Original Article

Journal of Material Culture

2022, Vol. 27(1) 48–70
The issue is moot: © The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
Decolonizing art/artifact sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/13591835211069603
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Ruth B. Phillips
Department of Art History, Carleton University, Canada

Abstract
This article seeks to step back from the long-standing debate between art and artifact—aesthetics
and science– understood as terms that reference central concerns of the quintessentially modern
Western disciplines of art history and anthropology. In their landmark edited volume The Traffic in
Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology, George Marcus and Fred Myers explored the growing
convergences exhibited by the concerns and methods of practitioners of the two disciplines, both
in the academy and the museum. By training our attention on contemporary artworlds—under-
stood as systems—they illuminated the exchanges of aesthetic and conceptual ideas and forms
that have brought Western and non-Western arts into shared discursive and real spaces. Yet in
the quarter century since the book’s publication there has been a noticeable retreat from attempts
by the proponents of visual studies and an expanded visual anthropology to actualize disciplinary
convergences. The boundaries that separate art and anthropology have not been dissolved. Art
historians and anthropologists continue to ask different questions and to support different regimes
of value.
From the author’s vantage point in a settler society currently directing considerable energies to
institutional projects of decolonization the old debates have rapidly been receding as a new ‘third
term’ – Indigenous Studies– intrudes itself on the well trodden terrain. Not (yet) definable as a
discipline but, rather, maintaining itself as an orientation, Indigenous Studies nevertheless renders
the earlier disciplinary debates moot. Place, rather than time-based, collective rather than indivi-
dual, holistic rather than either disciplinary or interdisciplinary, Indigenous Studies formulations
exert decolonizing pressures on institutions that are rapidly mounting. Using Anishinaabeg: Art
and Power, a show in 2017 at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), as a case study, this article
shows how an exhibition moved representation away from the art/artifact dichotomy as well as
from contested strategies of ‘inclusion’ and pro forma recognitions of ‘Indigenous ontology’
toward a genuine paradigm shift.

Corresponding author:
Ruth B. Phillips, Department of Art History, Carleton University, 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, NO,
K1S 5B6, Canada; 154 Cameron Ave, Ottawa, ON K1S 0X1, Canada.
Email: ruth.phillips@carleton.ca
Phillips 49

Keywords
art / artifact, museum representation, indigenous knowledge, anishinaabeg art and power
Navigating the translation between art-world discourse and that of anthropology … is parti-
cularly challenging, demanding a genuinely dialogical stance and a recognition that the
boundary between ‘art’ and ‘anthropology’ has never been very clear

George E. Marcus and Fred Myers 1995, 5

While anti-racist efforts that attempt to decolonize human relationships within sites of
research (e.g. the academy) move forward, albeit slowly, there has been little systemic
shift in the ideologies of knowledge production.

Margaret Kovach 2009, 28

We live in an age full … of Moot Questions—some mooter than others.

P.G. Wodehouse 1932, 771

In the twenty-first century Indigenous Studies has been expanding rapidly as a field of
knowledge production and practice in both the academy and the museum, and it is chan-
ging the terms in which Western-trained scholars have conceptualized the collections
amassed during the colonial era. The impact of this change will be extensive, for
these collections—not only of material, but also of other forms of expressive
culture—continue to play a central role in representing the diverse peoples of the
world to each other. The new field of articulation has particular implications for the con-
structs of art and artifact, the two dialectically positioned options for comprehending
material culture offered by art historians and anthropologists in the modern era. In
this article I explore the nature of a paradigm shift that is, I argue, in progress in
North American cultural and educational institutions. I begin by reviewing, with neces-
sary brevity, the dynamics of disciplinary divergence and convergence during the twen-
tieth century and the alternative premises that inform Indigenous Studies. In my last
section I offer a case study of a recent Canadian exhibition that suggests the nature
of the new paradigm that is emerging as a result of decolonial activism. Although
the changes I describe resonate strongly with developments in other settler societies,
I write from a specific subjectivity, time, and place – from my perspective as a
settler scholar in Canada at a moment in its history when a national project of decolon-
ization has achieved widespread national support. Although the ‘hard’ issues of legal
status, ‘land back,’ and social justice have yet to be resolved, real institutional
changes have already occurred. In little more than a decade, Indigenous Studies pro-
grammes have become ubiquitous in Canadian universities, and professorial and cura-
torial authority over the teaching and representation of Indigenous arts and material
culture has been largely transferred to Indigenous professionals.2
Debates and dialogues about art and artifact run through the modern history of art
history and anthropology. The historical reasons for this insistent worrying of the
50 Journal of Material Culture 27(1)

two paradigms are not hard to find. They are rooted in their histories of mid-
nineteenth century disciplinary formation as scientific practices (Ginsburg and
Davin 1980), their mutual acceptance of versions of primitivism grounded in cul-
tural evolutionism and colonial hierarchy, and their acceptance of a qualitative dif-
ference between Kultur and culture (Dominguez 1992), the folk and the civilized,
and discriminations grounded in comparative practises of connoisseurship. Yet
each discipline aims to answer different kinds of questions and has developed dis-
tinctive methodologies. Periodically, each has challenged premises fundamental
to the project of its academic ‘other,’ or – if more peacefully inclined – sought to
resolve differences by borrowing the other’s theories and practices and working to
identify common ground.3 When, for example, the US Bureau of American
Ethnology launched its first Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico in
1907, the definition given in the entry for “Art” by anthropologist Frederick
Hodge (1907: 94) came straight from the post-Renaissance European tradition:
‘The term “art” … is here employed … to refer only to those elements of the arts
which in the higher stages of culture come fully within the realm of taste and culmin-
ate in the ornamental and fine arts’.
Fifty years later, New York’s Museum of Primitive Art sought to bring art historians,
art connoisseurs, and anthropologists together in the universalist spirit of liberal human-
ism. Invited to lecture there, anthropologist Robert Redfield (1959: 94) sought with great
eloquence to reconcile the contrasting paradigms of ‘art and icon’ that had developed in
art and anthropology museums in the interim. He argued that although ‘the aesthetic and
the iconic are two worlds of thought,’ their relationship is complementary rather than
competitive: ‘Whether we come to see the artifact as a creative mastery of form, or see
it as a sign or symbol of a traditional way of life, we are discovering, for ourselves,
new territory of our common humanity’.
In the following decades, as art historians began to study the arts of Africa,
Oceania and the Americas, they joined anthropologists in their quest for more emic
understandings of diverse traditions of aesthetic expression by adopting anthropo-
logical methods of fieldwork and ethnographic documentation (e.g. Maurer 1986;
Thompson 1969, 1971). In the last decades of the twentieth century, however, the
old debates were driven into a new, hyperactive phase by the deconstructive energies
of poststructuralism, postmodernism and postcolonialism. The 1995 publication of
The Traffic in Culture marked a culminating moment in this reflexive process. In
their timely and penetrating introduction, George Marcus and Fred Myers trained
their critical lens on Western art worlds themselves, raising old discussions to a
new level of reflexivity and shifting the focus of many subsequent inquiries. In
arguing for the primacy of ‘art’ as ‘the space in which difference, identity, and cul-
tural value are being produced and contested’ (1995, 11), they helped to stimulate
both the notable return to the study of art and materiality within anthropology (e.g.
Gell 2003; Thomas 1991; Chris et al. 2013) and the reconsideration of hierarchies
of world cultures and fine and applied arts within art history (e.g. Elkins 2006;
Summers 2003; Belting, Buddenseig, and Weibel 2013).
Twenty-five years later, as I will argue in this article, the terms of the debate are
shifting again. Both museologists and academics now proclaim themselves to be
Phillips 51

doing ‘decolonial’ rather than ‘postcolonial’ work. As widely understood in Canada,

decolonization is achieved when ‘power, dominance, and control are rebalanced and
returned to Indigenous peoples’ and when ‘Indigenous ways of knowing and doing
are perceived, presented, and practiced as equal to Western ways of knowing and
doing.’4 If, in other words, the marked tendency of newly independent colonies
was to redeploy Western systems of knowledge production and museological repre-
sentation to new ends (Dominguez 1992), the contemporary project of many formerly
colonized peoples is to undo these impositions and recover Indigenous knowledges
suppressed or erased by colonial regimes (Smith 1999; Todd 2016; Tuck and Yang
2012). They are guided by a growing body of theoretical, methodological, and cura-
torial work produced by Indigenous academics and museum professionals for whom
the disciplinary traditions within which these cross disciplinary debates have been
conducted are largely irrelevant—including such binaries as art/artifact. Margaret
Kovach (2009: 26–27), for example, acknowledges the paradigmatic specificity of dif-
ferent Western methodologies – ‘postitivism/ postpositivism, constructivism, transfor-
mative, and pragmatic’ – and that each is ‘characterized by its own ontology,
epistemology, and methodology’. She argues, however, that ‘all … nonetheless, fall
within the larger paradigm of Western thought. Paradigms within a paradigm’.
Like Marcus and Myers a quarter century earlier, Kovach and other Indigenous
Studies scholars strive for a meta-reflexivity whose longer perspectives enable the
production of new kinds of research questions and methods. Both the postmodern
and the decolonial projects have sought to shift and transform the discourses in
which their authors were trained. For Marcus and Myers (1995, 7), challenging
themselves to stand outside the confines of both anthropology and art writing
revealed that ‘this discursive separation of art from culture created a part of
culture that, like anthropology itself, had culture as its object’. For Kovach (2009:
85) the task is ‘to point out that Indigenous approaches to seeking knowledge are
not of a Western worldview, a matter that colonialism (and its supporters) has
long worked to confuse’. As fellow Indigenous researcher Jeannine Carriere put
it: ‘Our Western mind … is always in the background. That is the other struggle,
always having to push it back all the time, that other voice’ (quoted in Kovach
2009: 85).
I, too, strive to write from a position of double consciousness. As a settler art historian
who has used both art historical and anthropological theories and methods to study West
African and North American Indigenous arts, I was trained to formulate research ques-
tions that arise from the classical concerns of those Western disciplines with iconography,
style, connoisseurship, cultural difference and social reproduction, but I have also been
privileged to learn from Sierra Leonean and Great Lakes Indigenous collaborators who
ask different questions about aesthetic expression, materiality, ontology, and ethical
responsibility. I am both enabled and challenged by the tensions between Western and
Indigenous knowledge systems that have become increasingly evident in Canadian uni-
versities and museums in the early twenty-first century. I also write in a particular histor-
ical moment, in the wake of the release, in 2015, of the Report of the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Its ninety-four Calls to Action address every
sector of Canadian society including educational institutions and museums. Although
52 Journal of Material Culture 27(1)

