Pow Wow and the Power of Imagination

Fuck 2016

Asking ‘What If’

“Its amazing how those ideas spoken back in the present have become the future.”

– The Henceforward

Indigenous Futurism (IF) is the re-imagining of Indigenous bodies, identities and spaces in the past, present and future. IF is imagining the what if. It creates an alternative vision to the realities of colonialism that serves to inspire resurgence and resistance. But it goes well beyond inspiration too: IF has the capacity to change the future by imagining it differently. Imagine Otherwise as Daniel Heath Justice might say.

In Plato’s Republic he argues against the legitimacy and importance of poets and theatre. He distinguished between praxis or ‘real life’ and fictio or ‘make-believe’ and says that anyone who reacts emotionally to something that is not real life is not in their right mind. Clearly Plato has never seen an episode of Criminal Minds.

Cyberspace is the modern arbiter of identity and it shapes the landscape of imagination. It’s connected to real life – it is real life. Here in cyberspace the lines between praxis and fictio are not as binary as Plato assumed.

IF understands this because Indigenous ways of knowing tend to be less bound up in binaries than Western thought. IF also knows that the lines between imagination and reality are not so easily defined. Imagination has the power to inform reality.

Skawennati Tricia Fragnito clearly understands the power of imagination in IF. She says that the Pow Wow of the Future in Timetraveller™ “was the first time [she] consciously imagined Native people in the future”. Reflecting back on this moment she remembers thinking “there are no Native people in the future… and I think that’s scary. Its possible that if we’re not imagining ourselves in the future we won’t be there.”

In the Pow Wow of the Future, she boldly imagines a world where Indigenous people are not simply present but they are powerful, self-determined and thriving. When Karahkwenhawi transports to 2112 the scene opens with a packed stadium where a vibrant, global-scale Pow Wow is unfolding.

Pause here: this can’t be overlooked.

There is a stadium filled with Indigenous people freely celebrating their culture and practicing their traditions uninhibited and uninterrupted by settler colonialism. Given the context of a post-contact history bent on wiping out this population and its culture – small pox blankets, potlatch bans, residential schools, wounded knee, the Indian Act, mass incarceration – this is not a docile vision that can be taken for granted. Indigenous existence in the present speaks to their resilience as a people. This imagination of Indigenous people in the future is pure and fiery defiance to the settler-colonial agenda.

Skawennati expands on this defiance, and resilience, through the dialogue of the Pow Wow’s host:

“My grandmother told me, at one time her grandmother told her, the Pow Wow was outlaaaaawed.

*crowd boos*

“They didn’t want us to get together because we’d talk… we’d plan… so what did we do? We got together in private. We got busyyy. As record numbers of Indian babies were born in the 21^st century, the Pow Wow grew and thrived with more dancers, singers, and drummers – bigger shows, larger audiences, woooorld wiiiiiide broadcast rights”

*crowd cheers* *view zooms out to show a packed Winnipeg Olympic Stadium*

Another significant component to the way Skawennati has imagined the Pow Wow of the Future is the way that Karahkwenhawi participates in it. She doesn’t just watch – she is in it. It is one thing to present a far away vision of the future. But it is quite another to ask the viewers to participate in it in their present through identification with the protagonist.

Of course, we haven’t completely arrived at Skawennati’s vision of the future in the present yet. That is part of why Skawennati’s use of IF is so powerful. There’s the ‘not yet’ and the already happening are joined yet in tension with one another – with the longing for the ‘not yet’ firmly situated in the present, fully available to participate in until it is realized in full.

 “Beauty has the power to be solicitous. It moves us towards different arrangements”.

– Richard Topping

Speaking on the power of imagination to change the future, theologian Richard Topping calls into question modernity’s tendency to laugh at or label as naïve those who imagine a better future. He is critical of those who say, “you’ve got to live in the real world.”

“What modernity lacks is the capacity of imagination. We call something the real world because we just can’t imagine it changed. The ‘real world’ is very often the world that people with the biggest speakers say it is – they can just drown out other voices.”

