Figure 01: Tanya Lukin Linklater, We wear one another, Inuvialuit rain gut

For NDN Love Songs (2018-ongoing), Morin works with the drums stored in the Royal BC Museum. In this case, the drums did not physically leave the Royal BC Museum, but Morin filmed their “portraits.” Morin was granted access by the museum to spend time with, to handle, and to film the drums, and imagine ways to re-sound them. Video recordings of the seven “drum portraits” are featured in the exhibit.

Morin and Lukin Linklater both engage with the issues of repatriation after the fashion of what the curator Candice Hopkins calls “repatriation otherwise” (2020). Grounded in Indigenous “functional” ontologies, they engage these belongings as “sites of instruction” and activation (Jacobsen, 2020). [3] In doing so they are reversing the process by which Indigenous belongings (nonhuman subjects) are—through Western cultural narratives of objectivity, and museum conservation, and display practices— turned into objects/artifacts/art: that is, sites for aesthetic contemplation and consumption  by the settler audiences (Garneau, 2016; Robinson, 2020; Jacobsen, 2020).

But, what is at stake with Morin’s and Lukin Linklater’s sensory repatriation of Indigenous material culture when there are already available institutional policies for physical repatriation of Indigenous belongings? Legal scholar Catherine Bell (2008) describes Canadian repatriation law as a highly complex and uncertain environment informed by various legal streams based in property and contract law that fail to provide “an interculturally legitimate dispute resolution mechanism to address potential power imbalance” (Bell & Napoleon, 2008, p 17). Final decision-making authority remains with custodial institutions. Bell notes that "even when Western law is used as a tool to empower Indigenous peoples, it captures their law. Its language and concepts suck Indigenous peoples into Western legal constructs” (p. 14). In contrast to the institutional repatriation policies based in the property/ownership discourse, Indigenous peoples ground repatriation in kinship frameworks of belonging, where kin spans temporally across generations, as well, across different forms of personhood (Krmpotich, 2010; Mathews and Roulette, 2020). From this perspective, repatriation is not about reasserting ownership over an artifact, but about extending care to and re-connecting with the nonhuman kin and ancestors that have been removed from the communities and the environments of activation (Robinson, 2020b; see also Krmpotich, 2010; Mathews and Roulette, 2020). Therefore, while repatriation policies demonstrate commitment to negotiations and inclusion of Indigenous peoples by the settler institutions, by subjecting Indigenous knowledge systems to Western standards, such policies only serve to retrench colonial principles and values and continue to colonize Indigenous ways of being and knowing (Bell & Napoleon, 2008; Phillips, 2012; Krmpotich, 2010; Mathews and Roulette, 2020).

For Indigenous peoples this means manipulating their connections to the material world under settler terms, translating and rendering themselves intelligible to Western taxonomic systems and intellectual categories (Bell & Napoleon, 2008; Krmpotich, 2010; Phillips, 2011, 2012; Mathews and Roulette, 2020). This is why Lukin Linklater’s and Morin’s reparative practices based on reclaiming sensory agency are so crucial. At stake is Indigenous sovereignty and futurity. At stake is the continuation—activation of different kinds of values through resurgent perception in ways that the recognition-based forms privileged by the settler institutions obscure and coopt. [4] Lukin Linklater and Morin mobilize sensory strategies that challenge normative perceptual attention that institutions such as museums embody while refusing to render themselves intelligible to settler logics (Garneau, 2016; Robinson, 2020). This allows them to work around the limitations imposed by the museums e.g. conservation concerns that prohibit touch and handling, as well as re-colonizing repatriation museum policies, which continue to undermine Indigenous systems of authority, knowledge and protocols (Bell & Napoleon, 2008; Krmpotich, 2010; Phillips, 2011; Mathews and Roulette, 2020).