the end results cannot be known, the report is compelling a broad-based and unprece-
dented level of response that is long overdue.5
In the middle of this transformational period in settler-Indigenous relations, the receipt
of an invitation to address the large conference entitled Art, Materiality, Representation
organized in London in 2018 by the British Museum, the Royal Anthropological
Institute, and the School of Oriental and African Studies (my alma mater) brought me
up short. The conference title recalled a series of other symposia in which I had partici-
pated during the 1990s and early 2000′ s, each designed to bring art historians and anthro-
pologists together to compare – and perhaps to reconcile – the paradigms of art and
artifact their disciplines have produced under the sign of modernity. I took the conference
organizers’ three terms – ‘art,’ ‘materiality,’ and ‘representation’ – to reference these
debates but also as a summons to define the moment we have reached in a cross–discip-
linary conversation whose terms have changed dramatically during the past few decades.
The rich and comprehensive array of panels and papers at the 2018 conference evi-
denced the contemporary porousness of the disciplinary boundaries. Art historians and
anthropologists have expanded their scope to consider world arts and their diasporic itera-
tions. The social history of art has moved from art history’s margins to its centre, and
anthropologists have re-theorized material culture and materiality as active forces in
the social world. The ongoing conversation between the disciplines was signalled by
Michael Ann Holly in a roundtable discussion on art history’s address of materiality
when she noted that although ‘the obdurate physicality of things has often been repressed
in the discipline because of its eagerness to energize some kind of meaning production’
(2013: 15), ‘anthropologists seemed to come to art historians’ aid, at first through studies
of material culture … and eventually through concepts of agency’ (2013: 16).
For practitioners of both disciplines, the term ‘representation’ codes the museum as a crit-
ical space for the public dissemination of these revised disciplinary knowledges. For a time, in
the academy, it seemed that the new field of visual studies or a reinvented visual anthropology
would dissolve the old disciplinary boundaries (Dikovitskaya 2006; Morphy and Banks
1999). At the same time, the art museum’s embrace of extended labels, videos and other
forms of contextualization and the anthropology museum’s incorporation of art museum
display styles and interventions by contemporary artists seemed to be producing a conver-
gence of museum typologies. Yet even in several new and experimental multidisciplinary
museums – Lyon’s Musée des Confluences or Antwerp’s Museum aan de Stroom, for
example – it has become clear that interdisciplinarity draws its strength from disciplinarity
(Phillips 2020; Sherman 2019). On the whole, art history and anthropology and their asso-
ciated museums have proved resistant to all attempts to erase their boundaries. As Marcus
and Myers (1995: 23) comment regarding a group of influential art historians in the vanguard
of a new art history informed by continental critical theory and British cultural studies, ‘even
those who wanted to collapse the relationship between art and life subtly depended, through
their mere participation in given art institutions, on this autonomy. As long as the possibility
of autonomy remained an inherent part not only of art discourse but also for art production,
the art world itself would be very limited in its reflexive critical ability’.
Yet despite all these promising developments, the word that kept coming to mind as I
thought about the conference invitation was ‘moot’. This word, as the Oxford English
Dictionary tells us, derives from medieval legal traditions of argument and dispute but
Phillips 53

