Urban Mi Kmaw Woman Analysis

Unique traditions, language, beliefs and values all comprise Indigenous culture. It is critical that a meaningful appreciation of their culture

Today in Canada, the lives of Indigenous women are affected by colonization every day. Since the moment of contact, settlers have used Indigenous women as key objects to oppress and assimilate Indigenous people as a whole. As a female, non-Indigenous university student, I strongly feel that in moving forward trying to stop allowing there to be missing and murdered Indigenous women, we must discuss where these problems originated and why the origin is still relevant today. Indigenous women were oppressed and used by Europeans as a tool to assimilate all Indigenous Peoples and erase Indigenous culture through forcing women into ‘traditional’ western gender roles; which has had lasting impacts on Indigenous women today through being stereotyped and dehumanized in their forcedly assigned gender roles. Firstly, I will discuss how western gender roles were involved in the colonization of Indigenous women and how women were targeted specifically in the attempted erasure of Indigenous Peoples. Next, I will examine the effects of colonization on Indigenous women who were forced to take on not only the same but even further dehumanizing gender roles that European women assumed. Finally, I will argue how the imposition of these gender roles has affected and still affects Indigenous women today.

Paige Raibmon’s book “Authentic Indians” take a closer look at the concept of authenticity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Focusing on the culturally diverse Aboriginal people of the Northwest Coast, Raibmon examines how both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people constructed and used the idea of the authentic Indian to achieve their goals. Drawing examples from three ‘episodes’ or stories about Aboriginal people of the Northwest Coast, Raibmon argues that authenticity is not a set marker that we can use to measure the distance between what an Aboriginal culture looks like today and what “real” Aboriginal culture looks like. Instead, Raibmon says that authenticity is an important and changing set of ideas that were used

This essay will provide information and outline the importance of being cultural competent, explore issues the Indigenous community have faced, and explain how Doris Pilkington Garimara drew attention to those problems. Cultural competence means to respect, accept and appreciate all cultures without any form of prejudice (Murphy, 2011). In the early twentieth century, Pilkington highlighted the issues about racism and the Stolen Generations to create awareness about those topics, lead people to respect and embrace Indigenous cultures, and hopefully lead those people to become culturally competent too.

While Canadians are known for their willingness to lend a hand, an Aboriginal individual would beg to differ. Students in secondary and postsecondary institutions ought to take a trip to communities like Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug and live with locals in order to understand the extent of these conditions, rather than travelling internationally to poverty-stricken countries. In order to shed light on these issues, one must reach out and extend a hand to our

In order to maximize clarity, she chose to dissect these articles one at a time, and in order of how she presented her thesis points. For instance, she discusses a photo essay entitled “Revolution on the Prairies,” and argues the first point in her thesis: that the Still Photography Division’s portrayal of Canadian landscapes as economically prospective effects national identity . She again mentions that camera angles make the land feel vast and plentiful, but also create a powerful gaze of ownership over the land. She likewise furthers a previous point made about how this possessive gaze on the landscape is Euro-centric by using the portrait of a Euro-centric farmer, the photo-essays narrative subject, as evidence. He “gazes” over the farmland from a powerful angle, and implies that his gaze is specific to his position as a colonial-settler farmer . The author continues to present evidence for the second part of her thesis, in which the NFB representation of landscape is racialized, and the landscape’s meaning transforms depending on who the subject of the photo-series is. To illustrate this, she discusses a different article published by the NFB that is specific to an Aboriginal narrative. The photo-essay, entitled, “Age-Old Hunt For Fabled Fish of Canada’s North: SAPOTIT – Where the Char Run Big,” helps illustrate the author’s issue that in contrast to the open, plentiful relationship that Euro-centric people had with Canada’s landscapes in the Still Photography Division’s work, Aboriginal people did not have any power. Instead, Payne argues that photo-essays on Aboriginal subjects changed the way the Still Photography Division shot and displayed the landscape. With respect to the Aboriginal subjects, the Aboriginals were displayed with friendliness and child-like interaction with land that made the groups appear primitive and like “Others” or “outsiders” to a

