growing

Crashing on the surface, level still

Rivers of pain keep flowing

From the corners of the Earth and into our veins

These waters, they know us by name

They know why we came, they have all the answers

We’re learning, learning to swim

Teach us to swim, we’re learning to swim

Beyond the purple tide, beneath the ocean floor

After the battle we, after the battle we find, we still find

We still find

Hear them say, we’re finished

No mountains left to climb

Where is our beginning?

Running out of time

These waters, they know us by name

They know why we came, they have all the answers

We’re learning, learning to swim

Teach us to swim, we’re learning to swim

Beyond the purple tide, beneath the ocean floor

After the battle we, after the battle we find, we still find

Beyond the purple tide, beneath the ocean floor

After the battle we, after the battle we find, we still find

37:18 INGRID WALDRON:

Beautiful. This was really a great idea to do this event! Really great. Thank you, Michelle and Kwento. So let’s move on to Sipekne’katik First Nation.

Dorene Bernard is a Grassroots Grandmother, from the Sipekne’katik Band in Mi’kmak’i. She is a Water Protector, a Water Walker, and Survivor of the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School. Her background is in Aboriginal Social Work where she worked for 20 years in Child Welfare and Community Support for Residential School Survivors. She was the Coady International Institute Chair in Social Justice in 2017, sharing her teachings on Environmental Racism, Climate Change, Residential School legacy, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, and Water teachings. She has been inspired and was mentored by the late Grandmother Josephine Mandamin, Mother Earth Water Walker.

With an eclectic background that has taken her through many performance styles on four different continents, Liliona Quarmyne is a dancer, actor, singer, community organizer, and activist. She performs across Canada and internationally, creates original works as an independent artist, facilitates community programming, and is the Artistic Director of Kinetic Studio. Liliona sees her body as a link to past and to future generations. Her scope of work is broad but is particularly focused on the relationship between art and social justice, on the body’s ability to carry ancestral memory, and on the role the performing arts can play in creating change. Welcome Dorene and Liliona.

39:55 LILIONA QUARMYNE:

Good evening everyone. Before I introduce our piece, I just want to give deep gratitude to Doreen as she joins us tonight from the front lines at Saulnierville and to acknowledge the incredible heart and care she has put into creating this piece as she has been fighting on the front lines. We’lalin Doreen.

Our piece, part teach-in, part dance, part offering, and part prayer. This performance piece touches on Alton Gas and the establishment of the Mi’kmaq Treaty Rights-Based Fisheries. Drawing on the Peace and Friendship Treaties, this piece will share the ways in which the actions of corporations and large commercial fisheries contradict our collective responsibility to live as treaty people.

42:52 LILIONA QUARMYNE & DORENE BERNARD’S PRESENTATION:
<Speaking/greets in L’nu language> My spirit name is <Introducing self in L’nu language>. My name’s Dorene Bernard, I’m from Sipekne’katik, <Introducing clan in L’nu language> clan and Mi’kmaq. In our teachings, water is life. We were given a gift, to bring life forward, to carry life in the womb, surrounded by water. The water is our first world. We can breathe the water, drink the water, we are the water. When we’re born, we come through the water. The water hears our dreams, hears our thoughts. The water is alive, it’s a spirit, it is our first medicine. With that gift, we’ve been given that sacred responsibility to take care of the water. We’re here to protect the sacred, not only for us, but for our future generations. I would like to see more people have a relationship with the water. Tell the water ‘I love you, I thank you, I respect you.’ Water is life. Our Peace and Friendship Treaties, they are a covenant chain of treaties that took decades to be ratified. And at that time in the 1700s we travelled throughout America, throughout Mi’kmak’i, to tell the people, to consult the people, to tell them that these treaties lived. So it did take years, because we travelled by canoe, we travelled by water, we travelled over land, walking the land. Many people look at our treaties as separate, but they’re all one continuous treaty. <inaudible> our own fishery where moderate livelihood <inaudible> use our lands and resources for the good of our people and to implement those into law. We have treaty rights and we are going to assert those rights. We are all treaty people. What does that mean? That means that we are living here together. This is our land. We share our land with you. And it means that you have a responsibility too. Standing on the shore, <inaudible> leave the wharf. Surrounded by hundreds of non-Native boats. <inaudible> I have such a deep pain in my heart. Our boats that went out there among those hundreds of fisherman, with big big boats compared to ours. And how they chased them and surrounded them and intimidated them. Many turned around and hauled all of our traps out of the water. We knew we had to do something about that. Called DFO, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, and the RCMP looked on and did nothing. <inaudible> They said it was too dangerous for them to be on the water, that says a lot about how much control they had over non-Native fisherman. Using their boats in a dangerous way, stealing gear, doing all the things that break the laws of the fishery. Not only for DFO regulations about also their own unspoken laws: you never touch another person’s gear. It’s not about conservation, it’s not about fishing in a different season. This was only racism. Them thinking they have ownership of the fishery and these are their waters and these are their fish and we were interfering with that. They just came out from everywhere. We know that racism is alive and well. It’s systemic racism, it’s not just in the fishing industry, and it’s not just the corporations. Alton Gas, but also gold mines and the mining that they want to do coming into our communities, on our lands, on our territory, that want to do business and bypass the consultation <inaudible> informed consent of the Indigenous peoples. But it’s also in the health system, the justice system. Pretty ingrained in Canadian society. We’ve lost decades of history. This isn’t something that I learned in residential schools. This isn’t something my parents or grandparents learned in residential schools. We are living this education. We are living this history. Many fisherman and those families down there, really don’t have the education on our rights as the Mi’kmaq people. Many people were educated during those three weeks, for sure. I know they read the treaties. I know they were looking for what these meant. So it was really something that was long needed, maybe this was a wake up call for them as well. As we were asserting our treaty rights they were trying to figure out what those rights are. And it’s important, really important, that these teachings about our treaties are taught in the schools. Taught in the governments and the organizations. It’s very important that people embrace the meaning of what it means to be a treaty people. We have a lot of catching up to do and a lot of healing of relationships because our treaties have not been implemented and it’s the government that has stopped those things from happening. And now we are implementing, we are serving our treaty rights, we are just doing what needs to be done, for the good of our people the Mi’kmaq and the Wabanaki people who are represented in those treaties. We are unified now to implement those treaties with our laws, with our governance, and not just rely on the Canadian government to define what it means. We need everyone to look at the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People and the Truth and Reconciliation Calls to Action. The UN Declaration is in thirteen of those ninety-four calls to action. The government has the blueprint, has a foundation, in those documents, to also implement those treaty rights into law and that’s what needs to be done. That’s where we are today. We are at this place in 2020, there is no turning back. We only can go forward and we’d like to go forward together. 2020 is the year of change and it’s going to be for the better.

52:27 INGRID WALDRON

Thank you, Dorene and Liliona for that beautiful piece called Salt Fish. Incredible. Let’s move toShelburne.

Vanessa Hartley is an 8th generation Black Loyalist descendant from Shelburne, Nova Scotia. Currently, she works for Shelburne Association Supporting Inclusion (SASI) as a Community Support Worker. She recently completed her diploma in Social Services and is currently working on community development presentations, programming, and other projects for African Nova Scotians in Shelburne. Vanessa also sits on the board of the South End Environmental Injustice Society (SEED) in Shelburne.

Leelee Oluwastoyosi Eko Davis is of Nigerian, Trinidadian, and French descent. They are a disabled, genderqueer intermedia artist. They are from Treaty One Territory in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Leelee also works as a program designer, facilitator, and consultant in the field of Social Innovation and Adaptive Change. Welcome, Vanessa and Leelee to present their piece.

54:21 LEELEE OLUWASTOYOSI EKO DAVIS:

Thank you, thank you. Thank you, Ingrid for the vision of this work coming together in the way that it has. Yeah, feeling really very blessed. Our piece today we’re sharing with you, Vanessa Hartley and myself, is called . It examines environmental violence that’s afflicting the Black rural communities of Shelburne. The impacts that environmental racism is having as demonstrated here is very real and is very tangible and very urgent. Shelburne’s rich history illustrates the systemic barriers that the community has faced and continues to face today. We, Vanessa and I, have asked ourselves: can these trials be overcome? How can resolution and faith carry us through these continual acts of violence? Where can we go to find solace in these turbulent times? We are sharing this through storytelling, film, sound, and movement, and we’re just going to take some time with these questions. That was our intention with this and not because we think we’ll find answers, but as a means to engage our spirits and our continued liberation in this powerful, powerful way that we are here together. Black, Indigenous, solidarity, liberation, sovereignty, together. Thank you. Hope you enjoy.

56:22 LEELEE OLUWASTOYOSI EKO DAVIS & VANESSA HARTLEY’S PRESENTATION:

Affliction

Affliction

Affliction

Afflictions

Afflictions that cut so deep, it harms the generations ahead

Afflictions that cut so deep, it harms the generations ahead

Speaking up to disrupt the cycle

Speaking up to disrupt the cycle

Speaking up to disrupt the cycle

Speaking up to disrupt the cycle

Speaking up to disrupt the cycle

Speaking up to disrupt the cycle

Speaking up to disrupt the cycle

Speaking up to disrupt the cycle

Speaking up to disrupt the cycle

Of inter-generational trauma

You said get over it

Environmental racism

Environmental racism

Environmental racism

Environmental racism

Environmental racism

We want water that won’t kill us

Your response, is to stop using the race card

We protest, speak, and fight in hopes to gain respect and equality

These afflictions that cut so deep

These afflictions that cut so deep

These afflictions that cut so deep

These afflictions that cut so deep

Our Black community is located in the South End of Shelburne.

Historically many loyalists settled within town limits along the waterfront.

Black loyalists would soon join and live within the outskirts of Shelburne.

Shelburne is where the first race riot within North America would happen.

Riots lasting up to 30 days. Homes, churches and everything else was burnt.

Black loyalists would then settle outside of Shelburne on the outskirts as well within

Birchtown and South End.

From the beginning our community was displaced and marginalized.

Our problems all start from historical presence.

We need to evaluate Shelburne as we still have many systemic barriers that our people are facing.

Shelburne creates these afflictions that run so deep within our history.

How can we establish our land?

When is this toxic inequality depreciating the value of our homes?

Dispense asbestos and chemicals into our wells and takes our elders all too soon.

This land, once a dream, a promise of freedom, is going to kill us.

It becomes quite challenging when town council is reluctant acknowledge environmental racism as a concrete issue.

South End Shelburne residents are perceived by town council as unvalued.

If our council cared of the health and well-being of the South End residents, they would have brought forth the ability and accountability to provide clean drinking water to our residents.

Blessedness I feel, it meets my skin with a warm glow.

The body of a Black woman feels many things.

Blessedness gives me permission to feel joyous.

This new state of self love is what they fear.

And like, some of the elders in the community talk about watching it burn and having to go to school smelling like that, and asking why they smelt so dirty and being sent home because of it. So it’s definitely impacted a lot of generations, I would say. Yeah, like, the toxins were going down into the wells so they’re getting that deep that they’re able to reach the water tables and there’s like super high levels of lead and asbestos in the water here. And there’s a lot of individuals that have passed away from multiple melanoma which is like a super rare type of cancer. And it’s so weird that this one little clump of Shelburne, everyone’s suffering from that one type of disease. But there is something in the water.

And what are the local politicians like?

Well, I think it was 2017 when this was in the midst of happening, um, the town councillor had said that this community, the Black community, needed to stop using the race card. So, they’re not even recognizing that environmental racism is alive and well in Shelburne, let alone being told to stop playing the race card when all we’re fighting for is clean drinking water that every human should have and everyone should have the right to. So it’s been challenging in that sense of just having the story told and people trying to understand and wanting to listen.

It doesn’t make any sense and to dis-acknowledge that we don’t have a Black community as well.

What?

Yeah. Our mayor dis-acknowledges that we have a Black community in Shelburne.

