Unsettling Histories: Representation and Indigenous Creative Art Praxis in Official Indian Residential School Redress

This dissertation offers an investigation of the role of visual strategies, art, and representation in reconciling Indian Residential School history in Canada. This research builds upon theories of biopolitics, settler colonialism, and race to examine the project of redress and reconciliation as nation and identity building strategies engaged in the ongoing structural invasion of settler colonialism. It considers the key policy moments and expressions of the federal government—from RCAP to the IRSSA and subsequent apology—as well as the visual discourse of reconciliation as it works through archival photography, institutional branding, and commissioned works. These articulations are read alongside the creative and critical work of Indigenous artists and knowledge producers working within and outside of hegemonic structures on the topics of Indian Residential School history and redress. In particular the works of Jeff Thomas, Adrian Stimson, Krista Belle Stewart, Christi Belcourt, Luke Marston, Peter Morin, and Carey Newman are discussed in this dissertation. These works must be understood in relationship to the normative discourse of reconciliation as a legitimizing mechanism of settler colonial hegemony. Beyond the binary of cooptation and autonomous resistance, these works demonstrate the complexity of representing Indigeneity: as an ongoing site of settler colonial encounter and simultaneously the forum for the willful refusal of contingency or containment.

It's only temporary: Time frame and the dynamics of creative project teams

The success of many knowledge-intensive industries depends on creative projects that lie at the heart of their logic of production. The temporality of such projects, however, is an issue that is insufficiently understood. To address this, we study the perceived time frame of teams that work on creative projects and its effects on project dynamics. An experiment with 267 managers assigned to creative project teams with varying time frames demonstrates that compared to creative project teams with a relatively longer time frame, project teams with a shorter time frame focus more on the immediate present, are less immersed in their task, and utilize a more heuristic mode of information processing. Furthermore, we find that time frame moderates the negative effect of team conflict on team cohesion. These results are consistent with our theory that the temporary nature of creative projects shapes different time frames among project participants, and that it is this time frame that is an important predictor of task and team processes.

Shattered dreams : a community project

The research field was community empowerment through education and skill-building. The context was the high rates of domestic violence in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community, and the dearth of culturally-appropriate resource materials to stimulate and encourage community engagement with the issue. The research question concerned the use of a specific media project – the creation of a 7-minute 48-second DVD on the causes and impacts of domestic violence – as a focus for community empowerment, education and skills development. The research represented an innovative partnership between the university research team, a non-government organisation, and various expert content-providers. The project generated new knowledge regarding best practice, in such areas as the culturally appropriate use of the voices of elders, focusing on the responsibilities of both men and women in relation to family and domestic violence, and the protection of Aboriginal and Islander children. The project has created an excellent tool for workshops on related issues including familiarity with the legal system. The film has been distributed to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander domestic violence services throughout the State, and has generated interstate interest, indicating a significant gap in available culturally-appropriate domestic violence resources. A support package for educational workers within Indigenous community groups wishing to use the resource has also been produced. In 2010, the DVD was nominated for a Queensland Domestic and Family Violence Prevention Award. Other non-government organisations have expressed interest in using the model created through this community-based project.

The soundscape as time capsule: A creative project based on the sounds of the first train station of Cuenca

This article reflects on the changing environment through the passage of time and how certain technologies for a creative proposal allow the preservation and transmission of a significant part of that ephemeral heritage for future generations. The general purpose of this particular project is aimed to achieve the sound synthesis of a specific and representative cityscape as the old train station in Cuenca –located in the heart of the city– that could be preserved and reproduced as an unique document of a present time, ascertainable in the future: a memory that interpret sound as a time capsule. This soundscape was made to mark the arrival of the high speed train in 2010 to a brand new station in the outskirts of the city. Therefore, the goal of this research was focused on achieving a synthetic document that provided a sound memory capable of reflecting the significant social, cultural and logistical features, of what was until then the only railway communication symbol in the city of Cuenca from 1883 to the first decade of the 21st century.

Community resilience, climate change, sustainability & engagement : adventures in creative project-based education on the Eyre Peninsula

Teaching sustainability ethics and creative practical technological applications holistically, in a multi-disciplinary ethos, with real community engagement is fraught with pedagogical and logistical issues. This paper reviews a highly community-acclaimed tertiary course/project, offered at the School of Architecture, Landscape Architecture & Urban Design at the University of Adelaide, undertaken on the Eyre Peninsula in 1st semester 2009. The course successfully enhanced student appreciation of rural community capacity building and economic fragility issues while undertaking a project-based approach to interrogating and working with rural communities to devise and demonstrate potential micro-relevant design and planning initiatives that could strengthen community resilience, climate change adaptiveness, and validate natural resource management aims within townships. The project involved some 120 students in 6 host communities through 6 local municipalities with the full support of the Natural Resource Management (NRM) Board and Local Government Association (LGA).