To understand better how reclaiming the sensory can be important for a sovereign work and decolonization processes, I turn here to Stó:lō music scholar and artist Dylan Robinson. In his recent book Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (2020), Robinson attends to perception in general, and listening and sound in particular as a politically interested and socially active field formative of settler colonial conditions, but also a site of Indigenous resurgence and sovereignty (Robinson, 2016, 2020). Robinson argues that we adopt and get naturalized into a certain—hungry—normative perceptual paradigm in which our perceptual habits and biases become themselves a form of “settlement.” Derived from the Stó:lō word “xwelítem,” meaning settler or a ‘starving person,’ hunger names forms of perception and listening informed/infused by desire to appropriate, extract, assimilate, objectify, consume—where everything is translatable and accessible for those with the means to access it (see also Garneau, 2016). If the first settlers were starving for food and gold, over time this hunger transmuted into hunger for Indigenous land and other resources characteristic of the Western progressivist techno-anthropocentric extractivist paradigm that treats the world as its breadbasket, and that has proved to be so ecologically unsustainable. By adopting this hungry sensory paradigm, we develop perceptual habits that refuse to hear, delegitimize, and render illegible other cultural practices and ecologies of relations. According to Robinson, our perceptual habits and attitudes become themselves a form of settler governmentality.

These hungry perceptual habits and biases are constituted and reinforced through forms and spaces—which Robinsons calls “structures of consumption”—that uphold a hungry sensory attention. Rooted in the Western ontologies of objectness such structures and perceptual habits continue to determine and police the boundaries of subject/object, life/not life, human/nonhuman, nature/culture. From their inception, museums actively shaped and directed our perceptual attention and behavior through their display strategies wherein knowledge was only accessible through silence and fixed attention (Bennett, 2006; Garneau, 2018; Robinson, 2020). An anthropologist of the senses David Howes and a historian of the senses Constance Classen (2006) recount how the Indigenous artifacts were, upon accession and entering the modern museum, “colonized by the gaze.” Analyzed through and assimilated within Western frameworks, with its preference for disembodied sight paradigmatic of Western rational thought, the Indigenous object was divested from its cultural impetuses and turned into a visual sign to be interpreted by a curator, or if not visually appealing, it ended up in the storeroom. Similarly, Métis artist and scholar David Garneau (2016) describes how “[t]hrough the alchemy of the colonial imagination, combined with brute power, sacred and cultural objects are transmogrified into commodities, melted for their gold value or collected for their artifact or art value” (p 26).

Museum taxonomic systems and display techniques such as glass cases, plexiglass, plinths, lighting, labels and so forth frame Indigenous difference in ways that accommodates settler recognition by subjecting a belonging to Western standards of fixed attention and modes of aesthetic appreciation aimed at displacing their local symbolic value and more-than-aesthetic function (Howes and Classen, 2006; Garneau, 2016; Robinson, 2020, 2020b). In the process, a set of sacred and eternal relationships—land/nonhuman kin—is turned into a property and a resource (Garneau, 2016). Perceptual experiences that would affirm nonhuman subjectivity and human-nonhuman ecologies of relations are rendered illegible; e.g. listening and looking is rendered fixed and single-sensed rather than embodied, proprioceptive and intersubjective, and touch, rather than intracorporeal and interactive, is toward a non-acting object (Robinson, 2016, 2020). Robinson (2020) asserts, “while such displays are to members of the public primarily for aesthetic contemplation, for Indigenous people the experience of such displays can often be traumatic and triggering” (86). This is not only because of traumatic cultural losses, practices and knowledges that these belongings embody, but also “because the very “objects” that are held behind glass are not objects at all. Instead what exists behind the glass goes by other names; they have life, they are living beings, or they are ancestors” (87). [5] When Indigenous cultural forms are rendered an equivalent to Western forms, their ontological difference is screened off, making them commensurable with and consumable for settler palate (Garneau, 2016; Robinson, 2020). [6] Such acts are then not just acts of appropriation, but ones of continued subjection of Indigenous lives and sovereignty (Robinson, 2020).

