Moderator: Justina Spencer

Presenters:

Amber Dean

Carly Ciufo

Angela May

Orly Lael Netzer

If remembering the past involves commemorating violent events, but settler colonialism is a structure and not an event, then how might we learn to read efforts to remember—including (counter-)memorials and (counter-)museums—for the structural violence that they reveal? Might memorials that recall a past event, but neglect to attend to the ongoing structures of violence risk situating the forms of violence commemorated too firmly in the past? If so, is attending to structural violence a key element of what allows counter-memorialization to intervene in contexts of ongoing settler colonialism? In this panel, each presenter will offer a brief provocation from their research on counter-memorial forms to invite a discussion with the audience about why counter-memorialization matters.

Carly Ciufo

During the opening of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) in Winnipeg, Manitoba in September 2014, members of the Shoal Lake #40 First Nation launched their “living museum:” the Museum of Canadian Human Rights Violations (MCHRV). Members of Shoal Lake #40 set up a sacred fire neighbouring the Winnipeg museum to invite visitors to their community 200 kilometers away. Here, they could tour the lack of road access and clean water on the land as well as the counter-museum displayed in the hockey rink lobby exhibiting human rights violations. Of particular interest here is the museal display of correspondence between Shoal Lake #40 and CMHR representatives. Outlining developments at the CMHR between 2014 and the opening of Freedom Road in 2019, I will discuss some of the real-world effects of and challenges to settler colonialism at this particular intersection of museum and counter-museum.

Carly Ciufo is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. She has worked in research, archival, copyright, and oral history posts at various arts and heritage organizations across Canada. Her current research focuses on the capacity of human rights museum workers to do human rights work at the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, England, the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta, Georgia, and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She is also an editor for ActiveHistory.ca.

Amber Dean

Can fiction provoke us to remember difficult/traumatic histories differently? Drawing on Mohawk lesbian writer Beth Brant (Degonwandonti)’s short story, “A Long Story,” I’ll reflect on my use of this story in the classroom to suggest that “A Long Story” can provoke a reconsideration of how memories of sexual regulation are passed on and memorialized in settler colonial contexts, particularly in mainstream LGBTQ+ movements. To demonstrate how the story might work as a form of counter-memorialization, I’ll juxtapose it with the proposed designs for an LGBTQ2+ National Monument, to open discussion about the differences between memorials/counter-memorials.

Amber Dean is Professor of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. Her research focuses on memorialization and public mourning in response to mass violence

Angela May

What happens when we are born into communities whose memories and identity are at odds with our own? How might this discord be shaped by settler colonialism? In this presentation, I reflect on my belonging in the Japanese Canadian community, specifically exploring my art practice and the role of letters in two of my public art projects: dear community, a creative video that interrogates the politics of Japanese Canadian commemoration in Vancouver’s historic Powell Street neighborhood (Paueru); and c/o, a series of six portraits that complicate encounters with Japanese Canadian archives and history. Drawing on these works, I consider how public art can put the settler colonial technology of letters to work for counter-memorial conversations. In other words I ask: what kind of difference can letters make?

How does (re)production in different creative forms extend the potential of counter-memorializing events? In Hair: The Performance, Tahltan artist Peter Morin and Japanese Canadian artist Ayumi Goto created a collaborative testimonial ceremony that threads Indigenous and diasporic dispossession, absences, and care. The singular performance was (re)produced with a video recording of the live event included on the Residency’s MOOC, and a co-authored version is featured in The Land We Are. Exploring the performance alongside its (re)productions, I ask how these objects, and their implications in settler-colonial institutions, (re)shape the pedagogy of witnessing embodied by the artists, and the ways that audiences are invited to inherit the difficult knowledge testified to.

Angela May is a writer, artist, activist, and PhD candidate working under the supervision of Dr. Amber Dean in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. While Angela’s research focuses broadly on the politics of loss, her doctoral project focuses specifically on the politics of loss in Vancouver’s Powell Street and Downtown Eastside neighbourhoods, examining how trauma circulates meaningfully and materially through places, bodies, and texts. Her academic work has been published in the Urban History Review and the Annual Review of Interdisciplinary Justice Research. Her art practice overlaps with but is separate from her scholarship, sitting somewhere between political and whimsical. Angela’s creative video projects, dear community and c/o, can be viewed on her YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/channel/UCG7ln2GwfFDYljP-7tX8bgw.

Orly Lael Netzer

How does (re)production in different creative forms extend the potential of counter-memorializing events? In Hair: The Performance, Tahltan artist Peter Morin and Japanese Canadian artist Ayumi Goto created a collaborative testimonial ceremony that threads Indigenous and diasporic dispossession, absences, and care. The singular performance was (re)produced with a video recording of the live event included on the Residency’s MOOC, and a co-authored version is featured in The Land We Are. Exploring the performance alongside its (re)productions, I ask how these objects, and their implications in settler-colonial institutions, (re)shape the pedagogy of witnessing embodied by the artists, and the ways that audiences are invited to inherit the difficult knowledge testified to.

Orly Lael Netzer (PhD) is an Instructor at Carleton University's School of Indigenous and Canadian Studies. She works at the intersection of autobiography scholarship, research on cultural memory, and Canadian studies. Her research explores the ethics of bearing witness to creative forms of testimony, with particular focus to the ways that testimony’s colonial legacies and trajectories shape contemporary practices of mediation and reception. She has co-edited special issues of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly and a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, and her work has been published in Canadian Literature, AmLit – American Literatures, and Postcolonial Studies.

Photo: (Sumi Mototsune, c/o): Angela May, Sumi Mototsune, March 2021, digital portrait.