Rhizomic Rap: Representation, Identity and Hip-Hop on Moccasin Flats
Brendan Burrows, doctoral candidate, OISE / University of Toronto
Keywords: aboriginal representation, articulation, fugitive culture, discourse, hip-hop, semiotics
With the rise of First Nations owned and created television content at the dawn of the millennia,
came a demand to see an accurate representation of Aboriginality that could look at Aboriginals as
both here and modern. From 2003-2006, the first Aboriginal made and produced television series
entitled Moccasin Flats, I argue, uses hip-hop discourse to both engage and dissect a host of complex
issues facing modern day urban Aboriginal society. This paper mobilizes multiple methodologies;
including: 1.) Eco’s code and sign function semiotic analysis, which operates to identify various hiphop codes in the text; 2.)Hall’s method of articulation to look at how meaning is fixed in the
discourse surrounding the show; and finally 3) Deleuze’s rhizomic approach to identity; to see how
the shows main characters are constructed in a way to highlight the paradoxical and undercut certain
flirtations with essentialization. This three-tiered methodological process paints a picture of a new
complex mobilization of hip-hop discourse to articulate different facets of aboriginality that had
previously been the sole product of dominant hegemonic institutions which relied on racist
stereotypes. By dissecting how identity is formed on Moccasin Flats, I will show how aboriginal
filmmakers construct a self-reflexive space where the character is perpetually in the process of
‘becoming’, and identity is always a site of negotiation.
Indigenous Intervention Projects: Film Contestations of Nation-State Commemorations
Janice Hladki, associate professor, McMaster University
Indigenous, film and video art, counter-commemoration, territorialization
This paper explores how “counter-memorial” artworks by contemporary, Canadian-based, Indigenous film
and video practitioners, “reclaim and recast” (Jiwani 2011, 343) – or disperse – the dominant narratives in
nation- and city-state celebrations of white settler histories. I examine non-mainstream film and video by
Alanis Obomsawin (Abenaki) (1993), Shelley Niro (Mohawk) (1993), Dana Claxton (Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux)
(2005), and Kent Monkman (Cree) (2011), who produce political memory work of counter-commemoration.
Alternative/experimental film and video art has been particularly important to the re-invigoration of a
democratic public sphere, and such art by Indigenous makers in particular is notable for how it contests and
re-imagines cultural discourses about globally resonant, nation-state commemorations and the territorial
claims embedded in these celebrations.
The films discussed in this paper are visual modalities “indicating an event whose effect continues into the
present” (Van Alphen 2005, 170). They realize “the entanglement of memory and imagination in relation to
images” (Van Alphen 2005, 48) and register trauma not only in the remembrance practices of the artists about
their particular Indigenous histories but also in the reiteration of that trauma by nation-state
commemorations, which, for Indigenous peoples, celebrate brutal invasions, the appropriation of land,
environmental devastation, and assimilation taxonomies that destroy language and culture. Global
neoliberalism for Indigenous peoples is understood as a prioritization of markets and profits, privatization
and individualism. Discourses of commemoration support the global circulation of ideologies that position
Indigenous lives as necessarily subjugated, excluded, and assimilated. As Pamela Wilson and Michelle Stewart
argue (2008), Indigenous challenges to the conditions of domination and dispossession that result from past
and present colonization are not simply counter measures but are necessary interventions for Indigenous
survival.
References
Claxton, Dana, dir. 2005 Anwolek Regatta City. Video. Canada. 4.22 min.
Jiwani, Yasmin. 2011. “Pedagogies of Hope: Counter Narratives and Anti-Disciplinary Tactics.”
The Review of Education, Pedagogy, & Cultural Studies 33, no. 4: 333-353.
Monkman, Kent, dir. 2011. Mary. High Definition Video. Canada. 3:18 min.
Niro, Shelley, and Anna Gronau, dirs. 1993. It Starts With a Whisper. Film. Canada. 27:30 min.
Obomsawin, Alanis. 1993. Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance. Film. Canada. 119:14 min.
Van Alphen, Ernst. 2005. Art in Mind: How Contemporary Images Shape Thought. Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press.
Wilson, Pamela and Michelle Stewart. 2008. “Introduction: Indigeneity and Indigenous Media
on the Global Stage.” In Global Indigenous Media: Cultures, Poetics, and Politics, edited
by Pamela Wilson and Michelle Stewart, 1-35. Durham and London: Duke UP.
The figural child and colonial futurist logics in learning to teach: Disrupting intimate
publics in response to residential school testimonial texts
Lisa K. Taylor, Bishop’s University
Keywords: teacher education, residential schools, literature, social affect, intimate publics, colonial
discourses
This paper reports on research conducted as part of my response to the invitation to educators
made by Canada’s TRC to engage our broader society in the task of publicly witnessing and
commemorating the testimonies of First Nations, Inuit and Métis (FNIM) residential school
survivors as part of a historic process of revising the terms of our national imaginary, historiography
and citizenship.
I approach this project of public remembrance and pedagogy (Simon et al. 2000) wary of the
challenges in initiating such conversations with non-indigenous Canadians who bring uneven
affective investments in a settler colonial multicultural neoliberal democracy (Hage 2000, Mackay
2002, Gunew 2004) and attachments to the normative promises of education. Encounters with
representations of the history and legacy of residential schools can open productive questions
regarding teachers’ positioning within an institution complicit in ongoing genocidal policies but also
concerning the affective and discursive horizons structuring their response to these encounters.
In the case study analyzed here—a B. Ed. undergraduate course on postcolonial and testimonial
literature—I examine excerpts from student journal responses to photographic, filmic and literary
testimonial texts addressing this history of trauma and survival. My analysis focuses on the figure of
the Child that shapes the futurist logic (Edelman, 2004) framing educational discourses within social
formations of the settler colonial nation. I examine how the figural logics of civilizational fantasies
of racial redemption and assimilation structuring my students’ optimistic attachments (Berlant,
2011a) are both disrupted and reinvigorated when my students encounter representations of
residential schools focused on the children sent there. My analysis worries about the experience of
learning to teach as a dispersed “intimate public” (Berlant, 2011b), a register of experience
affectively structured by a colonial logic of futurity made visible in the ambivalent, charged affects
clustered around the figure of the Child.
References:
Berlant, L., 2011a. Cruel optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Berlant, L., 2011b. Affect and the politics of austerity with G. Helms and M. Vischmidt. Variant, 39
(40), 3-6.
Gunew, S., 2004. Haunted nations : the colonial dimensions of multiculturalisms. London; New York:
Routledge.
Hage, G., 2000. White nation: fantasies of a white supremacy in a multicultural society. Annandale, NSW:
Pluto Press.
Mackay, E., 2002. The house of difference: cultural politics and national identity. University of Toronto Press.
Simon, R. I., Rosenberg, S., and Eppert, C., eds., 2000. Between hope and despair: pedagogy and the
remembrance of historical trauma. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Resistance and Reinscription: Being Indigenous in a Multi-Cultural Milieu
James C. Butler, University of Calgary
Keywords: assimilation, prescribed consciousness, reinscription, resistance, indigenous, oppression,
marginalization
Canada purports to be a multi-cultural mosaic; yet, this concept fails to account for the presence of
Indigenous peoples and their interactions with the dominant settler society. Further, discussions of
the place of Indigenous people in Canada often work from the assumption that in order to survive
and to prosper, Indigenous people must abandon many of the key cultural practices that
differentiate their worldview from that of the settlers. That is they must choose to be assimilated and
to become hyphenated-Canadians. This paper explores the intersection between Indigenous and
multi-cultural societies by focussing on one Indigenous people who have long been framed as fully
assimilated into white society. To achieve this this paper seeks to explicate how Mi’kmaq in
Newfoundland are revitalizing their Indigenous culture through resistance and reinscription. It
problematizes notions of hybridity and challenges the authority of governments, which seek to
control Indigenous identity through a legislative framework, oppression and marginalization. It
argues for the legitimacy and authenticity of Indigenous identities that incorporate cultural practices
from Pan-Indian sources in order to re-establish holistic Indigenous cultures. Finally, it presents an
alternative understanding of how Indigenous identities can continue to flourish even where people
are immersed in a society that seeks to erase them.