– Richard Topping

In contrast, he encourages us to be bold in our imagination of the future. Much like Skawennati demonstrates in Timetraveller, Topping argues that imagination is an integral tool in social change towards a more just world.

“The world you imagine you’re living toward has this kind of ethical force to change your behaviour now… ontology shapes ethics.”

– Richard Topping

What Skawennati’s TimeTraveller and Topping’s theology of imagination have in common is that they both ask ‘what if’ in a manner that shifts what is. This activity is at the heart of Indigenous Futurism.

Treatment

Now, I know we’re supposed to write a treatment in this blog post for a new episode of Timetraveller. The truth is, I’m struggling with that. I’m struggling to use my imagination. It’s been a strange and difficult week for all of us with the election and I think I unknowingly used up my creative faculty in the last few months imagining a world where the most qualified candidate in recent history could be elected President of the United States regardless of her gender. I spent too much creative energy imagining a world where racism, misogyny, and bigotry wouldn’t succeed, wouldn’t receive accolades.

I may have spent the last ounce of creativity I had on writing this poem.

2016

Fuck 2016.

“You don’t even know.”

Fuck 2016.

I know,

I know.

The second line is a quote from the film Moonlight (WHICH YOU SHOULD ALL SEE – the first paragraph of this review explains the scene this line is taken from). The last lines are from an imagined conversation between Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin about emails and cheating husbands from a This American Life episode called “Master of Her Domain… Name”. My friend answered the phone with “fuck 2016” to me the other day. So it’s a stretch to say I even wrote this poem.

I feel like a bit of a hypocrite, saying we need to re-engage with our imagination but seemingly lacking the capacity myself.

If I were to write a treatment, it would probably have something to do with Indigenous people around the world leading a movement of renewable energy that was consistent with their self-determination and relationship to land. It would somehow manage to lift the world out of the current climate crisis and simultaneously thwart the fossil fuel industry’s tendency to exploit Indigenous land and people for profit.

I believe this can happen. I earnestly do. But even as I type it the cynic in me is crouching in the shadows, leering at any possible impediment to hook onto and drag it down. The policy analyst in me scoffs at the plethora of institutional barriers in the way. The consumer in a neo-liberal capitalist society slyly questions whether I really want that vision to be realized.

I’m part of the problem in that way. I need to forget the ‘real world’ and imagine. I need to ask what if.

Even that’s not entirely accurate though: I can imagine. Sometimes I’m even good at it. But I’ve always been reticent to voice what I see in my imagination. It’s fear. I’m afraid of looking foolish, naïve. I’m afraid of failing. I’m afraid I’ll change my mind about what I want in my imagination. If people knew what I imagined and then it didn’t happen it would be the result of either hypocrisy or failure. I need to get over this. But that’s hard while abruptly coming down from the high of imagining a world “in which women’s inferiority isn’t a given”.

Part of the issue is that when it comes to policy I consider myself a pragmatist. That means that despite acknowledging its abounding flaws, I like to work within the system for gradual change. I believe the work of Justice is slow and sometimes grey. I don’t believe in smashing the patriarchy. I believe in dismantling it, piece by oppressive piece.

I need to learn how to hold imagination and pragmatism in tension. I need to believe that both are at once possible. Maybe I have Plato to blame for the difficulty I have in this. The binary between praxis and fictio has survived the last 2,300 years and wound its way into my Fuck 2016 worldview. I know that there has to be a way to dismantle the patriarchy through pragmatism while simultaneously imagining otherwise.

2 Weeks Later…

As a white cisgendered woman, I have the privilege to not be able to imagine otherwise sometimes. My survival doesn’t depend on it. But many others do not have the luxury to give up on imagining.

Thankfully, imagining isn’t something we have to do alone. In fact, creativity is bound up with community. When we struggle to imagine, we can rely on the imagination of others. In lieu of creating my own treatment, and in order to re-centre Indigenous voices in this post, I will rely on the strength of Faith Juma’s and Hunter Knight’s imaginations in The Henceforward podcast on Indian and Cowboy.