Historically and ongoingly, settler coloniality has been highly invested in the imposition of relational norms aimed at destroying Indigenous kinship systems and promoting a type of relationship and family style that secure a proper supporting of the settler-state—regulating not only relations between humans, but also non-human persons by ensuring property/resource-based relations to the land (Morgensen, 2010; TallBear, 2018; TallBear & Willey, 2019). [7] According to Dakota science studies scholar Kim TallBear (2018) heteronormative monogamy is a colonial device tied up with the ongoing control over, and allocation of rights and resources that perpetuate structural injustices (TallBear, 2018; TallBear & Willey, 2019, Morgensen, 2010). Mechanisms such as residential schools and "scoops" (of Indigenous children who were then put up for adoption In southern Canada) of the 1960s and '70s  were devised by the nation state to erode Indigenous kinship relations by removing Indigenous subjects from the environments of care, their knowledge systems and language (TallBear, 2018; TallBear & Willey, 2019, Morgensen, 2010; Robinson, 2016, 2020). This entailed subjecting them to moral reform and scrutiny of focused “civilizing” attention (Robinson, 2016, 2020b). Grounded in this understanding, the museum as yet another “site of confinement of Indigenous life” is implicated in double removal: a collection of life and maintaining the separation (Robinson, 2020, 2020b). [8] From this perspective we may ask how the sensory design/aesthetics contributes (or not) to reproducing the conditions of deprivation and separation—conditions for “the incarceration of Indigenous life.”

Sovereign acts

Resurgent perception, Robinson suggests, does not adhere to normative perceptual and relational scripts. It has a capacity to override colonial forms of governmentality and settler-imposed binaries—i.e. life/not life, human/nonhuman, nature/culture—and the hierarchies that they embody, with a decolonized account of the world as a system of reciprocal relationships while refusing to expand the territory of the settler state. [9] Robinson asserts: “there is agency in Indigenous perception to resist sovereign doings of the settler state. Indigenous subjects exert agency through resurgent perception: sovereign vision that actively and imaginatively revises a painting of settlement; sovereign listening that hears differently the soundscape of the territory we are from; and sovereign touch that is intercorporeal (that is, between human and other-than-human relations) rather than a singular touch made toward a non-acting object” (p. 88). Morin and Linklater (each in their own right) address Indigenous nonhuman subjects confined in the museum, not simply as generative sites of sound and movement, but as interlocutors and participants—as kin. Grounded in Indigenous ontologies where the aesthetic is a form of doing, they craft their multimodal works as-dialogue, as-nourishment, as-care, as-honoring the ancestors, their practices engender “how [Indigenous] ontologies continue to be articulated, renegotiated, and transformed in contemporary artistic media” (Robinson, 2018, p 223).

Lukin Linklater mobilizes the rain gut parka as a score for developing a dance and amplified violin performance with violinist Laura Ortman and dancers Ceinwen Gobert and Danah Rosales (Jacobsen, 2021). Made of whale intestine, black thread, auklet feathers, and auklet beaks, the parka was used when canoeing the Northern sea, it protected the body from icy water; moved by the body, it allowed body to move, while morphing, changing shape and sounding (Hopkins, 2020). The open rehearsals of the performance take place at the Isabel Bader Centre in Kingstone by the glass wall looking at the icy water entity now known as Lake Ontario. The performance begins with vibration-like sounds, long and buzzing. Silence. Another long echoey buzzing sound. The dancers lie heavy on the floor bathed in the bright sunlight. The sound of Ortman’s violin proceeds like a wave, intensifies, slows down, stops, starts again. The dancers move slowly, close to the ground, as if moving over the icy lake surface.

Figure 14: Peter Morin, NDN love songs, 2018-ongoing, vinyl transfer, digital video, at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery (September 8-December 6, 2020). Photo: Rachel Topham photography

Morin is finding ways to re-connect, new ways to play and resound the drums that had been displaced and confined in the museum storeroom for such a long time. Their lives artificially sustained, made toxic, unrelatable, censored, un-touchable… Through his work as a form of dialogue, a re-connection, a healing, a sustenance, Morin addresses the drums as more-than-artifacts, as more-than-use-value; he resituates them as interlocutors, as lovers, as kin. [10]

Morin’s score for re-sounding the drums is addressed to a violinist. When I place the earphones over my ears, I hear the Vancouver-based violinist/violist, composer and ethnomusicologist Parmela Attariwala’s response to Morin’s score. In a photo of Attariwala’s performance from the Agnes-Etherington Art Center, Gund Gallery in Kingston and the one from the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Attariwala looks both inward and attentively at the drum/s as she draws her bow across the strings of her violin. Conventionally, dance follows the music score, here however, the interaction—Morin’s “dance” with the drums—cues the sound. Long pauses and energetic playing, the sounds and silences are intertwined. The sounds Attariwala conjures are both familiar and intense, piercing and unfamiliar but nevertheless felt. All sorts of strings; stretched and those loose, wrapped and coiled featured on the drums come into focus.  

