Storied places: decolonizing settler colonial urban landscapes with Indigenous public art in Winnipeg, Treaty One

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Date
2025-03-21
Authors
Black, Honoure
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Abstract

Contemporary Indigenous public art can serve as a transformative (re)mapping medium. Through spatial expressions on the land, art can perform as a creative tool that aids in decolonizing the commons, by deconstructing biases, (re)storying histories, and igniting landscape narratives. In Canada, Indigenous public art can also provoke reconciliatory understandings regarding First Nations, Inuit, Métis, and Indigenous communities and peoples. This dissertation uses mixed methods and methodologies of critical place inquiry to create a decolonial framework for arts-based research that is transdisciplinary and intersectional. Data collection tactics are deployed through a variety of strategies such as ethnography, storywork, and site-writing. Through a feminist lens, I work to be a critically reflexive ethical researcher while asking: How do I continue to confront my position as a White settler female academic in the academy? By weaving together both Indigenous and non-Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies, I work to See with Two Eyes through this work. The first of three case studies examines the Métis community of Rooster Town and the public artwork Rooster Town Kettle and Fetching Water, by Ian August. The second investigates The Forks and the artwork Niimaamaa by KC Adams, Jaimie Isaac, and Val Vint, a sacred symbol of women, water, and the Earth that binds Indigenous peoples to the history of this site. The final case study examines the insurgent and resurgent activism of Indigenous temporal public art created through acts of 'counter-monumenting.' Two images of Queen Victoria, George Frampton’s Queen Victoria Statue, and Roland Souliere’s Mediating the Treaties, reveal the history and effects of the IRS system. Indigenous public art has the power to aid in reconciliation, while unsettling dominant hegemonic power structures through spatial expressions on the land. In this research, decolonial methods and methodologies work to dismantle power imbalances by creating intersectional stories of land, peoples, and histories that converge with contemporary interventions of public art in Winnipeg, Treaty One.

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Public Art, Indigenous, Resurgence, Reclamation, Stroytelling, Winnipeg, Landscape, Settler Colonialism, Reconciliation, Counter-Monument, Memory
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