video/performance
embodied, land, maps, decolonialism, countermapping
March 2022

How can I continue to reflect on the colonial exercise of map-making and my own complicity in it, while moving forward rather than being paralyzed?

For this piece I considered the feedback from the first assignment and the class feedback on my presentation as I moved into the second iteration of this explorative series. Originally, I was going to go back to my first concept for the work, where I wanted to create a large-scale piece where I would create and erase a map of Mi’kmaq lands. As with my first project, once I started working on it in an embodied way, the piece changed. To begin, after reading the feedback from the previous piece, I did take the comments about scale to heart and decided to create the second piece in a similar scale to the first. I then was considering the thoughts around using materials from the land and permissions and protocols around that. As I considered this, I concluded that with the timeline for the piece I did not have enough time to properly do the work to respectfully follow protocol around use of multiple natural materials. I also was considering our discussion of white settler Australian artist Amy Spiers’ practice – asking how, as a settler, can I create work that critically engages with the project of colonial nation-building topics without speaking for Indigenous people or appropriating aspects of their culture?

With this in mind, I decided to use the same materials as I did for the first assignment – charcoal, masking tape, and white paint. Additionally, I decided to use the blank white (yet textured) remains of the first piece as my canvas, as a way of actively continuing the explorations that began in the first assignment. I decided to use this second work to start building a new landscape from the site of erasure. I came to this thought after reflecting on the prompt for this assignment: as a white settler in a colonial state, what are my responsibilities, when it comes to this specific place that I am making work upon and about? As someone in relation with the land, with colonization(s), with settler and Indigenous communities, how can I use my work to embody ways that will move towards reconciliation and decolonization? For this piece I responded to this by re-building the map that I had created and destroyed in the first assignment, but rather than being focused on embodying the white settler erasure and control of the land, I wanted to focus on the responsibility that settlers carry to engage in active un-learning. First, I placed pieces of tape at the locations of reserves in Nova Scotia. Thinking of Alutiiq/Sugpiaq artist Tanya Lukin Linklater’s embodied performances ( In particular, How we mark land and how land marks us (2017), Untitled (for Sonya Kelliher-Combs) (2018), and Traces, 2017.) has made me reflect on how embodied work can implicate oneself in the action that is being undertaken. I want to be implicated directly in my application of the charcoal, rather than through the distance of a tool, I then used my hands to shape the form of the peninsula that is now called Nova Scotia, and the island now called Cape Breton. I then pulled off the tape pieces, which left white gaps in the drawn terrain representative of the areas where Mi’kmaq people were forced to live in reserves under colonial law. 

After doing this work I was still unsatisfied, and I realized that I wanted another aspect to this piece. I had re-created the map, but what are my responsibilities, if I am a product of colonial settler culture? Thinking this over, I considered knowledge, and how we can challenge colonial designations of knowledge by engaging with the knowledge and naming that exists in Mi’kmaq culture. Can it be my responsibility to pay attention to those ways of knowing and seeing, and to engage with them and amplify them? I chose to record myself listening to and repeating the place names of specific areas of Mi’kma’ki, using the incredible Mi’kmaw Place Names Digital Atlas, layering this over the map creation video, naming the places that I was roughly sketching in charcoal. I feel like this allowed me to consider my responsibilities towards learning, which is a slow and life-long process that requires attention, perseverance, humility, and work.