Figure 15: Vancouver-based violinist/violist, composer and ethnomusicologist Parmela Attariwala performs Peter Morin’s score NDN Love Songs at Agnes Etherington Art Centre. Photo by Tim Forbes

Figures 04-07: Tanya Lukin Linklater, We wear one another, 2019, performance documentation, courtesy of the artist and the Agnes Etherington Art Centre  

In a steady crescendo led by percussive sounds made with the wooden body of Ortman’s violin, the two dancers increase their pace of movement, before eventually culminating in an energetic series of athletic drill-like sequences (Jacobsen, 2021). Through the sound and their intersensorial and kinaesthetic engagement, Lukin Linklater and her collaborators create a web of activations, complicating and diverting hungry perceptual habits.

Figures 08-11: Tanya Lukin Linklater, We wear one another, 2019, performance documentation, courtesy of the artist and the Agnes Etherington Art Centre  

Morin’s piece NDN Love Songs (2019-) is an extension of his earlier works that engender forms of visiting and extending care to the ancestors in which he often engages the museum as site and reaffirms Indigenous song as a form of communication, healing, nourishment and/or weapon (Robinson, 2020). Morin too spent time in the Royal BC Museum before he felt invited by the drums to work with them. In the exhibit, seven video “drum portraits” are featured on seven screens mounted on the gallery wall in a row at an eyelevel. The videos play in short loops moving at different speeds. A drum per screen. Each “represent[ing] someone that Morin has loved in his life, and for whom he has not fully been able to express that love”.

Figure 12: Peter Morin, video installation of “drum portraits” for NDN Love Song at KWAG gallery, Kitchener Waterloo Photo by: Ika Peraic, July 2020

The drums look ancient. Their shapes are rarely entirely visible within the frame, they bleed out. Camera gets very close, our eyes can touch their skin, the tendons, the marks, the peeling paint, their textures, their scares… Morin holds each drum from behind; his bare fingers running gently across drum’s sides as he rotates them; first side-ways slowly, hypnotically…then gentle turn, back of the drum… each at their own speed. Their interaction feels incredibly intimate; the movement of rotation calming and disturbing at the same time. The material and embodied qualities of the sight, or what media scholar Laura C. Marks (2000) might characterize as “haptic visuality,” are called upon.

Figure 13: A video detail of Peter Morin installation NDN Love Songs at KWAG gallery, Kitchener Waterloo, Photo by: Ika Peraic, June 2020

In an interview, Morin explains that even though the museum staff warned him that the drums might be poisonous for handling due to the arsenic treatment that most museum artifacts undergo to satisfy the conservation standards, he refused to wear gloves and the idea that his culture is poisonous. The drums, his says, missed human touch and he was trying to imagine a new way of playing them (Morin & Attariwala, 2020, https://vimeo.com/467380848). On the neighboring wall a textual score completes Morin’s instruction for resounding the drums with more detail and frames the decolonial act as embodied, relational, sensual and resituating:

A decolonized body has the ability to remake love/loving/sex/sexuality
One draw across the strings is a body
One draw across the strings for the release of breath
One draw across the strings for the acknowledgement of desire
One draw across the strings is to let go
One draw across the strings to complete their name
The rest is up to you
Repeat eight times

In a conversation with Morin at Belkin Art Gallery (2020), Attariwala emphasizes the sense of humbleness, obligation, anxiety, self-reflexiveness and responsibility for being invited to perform in and inhabit the space created by Morin; how to account for the complex layers of colonization that we inherit and are embedded in (https://belkin.ubc.ca/events/peter-morin/). Her performative response models sonically situated collaborative practice of responsibility to the difficult colonial histories that she/we are implicated in as well as the commitment to work through them.