has come to refer to an argument that has been rendered irrelevant by a changed external
environment or to a fictitious case invented to test a point. Since the nineteenth century a
moot issue has signified one ‘open to argument, debatable; uncertain, doubtful; unable to
be firmly resolved’.6 Implicit in the state of irresolution this definition describes, then, is
the challenge of acting and moving forward even when relevant questions remain open
and undecided. The connection to the issues addressed at the London conference
becomes clear, for as scholars continue to reflect on their modern paradigms, the world
with which they interact continues to change dramatically in response to the political
and cultural dynamics of decolonization and the force of new global flows and shifts
of power. Academics and museologists are challenged by members of source communi-
ties to decolonize their discourses and institutions even as the modern structures and tra-
ditions of those institutions remain in place.
Yet the new forms of encounter, collaboration, and Indigenous empowerment that are
resulting have, I argue, intruded into the old duality a third term, which I will call
Indigenous Studies. It displaces the old art-artifact debate by identifying both paradigms
as colonial impositions. The Indigenous intrusion telescopes the disciplinary dualism that
has preoccupied Western scholars for so long. The art/artifact debate that has focused the
different approaches of anthropologists and art historians for a century and a half now
falls within a domain neatly captured in a bon mot by P.G. Wodehouse (1932: 77) and
rather mischievously included in the entry for ‘moot’ by the OED’s editors: ‘We live
in an age full … of Moot Questions,’ he wrote, ‘some mooter than others’.
The big questions that arise are whether the decolonial critiques of Indigenous Studies
are leading to a new paradigm of the artistic and the material and, if so, how it is being
manifested. To answer these questions I will begin by tracing in more detail a small
genealogy of Western cross-disciplinary debates as they unfolded in several conferences
I have had the opportunity to attend. Even so admittedly personal a subset reveals the
kinds of deficits and limits that have led to the emergence of the Indigenous third
term. I will then turn to Indigenous Studies as an emergent field that resists disciplinarity.
Finally, I will test the triangulation of Indigenous Studies with the Western disciplinary
paradigms by looking at the exhibition Anishinaabeg: Art & Power, organized by
Indigenous and non-Indigenous curators for Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum (ROM)
in 2016.

Four cross-disciplinary conversations: A lineage history

My mini lineage history begins in 1992, the 500th anniversary of the arrival of
Christopher Columbus in the Americas – a year of active de-celebration by Indigenous
artists and curators. Even the annual meeting of the American Association of Art
Museum Directors was not immune to intensified pressures for revisionism and inclusiv-
ity. Invited to speak on art history and anthropology in a panel on ‘New Directions in Art
History,’ I noted art historians’ ‘renewed engagement’ with anthropology as a feature of
the ‘new art history,’ celebrated the tendencies toward disciplinary ‘convergence,’ and
stressed the complementarity of the two disciplines. Rereading, ‘Fielding Culture’
(1994), the published version of that talk, I realize that I saw this complementary
54 Journal of Material Culture 27(1)

pairing as a closed system and understood the major challenge to be cross-disciplinary

exchanges of methods – the value of anthropological fieldwork methods for art historians
and of connoisseurship, iconographic study, and qualitative evaluation for
anthropologists.
A decade later, in 2003, the Clark Art Institute devoted its annual conference to
Anthropologies of Art. The convenor, art historian Mariet Westermann (2005), invited
anthropologists and art historians who had been exploring “intersections and diver-
gences” to ‘engage in a sustained exchange about their disciplinary motivations, proto-
cols, and boundaries.’7 My recollection of that convening is of a series of excellent
speakers who largely stayed true to their disciplinary formations, often talking past
rather than to each other. The gap was epitomized by a comment made in response to
my contribution as discussant. I had shown a slide of an eighteenth-century conversation
piece by Arthur Devis hanging next door in the Clark Art Museum in which two children
present their day’s catch to their uncle. The fish sit in a basket made by a Cree woman
living in northern Canada very similar to a set of baskets now in the British Museum
that had been collected around the time the picture was painted by a naval officer explor-
ing Hudson’s Bay (Phillips 2005).8 For me the discovery of this detail opened up exciting
new postcolonial questions art historians can ask of their canonical inventory, so I was
startled when one of the speakers, an eminent art historian, began his response by remark-
ing, ‘But it’s such a bad painting!’ His intervention confirmed the priority of aesthetic
judgment and the power of the canon for art historians.9 Tim Barringer recently noted
the specific relationship of quality discriminations to postcolonial critiques when he
spoke of ‘a conspiracy of silence of sorts, which took place under cover of the notion
of “quality”. Explicit reference to questions of empire and race, so the argument went,
were only brought forth by “bad art”’ (Grant and Price 2020: 13). Reflecting on the set
of papers in the response I wrote for the publication (Phillips 2005) I came to the conclu-
sion that ‘disciplinary differences are not only alive and well, but also well worth preser-
ving,’ and that ‘the tense interface between art history and anthropology makes it a fertile
site for the production of the cognitive rewards that come from attending to contrast, slip-
page, and dissonance’ (2015: 243).
A parallel engagement between art historians and anthropologists was staged in 2006
when the Harvard Art Museums collaborated with the Peabody Museum of Archaeology
and Ethnography to organize a symposium entitled Crossing Boundaries: Art and
Anthropology Museums in Search of Common Ground. As organizers Ivan Gaskell
and Jeffrey Quilter (2007: 5) wrote, the conference was ‘part of a long-term project to
promote scholarly collaboration among the collecting entities of the university to
address world cultures’. The speakers were Indigenous and non-Indigenous, the papers
were wide ranging and lively.10 My own contribution (Phillips 2007) invoked Actor
Network Theory in order to understand the apparently contradictory tendencies of
growing hybridity and unidisciplinary resilience – and the accompanying ‘imbroglios’
(Latour 1993) – that characterized recent museum exhibits. Hopes were high that the
art and anthropology museums might be able to join forces—or at least collections—
in the new building project then being planned for Harvard’s art museums. But in the
end, and doubtless for all kinds of reasons extending well beyond the intellectual
project, no ‘museum of art-thropology’ emerged in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Phillips 55