This series “considers relationships between Indigenous Peoples and Black Peoples on Turtle Island” by “reconsider[ing] the past and reimagin[ing] the future.” Episode #5 “Back to the Henceforward” imagines a city that remembers where it came from; where the #idlenomore and #blacklivesmatter movements have formed the city’s government; where Black and Indigenous histories are not forgotten but built into the very structure of the city. They imagine a city that smells tantalizing after society has been relinquished of its control by fossil fuels; where healthy relationship to the land informs the city’s design; where food is plentiful yet not wasted. They create a world where where empowering cross cultural kinship is the norm not the exception; where the relationship between past, present and future is not linear.

The Henceforward imagines a beautiful and decolonized future. But as it bends space and time it also acknowledges the struggle inherent in the work of imagination.

“We need to pause for a minute and talk about where we’re coming from. Because it turns out that thinking about the future is really hard. But that’s also why it’s necessary. If we’re serious about the work of decolonization then we need to know what we’re working towards.”

– The Henceforward

They explore this world through the TTCdelorean, “a time-space compression device” that is fuelled by hope alone. What I love about this is that the TTCdelorean can run even on even the smallest fumes of hope. When it becomes difficult to imagine the future it means we are running low on the fuel of hope. But we keep going. Because inherent in Indigenous Futurism is hope.

“We need a kind of extreme hope to be able to imagine that future”

– The Henceforward

This is Indigenous Futurism. Thank you Faith Juma and Hunter Knight for continuing to imagine when I was unable. Thank you for extreme hope. Thank you for asking what IF.

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References

Barry Jenkins, Moonlight Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NJj12tJzqc

Gratitude.

Daniel Heath Justice, Imagine Otherwise: http://imagineotherwise.ca

Gratitude.

Faith Juma and Hunter Knight, The Henceforward “Episode #5: Back to the Henceforward” on Indian and Cowboy: https://www.indianandcowboy.com/episodes/2016/9/6/the-henceforward-episode-5-back-to-the-henceforward

Gratitude.

Lauren Chval, “Moonlight Review: So Good it Hurts”, Red Eye Chicago: http://www.redeyechicago.com/movies/redeye-moonlight-review-so-good-it-hurts-20161027-story.html

Gratitude.

Lindy West, “Her Loss”: New York Times, 2016: What Happened on Election Day: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/opinion/election-night-2016

Gratitude.

Skawennati Artist Talk, Dunlop Art Gallery, 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKjjZea_AlE

Gratitude.

Skawennati Tricia Fragnito, Timetraveller™: http://www.timetravellertm.com/index.html 

Gratitude.

Richard Topping on Imagining Renewal, 2016: http://www.equipandbuild.org/equip-and-build/2016/9/19/imagining-renewal

Gratitude.

What is Screen Sovereignty?

Sovereignty is about space and sovereignty is about identity. In the context of colonialism, this means reclaiming space and identity. Visual, or screen sovereignty, are ways that Indigenous artists use new media to claim or reclaim space and identity. Kristen Dowel locates visual sovereignty in the act of production.

“We’re doing it ourselves! We’re producing our own images.” – Cleo Reece, in Kristen Dowell

Visual Sovereignty is process as well as product – medium as well as message, if you will.

How a piece is produced, by whom, and for whom makes a big difference to the final product.

Visual Sovereignty is the unique process of new media creation by Indigenous people with an Indigenous audience in mind. In particular it uses techniques that establish a space that is uniquely Indigenous by mediating who can enter and how. This means that the process of creating a work that establishes sovereignty will influence how that work is received by the audience.

Kevin Burton’s God’s Lake Narrows is an example of screen sovereignty because it establishes Indigenous space and identity by creating Insiders and Outsiders, putting forward an invitation that’s mediated the author and reclaiming representation. The result is that the audience is drawn into a process that brings them into proximity with God’s Lake in an intimate, respectful and uniquely Indigenous way.