He says there’s no Black community here?

Mmmhmm.

So basically, your family, all of your descendants, all that, you just don’t exist.

Yup.

Yeah, it’s there’s a lot of like white history that’s shown on the waterfront cause of like the loyalists themselves. There’s nothing to do with Black loyalists, yeah.

But what really struck me is that there was nothing, at all about any Indigenous population, like has been completely completely erased from the storytelling, from the time lining.

But we know they were here first, so what happened? And a lot of the times, my, it would have been my grandmother Clara’s side was First Nations. She actually had, was a part of, um, like the reserve, she lived on the reserve and she married, or had children with, my grandfather who was a Black man, so she lost all of her status. Yeah.

Our town council would have also brought forth an effort to establish and foster relationships within this community, as well acknowledge that there is a Black community in Shelburne.

Blessedness I feel.

Blessedness gives me permission to feel joyous.

This new state of self love is what they fear.

Blessedness I feel.

Blessedness I feel.

Blessedness I feel.

1:06:56 INGRID WALDRON:
Wow. Thank you, Vanessa and Leelee, for that haunting piece. Like all the other pieces, we didn’t know what we were getting. Life is like a box of chocolates. That was haunting and that was beautiful. Thank you so much. I would like to thank all of the speakers and performers for these wonderful, innovative, and incredibly creative performances and move to the final segment of our program tonight, which is a moderated discussion. I want to ask the speakers and performers to reflect on several issues, including their experiences collaborating together, what they learned, and how they think solidarities can be built through art and activism in Mi’kma’ki.

So let’s welcome once again Irvine and Rebecca; Michelle and Kwento; Dorene and Liliona; and Vanessa and Leelee. 

I’m going to pose this question to everyone, so you can all certainly answer if you choose. The first question is really just to get a sense of what it was like, you’ve produced some really beautiful pieces tonight, and I’m pretty sure the audience wants to know, what was it like creating your piece and bringing it to fruition?

1:08:29 MICHELLE FRANCIS-DENNY:
I can start by just, I really enjoyed working with Kwento. I think it just flowed, and I think what I appreciate most about her is that she just listened. When we’re in such traumatic, and so much turmoil constantly, you know, I just kind of word vomit to whoever would listen. But she was really kind in listening to the things that were important to me and that really transitioned and I’m so proud of the piece, that she decided to do an original, and I’m very grateful that we were paired together. So thank you, Kwento.

1:09:16 KWENTO:
Thank you, Michelle. I loved working with you. I feel like we’re very compatible as people, you know. I just loved sitting on the phone and just chatting with you and hearing your stories. I was taking notes and making little pointers on the things you were saying. Yeah, the song wouldn’t have turned out if you weren’t so open and willing to be vulnerable with me and share what you really felt. I really appreciate that and I loved working with you too.

1:09:48 REBECCA THOMAS:

I was going to jump in really quickly. I called up Irvine and he just told me a story, and he told me the story of Africville and I took furious notes. With the poetry I do, and when I write, I’m very clear about my intentions that I never want to write stories that aren’t mine, or speak to stories that aren’t mine, and here I was doing a story that’s not mine. But, Irvine was so warm and trusting and he said ‘you know, I’ve been following you since the beginning and I know you’re gonna do a good job.’ So I put an incredible amount of pressure on myself to write something. I was very nervous because I asked him ‘do you want to review it before I do it?’ and he said ‘nope, you’re gonna do a good job and I want to be surprised with everyone else.’ So that’s kind of what my experience was. To have that trust was such an honour, I guess, because I’m not from Nova Scotia, I’m from New Brunswick, so the story of Africville was something that I learned after I moved here. So to have such trust in me was a really wonderful and warm experience.

1:10:57 INGRID WALDRON:
What about you, Irvine?

1:10:59 IRVINE CARVERY:
Trying to unmute here.

1:11:05 INGRID WALDRON:
You’re good.

1:11:08 IRVINE CARVERY:

Am I good? Good now. Oh great. Listen, you know what, we – it’s hard to describe, but we are all Indigenous peoples. Whether that’s an Indigenous person from Africa or an Indigenous person from North America. In our Indigenous-ness we share the spirit. We share in the love of the Earth and Mother Earth. Those are things that we share together. Even though we didn’t grow up together, we lived different lives, I know that that’s why I said to Rebecca, ‘I trust you. Because I know that you’re gonna be able to really really touch on Africville’ and I sent her a note telling her that she really does have the spirit of Africville. In listening to everybody collaborate and the collaborations of everyone here this evening, I’ve got to say that I’m so humbled and honoured to be a part of this group. This is absolutely fantastic and I know that viewing audience is only gonna grow. Because I’ll bet ya, everybody who watched this tonight, is just gonna go spread the word. So I wanna thank all you young people for allowing me into your lives for a day. It’s been wonderful. Thank you so so much. And Rebecca, you’re the best.

1:13:01 REBECCA THOMAS:

Thank you so much.

1:13:04 INGRID WALDRON
What about Vanessa and Leelee, what was it like?

1:13:07 VANESSA HARTLEY
I had such an amazing experience. Typically, I’m not that artistic, so being able to collaborate on this project and really open up with my story and the history of Shelburne was incredible. As well, to be paired up with somebody, ten times as incredible to be allowed to express that. It was incredible and I’m forever grateful for this experience.

1:13:37 INGRID WALDRON:

Leelee –

1:13:38 DORENE BERNARD:

Oh, I’m sorry, did I –

1:13:40 LEELEE OLUWASTOYOSI EKO DAVIS:

No, no, you go ahead Dorene.

1:13:42 DORENE BERNARD:

Oh my goodness, it was beautiful and I want to thank Liliona for putting this all together. With, just some of the things I sent to her, and doing the water song the other day, and just last minute – everything was last minute – and having to come here and not even see the video before we, you know, get a chance to download it because, you know, we’re at the pound here and on the front line. All the things that happened today, this has been so uplifting and really fed my spirit. I’m so thankful that she, I just love that she was at the water and dancing in the water. Yeah. It just really uplifted me and I pray that it does for everybody who watched tonight. All our collaborations, they were just amazing.

1:14:45 INGRID WALDRON:
Thank you. I apologize, let me go back to Leelee and her piece with Vanessa.

1:14:55 LEELEE OLUWASTOYOSI EKO DAVIS:

Oh, it’s all good. To be honest, like, I’m just so moved by Vanessa and who you are as a person and your openness and your willingness, like, it’s really really clear these times require us to move with love, with care, with trust. And you gave and brought all of that, and I’m grateful. I’m so so happy and lucky.

1:15:21 INGRID WALDRON:

Thank you. Liliona? Liliona?

1:15:32 LILIONA QUARMYNE:

Yeah. It was, I think our experience, because what we’re dealing with is so, so alive in this particular moment, well, I mean, I have just so much love and respect for Dorene. But the reality of what we’re doing and the importance of, the importance of the words that everyone shared tonight, just felt so real in the creation process. I think throughout it, I was just so aware of what Dorene was saying and the lived reality of how she is in the world, you know, that she was talking about water as it was like, in everything she was doing, she was embodying water at the same time. It was really, really beautiful and powerful to be able to witness that and to feel it.

1:16:38 INGRID WALDRON:

Great. I’m also wondering if you could talk about what you learned from each other in your pairing. About your respective communities. What did you learn? Anyone can take this one

1:16:57 IRVINE CARVERY:

Well, you know for me, it was special because my grandmother is Mi’kmaq. And I never got to know my grandmother, but through my mother I got to know her. And to hear my brothers and sisters talking, and my sisters talking, it just brought to life the memory of my grandmother and I am so appreciative of that. And I have such faith, it renewed my faith in young people, that they are so powerful. That they have a gift and I’m so glad that they had the opportunity to share it with the world. It’s just simply amazing.

1:17:52 INGRID WALDRON:

Thank you. Anyone else, what did you learn through this collaboration for the piece?

1:18:00 LEELEE OLUWASTOYOSI EKO DAVIS:

Leelee here. I, you know, it’s funny because it’s like there’s all these moments that led to this moment, where all this learning was happening. And I’m not from here, I’m ‘come from away’ as Nova Scotian Africville descendants would call it. And I have to be aware of that. You know, I was very very hesitant about how much my voice was in the piece, how much my image was in the piece, because I wanted to honour Vanessa and honour Vanessa’s story and connection to that place which I don’t have. I have it only through the invitation from Vanessa. So I’m just grateful for the teachings that I have been gifted and passed forward from my Indigenous loves and community, the love of my life, and you know, then to this moment here that prepared me for this. My teaching, my learning is that everything is preparing me for what is coming now where I am.

1:19:10 INGRID WALDRON:

Thank you. I’m thinking about, for all of you, the importance of building solidarity. With Indigenous people, it’s an often discussed topic here, in this province, but across Canada. Did these issues emerge in the production of your piece, and if it did, how so?

1:19:44 REBECCA THOMAS:

I think for me when I was working on the piece, and learning as much as I did about Africville, like recognizing that there’s so many similarities in the stories between the Mi’kmaq people here in Nova Scotia and Mi’kma’ki and along with African Nova Scotians, just seeing how, how often we as people were just discarded. You know, for convenience, for capitalism, for development, for colonization. And to have very similar, like, you know, the Shubenacadie Residential School that my dad went to and the Home for Coloured Children, you just see so many of these kind of like similarities and it just kind of creates this sense of, though we are different in where we come from, and our backgrounds, we still have this really strong sense of solidarity by, you know, not only just surviving, because I don’t necessarily like framing it in that way, but to thrive and to find success beyond simple survival and I think that’s a really unique and incredible piece. It just brings, I don’t know, for me it just makes me feel closer to, you know, understanding or at least having an inkling of an understanding of the Africville Nova Scotian experience and how it relates to the Mi’kmaq experience. It was just a lot of learning and I feel good about this project. Sometimes I finish a poem and I just feel blah, but I didn’t feel this way about this poem. I feel good about this poem.

1:21:13 INGRID WALDRON:

Anyone else? Building bridges, building solidarities, how did that come out, how was it highlighted in the piece?

1:21:22 DORENE BERNARD:

I think that in our piece that we did, in listening to, seeing others, it’s about, it’s a spiritual movement. We build, through our spirituality, our connection with the Great Spirit, with the land, with Mother Earth, the water, and others, you know, all living beings. We talk about our relationships, you know, our relationships with the land, the water, the animals, the , the geese, and all the other living beings. And it’s our human relationships that are suffering. You know, we don’t have a problem with all these other living beings. We don’t have a problem with us. It’s how we treat each other and how that is reflected with how we treat the land, how we treat the water, how everything else is valued in the world. We don’t have value for ourselves and for each other, this is what’s playing out in the world. I think, you know, we talk about the value of our lives, our spirits, you know, so I think that for me, spoke in all of these collaborations, and I think it’s what came through for me and I want to thank everyone for being a part of this with me and Liliona and with you Ingrid, thank you for all you do. You’re the water warrior, you’re the Mother Earth warrior, and I always thought that and I’m so thankful for all the work you do because you bring good medicine. You take medicine from other people to make something good and I want to thank you for that. All of you.

1:23:54 INGRID WALDRON:

I want to pose this question to the artists specifically, to Rebecca, Kwento, Liliona, and Leelee. As you know, you’re artists, so you know there’s a long legacy of art for social justice. So I just want to hear from you, to hear what you think the role is, the role of art is, in raising critical consciousness and enabling people to listen to one another and respond effectively. What’s the role of art for you in that?

1:24:34 KWENTO:

I would say art is everything. Art is like taking nothing, like, space and time and there’s nothing there, and boom – art – and there’s something. I feel like, you know, like it comes from a place beyond ourselves. So if we want to raise our consciousness, art is the way. The way. Creating and making. Something from nothing. All movements have either a chant, or they have a you know ‘we shall overcome,’ there’s always a song. You know, there’s always a song or like, some type of visual, or some type of something. Because art also doesn’t ask permission to enter us, it just does. I think art is like the way, actually, to create social change.