The paper reviews the project, its historical evolution, aims, objectives, learning strategies, community aspirations and outcomes, and positions such against various professional education accreditation frameworks. The methodological learning process, including its philosophical, pedagogical and instruments outcomes are reviewed and interrogated. The student learning outcomes, University reputation impact, and community impact, professional practice knowledge and skill attributes, and instrumental outcomes are also reviewed drawing upon evidence derived from extensive meetings, questionnaire surveys, synergistic NRM-sponsored research projects, student evaluation of teachings (SELTS), and local media coverage of the project.

The project has received applause from the Australian Institute of Architects (AIA) and Australian Institute of Landscape Architects (AILA), and preliminary endorsement from the Planning Institute of Australia (PIA), as being integral to the School’s curriculum that achieves their professional accreditation expectations of key learning experiences relevant to climate change, master planning and design, and community engagement. The project offers a possible educational model that enriches student experience and learning and addresses recent generic university community engagement policy expectations.

A novella of ideas : how interactive new media art can effectively communicate an indigenous philosophical concept

How interactive new media art can effectively communicate an indigenous philosophical concept. The sophistication and complexity of the philosophical concept concerning relationships between land and people and between people, intrinsic to the laws and customs of Australian Indigenous society, has begun to be communicated and accessed beyond the realm of anthropological and ethnological domains of Western scholarship. The exciting scope and rapid development of new media arts presents an innovative means of creating an interactive relationship with the general Australian public, addressing the urgent need for an understanding of Indigenous Australian concepts of relationship to land, and to each other, absent from Western narratives. The study is framed by an Indigenous concept of place, and relationships between land and people and between people; and explores how this concept can be clearly communicated through interactive new media arts. It involves: a creative project, the development of an interactive new media art project, a website work-in-progress titled site\sight\cite; and an exegesis, a Novella of Ideas, on the origins, influences, objectives, and potential of creative practices and processes engaged in the creative project. Research undertaken for the creative project and exegesis extended my creative practice into the use of interdisciplinary arts, expressly for the expression of philosophical concepts, consolidating 23 years experience in Indigenous community arts development. The creative project and exegesis contributes to an existing body of Indigenous work in a range of areas - including education, the arts and humanities - which bridges old and new society in Australia. In this study, old and new society is defined by the time of the initial production of art and foundations of knowledge, in the country of its origins, in Indigenous Australia dating back at least 40,000 years.

Practice as method : the ex/centric fixations project

In the past decade, scholars have proposed a range of terms to describe the relationship between practice and research in the creative arts, including increasingly nuanced definitions of practice-based research, practice-led research and practice-as-research. In this paper, I consider the efficacy of creative practice as method. I use the example of The Ex/Centric Fixations Project – a project in which I have embedded creative practice in a research project, rather than embedding research in a creative project. The Ex/Centric Fixations project investigates the way spectators interpret human experiences – especially human experiences of difference, marginalisation or discrimination – depicted onstage. In particular, it investigates the way postmodern performance writing strategies, and the presence of performing bodied to which the experience depicted can be attached, impacts on interpretations. It is part of a broader research project which examines the performativity of spectatorship, and intervenes in emergent debates about performance, ethics and spectatorship in the context of debate about whether live performance is a privileged site for the emergence of an ethical face-to-face encounter with the Other. Using the metaphor of the Mobius strip, I examines the way practice – as a method, rather than an output – has informed, influenced and problematised the broader research project.

Indig-curious : what are the challenges for non Aboriginal theatre practitioners in accessing and interpreting Aboriginal themes?

How do non-Indigenous theatre practitioners, especially actors, access and incorporate Aboriginal themes in the plays they create or perform in? Will it ever be acceptable for a non-Aboriginal actor to play an Aboriginal role? In literature there are clear protocols for writing Aboriginal characters and themes. In the visual arts and in dance, non-Indigenous practitioners might 'reference' Aboriginal themes, but what about in theatre performance? This research embodies one cultural dilemma in a creative project and exegesis: exploring the complex issues which emerge when an Aboriginal playwright is commissioned to write an 'Aboriginal themed' play for two non-Aboriginal actors.

Indigenous livelihoods policy reference group: Research priorities identified from the first meeting, 28th April 2010

The CSIRO Indigenous Livelihoods Project sought to work with Indigenous communities, government and non-government stakeholders to bring together western science and Indigenous knowledge in order to understand the potential livelihood benefits of enterprises based on natural resource management. The research focus was to enhance livelihood opportunities for Indigenous communities derived from new enterprises and activities based on natural resource management in regional and remote Australia. Underpinning outcomes were: · Identification of effective policy and institutional arrangements required to establish and maintain sustainable livelihoods; · Improved systems understanding of factors that enhance or inhibit sustainable livelihoods based on natural resource management; · Tools and methods for measuring the livelihood benefits of natural resource management; · Education, training, employment and capacity building for Indigenous communities and researchers.