Insiders & Outsiders

“I grew up here… If you’re not an Indian, you’ve probably never been there.” – Kevin Lee Burton

“I grew up here… If you’re not from the reserve all the houses may seem the same to you.” – Kevin Lee Burton

Through these two statements, Burton is saying that you are unfamiliar with the place that he is part of and is part of him. This means you don’t have immediate access to the same type of knowledge. You’re an outsider. This isn’t meant to be hostile or unwelcoming, its just the positional reality and his firm but gentle stating of it is important in establishing sovereignty in God’s Lake Narrows.

Part of sovereignty is that there are people that belong and there are people that do not – Insiders and Outsiders. Burton distinguishes between these groups in a powerful way by speaking to a non-Indigenous audience and reminding them that they are outsiders to this piece, to God’s Lake and to Indigeneity.

“There are Differences between you and I.” – Kevin Lee Burton

Sovereignty exists in relationship to the outside. These phrases of differentiation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous audience reinforce sovereignty. Dowel explains that, “the significance of having non-Native audiences recognize these media works as Aboriginal serves as a form of recognition of Aboriginal presence in Canada”.

The photos of people are also a powerful way of creating Insiders and Outsiders. Instead of the viewer intruding and looking in on the subjects, it’s as if they are looking out at the viewer on the outside – as if the viewer is the object. This is a powerful way of communicating sovereignty.

An Artist Mediated Invitation

However, Burton doesn’t stop at differentiating between Insiders and Outsiders. He continues to establish screen sovereignty by initiating a process of invitation with the audience. He invites you into his world and allows you to see God’s Lake Narrows. But it’s not the same view you would get if you just googled it.

Go ahead and try it right now: Google God’s Lake Narrows, select ‘images’ and see what type of view you get.

You don’t get the same sense of the space or identity that Burton provides.

That’s because the view when you google it is curated by a search engine. The view of the reservation in God’s Lake Narrows is mediated by the artist – an artist who knows the place intimately and who carries it in the fabric of his identity. You can’t get that on Google. Google let’s you control how you navigate the images results. Of course, being a corporation, it also influences what you can see . But it let’s you choose which images you look at, whether you’ll read the caption or not, how long you spend with your curser hovered over an image.

In Burton’s piece he is in control. He determines what images you see and what order they are in and what sounds you hear as you do so. He invites the outsiders in but it is far from voyeurism: The process is mediated by the artist and the viewer must relinquish some of their control if they want to engage with the piece.

This creates sovereignty within the piece but it also extends beyond the artwork and into cyberspace. When you Google God’s Lake Narrows, the results are interspersed with the photos from Burton’s piece staring back at you: a reminder that in an ultra connected cyberspace, Burton’s particular style of screen sovereignty is not confined by the parameters of the National Film Board’s site and claims space and identity  that could otherwise be determined by the colonizer.

The Process

The process involved in Burton’s invitation first has viewers at a distance but gradually allows them into closer proximity. You start out watching a zoomed out map of Canada as the interactive piece loads.

Then based on the sites geo caching of your location, you’re told how far away you are from God’s Lake: 2,036 km for me. Your specific location is pointed out just as you are told you have little idea of where God’s Lake is – this has a disarming effect.

There’s reciprocity in this. The audience can’t know God’s Lake Narrows while itself remaining unknown. This reminds me of one of my favourite lines in A Tribe Called Red’s We are the Halluci Nation:

“The callers-of-names cannot see us but we can see them.”

The images that Burton chooses continue the process of gradually inviting you closer on the artist’s terms rather than your own. First, you are shown images of the outside of a house – curtains drawn, windows closed.

Then, by calling your attention to the front porch, he prompts you to look a bit closer than you might have initially.

Only once you’ve taken a closer look at his bidding, spent more time paying attention, are you invited inside the houses. Then you’re in their living rooms, with their children and their family photos, watching their T.V.

And they aren’t houses anymore, they’ve become homes.