1:25:37 INGRID WALDRON:

Thank you.

1:25:40 LILIONA QUARMYNE:

If I could just add to that, that was one of the most brilliant things I’ve ever heard in my life. I think too that art has the ability to be both incredibly simple and incredibly complex at the same time. So it can enable us to feel all the different emotions, and all the different sides, and all the realities at the same time which I think is essential for the really complex change that we need to deal with in the world right now. Yeah, and I think sometimes, non-artistic processes don’t have that capability.

1:26:30 REBECCA THOMAS:

I think for me, when I think about art, as someone who is both an artist and also, like a, kind of process oriented, nerdy, policy brain. Like, I live in those two worlds, very much, all the time. I can try to have this very rational conversation with somebody, I can pick apart a strategy, or look at a policy piece and try to find its flaws, but often times when you think about these social changes, those are rooted in emotion. So I often talk about the head work and the heart work. I think the head work is the laws, and policies, and all of that stuff that helps things function through process. But the art is the heart work. And in order to get your head to work, you have to have your heart working too. So I think for me, it becomes like a really great additional tool for me to invoke a sense of duty or responsibility to change. So I try to, at least within my art, blend together both that head work and heart work in a way that I can kind of elicit change.

1:27:43 IRVINE CARVERY:

I’m not an artist, but art is our humanity. Through art, we find our human selves. And that’s, that is incredible because, you know, when we look at our histories as peoples, any great movement has been led by people coming out of the arts. I think of James Baldwin, I think of Maya Angelou, I think of Tyler Perry today and the work that they do in bringing forward those very, very tough issues but bring it in such a way to bring humanity to it. So art for me is my humanity.

1:28:40 INGRID WALDRON:

What about Liliona? Anything you’d like to say? Not Liliona, I’m sorry, Leelee.

1:28:50 LEELEE OLUWASTOYOSI EKO DAVIS:
Well, it’s pretty much all been said. I just want to say, I guess in addition, that we are all artists, you know. Like, there’s an artists way in everyone if they give themselves space to have it. And that not all artists have the desire or the intent to create through their own humanity. So we’re all making this choice to do this in this way, because I’ve seen many artists who don’t think about intention, who don’t think about output, who don’t think about historical context, who don’t think about any of that. So, you know, I’m just grateful that I wound up in this place, in this time, in this vessel. So 100% yes, bring me back into my body, I started as a professional institution trained dancer and I left it primarily because I was sick of getting patted on the back like ‘hmm, that was nice.’ And I thought, ‘blood, sweat, and tears for that was nice?’ You know I wanted to tell stories and do things in a deeper, bigger way, and I’ve been grateful to be able to find that. To touch presence, to touch people’s humanity, their consciousness, and leave them with something that they can then go with and inform their steps forward. Yeah, y’all said it, but I came and said some more.

1:30:22 INGRID WALDRON:

Thank you. I’d like to pose this question to the speakers. When I say speakers, I mean members of the affected communities: Irvine, Michelle, Dorene, and Vanessa. We’re talking about building solidarity, but as you know there are barriers to building relationships and solidarities between Indigenous people, Black people and Indigenous people, and other communities, there are real barriers in Mi’kma’ki and other parts of Canada in doing so. What do you think those barriers are, and how do you think those barriers can be overcome. 

1:31:02 IRVINE CARVERY:
Hmm. Really serious question here, Ingrid. You know, really, the colonizer did a wonderful job in dividing and conquering. You know, they have done a wonderful job in the way in which they present opportunities for the African descendant community and the First Nations community. They’ve done a wonderful job to divide us, but through our learned experience that all of us have had in dealing with the colonizer, we are breaking down those barriers. You know, we talk about Africville, but we’ve gotta talk about Turtle Cove over in Dartmouth that was destroyed with the Halifax explosion, which was a Mi’kmaq community right across from us. And we shared, we went across that harbour back and forth, from Africville to the Mi’kmaq community, we intermarried. When we arrived here in Nova Scotia, with no supports, it was the Mi’kmaq people that taught us how to go into the woods to find the herbs that we needed, taught us how to fish, taught us how to survive here in this very, very unfriendly place. But over time, they divided us. We need to go back to that commonality that we have with each other and I, you know, the struggles that each of us have been through, the only thing, you know, that worries me, is that the colonizer will use the fact that First Nations people have treaties, so therefore we gotta treat them differently than what we treat people of African descent, because of that, we’ve gotta just say ‘no, sorry, you’ve treated us the same.’ You know, you called me a n*gg*r, and you called them oh that dirty old *nd**n. That’s our history, right. That’s common shared history that we have with each other and we need to recognize that and we need to come together through collaborations like what we’re doing here right now is the way in which we break down that control by the colonizer. We’ve got to get rid of his control over our thoughts and our minds. The spirituality in, when I heard Dorene talk, we talk about the need for us to build, you know, self awareness within our children. That we want them to be strong as young people growing up. That’s exactly what Dorene is talking about, and it’s through that shared history that we can get there. So, you know, we’ve got a lot of work to do, but we are beginning to see the light. We are beginning to walk the same path. And when we get on the same path all together, we are a powerful force. And we can move mountains.

1:34:30 MICHELLE FRANCIS-DENNY:

In my experience, when it comes to barriers, I’ve been working on the, you know, the Boat Harbour mediation project for more than four years now, so I’ve been working directly with the Nova Scotia government and the sector that is responsible for the clean up plans. And I can honestly say that there needs to be a lot of work to be done on the end of, you know, government representation. When you’re working with Indigenous communities because, you know, this word reconciliation gets thrown around so much to the point that it means nothing now. It means absolutely nothing to us, but they have this sense of pride, you know, to say ‘we’re working with this community and we’re reconciling.’ But in reality, you’re not. You’re not. There has to be more space. More space created for conversations. So, you know, we tend to deal with this facade, ‘oh, we’re listening to you.’ You know, you throw in a buzz word here and there to really, to try and capture peoples’ attention that we’re doing well and we’re paying attention. But in reality, on community levels, we feel a different way. And it’s important for government and those representatives that are assigned to acknowledge that. And I’ll tell you, it is a struggle to let anybody acknowledge that they could do better. And that’s the number one barrier for me, is I just want an acknowledgement that you can do better. And it’s impossible right now, so that’s all. So we can move forward. Let’s create space, but first you have to acknowledge that. Don’t hide under this facade that we’re gonna go, and you know, I’m gonna put on my rose coloured glasses and this is all gonna be lovely and we’re all gonna swim in Boat Harbour someday. No. There’s a lot of work here and pay attention and acknowledge. It is what needs to happen and if that has to go up the chain to whatever levels, you know, to ministers and project managers, just a whole slew of people involved, that aren’t paying attention. Something has to be done about that.

1:37:03 VANESSA HARTLEY:
I agree, and going off Michelle’s point, of them trying to throw us off of our path. I think the BIPOC population has an end goal and we have a goal of true equality and equity, and government loves to play the game of chucking a couple words in that makes it look nice and pretty to then distort our perception of what’s actually taking place. So I find, going off this question, I don’t see it as a lack of solidarity between Black and Indigenous because I think it’s always been there and historically we know that it was. I see the solidarity between these two groups uniting and trying to get this end goal and I think in Shelburne, the issue here, is we don’t have the relationship with our municipal, or our town, council. There’s a lack of trust there. I don’t trust that you’re going to tell my story correctly. I don’t trust that you’re intent is accurate. And I know it’s not, because I know that our community still struggles in accessing clean drinking water after being bypassed twice on town water well. So, we know that these things are here in place and we can see them, but they’re not being talked about so we know your intent is not correct and therefore we are continuing to have this conversation, therefore, speaking up for ourselves, trying to fight for what we should have, for what every human being should have, and that’s clean water, and being told ‘no, stop playing the race card, no, there’s no systemic barriers in your way, no, you don’t have health issues’ when we can see clearly that we have many elders in our community passing from cancer and other disease. So I don’t think, in the future, that this trust is going to be built overnight because for many years they’ve been here creating this horrible place of a hell in our Black community.

1:38:55 IRVINE CARVERY:

Very good, Vanessa. You know, I want to point out, how dare Sterling Belliveau – Belliveau, whatever his name is – dare to suggest to the First Nations people that they should stop for a year to negotiate with non-Indigenous fishers. How dare he. How dare the non-Indigenous fishers think that they should be at the table for discussions with the government and the Mi’kmaq people. How dare they. How dare the Premier of Nova Scotia come out and apologize to Black people about the justice system and appoint a committee where we had no input, there was no consultation with us whatsoever, he hand picked who he wanted to be on it. How dare they. How dare they do these, but they continue to do it because of their feelings of white privilege. It’s what it’s about. It’s about white privilege. They say these words, as Michelle said, but those words have no meaning. They have no meaning. And we need, we need, we – our peoples – need to see beyond those words and we need to demand. We are at a, it’s the 21^st Century, no more asking for anything, it’s now time to demand and get out there and make it happen. So, that’s where we need to get to as people with our collaborations. We need to support each community strongly.

1:40:49 LEELEE OLUWASTOYOSI EKO DAVIS:

I don’t think people realize that the fight that we’re fighting is God’s work for everybody’s survival. Because when there’s no water, and there’s no land for us to be on, and there’s no fish or nothing, it doesn’t matter if you’re white, Black, brown, yellow, whatever: you don’t got it. You don’t got nothing, right? So, that’s the thing is that we’re out here doing this work as Black and Indigenous folks, and I really want to highlight as a Black identified person with background great-great-grand Indigenous heritage also, acknowledge all the ways we’ve moved together. And if we do an abolitionist movement, we can see right now the reports, they show that Black people are inequitably incarcerated. But guess what? There’s no number in our Indigenous community. They didn’t even bother to do that report. So as a Black person, I feel I have to stand with my Indigenous community and my counterparts, to move forward because I’m seeing that there’s still shortages that even as a Black person, we’re getting acknowledges, we’re getting all these things, and then I look in these reports that just leave out my Indigenous community. So, I’m a little bit passionate about that.

1:42:10 INGRID WALDRON:

Anyone else?

1:42:13 DORENE BERNARD:

Yes, I’d like to say, I think the biggest barrier that we’re facing right now is the lack of education. The lack of education on what it means to be Indigenous and our rights as Indigenous people. There’s so much out there now, anybody could self educate on the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. That took over 20 years to write, and look how many years it took to have it accepted by all the countries in the world, and then, even to have it implemented in Canada. We are still working to have it implemented, those 94 calls to action. There’s been so much work by Indigenous people over the decades, like the World Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. They took the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, their report, and then the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. We have so many <inaudible> in government offices that haven’t even <inaudible> over these decades, trying to assert our –

1:44:03 INGRID WALDRON:

Did we lose Dorene?

1:44:08 LEELEE OLUWASTOYOSI EKO DAVIS:

She’s speaking truth and the internet came along.

1:44:13 INGRID WALDRON:

Hi, Dorene?

1:44:19 IRVINE CARVERY:

It said that her bandwidth was low, maybe we did lose her.

1:44:27 INGRID WALDRON:

Okay, so why don’t we just move on to the next question and we can come back to Dorene. I’m just kind of thinking about a comment that Leelee made when she mentioned that not every artist uses their work for intention. So this question is actually for the artists, I think most people know that you use your art for social justice, but for those who don’t or have yet to, or want to, how can that be done? How, thinking about what you’ve done throughout your lives, in terms of using art for grassroots mobilizing and social justice movements, you have any kind of words or insights to give artists on how they can begin to do that with intention?

1:45:24 REBECCA THOMAS:

I’ll begin, I guess. I know for me, I always think back to the one moment where I did my poem in city council for Edward Cornwallis, to help get the statue taken down. And that was not the poem that I had prepared for that day, I had a different poem prepared and it was literally within the last 30 seconds or so that I decided to do my piece Not Perfect because for me, when I thought about the responsibility and the access that I had, you know, to a group of decision makers, I said ‘this could be uncomfortable and this could be awkward and I’m just going to be prepared for that and I’m going to do it anyway.’ I think that that first piece is recognizing that if you want to make change with your art, well first of all you don’t have to, but if you want to, for me it helps to just acknowledge that this is going to be uncomfortable, acknowledge that people might not understand. I mean, the tabloid magazine that I will not name took out and did a two page poetic response with like a horrible caricature of me after doing that, and part of it is like steeling yourself for that. If you can acknowledge that that’s going to happen, then it can be less devastating when it does, so that you can continue moving forward.

1:46:59 INGRID WALDRON:

What about the other artists?

1:47:02 LILIONA QUARMYNE:

I think too, there’s this myth or this belief that maybe especially here because more in smaller communities, that there aren’t a lot of people already doing this work. But just because we don’t always know who the people are doing the work, doesn’t mean that there aren’t people doing the work. So, you know, you have to go, you have to work extra hard because the people are there. You just have to find them. I think that this is, I mean, I think this is something that every, not every but a whole bunch of, arts organizations are now starting to wake up to. The day after George Floyd was murdered, it was like, ‘oh, we need to be alive to this’ right? So there’s a lot of people now trying to catch up and catch up and catch up. I think it’s, part of it, is just resilience and persistence. Not saying ‘oh I just can’t find the person’ or ‘I just don’t know how.’ The knowledge is there, there are people doing it, you just have to keep at it and not let yourself off the hook, I think.

1:48:21 LEELEE OLUWASTOYOSI EKO DAVIS:

A hundred percent. A hundred percent the biggest foundational thing in that for me is time. Time. Capitalism cannot continue to function alongside the desires for what we say we need as time. Because capitalism has time is money, this and that, all of that stuff. And that type of thing that you’re suggesting, Liliona, requires taking time. Slowing down. Pausing. Moving at a different pace. You know? I feel like, that so many people say ‘oh well what can I do?’ I really think that, learn yourself. Learn about who you are. Learn about where you come from. Learn about what’s in your heart. Learn about your family’s history. Before you start getting all interested in all of our cultures and then be responsible for that and lead from that because we have our own stories to tell. And so that’s what I always say when I’m working with youth and other folks, is ‘okay well what’s your story?’ Because we can’t keep, it’s 2020, we can’t keep trying to do these old things we’ve done and there’s no excuse for ignorance in 2020.

1:49:39 KWENTO:

Yeah, I agree with that. Just finding your voice. Finding your own voice. And who you are and what you want to say, you know. I guess as advice, outside of your art form, what is it that you want to say? And then also, you know, the truth hurts so be ready for people to act like they don’t care. Because it hurts a little bit when you’re being really truthful but it definitely, that would be my advice.

1:50:16 INGRID WALDRON:

Anyone want to add anything before I begin to start the closing? I want to conclude our discussion by asking each panellist to describe, if it’s possible, in one word what belonging feels and looks like to you in this province?

1:50:44 VANESSA HARTLEY:
I’ll jump in. It’s not going to be one word, but I’ll try to be quick. I think my word is equity. I don’t want equality anymore, I want equity. I want to be put up to the level of other people if that’s what I need to be equal. I want true equity.

1:51:02 MICHELLE FRANCIS-DENNY:

Mine are two words: Mi’kma’ki Strong.

1:51:12 IRVINE CARVERY:

Thank you very much. Mine is Africville.

1:51:20 REBECCA THOMAS:

I’ll jump in, I gotta keep it to two words too, I’m very sorry. Righteous indignation.

1:51:32 KWENTO:

Mine is allowance. Just allow me, you know? Just let me.

1:51:45 LILIONA QUARMYNE:

I think mine is grace. It’s a far away dream but not an impossible one of us one day having enough grace, to be whole enough in ourselves, that we can allow other people to be whole in themselves.

1:52:08 LEELEE OLUWASTOYOSI EKO DAVIS:

That’s an inspiration for me, Liliona. I say that it’s touching grace. Like I can touch grace in myself and I can come over to you and I can touch grace in you.

1:52:24 INGRID WALDRON:

Dorene? Oh, yes, Dorene, are you back?

1:52:31 LEELEE OLUWASTOYOSI EKO DAVIS:

We don’t see her here.

1:52:33 INGRID WALDRON:

Okay, so, thank you for that everyone. So in closing then, we are at a few minutes before 9. This was a fantastic event, I mean, if I may say so myself. It was unique and haunting and thrilling and I’ve really enjoyed being a part of this. So I’d like to thank the speakers, performers and artists who participated in this event tonight. I would also like to thank Lindsay Dobbin, who curated this anchor project for Nocturne, I’Thandi Munro for providing logistical support, Bria Miller for the wonderful graphic art – you’ll notice the graphic art in the promo that we did but also in the Facebook event page, Laurie Graham for providing technical support for the Zoom online platform this evening, Ayoka Junaid for providing ESL interpretation and Lindsay Ann Cory, the Executive Director of Nocturne, for providing support throughout the whole process of bringing this project to fruition.

I would also like to thank our partners who helped fund, sponsor, and promote our event tonight and that includes: Visual Arts News, Halifax Regional Municipality, Arts Nova Scotia, Canada Council for the Arts, the Public Service Alliance of Canada – Nova Scotia branch, Kairos, Environmental Defence, The Leap, Sierra Club, The Black Environmental Initiative, Nova Scotia Environmental Network, Shake Up the Establishment, the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, and The Ecology Action Center.

Finally, I would like to thank you, the audience, for attending this event and I would like to wish you a great rest of the evening. Thank you very much everyone. I’m not sure if Lindsay Ann Cory would like to take a few final words or not.

1:54:51 LINDSAY ANN CORY:

Yeah, I don’t really want to add to much, I just think tonight has been so amazing. We’re gonna leave the chat open for a bit to let these kind words flow through, but just thank you so much to Ingrid, and to Lindsay, and the speakers, all of you, all of our artists, all of our speakers. Thank you so much.

1:55:15 INGRID WALDRON:

Thank you.

1:55:17 LEELEE OLUWASTOYOSI EKO DAVIS:

Thank you, Karen Staples for your ESL interpretation too.

1:55:23 LINDSAY ANN CORY:

Yeah, thank you Karen, I put that in the chat as well.

1:55:33 INGRID WALDRON:

Great everyone. Thank you so much. Bye bye! Bye audience! Take care!

“The only thing more powerful than the revolutionary imaginary is revolutionary action. The world can be better. Can be socially just. Can have full. Employment. Can create dignity for all.”

The voice belongs to Gillian Dykeman, a Fredericton-based artist, educator, cultural worker, and, in this instance, fitness instructor quasi anti-capitalist comrade. She’s cycling, instructing, and feeling the burn alongside the rest of us while wearing a handsewn red and cream-coloured uniform, inspired by the Constructivist workout attire of artist Varvara Stepanova. This spin class isn’t one of SMU’s regular fitness class offerings. Instead, it’s presented by Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery, as a performance called Revolution Revolution. It proposes group fitness classes as sites in which revolutionary energies can be generated, harnessed, and disseminated to collectively build radical futures. As the class cycles, creating and burning energy in turn, we are schooled on the exploitative conditions of precarious labour markets. We are prompted to think about how capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy are self-perpetuating systems of oppression. As we ramp up our intensity, we build strength for protest. As we cool down, we send energy to the precariat.

By the end of the class, we’re primed for collective action. We leave with Dykeman’s questions still floating through our bodies: “What is the energy of revolution? How do we better engineer our energetic outputs to formulate collective ways of being out of a culture that glorifies individualism …to radically reimagine what it is we’re doing with our lives? Our life-force? Our love?”

Dykeman’s practice is built on intersections—intersecting disciplines and intersectional feminist politics. Through disciplines such as performance, sculpture, video, sound, installation, and art criticism, Dykeman considers the deep relationships and tensions between bodies, land, labour, capitalism, colonialism, and care. Her work approaches questions of relationality and responsibility (to each other, to the land, to ourselves) through an interplay of parody and sincerity.

Beyond, yet related to her artistic practice, Gillian is also a cultural worker and an educator. For several years, she was the Executive Director at ArtsLink NB, where she built community for artists and advocated for the arts at a provincial level. She currently works as an instructor at the New Brunswick College of Art and Design, where she teaches Foundation Visual Arts and Advanced Studio Practice. Most recently, she’s taken on a brand new role: motherhood. I speak to her for this piece in February 2020, about four weeks after she has given birth to her first child. She is generous with her time and after we talk about how she’s doing (“tired, grateful, my body is doing amazing things”), we discuss her practice.

Lately, she has been interested in forests. Dykeman is a cis white woman living on unceded Wolastoqey, Mi’kmaq and Peskotomuhkati territory. Since the early 1800s, the land she resides on has been used to fuel the forestry industry, which is the province’s largest economic sector. Her recent work considers the many angles through which forests have been exploited to further the cause of colonialism, both historically and presently. This past fall, during a residency called Directing Our Gaze, supported by Connexion ARC and the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Dykeman mined the Beaverbrook’s permanent collection to research the historical relationship between watercolour paintings and colonization.

Several months earlier, she created Appetite for the Symposium international d’art contemporaries de Baie-Saint-Paul. Appetite is a durational performance and a large-scale installation of stacked chopped wood arranged in a spiral formation. The piece was born out of Dykeman’s personal fascination with the activity of chopping wood—a traditionally masculine coded task—and her interest in sustainable resource sharing. Lately, she has turned to small woodlot operations as a potential socially and environmentally sustainable alternative to harmful extraction technologies.

Appetite initiates a dialogue with the legacy of land art and explicitly with Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. But when I think about the way Dykeman engages with land, I am reminded of how Nancy Holt meticulously documented the construction of her piece Sun Tunnels (a piece that Dykeman engaged with directly in her 2016 video/installation work Dispatches from a Feminist Utopia). Holt filmed the construction of Sun Tunnels, taking care to observe, honour, and care for the labour and the labourers that were working on her behalf—something her male contemporaries had never done, instead preferring to maintain the illusion that the art appeared on the land as if by nature itself, and not by human hands. Both Dykeman and Holt attempt to understand how any intervention leaves a mark on the land, and they each acknowledge the labour of making that mark. Through Appetite, Dykeman explores how environmental resources and human resources are explicitly linked—and how the exploitation of one leads to the weakness of both.

“I see the way land is exploited under capitalism as akin to the way bodies are exploited under the [hetero]patriarchy,” says Dykeman. She explains how through colonization and under capitalism, land is commodified into parcels—often literally demarcated by arbitrary borders and property lines— in the same way that bodies and labour are commodified and compartmentalized under capitalist patriarchy.

“Bodies and land are, in this way, natural allies, and it makes sense to care for them both in similar ways,” she says. “Looking after the environment should entail being mindful to the land as a living being.”

My first introduction to Dykeman’s work was in Sackville, New Brunswick, in 2011. She was participating in a residency at Struts Gallery & Faucet Media Arts Center. When I entered the gallery, I saw a wall lined with handwritten letters. The piece was called Collaboration with 521 Friends. For one month, Dykeman wrote letters to each one of her facebook friends, posted them on the wall, and later mailed them out. Some of my friends now still have those letters.

Dykeman’s work is in constant dialogue with others: sometimes with theorists, sometimes with history, often with other artists, with social movement, with land, with friends. Her work shows that she is an active listener, that she wants to hear and learn from those her work initiates dialogue with, and that she is a student of her own work. Several of her projects explore these ideas explicitly, including her Artslant Podcast Working (it) Out, in which she interviewed a series of artists about one unifying question: Does art need an audience?