Working on the edge : Exploring the creative tensions experienced by practitioners facilitating participatory media projects with refugees and asylum seekers in Australia

This paper aims to provide a contextualised and embedded exploration of how the notions of "practice" and "participation", key concepts in the study of culture and media, are manifest in an example of a complex creative project. This project aimed to engage with refugees and asylum seekers through the co-creation of cultural material and is an outcome of an? ethnographic action research (Tacchi et al. 2003) partnership involving a community development worker in a settlement support agency and a storytelling/community media researcher (the author), along with other project collaborators. The discussion of this project focuses on the role of the facilitator and illustrates the processes of orchestrating a complex project involving a series of linked stages with cumulative effect. As practitioners at this site we are working in the space where personal narratives, participatory arts and media, and the staging of intercultural, civic dialogue events, intersect. Co-creative media facilitation in these contexts involves both managing hybrid communicative spaces and (re)combining the "integrative practices" (Schatzki 1996) of a range of professional approaches and creative roles. This is liminal work, located on the boundaries of several disciplines and practices. Drawing on reflections gathered from collaborative ethnographic descriptions (Bhattacharya 2008), this paper traces moments of practitioner uncertainty that can be linked to the way "practice" and “participation” is problematised within the community cultural development field in a way that is at times an uneasy fit with conventional ways of operating in social service roles. These moments of tension also indicate where this project pushed practitioners into spaces of improvisation and new learning. Keywords: Youth, refugees, community cultural development, co-creative media facilitation, ethnographic action research, intercultural dialogue.

A Home at School: Building Stronger Indigenous People through Cultural Resurgence in an Urban Ontario Public School Context.

In this thesis, I work through the educational narratives of young Aboriginal women and men as I explore the relationship between cultural programming and student engagement. My analysis is structured through a collaborative Indigenous research project. My overarching task is to explore how a cultural support program, the Native Youth Advancement with Education Hamilton (NYA WEH) Program, offered at Sir John A. Macdonald Secondary School, located in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, attempts to re-imagine Aboriginal education in ways that directly challenge the residential school legacy. In particular, I work to illuminate how particular forms of Aboriginal education are connected to the graduation rates of Aboriginal youth. I argue that the ways in which the NYA WEH Program navigates Native Studies curriculum, relationships, and notions of culture and tradition are significant to the engagement of Aboriginal youth. This research develops theoretical connections between the contemporary experience of Aboriginal social inequality and educational initiatives which attempt to reverse that legacy. By placing the NYA WEH Program narratives side-by-side with literature supporting Aboriginal education for Self-determination, I work to learn how to best support and encourage Aboriginal student engagement in secondary schools across Ontario.

Building capacity in an indigenous nonprofit artistic enterprise

Growth in Indigenous artistic enterprises has attracted government funding, cultural tourists, and arts managers with a strong interest in cultural democracy and, more recently, an interest in business models for these artists. This paper documents a case study of Arilla Paper, an artistic enterprise in Queensland, Australia, where a group of Aboriginal women, worked on making paper from natural materials, to create a sustainable non-profit arts business. Sections of the business manual developed for these women, together with primary and secondary data supporting the Indigenous creative industries, are presented. The paper concludes that success in such ventures requires a social entrepreneurship model of funding that recognises the challenges of Indigenous cultural ownership and capacity building in business practice.

Assessment of indigenous older peoples ’ needs for home and community care in remote central Australia

The Home and Community Care (HACC) program in Australia provides services which supports older people to live at home. Individual HACC organisations are generally responsible for initial assessment of eligibility and need of clients presenting for services. This paper reports on a project which aimed to develop an understanding of the various approaches to assessment of client needs in Central Australia. The majority of clients in this geographical area are indigenous. The project was initiated in recognition of the primary importance of assessment in determining service access and service delivery and of the particular challenges faced by service providers in remote areas. This paper discusses key project findings including the client group and services provided, initial needs assessment and care planning processes. Evident inconsistencies in practice reflect a variety of complex contextual factors. Staff in remote areas have an inadequate knowledge base to draw upon to assist them with assessment and care planning decisions, and further research and professional development is required.

It comes with the territory: 'remote' Indigenous reporting for mainstream audiences

Mainstream news coverage of ‘remote’ Indigenous Australia is arguably one of the most distinctive forms of Australian journalism practice. While there has been considerable scholarly interest in news media representations of ‘remote’ Indigenous people, little research has been done until now on the logic or operations of this reporting specialisation. This monograph presents a Bourdieuian analysis of the subfield based in the insights study participants offered in interviews undertaken as part of The Media and Indigenous Policy project. It analyses the reporting subfield through an investigation of the practices participants say shape the way white, mainstream journalists understand their role, its possibilities and limitations. Reporting specialists spoke of the geographical and ontological distances they have to negotiate in dealing with Indigenous and government sources, as well as the ways in which they are constrained by institutional pressures. They attribute many of the difficulties with covering ‘remote’ Indigenous issues to factors linked with these physical and cultural distances.