Performer: Leah Decter & Peter Morin
Moderator: Selena Couture
Location: Room 7-270, 7th Floor – John Molson Building, 1450 Rue Guy – Concordia University
In-Person Performance
Join Zoom Meeting
https://ualberta-ca.zoom.us/j/93503972153?pwd=abKkMB406tNp7ii8zMjIxasu7yUViL.1
Meeting ID: 935 0397 2153
Passcode: 975686
‘x: where our paths cross’ is part of an ongoing collaborative relationship between artist/scholars Peter Morin (Tahltan Nation) and Leah Decter (Jewish white settler). It brings together Morin’s work with Tahltan knowledge and sovereignties through activations of a book of Tahltan stories “collected” and transcribed by white anthropologist James Teit (1) in the early 1900s, and Decter’s work disturbing patterns of white settler emplacement and settler-state sovereignty, in part through interrogations of the Group of Seven’s landscape painting traditions of the same time period that significantly influenced “Canadian” national identity in celebration of colonial dominance.
This project began during the height of the COVID lockdown. At that time, it consisted of recorded Zoom sessions in which Morin read Tahltan stories aloud from the James Teit book while Decter drew images of Tahltan Nation territory using photographs collaboratively selected from Morin’s personal and historical archives. In these performance sessions Morin’s act of reading re-informs Teit’s interpretation of Tahltan stories through the assertion of embodied sovereignty and Decter’s drawing-while-listening erodes assumptions of white settler authority and entitlement with respect to the land.
The proposed performance for CATR brings this on-line iteration of the work into a live in-person context while retaining the zoom meeting component that accommodates remote attendance. In this way it straddles the varied intimacies of live and virtual spaces of “visiting” while activating concepts of decolonial host-guest relations that enact Indigenous sovereignties and confront the certainty of settler emplacement. Working through personal and socio-political scales of relationality and embodiment, our actions contribute to envisioning the otherwise possibilities of meeting on territory in ways that generate ripples of change in the present and for the future.
Further Details:
In the performance as proposed we are both present in the performance space – Peter reading and Leah drawing – so that a live audience can experience the performance in person. In addition, cameras focused on each of us create two live streams that are channelled through a zoom meeting to accommodate virtual attendances. The zoom feed is also projected in the performance space so that it can simultaneously be viewed by the live audience in its original on-line format. We are also interested in the possibility of the zoom meeting aspect of the performance being projected in a location in public space for a wider audience, perhaps in this case for the wider congress attendees.
1 Teit’s Tahltan Tales was originally published in Journal of American Folklore, 1919, 1921
Leah Decter, NSCAD University
Leah Decter is a white settler inter-media artist and scholar based between Treaty 1 territory and K’jipuktuk where she holds a Canada Research Chair at NSCAD University. Her artistic practice and research address power dynamics in settler colonial contexts through decolonizing practices and an ethic of being-in-relation in spaces of Indigenous sovereignty.
Peter Morin, OCADU
Peter Morin is a grandson of Tahltan Ancestor Artists. Morin’s artistic offerings can be organized around four themes: articulating Land/Knowing, articulating Indigenous Grief/Loss, articulating Community Knowing, and understanding the Creative Agency/Power of the Indigenous body. Morin holds a tenured position with the Faculty of Arts at OCADU.