Celeste V. Pedri-Spade
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Bearing the Blue Badge

2/13/2014

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Picture
As an Anishinabekwe I stand in solidarity with those who resist the First First Nations Control over First Nations Education Agreement, a retooling of the FNEA because I believe… 

1) Anishinabeg have a right to an education that is not the same as every other Canadian, but an education that will help reclaim, revitalize and strengthen our knowledges and the intergenerational ties that are instrumental to the life of these knowledges. 

2) this agreement is an economic strategy aimed at assimilating Indigenous Peoples so that they can be more productive members of a Canadian society.

3) this agreement further colonizes our knowledges and knowledge sharing practices through the imposition of provincial rules, certification, training, etc.

4) this agreement reflects more about what Canada wants for "it's First Nations" as opposed to recognizing what each Nation has an inherent treaty right to. 
5) fear, ignorance, and greed motivate the people in authoritative, elitist positions that claim they are acting for my wellbeing yet refuse to listen to my voice or the voice of thousands of other Indigenous Peoples who share my concerns and relate to my struggle.

6) I will be labeled by the aforementioned elite group as a delinquent—a derelict—a disinformed Indian…the other half will accuse me of "spewing pseudo academia". 

7) through the process of making my mark, I awaken and strengthen my imagination, consciousness, body, awareness

8) in fighting colonialism on the visual/material battlefield 

9) I am supported and surrounded by my ancestors 

10) in a good life for my children, Keeshig and Kiniw, and their children’s children. 

****On February 12, 2014 Métis artist/activist Christi Belcourt initiated a visual campaign following meetings and announcements regarding the First Nations Control over First Nations Education Agreement which took place last week in Alberta. 
Here are her words on why she started this: 
"For all of us who disagree, who want change, who stand up for change. I’m claiming the blue dot for us as a mark of pride"
 

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A Response to Gell and Morphy 

2/10/2014

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* Both Alfred Gell and Howard Morphy have contributed influential writings on the anthropology of art. Their work deals mostly with art produced by non-Western societies (Indigenous Peoples). In the following excerpt, I summarize and respond to two quite "famous" pieces of their large corpora of writing, Gell's "The technology of enchantment and the enchantment of technology" (1992) and Morphy's "Art as Evidence and Art as Action" (2009). I focus on their understandings and applications of aesthetics and agency. 

Gell's (1992) calls for anthropologists to reject a purely semiological or aesthetic understanding of images and objects, considering art objects as social agents in themselves able to produce and effect social relationships. While Gell does acknowledge that “we have to somehow retain the capacity of the aesthetic approach to illuminate specific objective characteristics of the art object” (p. 42), he refuses to treat the aesthetic as a communicator or driver of social consequences and instead posits that the agency of art objects is a result of the technical processes it embodies. Technical processes being all the material processes that go into art’s production. To Gell, an artwork is inherently social because it is a real thing in the world that mediates between two beings and therefore creates a social relation between them (p. 52). Howard Morphy (2009) also emphasizes the capacity of art as a form of action that shapes relationships between people, and emphasizes the potential for art to communicate values, beliefs and knowledges cross-culturally (p. 265). While Morphy agrees that it is important to distance non-Western art from the post-Enlightenment aesthetic criteria, he critiques Gell for employing too narrow an understanding of “aesthetics” (as just form of moral discourse). Morphy argues that it is the form and style of an artwork that enables them to be used to act in the world and in some cases enables agency to be attributed to them. While Gell may be too marrow in his understanding and application of aesthetics, I suggest that Morphy adopts too narrow of an understanding of agency. He seems to adopt a form of ontological agnosticism, suggesting that it is only people who “believe” that objects have agency—objects can be believed (by people) to be animate and endowed with attributes of persons as if they were persons. It must be noted that this approach ignores ontologies of peoples that allow for “other-than-human” worlds with agentive objects and materials (with agencies inherently different than human agency) that are continuously interacting and negotiating with the human world. So while Morphy argues that art and images must be understood in the context of their producing society, I would say that researchers attempting to do so must be wary of imposing their own ontological perspectives on other peoples.  After all, art and culture cannot be separated from a people’s worldview.      
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