The three art museums remained part of a separately administered complex and were
brought under a single roof, while the Peabody Museum was administratively amalga-
mated with natural history and science institutions into the Harvard Museums of
Science and Culture.
A fourth conference took place in Paris a year later, in 2007, at the recently opened
Musée du quai Branly (Price 2007). The organizers, art historian Thierry Dufréne and
anthropologist Anne-Christine Taylor, titled it simply Histoire de l’art et anthropologie,
but the title they gave the published book (2009) – Cannibalismes Disciplinaires: Quand
l’histoire de l’art et l’anthropologie se rencontrent [Disciplinary Cannibalisms: When
Art History and Anthropology Meet] – although inspired by Montaigne, evokes a kind
of Darwinian struggle for survival that surfaced in several of the papers. In one of the
keynote addresses an American art historian discussed Aby Warburg’s 1896 visit to
the American Southwest and projected Warburg’s photographs of the Hopi Snake
Dance in apparent ignorance of the widely circulated request made by the Hopi
Cultural Preservation Office more than a decade earlier that no objects, images or descrip-
tions related to Hopi ritual ceremonies be published or publically displayed.11 At the end
of the morning, a well-known anthropologist criticized quai Branly itself for the promi-
nent display of West African sculptures that, according to the collectors’ own published
texts, they had stolen from shrines in the 1930s (Leiris 1934: 81–83; Price 2009: 273–74).
If the Clark conference had brought to the fore the barrier to cross-disciplinary engage-
ment presented by the different priorities of art historians and anthropologists, the quai
Branly conference pointed to a yawning gap between both disciplines and emergent deco-
lonial politics and ethical codes. I don’t, of course, mean to imply that all art historians
have failed to respect such protocols just as I don’t suggest that anthropologists ignore
issues of aesthetic judgment. Rather, the disconnects of these conferences point both to
the different questions at the centre of each discipline’s inquiry and to a history of disre-
gard for the authority of Indigenous and source community protocols, epistemologies and
ontologies.

Indigenous studies and the disciplines

Indigenous Studies has foregrounded precisely these issues. As noted earlier, in Canada
an unprecedented period of national consciousness-raising regarding the destructive
impacts of colonization on Indigenous peoples has followed the publication in 2015 of
the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, only two years
before the country was set to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Canadian
Confederation.12 Its calls to action are addressed to every sector of Canadian society.
Number sixty-seven, directed at museums, reads: ‘We call upon the federal government
to provide funding to the Canadian Museums Association to undertake, in collaboration
with Aboriginal peoples, a national review of museum policies and best practices to deter-
mine the level of compliance with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples and to make recommendations’. The next call to action asked for
federal funding for Indigenous-initiated commemorative projects that would foster
reconciliation during the coming anniversary year. The exhibition to which I will
56 Journal of Material Culture 27(1)

shortly turn as an instantiation of Indigenous Studies approaches received some of its

