Moderator: Ian Garrett
Location: Room 1177 – Pavilion André Aidenstadt – 2920 chemin de la tour – Université de Montréal
(Building 19 on the UdM Map)
In-Person Session
POW-WOW AND INDIGENOUS PERCEPTION OF SPACE: DANCE AS A TOOL TO RETHINK PUBLIC SPACES
Cassandre Chatonnier
We Are Not the Rock(s): Settler hospitalities as moves to Indigeneity
From its opening number ,“Welcome to the Rock,” the internationally successful musical Come From Away introduces its audiences to a poetics of land long established in Newfoundland’s colonial imaginary. This poetics—within which resilient settlers with a tenuous purchase on the land are galvanized into cooperation and generous hospitality as a survival tactic in a hostile environment—was already manifest in the 19th-century travel literature of the pre-confederation Colony of Newfoundland. As the musical attests, representations of the hardy-but-happy islanders of “the rock” remain popular in performances of the island’s cultural nationhood today (O’Flaherty, Overton).
I have argued previously that Come From Away can be understood as a projection of a tragedy that America was ready to confront (2018). Expanding this argument for a long-term scholarly memoir project, I want to go further to suggest that Come From Away is as well a picture—perhaps in the negative—of a tragedy that Newfoundland is less ready to confront. I take my cue from Alan Filewod’s shrewd observation two decades ago that the genocide of the Indigenous Beothuk people of the island “was the defining condition that permitted Newfoundlanders to feel that they were truly ‘of’ the land” (2002, 71). In this paper, I will bring in Ininiw scholar Megan Scribe’s recent theorization of “settler moves to Indigeneity,” (2023) to reflect on my affective experiences with both the musical and with rocks metaphoric and not, considering not so much how we got here, but where we are to go from here.
Barry Freeman, University of Toronto Scarborough
Barry Freeman is an Associate Professor of Theatre & Performance at the University of Toronto Scarborough and the Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies at the University of Toronto.
Dramaturgies of Generosity: Community, Truth, and Reckoning in the Shadow of Settler Colonialism
In May of 2021, a survey of the grounds at Kamloops Indian Residential School via ground penetrating radar revealed what Dr. Sarah Beaulieu argued could be the graves of roughly 200 Indigenous children who died while in the school’s custody. In the wake of Beaulieu’s discovery, media discourse tended to be preoccupied with strict definitions of “mass graves” and with comparing the mortality rates of students in these schools against the broader population, discounting or downplaying, for instance, the state-sanctioned kidnapping of children as a direct symptom of the settler colonial project that is Canada.
Jeff Gagnon, University of Toronto
Jeff Gagnon is a Doctoral Graduate of the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies.