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Arts of Engagement focuses on the role that music, film, visual art, and Indigenous cultural practices play in and beyond Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools. Contributors here examine the impact of aesthetic and sensory experience in residential school history, at TRC national and community events, and in artwork and exhibitions not affiliated with the TRC. Using the framework of “aesthetic action,” the essays expand the frame of aesthetics to include visual, aural, and kinetic sensory experience, and question the ways in which key components of reconciliation such as apology and witnessing have social and political effects for residential school survivors, intergenerational survivors, and settler publics.
This volume makes an important contribution to the discourse on reconciliation in Canada by examining how aesthetic and sensory interventions offer alternative forms of political action and healing. These forms of aesthetic action encompass both sensory appeals to empathize and invitations to join together in alliance and new relationships as well as refusals to follow the normative scripts of reconciliation. Such refusals are important in their assertion of new terms for conciliation, terms that resist the imperatives of reconciliation as a form of resolution.
This collection charts new ground by detailing the aesthetic grammars of reconciliation and conciliation. The authors document the efficacies of the TRC for the various Indigenous and settler publics it has addressed, and consider the future aesthetic actions that must be taken in order to move beyond what many have identified as the TRC’s political limitations.
Dylan Robinson is a Stó:lō scholar who holds the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Arts at Queen’s University. His research focuses upon the sensory politics of Indigenous activism and the arts, and questions how Indigenous rights and settler colonialism are embodied and spatialized in public space. His current project documents the history of contemporary Indigenous public art across North America.
|Keavy Martin is an associate professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. Her research interests revolve around Indigenous literatures and literary theory, with a focus on Inuit literature and performance; Indigenous research methodologies; Indigenous languages; Indigenous literary nationalism and literary history; Aboriginal rights, treaties, and land claims; and the concept and practice of reconciliation. Stories in a New Skin: Approaches to Inuit Literature won the 2012 Gabrielle Roy Prize.
Table of Contents for Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action In and Beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, edited by Dylan Robinson and Keavy Martin
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction “The Body Is a Resonant Chamber” 1 / Dylan Robinson and Keavy Martin
Chapter 1 Imaginary Spaces of Conciliation and Reconciliation: Art, Curation, and Healing 21 / David Garneau
Chapter 2 Intergenerational Sense, Intergenerational Responsibility 43 / Dylan Robinson
Chapter 3 this is what happens when we perform the memory of the land 67 / Peter Morin
Chapter 4 Witnessing In Camera: Photographic Reflections on Truth and Reconciliation 93 / Naomi Angel and Pauline Wakeham
Chapter 5 “Aboriginal Principles of Witnessing” and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 135 / David Gaertner
Chapter 6 Polishing the Chain: Haudenosaunee Peacebuilding and Nation-Specific Frameworks of Redress 157 / Jill Scott and Alana Fletcher
Chapter 7 Acts of Defiance in Indigenous Theatre: A Conversation with Lisa C. Ravensbergen 181 Dylan Robinson
Chapter 8 “pain, pleasure, shame. Shame”: Masculine Embodiment, Kinship, and Indigenous Reterritorialization 193 / Sam McKegney
Chapter 9 “Our Roots Go Much Deeper”: A Conversation with Armand Garnet Ruffo 215 / Jonathan Dewar
Chapter 10 “This Is the Beginning of a Major Healing Movement”: A Conversation with Georgina Lightning 227 / Keavy Martin
Chapter 11 Resisting Containment: The Long Reach of Song at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools 239 / Beverley Diamond
Chapter 12 Song, Participation, and Intimacy at Truth and Reconciliation Gatherings 267 / Byron Dueck
Chapter 13 Gesture of Reconciliation: The TRC Medicine Box as Communicative Thing 283 / Elizabeth Kalbfleisch
Chapter 14 Imagining New Platforms for Public Engagement: A Conversation with Bracken Hanuse Corlett 305 / Dylan Robinson
Bibliography 321
Discography 342
About the Contributors 343
Copyright Acknowledgements 349
Index 351