In the chapter Saving Clayoquot: Wilderness and the politics of Indigeneity, author Bruce Braun argues that although indigeneity is one of postcolonial environmentalism's most privileged terms, it risks indigenous peoples becoming subsumed within the “natural history” of being saved. The image I chose symbolizes how indigeneity in contemporary eco-politics simply inserts indigenous people into a pre-existing natural landscape. It paints an image that indigenous people are only an element in nature to be objectively ordered and described. We see this type of cultural objectification in many mainstream environmental advertisements that celebrate indigenous culture by banishing it to the past or mourning the loss of wildlife in association to

Indigenous cultures, traditions and languages have been disappearing ever since the creation of the residential school system. The physical, mental and sexual abuse that Native children endured in these schools is a horrible part of Canadian History and still has negative effects on Indigenous people to this day. In my vision of an ideal Canada, I imagine a Canada where Native people regain what the residential schools stole

The reification of these peoples seems to only operate on discourses, resembling the ancestral times when its inhabitants were “purely” indigenous. Currently, the “indigenousness”, no longer means isolation, and a contemplative lifestyle; the Rousseauian noble savage, as portrayed by privileged groups and organic State’s intellectuals, has decided to raise its voice and self-define. From Acteal to Cherán, from Tosepan Titaniske to Skinal Nichimetik, from community police corps to transnational immigrants, the (de)construction and (re)configuration of identity points out a new meaning of decolonization. Among these political entities, self-definitions vary as much as their languages, however the First nations new identities are not only an oxymoron of socio-cultural dynamics, but the representation of contemporary process of autonomy and self-determination. Although the question on how

Comparatively, Elle-Maija Tailfeathers’ “A Red Girl’s Reasoning” and A Tribe Called Red’s A Tribe Called Red offer nearly polar narratives on the intersection between Canadian First Nation identity and urban Western cultural norms. While the former takes an indefinite critical stance on the exploitation of First Nations in Western society, the latter offers a creative product which utilizes juxtapositions between Western First Nations’ culture.

As a non-indigenous student, I want future generations to understand that the fact that you do not live on a reserve, does not mean you cannot embrace your own Indigeneity, connect to your place and ancestry, and put effort into learning about your ancestral roots. I was feeling frustrated that I did not have that connection to my ancestors, that I did not know their struggles, their stories, let alone their names. For this embodiment project I expanded my knowledge of my own personal genealogy and developed a deep sense of appreciation for archival records, census forms, and any record at all, of life in the eighteenth century and beyond. Throughout this ongoing project, the four R’s (Reciprocity, respect, responsibility, and relevance)

Smith discusses how the logic of colonialism is that through genocide, Indigenous peoples must disappear, and that they must always be disappearing in order to allow non-indigenous peoples the ‘rightful’ claim over this land (2006). As genocide serves as the anchor for colonialism, it makes it acceptable to take Indigenous land because Indigenous peoples have always disappeared (Smith, 2006). Thus, my art is a depiction of this, the background of the image is of a group of Anishinaabe peoples. This represents the Indigenous people of the land, and rightful owners. The image on top of the Anishinaabe peoples is the Toronto skyline, which represents how the genocide of Indigenous peoples allowed for the expansion of Canada and gave the Colnial powers claim to the land, as the Indigenous peoples were forced to disappear. On top of the Toronto skyline there is an image of a protest sign that reads ‘justice for missing and murdered Indigenous woman now.’ This slogan is representative of resistance movements that are fighting for the lives of Indigenous peoples. The murders and disappearances of Indigenous women serve as a form of genocide as there has been no action taken on these issues for numerous years. The image is also representative of how Indigenous peoples are fighting for their rights, by resisting the on going colonization of their bodies and land. Thus, as

. . the tendency toward glorifying all things indigenous even when they deserve to be left in the past.” . . .

In 2008, the government created a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, hereafter referred to as TRC, committed to the tasks of discovering the truth about Canada’s Indian Residential Schools, revealing this truth to all Canadians, and attempting to reconcile the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians. One of the ways the TRC suggested to facilitate this reconciliation process is through the creative arts. Indeed, in the last few years, Canada has seen a host of artistic projects launched which seek to heal and reconcile this relationship, these projects will hereafter be referred to as ‘reconciliation art’. One of the most prominent

Indigenous histories are marked by dispossession, dislocation, and loss. Yet, as the Encounters exhibition illustrates, they also provide examples of resilience, creativity, transformation, entanglement and hope.