These images very deliberately take you through a process of slow invitation. The sense of hesitancy towards a newcomer is palpable, and eloquently justified by Burton’s words:

“Yeah reserves seem like closed communities and you might feel scrutinized when you’re passing through on the way to the beach or cottage country or whatever. It’s a protective thing. There are different social codes. What do you expect from people that have a legacy of displacement and removal?” – Kevin Lee Burton

Invitation as Sovereignty

The act of invitation is an act of sovereignty. By saying ‘you may enter’, you establish that it is your own space, not the visitors. And to the sound of footsteps crunching on snow, Burton does this, at his own pace, on his own authority. The way he slowly and measuredly brings the audience closer reminds me again of the We Are Halluci Nation music video – how the birds eye view gets gradually closer to the Halluci Nation Seal. Then you can finally read it and it cuts through the name’s placed on the Haluci Nation at the beginning of the video by the “callers-of-names”.

Burton’s invitation is powerful by virtue of extending an invitation to the very people who have hurt him. But it is all the more powerful because it simultaneously rejects the colonial tendency of entitlement to be in an Indigenous space. It subverts the mindset of instantaneous access to information that has come to define the modern age of the worldwide web – the mindset of deserving to know. It confronts the colonial way of consuming knowledge.

The audience isn’t entitled to be in these people’s homes. They may not enter at their own leisure but must be invited and come with respect. There is a constant reminder that you are a guest in a space where the the artist and his subjects are in control. Burton has successfully created an Indigenous space that protects an Indigenous identity form outsiders.

Just like you can’t get all the Bingo numbers in one go, you have to follow Burton’s process to have access to God’s Lake Narrows.

Reclaiming Representation

There is a key shift in the audio when Burton says it’s time to repaint that picture”. All of a sudden the music and voices change to reveal a vibrant community.

The picture that needs repainting that he’s referring to is the “age-old prejudice of reserves as desolate places.” Just as quickly as he speaks back to the legacy of misrepresentation and racism, he counters it, not only through visual sovereignty, but through auditory sovereignty.

“Whoever phoned for a whole pizza at Loraine Trout’s, phone back.”

“Carolyn Nancy bring back the truck, I want to go to work.”

“Recreation Bingo tonight at 8 o’clock.”

“I-29, N-34, O-66, 0-69, I-18, G-57, O-75…”

The announcements heard on CV radio overlaid with the Bingo caller are an intimate look into every day life in God’s Lake – one that you could never experience without and invitation and a host. This is a key part of establishing sovereignty in God’s Lake Narrows. Dowell states that:

 “An Aboriginal filmaker’s act of creating a media work is an act of self-determination. Speaking back to the legacy of misrepresentation in dominant media is an act of cultural autonomy that reclaims the screen to tell Aboriginal stories from Aboriginal perspectives.”

This is exactly what Burton accomplishes through the audio in God’s Lake Narrows. It is made all the more beautiful and poignant by the measured process it took for the audience to get to that point.

“It’s time to repaint that picture.” – Kevin Lee Burton

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Resources:

A Tribe Called Red, John Trudell and Northern Voice, “We are the Halluci Nation”. 2016 http://atribecalledred.com

Kevin Lee Burton and Alicia Smith, “God’s Lake Narrows” http://godslake.nfb.ca/#/godslake

Kristen Dowell “Vancouver’s Aboriginal Media World”. Aboriginal Media on the Canadian West Coast. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2013. 1 – 20.

 

 

 

 

The medium is the message. The medium is the massage. Even if you have never heard of Marshal Mcluhan before, you are likely familiar with this phrase. Even if you are not familiar with it, you have undoubtedly lived it out: proven it time and again with the way you use media, the way you communicate, the way you think, the way you are surrounded by embedded attitudes that are so much a part of the fabric of society that you are not even aware you might be carrying them around. Mcluhan’s ideas are so entrenched around us that we can no longer see them.

How does a fish know it is in water?

Ironically, I thought this phrase was a good metaphor and only when I googled it did I realize Marshal Mcluhan originally said it. Case and point.

Mcluhan is a big deal. It is impossible to talk about new media without talking about his ideas. I mean, the guy predicted the world wide web thirty years before it happened for goodness sake.

