Return to: Anthro(a)pologizing

Anthro(a)pologizing, 2018
laser etching on 3M reflective fabric
Read more about this Project here: Casting Light to Fill Shadow
The basis of this project is to link research into the physical
anthropology of Interior Salish Indigenous people in the early colonial period in
British Columbia with the measuring and dislocating of Indigenous lands
as expropriated by Settler policies in a research creation model to be
exhibited as an installation and exhibition.
By examining physical anthropological records, anthropometric data and
ethnographic life-casts of Interior Salish people made during the North
Pacific Jesup expedition (collection of the American Museum of Natural
History, NY) and an Interior Chief's delegation to Ottawa in 1916
(collection of the Museum of History, QC) my research connects the
practice of anthropometric measurements with government policies of land
dispossession as problematized methods of the colonial politics of
measurement and survey. My thesis project attempts to locate, within the
subjects of the study, a political imperative of land rights struggle
through relational and installation based artworks within these
conceptual paradigms.
Using methods of Indigenous ways of knowing like: decolonial aesthesis,
the politics of refusal and the Secwepémc concept of kweselktnéws, a
culturally specific concept of relationality, grounds my research within
my family, responsibility, community and territory.
My MFA thesis project, Casting Light to Fill Shadow: A Decolonial
Aesthesis in Secwepemcúl'ecw, will model alternative ways to engage with
and value Indigenous knowledge(s) in relation to decolonial aesthetics.
Through this project I draw out the connections between
ethnographic study, Indigenous land rights and contemporary art practice
adding to the bodies of knowledge around Indigenous and decolonial
aesthetics.