Affective labour is a recurrent methodology in Dykeman’s approach to her art. And friendships, genuine ones, seem to function as praxis. Her work invites collaboration and participation, often literally. As we talk about performance and the use of physicality in her work, she tells me that she often just wants “to be in the work.” She tells me that in many of her projects she wants “to create a sense of hosting, so that other people can be in it too. So that they can ask ‘What if?’ And propose alternatives.” Friendship and collaborations can lead to utopian futures, to radical imagining and collective world building. Creating containers for those interactions can be what Dykeman refers to as “utopian gestures.” Involving others in her work allows Dykeman to learn how people experience her art and, more broadly, how they experience the world. “I became an artist as a way to find agency,” she says. Her art is a way to extend that agency to others.

At the entrance of the Galerie d’art Louise-et-Reuben-Cohen in Moncton, on the occasion of Sovereign Acts exhibition curated by Wanda Nanibush, a small monitor is installed on the wall. Showing in a black and white historical video, a group of performers are dancing, dressed in what appears to be traditional garments and headdresses. Captured on film by Thomas A. Edison in 1894, it is here one of the oldest Indigenous performance videos. Ironically, it’s the video of a fake Ghost dance. In an accompanying description, it is explained that in 1884 in Canada and 1904 in the United States, traditional rituals were punishable by imprisonment. In order to continue to perform and share their knowledge, these Indigenous groups had to adapt to stereotypical movements to please and fill the imagination of a colonial public, consciously leaving aside a part of their identity. This recording is a document of assimilation and the subjugation of Indigenous peoples of North America.

The exhibition Sovereign Acts includes the work of Indigenous artists Rebecca Belmore, Lori Blondeau, Dayna Danger, Robert Houle, James Luna, Shelley Niro, Adrian Stimson, and Jeff Thomas as they explore various aspects of artistic performance as an act of cultural resistance. Through various techniques combining photography, video, painting, installation, and performative documentation, the exhibition examines the influence of the identity of colonialism on Indigenous cultures. 

Robert Houle’s traditional portrait paintings, Mississauga Portraits “Waubuddick”, “Maungwudaus,” “Hannah,” installed on a painted royal blue wall, recalls museum aesthetics and criticizes the lack of representation of Indigenous art in these institutions. The same concern is present in Jeff Thomas’ work, which exhibits black and white photographs of preparations for a Powwow celebration. Unlike the conventional image of performers in action, Thomas manages to capture spontaneous and intimate moments. His work is an internal point of view highlighting the authenticity of his own culture in order to participate in the creation of visual references.

The complexity of identity influences from a contemporary point of view is accentuated by the masquerade present in the photographic series of both James Luna and Shelley Niro. Luna and Niro examine cultural appropriation as a way of addressing stereotypes. In particular, Niro’s photographic series, “This Land is Mime Land,” reflects on three diverse perspectives of Indigenous women’s role throughout an international and colonial, an Indigenous viewpoint, and an introspective gaze. 

On the other hand, Dayna Danger’s large-scale photo-graphic installation depicts four people wearing black fetish masks covered with beadwork of the same colour. Danger’s work explores a paradoxical dynamism between empower-ment and its objectification through a glim of vulnerability. Do the masks create a distance between the identity of the subjects and the space they occupied in the gallery? In this case, the hidden identity of the subjects reclaims space for gender non-conforming people, sexual minorities and sexually diverse role outside of the settler colonial institutions. Danger’s work also speaks to the bodies’ resistance of the perceiving of gender within a western gender binary. 

Adrian Stimson’s work explores self-construction through characters, mostly known by The Shaman Exterminator and Buffalo Boy. Stimson investigates from his personal experience including several generations of Indigenous communities attending residential schools and its impact on culture. The photographic series in the gallery revisit and bringing together both stills from performances and historical images taken in 1892 in Sisika Nation. In a first diptych, Onward upward, Christian frock, the front of the lie… the work depicts an historical image showing Indigenous children dressed as altar servers, standing in line on the side of a church. It is accompanied by an image of Stimson personifying a priest dressed with nylon stockings and high heels. The adjacent diptych, Chalk Board Witness signs, Telling Eyes, Sketches of Indian Life, the historical image shows children in a classroom with a cold and surprised look. This one is presented with a picture of Stimson’s Buffalo Boy sitting in a classroom with a similar facial expression. In a way, these performances are healing efforts through the recognition of ongoing suffering and self-acceptance to better understand how to live with trauma and tragedy. 

Rebecca Belmore’s “In A Wilderness Garden,” is presented as a triptych video installation projected on a large wall. In the first video, Belmore is seen in a forest, her hands tied behind her back while lying on the ground covered with leaves. Belmore is tenacious in constant motion and tries to get up. This section of the performance makes me restless, impatient, but above all helpless in front of this struggling woman. Then I notice the centre video. I see a character motionless with a blanket over his head and bare feet. This immobilization reminds me of mine in this moment. It also makes me think about the inaction of colonial peoples vis-à-vis the many injustices of Indigenous Peoples. In particular, I am thinking of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous women and girls, whose presence I feel symbolized on the adjacent wall by Lori Blondeau, who is wearing a red dress. The third video shows a leaf blower scattering leaves. This last scene may imply that the conse-quences of the inaction of the second figure will make life even more difficult for this woman in order to finalize her efforts.

As an exhibition, Sovereign Acts is a space of understanding, shared knowledge, and above all, an awareness of reconciliation. The performances of every artist of the exhibition constitute an act of resistance aimed to reclaim the narrative of their cultural voices by changing colonial perspectives that had influence their identity.

Of particular interest to my own research is the generative ability of art—how connections made within ones self and between participants can bring forth a sense of belonging and make a difference. Presenting my work in company with two others, the actioning panel showcased artists with participatory or socially engaged practices. These included Alana Hunt’s memorial project Cups of Nun Chai and Joanne Choueiri’s research project The Missing Album alongside my own work in civic parades, Ris Publica. Motivated by the political—both locally and globally, our group presented works that are taking place over several years and find entry into the political sphere through social engagement.

As a somewhat recently recognized mode of art, socially engaged practice grapples with murky questions such as who has the authority to represent/be represented and how?  During our panel, ethical questions were raised surrounding the responsibilities of artists with a socially engaged practice. Curator Macushla Robinson joined us to moderate the discussion. Our actioning panel attempted to address these questions as a point of departure.

The most pointed question implied that artists acknowledge their privileged position in the midst of the disadvantaged, suffering or voiceless participants in the artwork. While this is the responsibility of every artist to bear one’s position of power in mind, I would offer that the work of socially engaged artists does not bring something from nothing. The participants involved, far from being vacuous, bring their own issues into the public sphere through common participation – the artwork coalesces a pre-existing meaning.

Perhaps these issues are brought to mind currently because Suzanne Lacy, an early instigator of socially engaged projects, is being celebrated in a retrospective exhibition titled We Are Here. After nearly 50 years of work that has brought real issues of participants’ personal lives into the public forum through her art, she is emblematic of an artist who has deployed the complex privileges she holds to create platforms for a multitude of voices alongside her own.

Her project Between the Door and the Street is emblematic of this process. She notes that it grew out of a foundational series of conversations between Lacy and a group of activist women in New York City, held over the course of five months. The ideas, expertise and principles from these conversations coalesced into a collaboratively developed discussion program loosely facilitated on each of 60 stoops in a Brooklyn neighborhood and reflected the region’s vast diversity. On the day of the final performance, nearly 2500 visitors entered the temporarily closed-off street, via a sound installation while the scene was punctuated with bright yellow project signifiers: the street held a painted line, potted chrysanthemums, and certain participants lead conversations, dressed with yellow scarves. Each porch conversation was distinctly pitched to the original discussions ranging on issues of gender, race, ethnicity and class. As the discussions wrapped up, tables and refreshments were offered with a musical performance to close the event.

Of current relevance to Lacy and the conference discussions, I am brought to the writing of philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906 -75). Her notions of appearing in the world, forward that our unique personae, what she terms the living essence of a person, appears through its presentation to others. Quite opposed to a self-willed identity, appearing in the world only occurs in the public-political arena. Recognizing the need for people to bring themselves out – that self-representation, of identity, of concerns, requires that we leave private spaces, and coalesce in public, where our appearance is recognized politically. This concept may run contrary to most contemporary notions of individuality existing as an expression of one’s personal makeup, but it supports the rationale for art projects occurring Elsewhere and Anywhere.

Each unique person at the conference and involved in each project, carries their own differing levels of agency, limitations and diverse points of view. Rather than working in solitary private practices, projects presented at the conference offered a unique opportunity for people to come together through carefully embedded activities that promote the emergence of new considerations.

Appearance, or agency to be in public, has much less to do with the nomination of authority from outside; rather, it involves enmeshing oneself in the currents of discussion and recognizing one’s own position therein. The recognition Suzanne Lacey is now receiving (though developing this process throughout her career) should prompt artists working in a socially engaged context to continue her work; to reveal these qualities (of the space of appearance or agency) to both the participants of the projects and the audiences, locally and globally, lest these abilities be assumed to reside in only one arena. While these thoughts were not the focus of the conference itself, the conversations on our panel reflect important conversations on public and participatory practices essential here, elsewhere and anywhere.

Brian Solomon and Mariana Medellin-Meinke, The NDN Way, dance performance hosted by Eastern Edge Gallery in April 2018. Photo: Ed Maruyama

To “identify” is to name something and render it visible, even if it may have been present all along. Organized by Eastern Edge Gallery, the Identify festival facilitates the gathering and sharing of traditional and contemporary artistic and cultural practices of Indigenous peoples in Newfoundland and Labrador including Mi’kmaq, Inuit, Innu, Southern Inuit of Nunatukavut and Beothuk. The Gallery describes it as a “platform for Indigenous-led conversations on self-identity, self-rediscovery and celebration of Indigenous cultures of Newfoundland and Labrador”—and it’s more than a year-long process (running from September 2017- December 2018).

Why does Eastern Edge use the term “self-rediscovery”? The answer is rooted in a complex settler-biased history that has, until recently, emphasized distance and loss when discussing Indigenous peoples. Many examples can be cited. Among them, a widely held and historically convenient belief that all Beothuk were decimated due to colonial intervention—a stance that negates many who identify now as having Beothuk ancestry. In Labrador, the people of Nunatsiavut and Nunavik (one-third of Canada’s Inuit population) were excluded from the Federal Government’s Northern Strategy in 2004, which outlined initiatives for economic development and northern sovereignty. Residential-school survivors in Labrador were also excluded from compensation provided to survivors elsewhere. In residential schools throughout the province, many Indigenous children were taught to be ashamed of their heritage.

This history is now changing as more people reclaim and celebrate their Indigeneity. With the recent establishment of the Qalipu (Mi’kmaq) nation, approximately one-fifth of Newfoundland and Labrador’s population fit the criteria for membership. So many people applied, that the Federal Government began to deny status to many people who identified as Indigenous, and revisited the terms of acceptance. In Labrador, there was only recent acknowledgement of many Labrador Indigenous groups as having status on a Federal level. To “re-discover” is to shine light upon what has always existed, while also defining its terms from within the communities themselves.

Identify launched with an exhibition titled The Lay of the Land, featuring work by Logan MacDonald, followed by Pejipuk: the winter is coming by Meagan Musseau. Both artists spoke from a position of rediscovering and redefining their Indigenous heritage, and approaching larger histories from a personal perspective while exploring key notions of memory and reactivation.

Logan MacDonald, installation detail of The Lay of the Land, October 27 – December 08, 2017, Eastern Edge Gallery.

The act of recovery was made plain through a powerful exhibition titled RECLAMATION by Mi’kmaq curator and artist Jerry Evans, who placed Indigenous artists from throughout the province in the Lieutenant Governor’s residence. A teepee was also constructed on the lawn of the residence by the St. John’s Native Friendship Centre—a significant and impactful gesture of presence and gathering. At Eastern Edge Gallery that same week, Mi’kmaq musician Joanna Barker’s curatorial debut, tet; mâni; ute|here, brought together two artists who turned their attention to everyday life in Newfoundland and Labrador. John Jeddore recorded scenes from everyday life in Miawpukek First Nation (Conne River, NL), while Melissa Tremblett passed her camera to children in her community of Sheshatshui (Labrador). Each child’s perspective was gathered in a hand-bound book with their name, and accompanied by Labrador tea dolls made by different generations.