But you also can’t read Mcluhan without being confronted and jarred by his racist notions of Indigeniety. There are his diminishing attitudes towards oral cultures:

“Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror”. – Marshal Mcluhan

The Bathwater

This attitude prevails today and is consistently pushing against Indigenous resurgence. One example is the hesitancy of Canadian courts to recognize oral history as evidence, something that happened only in 1997 with Delgamuukw v British Columbia and remains misunderstood to this day. Another is the ‘remarkable’ recent discovery of Sir John Franklin’s failed expeditions on The Erabus and The Terror, despite the Inuit people having known the ships location all along due to their tradition of oral history.

Yet Mcluhan then goes on to elevate our “emerging” auditory culture in a manner that dangerously romanticizes Indigenous cultures. In Coded Territories: Tracing Indigenous Pathways in New Media Art, ­­­­Steven Loft asserts that Mcluhan is invoking notions of the ‘noble savage’, which dehumanizes very real, here-and-now cultures by mythologizing them and creating an abyss between the ‘back then’ and the present moment that they occupy. This is dangerous because it leads to what Thomas King calls ‘Dead Indian’ thinking. Think Disney’s Pocahontas and this list of white actors playing Indigenous characters in films.

Against this backdrop, Mcluhan’s comment that “Holywood is often a fomenter of anti-colonialist revolutions”, seems absurd. It is moments like these, amongst others, that make us say….

This aspect of Mcluhan – conceited colonialism, white male privilege, academic egotism, absolute after absolute – is what we might call the bathwater. But there is still a baby to be found in Mcluhan’s work.

The Baby: Time & Space

While Loft notes Mcluhan’s problematic language and views, he actually focuses most of his chapter about “Mediacosmology” on what Mcluhan got right.

“I am still amazed at his insight into an area into which other Western theorists fear to tread. And sometimes he just nails it”. – Steven Loft

So what did Mcluhan get right in his infamous phrase ‘the medium is the message?’

The medium is the message means that how we communicate is often more important than what we communicate. But it goes beyond that as well. It means that our modes of communication, more so than the content we communicate, shapes our society, our worldview and our perception of self and others. One of the ways that it does this is blurring our conceptions of time and space. Medium is message and medium is Mass Age.

Mcluhan observes the erasure of time and space as one of the major ‘effects’ of new electric circuitry. I tweeted this observation of his on a forum that marks the exact date that I posted it…

Where it will exist forever on the internet where the most prominent button is usually the ‘home’ button.

Nonetheless, Mcluhan states that electric circuitry “has overthrown the regime of ‘time and ‘space’… Its message is Total Change, ending psychic, social, economic, and political parochialism… Nothing can be further from the spirit of the new technology than ‘a place for everything and everything in its place’. You can’t go home again”.

This certainly was revolutionary at the time, and still is today. But only to certain audiences: Indigenous people have known this since time immemorial. While Mcluhan says we are ‘retribalizing’ through our modes of communication, Loft says “there is no ‘re’ for us”.

“Cyberspace connects the past to the present and the spiritual to the material in ways that would make our elders laugh. They’ve always known this. It’s in our stories and it’s in our ways of communicating and remembering”. – Steven Loft

In other words, there is nothing new under the sun. Mcluhan isn’t discovering something revolutionary that no soul on earth had ever thought of. He is merely stumbling on a way of life that is older than he or I can imagine. Media can do what Mcluhan is suggesting, blur time and space, but so can traditional knowledge.

“For Aboriginal people, circularity of thinking and concepts of time and space and continuity are intrinsic to the way we see the world and behave toward it”. – Steven Loft

It’s not necessarily that Time and Space are overthrown or don’t exist, it’s merely that our western conceptions of them do not or cannot comprehend how these work beyond our alphabetized worldview.

By alphabetized worldview, I mean the linear, ultra-rational thinking that Mcluhan believes comes from our mode of writing: the alphabet. He says it has fragmented our thinking.

“The fragmenting of activities, our habit of thinking in bits and parts – ‘specialism’ – reflected the step-by-step linear departmentalizing process inherent in the technology of the alphabet”. – Marshall Mcluhan

The medium is the message indeed.