During my visit to the KWAG gallery, an audio track of Attariwala’s performance was available over the earphones. The gallery’s website featured a recording of the live performance of Morin’s score by a Kitchener based musician Charlena Russell for KWAG’s iteration of the Soundings in June 2020. [11] Even though mediated by the screen of my laptop, encountering Russell’s performance within the space had an intense and profound effect on me. This time, the sound was not contained within the earphones. I witnessed Russell’s full-bodied presence and resounding of the drums in unfolding. How they are sounded with and for, how the sounds fill up, interact with and re-configure the space created by Morin; how her sonic interaction with the drums resituate me, the viewer/listener, relationally within the work.

Figure 17: Kitchener-based vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Charlena Russell performs her interpretation of Peter Morin’s score 'NDN Love Songs' at KWAG, Saturday 20 June, 2020

If Morin’s videos of “drum portraits” already trouble the focused gaze and allude to the personhood of the drums, Russell’s sonic intervention further destabilized the idea of the drum-as-image/artifact. I experienced an intermodal alchemy between the visual and the aural that reconfigured a video-as-image into a video-as-presence. It felt as if this alchemy created intersensory cross-dimensional escape route for the drums that are otherwise physically confined in the Royal BC museum’s storeroom. The sound pulled the drums into here and now, while also making their absence, the distance, the trauma, their removal, the control, the separation, the censorship, their long confinement, the systematic subtraction, the impossibility of touch… painfully felt. It felt like communicating with the dead… I felt again (as in the Lukin Linklater’s piece), a strong web of activations; the drums activated the sound and the space, as much as the sound activated the drums. Video and sound recast as-more-than representational—are mobilized as mediums for reconnecting, for calling into presence, for communicating across time/space, for healing, for re-orienting our perception—while resituating me/us as a witness.

Here too, Morin and his collaborators reversed the process by which forms of nonhuman subjects are turned into artifacts and a resource for Western instrumentalization. By mobilizing different cross-modal intersensory strategies to reclaim “sensory agency,” both artists inhabited the existing colonial infrastructure of the gallery space and the perceptual attention that such places assert to denaturalize their givenness. According to Robinson (2016) to reclaim sensory agency “is to give material presence to memory previously too painful to speak of through modes of telling that both affirm cultural strength and assert an affective force upon those who are present” (Robinson, 2016, p 46). In turn, the audience is resituated as a witness, not only to hear about experiences of colonial violence, but we are subjected to the material affective impact of the sound and its duration for which we are offered no translation (Robinson, 2016). In the absence of forms that promote certainty and recognition-based attention, we need to feel our way and work through the encounters crafted by Lukin Linklater and Morin. The attention is turned inward while rendering felt the oppressive structures that (at least at times) orient my/our attention despite my commitment to reworking them. In the process our perceptual habits are rendered non-innocent and we are made accountable for our act of looking, listening, feeling.

With these thoughts at heart. we might begin to ask how we might mobilize sensory design as a thick and situated decolonizing practice for creating conditions for working through our settler ignorance, in a mode that “turn[s] the mirror back upon ourselves” so we can name the settler that lurks within (Reagan, 2012, p 12). Rather than simply entertain and educate in ways appealing to the settler palette, how the sensory aesthetics might be practiced to expose the ways settler ignorance and Indigenous erasure are embedded in the environments we create. How perception is organized to perpetuate effects of inscribing our settler privilege and forgetfulness into the everyday experience through designs we create (Hopkins, 2018; Robinson, 2017, 2020). In attending to ethics of incommensurability (Robinson, 2016, 2020) and irreconcilable spaces of Indigenous sovereignty (Garneau, 2016) sensory design might trouble the neoliberal ideas of unlimited access, translatability and unproblematic accumulation of knowledge to give way to more ethical, re-orienting, performative, affective, display designs that render us more accountable and caring.

