Not Just a Movement for Liberation but Movement for Liberation: Generating Counterspaces in Indigenous Art

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 10
  In Roundtable Session: Indigenous Visual Methods: Challenging Settler Structures Through Images, Movement, and Participatory Research

Abstract

A Grand Entry of 856 dancers in Misi-Zaaga’iganing (also known as Mille Lacs, MN) was my first visual lesson in a key part of Anishinaabe knowledge systems, or the first time I became conscious that I was looking at a form of knowledge production. The whirling, swaying, progressive momentum within the circle is built and actuated by each dancer agreeing to a set of protocols and bringing their own self-determination —”dance your style!”— into that collectivity. What is produced is a powerful site of Indigenous sovereignty that, like the movement of a traditional dancer, looks both forward and behind. Within Anishinaabe ceremonies, dancing (the movement of intention into the physical using the body) and singing (the movement of intention into the physical using breath) are employed as a means of collecting knowledge within the body. It is a very old yet constantly renewed pedagogical practice that is both self-reflexive and profoundly relational.

Much of the discourse around Ogimaa Mikana, the interventionist art collective co-founded by Hayden King and Susan Blight in 2013, has focused on the ways in which the visual/textual properties of the work challenges normative settler colonial notions of space. Existing alongside the centering of Anishinaabe language in the work is the covert movement of the artists through urban spaces as production and which the work itself reflects. Having the work of Ogimaa Mikana exist exclusively outside of the gallery allows the artists to both circumvent capitalist art economies and grant themselves the freedom to move around. Like the powwow circle, Ogimaa Mikana seeks to be simultaneously part of a collective momentum and to be self-determined individuals. The artists use movement to announce their presence in the world.

Present-day Canada is comprised of layers of settlement on Indigenous land. It continually removes Indigenous peoples from the land; land being what Glen Coulthard calls, “the material basis of Indigenous people's health and nationhood” (Walia, 2015). We can think of one form of resistance to the nation state as the making and re-making of Indigenous space under conditions of constraint, surveillance, and duress; the generating of Indigenous space as a means of crumbling settlement.

This paper explores how Ogimaa Mikana and other forms of Indigenous art that center movement produce what Karyn Recollet calls “counter-spaces to resist oppressive socio-spatial arrangements of space” (2015). Movement outside the gallery can refuse the demand for consumable Indigenous images and disrupt the colonial gaze, a gaze that believes it should be able to consume everything and that which cannot be consumed by the eyes, ears, hands, and mouth ceases to exist. As Salote Tawale writes, “the colonial gaze is hungry, yet establishing these sovereign spaces remains crucial to survival” (Tawale, 2016). Through a discussion of these works, I link the use of movement to generating Indigenous counter-space as a form of knowledge production that is both ancestral and futurist.

Author

• Susan Blight, University of Toronto