Critical Conversations 2021: Dylan Robinson: The Museum’s Incarceration of Indigenous Life

CRITICAL CONVERSATIONS 2021
Presented by the University of Saskatchewan Art Galleries and Collections 

thá:ytset: shxwelí li te shxwelítemelh xíts'etáwtxw/Reparative Aesthetics: The Museum’s Incarceration of Indigenous Life
Speaker: Prof. Dylan Robinson, Queen's University

Date: Friday, March 5, 2021
Time: 2 pm - 3:30 pm
Location: Online via Webex
Register through Eventbrite.

About this talk
Across the globe, museums filled with glass and Plexiglass vitrines display collections of Indigenous belongings. These cases render the life they contain into objects of display, things to be seen but not touched. Alongside the life of ancestors who take material form, thousands of Indigenous songs collected by ethnographers on wax cylinder recordings, reel-to-reel tape, and electronic formats are similarly confined in museums. These songs also hold life, but of different kinds to that of their material cousins. For Indigenous people, experiencing these systems of display and storage are often traumatic because of the ways in which they maintain the separation of kinship at the heart of settler colonialism. To re-assess the role of the museum as a place that confines life is to put into question the museum’s relationship to incarceration. If the museum is a carceral space, how then might we define repatriation in relation to practices of “re-entry” and the reconnection of kinship? In what ways might the context of prison abolition apply to the museum? These questions, among others, are increasingly focalized through the reparative aesthetics of Indigenous artists.

Speaker's bio
Dylan Robinson is a xwélmexw (Stó:lō/Skwah) artist and writer, and the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Arts at Queen’s University. He is the author of Hungry Listening (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) on Indigenous and settler colonial forms of listening. His current research focuses on the material and sonic life of Indigenous ancestors held by museums, and reparative artistic practices that address these ancestors' incarceration in museums.

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