[1] The first reform of museological practices was prompted by The Spirit Sings controversy in the 1988. This large ethnographic exhibition of Indigenous cultures organized by the Glenbow Museum accompanied the 1988 Winter Olympics inspired a range of Indigenous activism and generated critical awareness on issues involving museum policies, practices and politics of display (Phillips, 2012; Lonetree, 2011). Lubicon Cree whose cultural belongings were on the display boycotted the exhibit whose major corporate sponsor, Shell Canada Ltd., drilled for oil on their ancestral lands, while the government procrastinated with the treaty negotiations (Phillips, 2011). The Spirit Sings controversy led to the founding of the Assembly of First Nations Task Force on Museums and a commitment to community collaboration and consultation within the museum world (Bennett, 2006; Phillips, 2011, 2012; Lonetree, 2012).

[2] Since its opening at the Agnes-Etherington Art Center, Gund Gallery in Kingston, the exhibition traveled to ON to Kitchener-Waterloo Gallery (KWAG) to Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Colombia and engaged different communities.

[3] Grounded in the different ontological world, Indigenous aesthetic forms have a strikingly different function from their Western equivalents. Here e.g. song, painting can have a function of a law, medicine, historical document, weapon. They have more-than-aesthetic and more-than-representational function.

[4] Similar assertion of perceptual sovereignty and its implication for challenging hegemonic politics comes from black education scholar and activist bell hooks when she asserts “Not only will I stare. I want my look to change reality” (bell hooks, 1992, 116 in Watermen and Wong, 2020, p 251).

[5] Indigenous attribution of animacy and social roles to apparently inert objects is not an inherent property, but a relational and emergent quality that unfolds temporally and relationally within the dictates of its social connections (Mathews and Roulette, 2020). Some things become alive when in a certain “relational possibilities” or used in a certain way (Mathews and Roulette, 2020).[3] There is no universal key to translating Indigenous animacy of things into Western taxonomic systems of fixed categories e.g. animate/inanimate, sacred/profane as museums attempt to do (Mathews and Roulette, 2020). They are grounded in a different ontological world that precedes and supersedes settler-imposed categories (Robinson, 2020; Mathews and Roulette, 2020).

[6] According to Robinson, “foundational differences between Indigenous and settler modes of listening are guided by their respective ontologies of song and music. Western music is largely though not exclusively oriented toward aesthetic contemplation and for the affordances it provides. […] “Indigenous song, in contrast, serves a strikingly different functions, including that of law and primary historical documentation” (p 41).

[7] This relational norm validated taking children away during the time of the residential school system and the Sixties Scoop. Indigenous families were often declared unfit to raise their children because they did not adhere properly to the coupledom norm, and/or if children/youth did not adhere to normative sexual identities (Morgensen, 2010; TallBear, 2018).

[8] In the museum, such nonhuman subjects are often subjected to toxic chemicals due to conservation concerns, kept separated from other belongings/relatives held in the museum collections due to classificatory museum systems of art/artefact, sacred/secular (Mathews and Roulette, 2020). The artefacts classified “sacred” can end up in restricted access storage, “isolated from human contact and the relational possibilities of the museum” (p 182).

[1] Nishnabeeg scholar and artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s (2018) writing and the practices of maple sap harvesting, wild goose hunting, and wild rice growing that Simpson nurtures within urban areas where she lives, refuse to uphold a settler-imposed binaries and hierarchies that they embody: and which separate and isolate traditional Indigenous territories from contemporary urban spaces. As she stresses—and bodies forth in her life and work: ‘all of “Canada” is Indigenous land.’

[10] According Anishinabek artist/scholar Leanne Simpson (2013), decolonial love is about finding ways to create and nurture meaningful connections built on joy with humans and non-humans that “promote more life”—even and especially in the face of difficulty/brokenness caused by colonial violence. It activates ecologies of relations occluded by settler-imposed binaries and the hierarchies that they embody: life/not life, human/non-human, culture/nature (TallBear, 2016; Simpson, 2013). Speaking to the importance and challenges of restoring loving connections with the land devastated, and made unrelatable by profit driven extraction of the settler-states, Simpson says: “If you can’t swim in it, canoe across it. Find a way to connect to it. When the lake is too ruined to swim or to eat from it, then that’s where the healing ceremonies come in, because you can still do ceremonies with it” (Simpson & Klein 2013, On Loving the Wounded).

[11] Charlena Russell’s performance happened after my visit of the Soundings exhibition at KWAG that summer, I watched the recording on KWAG’s website.