funding from this source.
In its recommendations to educational institutions, the TRC focused centrally on pre-
serving and reviving Indigenous languages, stating the urgent need for ‘college degree
and diploma programmes in Aboriginal languages’. This priority is also at the heart of
Indigenous Studies. As Kovach (2009: 59) writes: ‘In tribal epistemologies and
Indigenous research frameworks one must first assert the interrelationship between
Indigenous language structure and worldview, and then the manner in which colonialism
has interfered with this dynamic. Given this history and interruption, it is no wonder that
Indigenous thought tends to dance around the sharp edges of the language binaries that
define Western methodologies’. It is too early to assess how the responses of govern-
ments, institutions and individuals will remediate Indigenous poverty, health, housing,
education, thefts of land and appropriations of cultural heritage.13 Universities and
museums are, however, stepping up smartly, responding to the TRC calls to action
with new curricula, exhibitions, and affirmative action hiring programmes.14
A longer period of change has, of course, led to this moment, as James Clifford wrote
in 2012 (Clifford 2012: 419): ‘I have come to believe that a profound shift of power rela-
tions and discursive locations was going on, and still is … .I hasten to add that decentering
doesn’t mean abolition, defeat, disappearance, or transcendence of ‘the West’—that still-
potent zone of power. But a change, uneven and incomplete, has been under way. The
ground has shifted under our feet’. Reflexive critiques of disciplines and paradigms
could not, in themselves, decentre ‘power relations’ but they were a necessary first
stage. In the twenty-first century, I would argue, we have entered a second phase in
which the focus has shifted from deconstruction to activism. If, in other words, postco-
lonial critique softened the ground, a new generation of activists is campaigning under
the decolonial banner to win actual territory.
Indigenous Studies, as a field of theory and practice, emerged out of the reflexive crit-
ical discourses of the last decades of the twentieth century. For Kovach, its research para-
digm is based on relational and holistic epistemologies, non-binary linguistic expression,
and integral practices of decolonial analysis and the betterment of Indigenous societies. In
a recent edited volume, Chris Andersen and Jean O’Brien (2016a: 2) provide a helpful
survey of its sources and methods. The subtitle of their introduction – ‘An Appeal for
Methodological Promiscuity’ – clearly signals Indigenous Studies scholars’ refusal of
disciplinarity. Rather, the field embraces a constellation of methods, theories, practices,
and ethical positions. It promotes research on and preservation of Indigenous knowledge
and affirms its authority, but it also insists on the need for ongoing critical evaluation of
colonial systems and their impacts on Indigenous societies and cultural traditions. An
Indigenous Studies orientation fosters a holistic approach to knowledge, the recognition
of collective as opposed to individual identities, the fundamental relationship of these
identities to land and place, non-linear trajectories of time, reciprocal relationships
with the ‘natural’ world, and the primary responsibility of researchers to contribute to
the revitalization and health of Indigenous societies.15
Although parallels can be drawn between Indigenous Studies and other multi- and
inter-disciplinary formations, such as twentieth-century area studies and more recent
black studies programmes, Indigenous Studies is distinctive in its insistence on
Phillips 57

conjoining and harmonizing a holistic epistemology that is both cognitive and spiritual
with a place- or land-based orientation and particular ethical practices. As a project endea-
vouring to overcome disciplinary barriers it is, perhaps, more resonant with
Actor-Network-Theory than with existing inter-disciplinary programmes because it
shares with ANT the core proposition that the ‘purifications’ attempted by the modern
Western disciplines are both impossible and dangerous (Latour 1993). Both are deeply
concerned with the environmental crisis and are committed to the integration of intellec-
tual work with ethical and political practices. Nevertheless, Indigenous Studies’ goal of
erasing bounded disciplinary spaces—of realizing a-disciplinarity – harbours a paradox.
In its current phase of development, it must be hosted and housed within pre-existing aca-
demic structures that continue to be defined by disciplines to which its faculty are often
cross-appointed and in which they have been trained. Yet the holism of Indigenous
Studies, even if it remains aspirational, aims at a higher level of integration than either
of the Western models. Its central principles of relationality and reciprocity contrast
conceptually with ANT’s mechanical model of the processes of ‘translation’ needed to
maintain effective systems linking the human, the natural, and the technological
(Latour 2005).

Anishinaabeg: Art & power – A test case

I have two reasons for choosing a museum exhibition to test the agency of Indigenous
Studies as a paradigm changing ‘third term.’ Museums are, of course, repositories of
material and other expressive culture whose incorporation into these institutions has
come to symbolize much more extensive acts of colonial appropriation and oppression.
Uniquely positioned between public space and more secluded academic precincts, they
offer strategic sites for Indigenous intervention and reclamation. More importantly for
this discussion, museums offer spatialized, immersive, and experiential environments
that can better approximate the holistic, collective, and relational approaches promoted
by Indigenous Studies than can other sites of knowledge production and communication.
Anishinaabeg: Art & Power, shown at Toronto’s ROM from June to November 2016,
realized this potential.16 The project began modestly with ethnology curator Arni
Brownstone’s plan to rotate into the First Nations galleries a small group of paintings by
late-twentieth century Anishinaabe artists. Often referred to as the ‘Woodlands School,’
these mostly young and self-taught artists had been inspired by the dramatic success of
the pioneering painter Norval Morrisseau during the 1960s.17 Until very recently, their
work has been collected primarily by anthropology museums to document the revitalization
of traditional teachings, stories, and cultural values. Brownstone, an art school graduate
who worked in high-end commercial galleries before becoming an ethnologist, had initially
shared the view of most art museums that these works did not fit the criteria for modern or
contemporary fine art. His interest had been piqued, however, when Saul Williams, one of
the artists, visited the ROM to look at collections from his Northern Ontario region.
The release of the TRC report and the desire to mark the forthcoming Canadian ses-
quicentennial led the museum to enlarge the scope of this small project, enabling it to
address the arts of the Anishinnabeg – the most populous Indigenous people in
58 Journal of Material Culture 27(1)