As a curator at the provincial institution and a person of settler origin, I was humbled by the care and attention given by all involved. In particular, I was reminded of the value of sharing stories in a safe space (and the importance of listening when these stories are told). It was a lesson reinforced as Mi’kmaq artist Jordan Bennett painted his mural at the Rawlin’s Cross intersection in St. John’s. His imagery draws from Shanawdithit drawings held in The Rooms’ collections, Mi’kmaq and Beothuk canoe and paddle designs, and motifs from quill basketry. The site for the mural became a gathering space as other artists helped paint while members of the community dropped by. It remains a record of that time, in addition to altering the tone of the intersection for passersby.

A mural may last decades, but what is the lifespan of a voice? With this festival, each voice resonated. The powerful performance of NDN Way, by Brian Solomon and Mariana Medellin-Meinke, combined songs and imagery from contemporary popular culture with a voiceover by Cree storyteller Ron Evans that described Indigenous knowledge. The final event of the week celebrated throat singing by Jennie Williams and Tabitha Blake, and a performance by the all-women drum group Eastern Owl, who blend contemporary and traditional compositions.

Brian Solomon and Mariana Medellin-Meinke, The NDN Way, dance performance hosted by Eastern Edge Gallery in April 2018. Photo: Ed Maruyama

As they introduced each song, Jennie William’s baby could be heard backstage. The baby’s coos had permeated every event. Baby sounds would punctuate speeches mid-sentence, halt panel discussions in acknowledgement of her presence, and even sing along with her mother. At each event, she was passed lovingly and carefully from person to person, and kissed gently if she cried.

I’ve descended into a dark room with a large video projection of what looks like a tropical jungle. The camera moves slowly and deliberately through rich vegetation while the narrator— New Zealand artist Mark Harvey—gently talks to you about Schrödinger’s Cat. Mark explains how plants absorb energy from other nearby plants, and the research suggesting this applies to people too. He talks about quantum entanglement. The whole thing is quite hypnotic. And sitting on the floor in the far corner of the room, is a small video monitor showing the artist wrestling with a young tree, yanking and pulling, trying to rip it out of the ground with his hands.

Mark visited Halifax’s Anna Leonowens Gallery this summer, presenting a video installation, Drop Point, alongside a series of daily public performances, titled Free Hand. I spoke with Mark over lunch about his work, colonialism, caring for plants, religion, quantum physics (some real, some not), optimism, and life advice from our grandmothers.

DANIEL HIGHAM: I found that small video of you wrestling the tree really interesting because it was just so violent compared to the rest of the work.

MARK HARVEY: It’s interesting to hear you say that. It seems a lot of people don’t notice the tree being pulled out in the corner. So the forest in the main video is, you could argue, “pure” New Zealand forest—all endemic and rare species—and it’s actually my back yard. We live out in the rain forest, and I do a lot of caring for it, and I look after other people’s land in the area as a hobby. I get rid of invasive weeds and replant native species.

DANIEL: You could tell by the way the camera moved through the space, that you really knew the land. It was almost intimate, very slow and considered.

MARK: Yeah, I did. I also filmed it with a Steadicam. I wanted to seduce or hypnotize the viewer. Some of my earlier background is in contemporary dance, holistic contemporary dance, conditioning your body, often touching on the New Age kind of thing. So there is that, but I’m also interested in the politics of the space—art galleries—and also the psychology of it. For this work, I collaborated partly with a physicist, Shaun Hendy. So some of the quantum physics that’s coming into the video is coming from him, but some of it is spoof physics—it’s not actually scientific.

DANIEL: But it’s presented in this authoritative sort of way, with a lot of seemingly factual information.

MARK: I was worried it might be a bit naughty to do it.

DANIEL: It is! At one point you say, “We’re all matter extending out into space,” and that we all contain lead.

MARK: Yeah! Apparently we do! That’s from Shaun.

DANIEL: So that part is real.

MARK: That part is, yeah.

DANIEL: It reminds me of something I read recently that said we’re actually all experiencing the Big Bang right now, that in this very moment it’s still happening.

MARK: It’s still resonating.

DANIEL: And we’re part of it—it’s what we are.

MARK: You know there’s an ongoing earthquake going on back home? It’s been going on for I don’t know how many years—five years, six years?—but it’s very slow and subtle, and there’s constant shifting going on.

DANIEL: And it’s always changing.

MARK: A teacher of mine years ago used to say that the landscape really affects and influences what you do on it, when you make stuff. I definitely think that’s true for what I do even if I don’t mean it to. And going back to the video off to the side, I wasn’t sure  at first if I would include that or not. All the species that you see in that are invasive weeds.

DANIEL: See, I wouldn’t have known that because I don’t recognize any of those plants.

MARK: It actually is a problematic tree and it’s really futile to try and pull it out with bare hands. It’s a work in itself that I’ve shown elsewhere, but I felt like bringing it back in as part of a conversation, so the New Age sort of experience doesn’t seem all too dominant—although people can relax, it’s not as simple as that. We often relax and accept our role as colonizers, we kind of take it for granted. Despite being half Scottish and English, there’s also Maori in my ancestry, so that does influence how I’m thinking about politics. But I don’t want to say it too directly. And it’s only recently that we’ve clarified in my family that ancestry. Years ago when I did a PhD, I was very interested in critiquing the position of White Man through being a white man.

DANIEL: I was watching that video, going along with it, feeling comfortable, relaxed. Then there’s a point in the video where you keep repeating the word “whiteness.” That really unsettled me.

MARK: Yeah.

DANIEL: And then you talk about the colour Alabaster White, and the history of the “white cube,” which may have been started in Nazi Germany, where they began painting the walls of museums white. You say something in the video like, “Whiteness… whiteness, and darkness.”

MARK: Yeah. “Colonizer and colonized. Breathe in. Now breathe out.” The landscape painting, going back to the nineteenth century, it’s often landscapes done by people from colonizing cultures representing land that was there to be conquered or taken over. Empty space ready to be tamed and pastoralised. I think there’s that kind of tension in the work as well.

DANIEL: That reminds me of the “Doctrine of Discovery,” where Pope Nicholas V basically said, go out into the world and take everything that isn’t Christian and make it ours.

MARK: Exactly. And then in the video I start going on about Roman arches, to reference that and all of the things we associate with Roman culture, patriarchal culture, colonization, all of these things.

DANIEL: You mentioned that you started in contemporary dance. How did you end up in performance art?

MARK: Yeah. I started in contemporary dance and very quickly moved toward performance art. You know, twenty years ago—I can’t believe it was twenty years ago, 1998—I was being told not to do that stuff by a lot of people in that community, that I would alienate people, so I moved into visual arts.

DANIEL: What kind of stuff?

MARK: I was doing these great big actions with very simple… for instance, I had my uncle’s drag racing videos—he was into drag racing, hot rods and things—and I had a friend on a reverb pedal playing the sound from the video of the revving engines, looking like a rock star. It was this white man thing I was looking at. It was quite theatrical. I called it HEMI 265, which was the name of an engine in these iconic Australian cars that were big back home, associated with masculinity, macho-ness, and tradesmen—guys who vote for the Tories, that kind of thing.

DANIEL: Toxic masculinity.

MARK: Exactly. And group-think. My first degree was in psychology, and a big thread in all of my work is: what decisions do people make, and why do they make those decisions? There’s a psychologist, Niki Harré, who’s written some books recently that look at why, in relation to sustainability and social justice, people make the decisions they do, and why they often don’t go near this stuff.

DANIEL: Why people avoid it?

MARK: Yeah, it’s fascinating to me. We are in a bubble in the art world, and that is a risk. Some of my works, I definitely try to do out in the public. The first performance I did here last week, I had this huge plastic container—made in Canada—filled with dirty oil, which was made in Canada too, and I was asking people, bystanders, to give me a hand and asking them what they liked about Canada.

DANIEL: I really liked how precarious that performance seemed at times. I was watching the oil slosh around in the bucket as people helped you carry it, wondering if it would spill. I think that’s a good metaphor for the situation that we live in: we’re moving around all this oil, always on the brink of some catastrophe, not really thinking about it. It was also interesting to see people react—they seemed scared of it, as if they’ve never actually seen oil before. But all of the lights in here are on because of oil.

MARK: And because of my accent, I could play the tourist. But I don’t want to take advantage of people, there’s a risk of that too, you know being patronizing.

DANIEL: Or tricking them into something they might not agree to.

MARK: Yeah. I did a work last year, where for five hours I was pulling things around this city precinct. Mostly it was wreckage left over from the earthquake. There’s still bits of wreckage. I would go from one place to another, but always towing something around, trying to look useful. And sometimes people would come up to me and ask what I was doing, so I’d ask them “do you wanna give me a hand?” It was really fun. I was also pushing a van sometimes, and that especially got people involved. I’d say, “Yeah, this is an artwork! I’m doing this for an artwork, do you want to give me a hand?”

DANIEL: I like that you tell people it’s art.

MARK: I believe in being up-front with people, and not taking advantage of them. I believe that art hopefully can be educational for people. One common response from people was, “Oh, I don’t think it’s art. But I still really enjoy it. I do really like it.”

DANIEL: [laughs]

MARK: While I’ve been here, in Halifax, I’ve been taking time to talk to people outside of the works, and I went and visited the Mi’kmaw Native Friendship Centre and accidentally got myself invited into a language class. So I joined in! It was fantastic, I loved it because it was like an exchange, lots of conversations. In return I shared lots of the Maori language, Te Reo.

DANIEL: Is it spoken much?

MARK: We use Maori words all the time in New Zealand, I think four percent of our population are fluent, and there’s a lot of us, at least half of us, that understand quite a bit. They’re trying to make it compulsory. The Maori population is 15 percent, but it’s more like 25 for people who have Maori ancestry.

DANIEL: That’s great, that it’s being recognized at that level.

MARK: It’s an official language. We have three: English, Maori, and sign language.

DANIEL: Unfortunately Indigenous languages in Canada are at risk of dying out, because of the residential school system and many years of systematic cultural genocide. There’s a whole generation who were violently cut off from their language.

MARK: It happened too in New Zealand, but there was a bit of a renaissance in the ‘80s.

DANIEL: I’m excited about the new Friendship Centre. It will be this beautiful space right across the street from the Halifax Police headquarters, which is this really oppressive sort of building.

MARK: I know, I observed it while I was crawling around the Citadel. I was trying to listen to the power here.

DANIEL: Did the public interact with you while you did that performance?

MARK: A little bit, yeah. I had a whole bus load of tourists that were calling out to me and cheering me on.

DANIEL: What did they say?

MARK: People were yelling out, “WHY ARE YOU CRAWLING?” And it was the only work where I wasn’t talking to people. But it felt like a silent crawl might be the right thing. It was the day after I went to the Mi’kmaw Native Friendship Centre. The Citadel is a place I know where people do drugs, and also a cruising place, but what it meant historically: the British colony, and because of my family, I felt like doing a listening performance. Just listen. It took nearly two hours.

DANIEL: Why were you crawling?

MARK: This idea of submission, submissiveness. Sometimes invaders might crawl before an attack, but in this case I wanted to put myself below, below them, below this place. It’s interesting because on the one hand, I come from colonizers, but on the other hand I don’t, I come from the opposite.

DANIEL: I think there’s important work to be done—by white men, like me—looking at what it means to be a white man, in what was the British Empire. That I need to figure out for myself who I am and how I want to participate in society. That we can’t just blindly follow along with how things are. Which reminds me of the performance you did today, Thought Leader, I think you called it? You put on a blindfold and asked people to guide you around Parade Square, but also to think for you. I feel like a lot of people unwillingly or unknowingly give away their agency. And I think a lot of people just want someone else to make decisions for them.