The  s  y  m  b  o  l  s  we use in the modern alphabet evolved from the Pheonecian alphabet, which is originally derived from Egyptian Hieroglyphs. Fast-forward to 2015 and Oxford Dictionary’s Word of the Year was an emoji. The ‘tears of joy’ emoji to be precise.

          —————>      

The emoji is a picture that has come to replace alphabetic symbols that once descended from ancient pictographs. We appear to have come full circle. This may be an example of how today’s methods of communication have blurred the relationship between different times and different spaces. Emojis evidently have their problems with representation but I keep wondering, “what will be the effect on our worldview of communicating through pictures once more if the medium really is the message?”

Loft’s example of a medium that transcends time and space is somewhat more significant and certainly more aesthetically pleasing. He refers to the Wampum as part of “a visual language, conceptual, and mystical, transcending the temporality of the written word: a language for the ages, to be constantly recounted and re-inscribed for the generations past, present, and into the future”.

It interrupts fragmentation. It blurs time and space. It does what cyberspace did before cyberspace was conceivable. This is why Loft says that cyberspace is Indigenous space. Because it has always existed within their culture.

We should be cautious though, when thinking about Mcluhan’s assertions of time and space and medium as message, that they do not impede efforts of de-colonization. Linear, western notions of time and space have been used as means of colonization: prescriptive maps, arbitrary borders, relocation of communities, residential schools far away from communities, the false binary between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’, settlers who say “it happened so long ago” or “I wasn’t directly involved. I wasn’t there”.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z   !@#$(*&^   1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0

Western culture may well be evolving to a more flexible conception of time and space through the mediums we use. But we cannot let that erase or overshadow the way that the concepts ‘time’ and ‘space’ have previously been perceived and the way that they were and are used to perpetrate violence against Indigenous peoples.

At the same time, new notions of time and space can challenge parochial and neo-colonial views of ‘primitive vs. modern’. As our mediums of communication cause western concepts of time to become further stretched and challenged, one can only hope that this will also challenge the binary between modern and ‘primitive’, traditional and contemporary, urban and rural – the binaries that play into the problem of the ‘noble savage’ and ‘Dead Indian’ discussed earlier.

 

“Native concepts of history find no gulf between different segments of time. Each time is different, but it does not mean that there is an impenetrable wall because of that difference”. – Deborah Doxtator

One can only hope that the worldview articulated by Deborah Doxtator, and to some extent by Mcluhan, can help challenge the settler colonial tendency of using time and space to disassociate themselves from ‘historic’ violence against Indigenous bodies and systems of knowledge.

Maybe Mcluhan’s articulation of an idea that has been alive and woven into Indigenous societies for millennial can be helpful for this. Maybe it can be helpful in helping setters take off the blinders of linear thinking and the western alphabetized worldview. And maybe this will ultimately help them understand Indigenous conceptions of time and space. Hopefully it will then contribute to decolonizing the psyche and worldview of settlers across North America.

So don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater just yet.

While the question of “what do we do with Mcluhan” still rings loud in our ears and I do not claim to have the answers, somewhere deep in the depths of the internet someone has at least made a good start:

Resources:

Ashifa Kassam, The Guardian: Inuit argue for say as Canada and Britain decide fate of HMS Terror wreck https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/16/inuit-canada-britain-shipwreck-hms-terror-nunavut

Katie Hyslop, The Tyee: UBC Professor says Aboriginal Oral History Misunderstood http://thetyee.ca/Blogs/TheHook/Aboriginal-Affairs/2012/02/06/UBC-profs-say-Aboriginal-oral-history-misunderstood/

Lauren Duca, The Huffington Post: A Brief History of White Actors Playing Native Americans http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/13/white-actors-native-americans_n_4957555.html

Marshal McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage

Steven Loft, “Mediacosmology” in Coded Territories: Tracing Indigenous Pathways in New Media Art

Thomas King, Dead Indians: too heavy to lift http://hazlitt.net/feature/dead-indians-too-heavy-lift