Ontario—more comprehensively. After a focus group established strong general interest

in the topic, the museum assigned a temporary exhibition gallery that could accommodate
three-dimensional objects and provided funding for loans.18 At Brownstone’s invitation,
Williams and Alan Corbiere joined him as guest curators. Corbiere is an Anishinaabe his-
torian, language educator and former director of the Ojibwe Cultural Foundation on
Manitoulin Island, Lake Huron. Although he had worked on small exhibitions and
served as a consultant to large museums, his role as a guest curator at the ROM
engaged him directly in the active persuasion, lobbying, trading-off, and occasional con-
frontations through which power over representation is negotiated in large museums.19 I
draw on an unpublished paper he has generously shared in which he reflects on this
process20 as well as on interviews with Brownstone and the exhibition co-designer,
Luciana Calvet.21
The Anishinaabeg are speakers of Anishinaabemowin whose traditional lands extend
north, south, east and west of the Great Lakes. Anthropologists have subdivided them
into ecologically defined culture areas – Woodlands, Plains and Subarctic – and discrete
tribes – Ojibwe, Chippewa, Potawatomi, Odawa, Algonquin, Cree, Saulteaux, Plains
Cree. Colonial governments imposed further fragmentation through confinement to
small reserves. A key aspect of late-twentieth century Anishinaabe decolonization has
been the reclamation of their own name for themselves and attendant cultural, linguistic,
and political unities. The three curators enacted this unity in diversity through their per-
sonal and professional associations with southern, northern, and western Anishinaabe ter-
ritories.22 As Corbiere puts it, they ‘were … tasked with representing and advocating for
their community at large or perhaps, their nation, the Anishinaabe’. For the ROM,
Ontario’s provincial museum, to collaborate in inscribing this fundamental unity was,
in itself, an important Indigenizing move.
From the outset, the curators addressed the time and periodization of Anishinaabe art
in an Indigenous way. They began by pulling from storage the tracings of rock paintings
made during the 1950s by amateur archaeologist Selwyn Dewdney—a large corpus that
documents a visual artistic tradition extending across the Canadian Shield from Quebec to
Saskatchewan. Dewdney’s sharing of his rock art research (1962) with Morrisseau had
catalyzed the artist’s reinvention of Anishinaabe graphic style, yet rock art is rarely
addressed in museum exhibitions (Phillips 2006). Corbiere explains: ‘We wanted to
show a continuity of form through the ages and throughout the territory. This idea of
showing reverberations of art forms and motifs in various media through time and
space would become an organizing principle of the exhibit’. Small-scale images of
rock paintings reproduced in brown were interspersed with the modern paintings hung
on the light tan walls of the gallery. As visitors followed the thematic groupings –
Beings, Dance, Ceremony, Hurt, and Travel – they were thus offered evidence of a con-
tinuity of world view, story, and values stretching back for at least 2000 years.
This outer ring of paintings established a circular geometry of movement around the
room deeply resonant with sacred cosmology. Corbiere also exploited the gallery’s east-
west orientation, marked by doorways at both ends, by positioning the reproductions of
rock art according to their geographical locations along the east-west axis of Anishinaabe
territory.23 The pictographs, Corbiere explains, ‘were not merely decorative, they are
actually situated at sites of power as well as at places where significant events occurred.
Phillips 59