MARK: Yeaaaaah. I’ve been so wound up and bothered that we give all this power to the same, really powerful, usually white men, and follow what they say.

DANIEL: I’ve noticed in your performances, where religion comes up, a lot of participants are very anti-religion. And I think that’s sad in some ways. Obviously the church has done a lot of harm, and that needs to be acknowledged and repaired. But it seems like we’ve almost given up entirely on moral decision making, so that at the government level we purely rely on statistics or economic factors. And somehow we’ve come to accept that. Like trying to do good is too hard, so we gave up altogether.

MARK: I’ll go back to Niki Harré’s book. What I read from her writing, is that what influences people around big political issues—things like poverty, climate change, equality—is what’s sacred to people, what is going on for people at a spiritual level. And it’s only connecting people with that that moves people to make these deeper commitments or changes. It’s very hard to do. I’ve got this conservation buzz going, I guess that’s probably my religion. I go out into the bush and get really excited learning about different plant species, helping neighbours with them, it’s really wonderful. That for me is a big driving thing. Definitely. And I’m optimistic about it. I’ve got two kids, two daughters, and want them to be better people than we are, if I can help it. If my work can contribute to conversation about these things, that would be nice.

DANIEL: I think conversation is the only way to really make positive change, conversation in whatever form it might take. I really appreciate how some of your performances are actually just frameworks to have pointed conversations with the public. Like with Life Advice, there was this whole setup—you’re doing this workout routine, there’s free fish and chips—but really you’re just asking people for advice.

MARK: Life tips! We got a few too, didn’t we? It was really nice.

DANIEL: And most of the advice that people shared came from their grandmother.

MARK: You’re right! It really shows how important grandmothers are. How underrated they are.

DANIEL: One more question, on the theme of life advice. What advice do you have for someone early in their career in the arts doing something like performance art?

MARK: Keep trying stuff out, especially if others around you are not doing it. And definitely don’t feel like you have to follow the norms—performance has been around long enough now that it has its norms. That’s really important. There are friends of mine in Germany who say there are a lot of young artists that have been taught to do performance art and it all looks kind of the same, often just standing there and dropping things.

DANIEL: I think sometimes just trying to challenge the norm becomes the norm.

MARK: Exactly. Like the idea that all performance art should be about pulling apart things—that in itself is like a cat chasing its tail. That can undo the very essence of the work, if it has that potential. It’s like, when you try to fall over, you never are falling over because you’re conscious of doing it. Stick with concepts rather than trying to constantly pull apart things. And don’t listen to me about things. Or older people. Unless you really think they should be listened to.

Performance of Samuel Thulin’s “Compositional Routes of the Magdalen Islands.” Photo: Nigel Quinn

For me, sound and landscape go hand in hand. We travel through life being highly influenced by the sounds in our environment. Although hearing is not at the highest point of the sensual hierarchy, the sensuous space of sound is a powerful knowledge position to work from. Sound is used in medicine to determine the well being of our bodies and is used in geology to connect and predict the makeup and movement of the earth. It resonates through all matter, the rock, the path, the tree and the land, and it is perceived through our ears, our skin and our bones.

This intimate relationship between the land, human, song and sound plays an important role in the theme of the artist residency and event created by curator Caroline Loncol Daigneault, in collaboration with the Magdalen Island’s Artist Run Centre AdMare. The theme Songlines draws directly upon the Australian Aboriginal ways of knowing that include Dreamtime and Songlines as it recalls the essence of the 1987 book written by Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines.

From this point of knowing, it is easy to enter the sound work of New Brunswick born Samuel Thulin, Compositional Routes of the Magdalen Islands. Dr. Thulin is an academically based sound artist whose process includes what he describes as “situated composition.” This method is not only about utilizing and challenging new technologies’ capacity to create mobile sound studios or compositional situations beyond professional boundaries, it is also about dissolving the walls of the theoretical and established sound studio. Thulin is working to bring attention to the ways in which sonic and social space are composed and composing forces. Situated composition brings together and acknowledges the impacts that social, material, virtual and digital elements have as co-composers of new sounds and of each other.

Compositional Routes of the Magdalen Islands looked to local meteorological and geological components for inspiration. The Dunes, the sand, the wind, the sea and erosion combined with with the method of granular synthesis played key roles in the composition of his artwork. He created the work in-situ over two and a half weeks of residency. Thulin presented the final piece to the public in a participatory performance, a collective walk through a forest and meadow landscape with transistor radios and no lack of mosquitos.

Performance of Samuel Thulin’s “Compositional Routes of the Magdalen Islands.” Photo: Nigel Quinn

I participated in a performance including about 10 people plus the artist.  Thulin lead the performance by introducing the participants to the concept of the sound, the method of granular synthesis and the use of sounds from the sea and the coast rather than sounds of the forest or other inland elements. He also outlined the guidelines for participating in the performance: we were to walk, listening collectively to the sound as it was affected by the physical realities of walking in a group through a forest path. He intended for us to encounter erosion and interference as we experienced being near or distanced from the source of the transmission.

With transistor radios in hand, eager participants followed Samuel into the woods as he began the transmission. The experience was just as Thulin explained it would be — the sound became clear as I got closer to the source of the transmission, and the sound became deteriorated with interference from other broadcasts as I trailed behind the main group. The element I wasn’t expecting to have such an impact on my experience during the performance was the ever present white noise. It echoed from the radios that were out of transmission range. The white noise resonated with me as the voice of the wind, even though it wasn’t necessarily the recorded voice of the wind. The majority of my trip to the Magdalen Islands was engulfed by the region’s unforgiving winds. And I recall mentioning to my partner on multiple occasions that the wind was like an unrelenting white noise, definitely a characteristic of my Magdalen Island soundscape. Hard on the head but still a somewhat soothing and consistent characteristic of the Islands.

Thulin’s project Compositional Routes of the Magdalen Islands was one of my favourite pieces during my Songlines experience. It connected to the theme of the project in a poetic and material way. The final presentation was approached as an extension of the artist’s research, as the performance the “soundwalk” is to be considered part of the creation of the work. And although I don’t feel that didactic explanation of the inner workings of an art project always contributes to the strength of a project, in this instance it was helpful to set the stage for the players and enhanced the focus of my listening through the process of performing.

For me, Thulin’s piece created a dynamic intersection between the material and social realities of the island. Not only are the Magdalen Islands at the mercy of the sea socially, as an isolated Island community, the material composition of the Islands is primarily of sandstone, the kind of land that is far too easily eroded by the unrelenting ocean waves. The coastline of the Magdalen Islands is unstable, constantly shifting, being reshaped and dissolved into new formations. All it takes is one good storm surge and whole sections of coastline can disappear overnight. Or in the case of Thulin’s project, a slight change in the frequency and his composition is lost to the white noise of the wind.

Related: Marie-Line Leblanc and Sara Dignard find everyday wonder on the Magdalen Islands

Related: Christopher Boyne blurs lines between ‘artist’ and ‘non artist’ actors

Image from public presentation of Flotsam by Christopher Boyne, Songlines 2016. Photo: Nigel Quinn

Christopher Boyne’s practice often revolves around maritime life and the sea. Born and raised on the east coast of Nova Scotia, his relationship with the ocean is intimate. His father was a fisher and his childhood memories often include playing on eastern shores.

Memory, found objects and fictional stories drive his research and studio process. The objects that Christopher makes are generally simple in form. Echoes of objects once seen and known. The Boats, water, the shore, the waves, the boats — often these characters resonate between life and art, the ‘non-art’ conversation and the isolated discourses of the gallery. The final iterations of his research often result in a clean, slick aesthetic which lends itself well to the white cube. However could it survive the messy, quite ephemeral process of the Songlines residency in the Magdalen Islands?

The Songlines residency indeed challenged his studio process and comfortable aesthetic. He set out to increase the scale of his built object, working from sea wood found on the shores of the Magdalen Islands and directed by local boat building knowledge and culture. These elements interrupted the amount of control Christopher was used to in his studio. Generally working from his own memory or the memories of family and close friends, the knowledge he collected during this residency was new, slightly foreign, and the materials were messy.

Christopher Boyne at work. Photo: Nigel Quinn

Detail of Christopher Boyne’s Flotsam. Photo: Becka Viau

Yet, perhaps the aesthetic of the final object wasn’t as important as originally thought. Even though I found the model boat to be quite compelling, I feel the project wasn’t necessarily about the model. It felt to me as though Boyne was building the model fishing boat as a way to engage in the action of the artist residency. To challenge his technical skills and keep his hands working which, is the expected activity during a residency. I wonder if making with one’s hand is still the expected work of an artist, in residency or not? Either way, Christopher did craft a beautiful model of a Magdalen Island fishing boat, built with guidance from local fishers and boat builders.

The project’s relationship to local labour and the ‘non-artist’ continues past the construction of the model, and to me, this is where the most interesting points of the project emerge. The plan for Boyne’s model boat is one of an unknown ending. It would be set adrift in the Atlantic Ocean, left to the fate of the sea.

The release of the boat would be performed by a ‘non-artist.’ A local fisher would take the model boat off the East coast of Grosse Isle and and release it to sea. The fisher would also be taking the final photographs of the boat before it was left alone in the middle of the ocean. An interesting point to note here is that the fisher, according to Christopher, wasn’t really interested in knowing why he was to perform the action he was just doing it because he was asked.

The actual story of the object after its release into the sea isn’t of great importance to Christopher Boyne. Rather, what is important to Boyne is the imagined reality of the abandoned ship, the performance and record of the action of the release, and finally the photographic object that will remain as the art object.

The compelling part of Boyne’s practice, during this residency and beyond, is his interest in engaging with or blurring the lines between ‘artist’ and ‘non artist’ actors, and notions of community collaboration. His finished works are beautiful, refined and compelling yet, there is something about the process of abandoning the art project into the hands of the ‘non-artist,’ whose actions bring the art object back from its secluded realm and carry it once again into the everyday gesture. I hope Christopher will continue to explore this element of his process and practice, as research into the ‘artist’ and ‘non-artist’ interaction is warranted.

Related: Marie-Line Leblanc and Sara Dignard find everyday wonder on the Magdalen Islands

Graeme Patterson, “Player Piano Waltz,” 7ft H x 5ft W x 4ft L. Working player piano, wood, mixed materials, video/audio components.

Editor’s note: This article originally ran in the Summer 2014 Edition of Visual Arts News.  Graeme Patterson’s Secret Citadel is on view at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery February 14-April 12, 2015. 

Enter into the imaginary world of Graeme Patterson’s Secret Citadel where memory, invention, and fantasy collide to provoke a multifaceted narrative of childhood friendship, rights of passage and adult isolation. Conveying a much more personal psychology than the social resonance of his iconic Woodrow (2007)—a multimedia installation inspired by his family’s Saskatchewan homestead—Patterson’s Secret Citadel reveals the breadth of his creativity and the complexity of his imagination. It is an ambitious exhibition that integrates sculpture, animation, robotics, music and video projections with humour, insight and melancholy.

Patterson admits the subjective nature of this work as an incarnation of his memories and imaginings of a lost childhood friendship and male friendships in general; and he chooses two animal avatars, a sprightly blue bison as himself and an energetic orange cougar as his childhood friend Yuki to guide our way through his tale. The transmutable nature of these avatars invites the viewer to imagine or remember our own childhood adventures and turning points as we assume the role of one or the other of the characters.

Although natural enemies in the wild, this unlikely pair form the binding link between the four sculptures, which allude to four pivotal scenes in their relationship. The bison and cougar appear in various incarnations throughout, from lifeless costume hides suspended mid-air to bouncing animated video projections. These two characters begin as whimsical compatriots and end as somewhat maudlin loners; their transformation underscores the vagaries of a life and implies a rather pessimistic depiction of growing up and becoming an adult.

