Leader: Lib Spry
Location: Studio II, Concordia University
In-Person Session
As a practical, playful way to look at how to activate settlers to think about justice here on Turtle Island, I am proposing the playing of ¡Unsettling! which was my research-creation thesis in Cultural Studies at Queens and built on during my post-doctoral fellowship at Concordia, supervised by Algonquin artist and scholar Nadia Myre. It is a live, interactive, board game that adapts techniques used in community arts, game-playing, popular theatre, and social practice. As the players move around the life-sized board the aim is to help them learn about the myriad realities that create, and created, settlers’ relationships to the original peoples of this land by asking a series of questions which are a mixture of fact, opinion and feelings, interwoven with teachings from the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe traditions. The game is designed to be played by the non-Indigenous who have settled on Turtle Island, exploring our history and relationships with the original peoples and the land. Indigenous people are welcome but may find some of the material all too familiar and triggering. Each game is followed by a group discussion.