| dc.description.abstract | A Place for Us to Sit: Making and Remembering Visual and Material Histories of Deshkan Ziibiing tracks the journey that I undertook to locate ancestral belongings and to learn the stories and practices of making that are unique to the Anishinaabeg of Deshkan Ziibiing (Chippewas of the Thames First Nation)¬¬¬¬a First Nation community located in southwestern Ontario, Canada. Through visits to museum collections and archives, this dissertation traces a journey of reconnecting with Deshkan Ziibiing material culture, which I refer to as gete-anishinaabeg, the old ones. This process is further enriched by oral histories that identify how colonialism has impacted Deshkan Ziibiing makers and how the community is and has been reclaiming practices of making.
This dissertation was inspired by a collection of gete-anishinaabeg that now resides at the American Museum of Natural History. The collection, acquired by American Anthropologist Mark Raymond Harrington in 1907, raises critical questions for me as someone who has grown up not knowing, seeing, and engaging with the arts of my ancestors—furthering the desire to learn about what was happening in the lives of Deshkan Ziibiing families before and after Harrington’s collecting expedition. Through the recovery and re-engagement with the things our ancestors left behind, I resituate gete-anishinaabeg in a continuum of making practices that embody Anishinaabe futurity. Grounded in Indigenous methodologies such as Biskaabiiyang, Storywork, Felt Theory, and Native Feminist Analysis this dissertation reveals complex layers of interconnected histories and adds to the emerging discourse of art histories that are specific to Indigenous communities and place. This work builds upon decolonizing praxis as theorized by Michelle M. Jacob (Yakama) and fosters a process of reconnecting Indigenous minds and bodies to the things our ancestors made, the experiences they felt, and the knowledge they created. | en_US |