Patterson’s trademark model making skills are as fastidious in their detail as his earlier work, but there is a noticeable difference in their materiality and tone. Almost a boyish creativity is evident in paperclip hinges, toothpick furniture and blanket fort mountains, which evoke childhood and adolescent pastimes. Except for in his Player Piano Waltz (2013), which retains a detached coolness and finesse. Not surprisingly, Player Piano Waltz references the last scene, where the bison and cougar are solitary adults wandering aimlessly through the rooms of a fading gentleman’s club.

Once again as in Woodrow, the model is meticulously constructed and void of any three dimensional characters within the space itself. Instead the set integrates the narrative through looped animated projections viewed through the external windowed walls of the club. The viewer is held at bay, unless a coin is dropped into the pay box to initiate the musical score of the player piano, which serves as the base for the sculpture. Patterson also wrote the lilting music reminiscent of early Tom Waits.

In the three other sculptures, Patterson moves away from the self-contained voyeuristic miniature style of Woodrow towards a more openly inviting physicality of space. Grudge Match (2013) allows viewers to choose a team and sit on their side of wooden gymnasium bleachers to watch the animated high school wrestling match projected onto the wall. Patterson’s style of stop-motion animation integrates detailed homemade puppets and sets with sophisticated digital projections to create a quirky hybrid throw back to 1960s cartoons like Davey and Goliath or the Thunderbirds.

The gymnasium stage for the animated wrestling match sits under and behind the bleachers, and includes two drawer-like attachments of a locker room and washroom alongside a weight room and coach’s office. It almost feels like a giant Barbie palace for boys that could be folded up and set up in your bedroom. Despite the playful elements, competition is the focus of this high school match, where potential alpha status is declared and clique alignments develop. Grudge Match severs the common bond of imaginative play and adventure evident in The Mountain (2013) and Camp Wakonda (2013).

Camp Wakonda (2013) is a haunting installation featuring two charred bunk beds as the platform for a reconstructed summer camp and vehicular accident. It links the structured independence of camp with the freedom of a driver’s license as complex rites of passage. Each rite carries its own inherent danger, but is an essential step in personal character development. Manly adult skills such as archery and wood chopping are practiced and tested in projected animations onto the top bunks’ replicas of the open framed camp buildings—while the lower bunks’ projections find our protagonists locked in a battle within, as the civilized avatar fights off its wild counterpart. It is a layered and complicated narrative that culminates in the final collision between childhood and adolescence portrayed in the flaming accident between school bus and family sedan.

Graeme Patterson, “Camp Wakonda” 6ft H x 10ft W x 7ft L. Wood fabric, mixed material, video/audio components.

The story begins, however, with The Mountain (2012), a massive sculptural installation with a white blanket covered mountain cloaking the ideal artist’s studio within. Two suburban family homes straddle either side of mountain linked by telephone poles that stretch over the top of the mountain and a secret passage tunnel that runs underneath the dining room table base. One house has its furniture neatly stacked outside indicating either a move in or out of the neighbourhood, simultaneously bringing the friends together and tearing them apart. The mountain’s physical inference to a blanket fort with imagined secret passageways connects the imaginative play of childhood to the imaginative play of an artist. It’s possible to envision the young buffalo and cougar running over to share their latest comics and practice their super hero moves.

Patterson seamlessly relates these childhood pastimes to his secret artist’s studio deep within the mountain, which evidently refers to Superman’s “Secret Citadel”—the earliest comic book version of his “Fortress of Solitude”—where Superman would go to contemplate and rejuvenate after saving the world. Of all the sculptural works, The Mountain is the most joyful, perhaps because it reflects the artist’s studio practice. A practice that is connected to the creative abandon of childhood rather than the dismal boredom of a gentleman’s club.

Interspersed between these four works are wall projections that fill out the narrative of the bison and cougar. Patterson includes an array of technical styles. Some are live action models dressed in the bison or cougar costumes, and others involve his puppetry. All are relatively short loops that can be caught between viewing the sculptures to add another layer of insight and detail. But one must not miss the Secret Citadel (2013), a thirty-minute stop motion animation that tells the unabridged story of bison and cougar, and showcases Patterson’s considerable animation skills. It’s a visual and aural delight. Patterson is an artist with a substantial range of technical accomplishment, but he seems to hold animation with a particular affection.

After watching Secret Citadel, the rest of the exhibition shifted context. Initially, the sculptures stood independently as sculptures, yet afterwards they evolved into elaborate sets for the animation. Not that one category holds more value; rather one reveals a lingering childhood fascination with Saturday mornings.

The Scotiabank Nuit Blanche spectacle in Toronto with its more than 110 contemporary art projects gets most of the press, of course, but Charlottetown’s fourth annual Art in the Open—with more than 36 projects in six locations throughout PEI’s capital city—was an evening’s entertainment worth the travel. In 2013 I made the error of having to leave by 7 pm little knowing that the art really only gets going after the sun sets. No mistake made with the second visit to this ambitious Atlantic Canadian project: I wandered the streets and parks for the entire eight hours, 4 pm to midnight!

Yet we still weren’t able to see everything and, perhaps, that is the important aspect of these temporally tightly defined public art productions that seem to be popping up everywhere in lieu of and as a kind of poor community’s “biennale”?  In their “Welcome” to the 2014 Art in the Open, curators Pan Wendt and Becka Viau state “the aim is to provide through performances, installations and projections, experiences that help us rethink the spaces we move through every day.” They didn’t succeed with me. What was exhilarating that late summer evening in August was the immediate sense of audience, and especially younger audiences, and the feeling that our art and culture need not be restrained and limited to the confines of that specially groomed place, the gallery. It was exhilarating to hear kids yelp and yell from experiences and encounters that gained their attention without anyone saying “Shush!” It was more that feeling of an open encounter without regard for all the usual accoutrement that comes with art viewing. It was such fun to see kids, and adults too, playing with Monica Lacey’s Indoor/Outdoor sculptural installation in the night darkened Victoria Park, and later joining all manner of person brought to a stop on a Queen Street sidewalk to figure out what they were seeing and hearing with the staging of Ursula Johnson’s Hot Looking performance in the window of the normally sedate Casa Mia Café.

It seems to me unlikely that many, if any, people came away from Art in the Open rethinking their experiences of the spaces they occupy everyday, with a different understanding of the beautiful Victoria Park or the existing delights of the urban Rochford Square. The curatorial aim suggests, I think, how distanced we professional art people can get from every day experiences notwithstanding our best efforts. Well, theory and practice are often distant cousins without much effect on the vibrant lives of the other!

My evening started at 4 pm hanging around the Confederation Centre Plaza, one of the six loci for staging Art in the Open and, almost eight hours later, the site of the last project I was able to see as well as a snack and refreshing drink around the welcomed warming fires of Mavor’s. What gained my attention? What did I like, and there is no reason why I, or anyone, would like everything.

Alexis Bulman was just setting up The Free Ads Structure/L’issue des petites annonces gratuites on the plaza overlooking the pedestrian only Victoria Row: a collection of found objects from free ads, objects that would be offered free of charge later in the evening. The homemade sculptural pile was just beginning, and when I returned evidently all had been given away because there remained no trace of art. From nothing to nothing has long been a powerful philosophical concept. Nowadays it is also a powerful art attitude, often merely a conceit, for a way of working in a hyper-productive world, a world where more product is a matter of bad faith and counter-productive. Bulman’s project worked very well because it almost never existed for me! I liked that.

There must have been half a dozen and more projects around the Confederation Centre of the Arts (home of Anne of Green Gables – the Musical and of the Confederation Centre Art Gallery). Over the railing from Bulman’s project on Victoria Row, Amy Malbeuf continued her 2009 performance Portals/Portails, one component of Art in the Open’s Indigenous Art Programming curated by Carla Taunton and Heather Igloliorte. The artist emerged on the crowded street scene covered from head to toe in a golden, skin-tight body suit. She pushed a garden variety fertilize spreader loaded, I found out later, with pinkish salt. Malbeuf walked spreading the salt, creating a strikingly colourful circular residue and then made a second circle next to it before leaving the street stage. Almost immediately the kids of all ages in the audience flocked to the circles and played in them as if the circles were tempting puddles of water. Soon the discrete circles were blurred almost to oblivion. Historically, “salting the earth” was a symbolic ritual to place a curse on conquered lands to prevent the original inhabitants from returning.  The work was somewhat confusing conceptually, I thought, but, ironically, hugely enjoyed by the mainly white middle class audience. Perhaps that is Malbeuf’s point?

Maybe because it did not have a “point,” Monica Lacey’s Indoor/Outdoor was more intriguing, exciting to my fancy. And kids seemed to like it too! A small structure in the middle of a great field in Victoria Park and made only of doors for ingress and egress – actually, only enabling entrance and exit from a space that wasn’t a room or hall or anything but a space for doors leading only from here to the other side of there on a dark night. Alice’s Adventures seemed suddenly transported to here and now. What nuttiness art can offer if both it and we step out of the ordinary.

Lukas Steinman’s Tourists was one of the works truly developed with the darkened context of Art in the Open in mind: cutout silhouetted figures of stereotyped tourists suddenly popping out of the night woods fully illuminated. The first tourist completely caught me by surprise before it disappeared and then another popped up any particular further along the park path. It was very funny and a wry observation on Island culture without making judgmental critiques.

Other projects were more seriously demanding than might be apt in an evening’s festive spirit, although Rilla Marshall’s Diminished Island was serious, subtle and effective. Marshall highlighted the sea’s projected rise in level 90 years hence with a series of stakes extending for perhaps a kilometer along Victoria Park’s water edge. Each stake was topped with lights. For the uninitiated it was a serpentine line of lights that delighted the eye as lines of light at night do, perhaps because it makes us think of the creation of form out of nothing? When informed, our eyes have a graphic demonstration of contemporary climate change.

By the time I got to Diminished Island—several hours and several kilometers later—I was tired and greatly appreciated Amanda Fauteux’s Victoria Park Public Transportation. With schedules of stops posted throughout the park and dressed in a homemade uniform, Fauteaux  freely offered rides to customers, a social practice made truly helpful! When I got to the end of my ride, I was ready to head back downtown because I did not want to miss Ursula Johnson’s Hot Looking performance.

You do have to imagine a main street in a provincial capital late in the summer’s evening with lots of people, tourists and guests and residents, mulling around enjoying themselves and often looking for one of the several bars and eateries. Blasting from a brightly lit storefront is a pop jingle of a song and there in the window a young man dressed in “traditional” indigenous garb. He is dancing in a “traditional” indigenous manner and lip syncing No Doubt’s “Looking Hot” (the 2012 video for this song features the white singer Gwen Stefani decked out in culturally questionable Native American-style costume).  I have put “traditional” in quotation marks because we are into the problematic and often fiery arena of cross-cultural discussion. I do not know very much about what may or may not be traditionally indigenous here in Maritime Canada, so experienced this performance at face value. The  performer was dancing his heart out and lip singing the song, now and again looking and pointing suggestively at the audience. It was funny. It was exhausting as contemporary durational performances usually are as they test our resolve to stay with the performer. It was surreal and like great surreal art it was finally unnerving and disorienting. I didn’t catch the full extent of Johnson’s reference until some retrospective digging, and can only here suggest that you look at the No Doubt video yourself to fully appreciate Johnson’s work.

I missed as many projects as I saw at Art in the Open and that’s probably how it ought to be in this kind of festival atmosphere. Fullness and exuberance must be the kinds of descriptors for these events. And messy. Dozens of descriptors that are not usually brought to bear for a gallery exhibition. Just when I might be thinking the organizers had reduced art to another class of entertainment, I would encounter a project that was both entertaining and sustaining. What more could I ask? Well, I can look forward to a 2015 Art in the Open!

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