Viewed from this perspective, we realized that the pictographs were representing a form
of historical consciousness.’ Corbiere’s and Williams’ intention was to enable the exhibit
to ‘transgress art as aesthetic and foray into art as heuristic.’ Similarly, Corbiere saw a
further meaning in the room’s architecture because it forms a bridge between two build-
ings and leads at one end into the Greek and Roman exhibits. It served, in his phrase, as a
‘conceptual bridge’ between Indigenous and museum communities.
Luciana Calvet had not previously designed an exhibit on an Indigenous topic, but
her interest was caught at her first meeting with the curators. Speaking first in
Anishinaabemowin, Corbiere and Williams moved into a discussion which, in her
words, was ‘so different from any other project … really refreshing and inspiring’. She
comments that although chronological ordering is favoured by many curators to
convey ‘a cumulative knowledge experience,’ it ‘really chokes an exhibit and chokes
the material’. For her, the circle and the four cardinal directions are ‘dynamic,’ allowing
the body to move through space in a ‘non-random way’ that leads to a ‘joy of discovery.’
As Calvet was reading up on Anishinaabe world view, the three curators were beginning
to conceptualize the exhibition as a ‘three-dimensional story.’ All were in agreement that
they wanted to get away from linearity and to create a ‘free flowing space’ and fought
successfully to have a wall removed that stood in the way of this goal.
For Corbiere and Williams, circularity and the east-west axis carried critical cultural
meaning because they reproduced the orientation of Anishinaabe ceremonial lodges,
which are centred on the four directions, and reference the spiritual powers of the man-
idoog residing in the four quarters. Initially, however, their efforts to incorporate
Anishinaabe principles of colour, order, and design seemed not to be surviving their
journey through the museum’s various departments, and Corbiere’s frustration brought
him close to leaving the project. At that critical moment Calvet circulated her schematic
floor plan. (Figure 1) As he writes, ‘I looked at it, smiled, and realized that some of my
suggestions filtered through and that this exhibit had potential.’ He saw that,‘though in a
square room, the circular motion of Anishinaabe ceremony was invoked, while still being
legible to visitors accustomed to the left to right order of reading.’
Calvet’s design was compelling in its clarity and rigour. It laid out three concentric
zones of display: the modern paintings mounted around the outer walls alongside render-
ings of the ancient rock art, an inner ring of full height cases displaying a remarkable
array of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century beaded clothing, and, holding the
centre, a rectangular platform displaying ritual and ceremonial arts collected during the
early contact period and the nineteenth-century heyday of salvage ethnography.
(Figure 2) Works by contemporary artists were introduced throughout, emphasizing
the continuities linking Anishinaabe pasts with the present. The design brilliantly trans-
lated the circular movement and temporal unities fundamental to Anishinaabe cosmology
and historical consciousness into the rectilinear structures of traditional museum build-
ings. In place of the linear and chronological or thematic and sequential design
approaches conventional in such exhibitions (including those mounted at the ROM), it
enabled the viewer to experience an Anishinaabe concept of time and movement. It struc-
tured ancestral and contemporary temporalities, cosmic spatial zones, and the surface
geography of the earth so that visitors experienced them as relational, co-existent, and
traversable. The coherence of curatorial concepts and design illustrated Audrey
60 Journal of Material Culture 27(1)

Figure 1. Luciana Calvet, exhibition plan for Anishinaabeg: Art and Power, courtesy of the Royal
Ontario Museum, ROM Creative © ROM, 2017.

Hawthorn’s dictum—often repeated to me when I worked at the UBC Museum of

Anthropology she had founded—that a successful exhibition is sixty percent curatorial
and sixty percent design.
Other strategies insisted on the historical human presence. Brownstone designed the
mount that allowed the heavy beaded bandolier bags to be hung on black body forms
so that they could be displayed as they had been worn. At Corbiere’s urging enlarged his-
toric photographs were juxtaposed with related clothing ensembles throughout. As a
reviewer wrote of one case: ‘The [photographic] image of Sitting White Eagle …
loosens the museum’s hold on his habit as mere artifact and resituates it in a human
context. It is the shift from object to subject, thing to being’.24 (Figure 3)
Anishinaabeg: Art and Power resisted recent museological conventions in another sur-
prising way. Among the wampums, war clubs and quilled deerskin bags on the central
platform the curators included several culturally sensitive medicine effigies to which
access has long been restricted. ‘We knew we were pushing that kind of envelope,’
Brownstone comments, but adds, ‘There’s a whole generation of young people
growing up who feel much more open about those kinds of objects’. Corbiere and
Williams also had new generations in mind—especially the large and growing urban
Anishinaabe community in the Greater Toronto Area. Corbiere has stated these goals
clearly:

The exhibit development was informed by the aspirations and actions of many Anishinaabe
who are learning more about their traditional heritage … we wanted the exhibit to be used as
a teaching tool for urban Anishinaabe people. As curators … Saul and I considered this
exhibit to be geared to our own people, to teach them about the ROM collections, as well
Phillips 61

Figure 2. General view, Anishinaabeg: Art and Power, 2017. Photo: Brian Boyle, Courtesy of the
Royal Ontario Museum © ROM 2017.15746.40.

as to teach them about some of the history, traditions and stories conveyed through the
artwork … we wanted to show the richness, beauty and complexity of our culture as visually
expressed through art. 25

Here again the priority given to a socially constructive educational goal accords with the
ethical protocols of Indigenous Studies research methodologies (as well as with those of
Participatory Action Research). As Kovach (2009: 82) writes: ‘decolonizing theory and
methods that work in tandem with tribal epistemologies shape-shift the traditional social
relations of research. Such methods act to give power back to the participant and the par-
ticipant’s community’.
Given the curators’ clear and present goals and primary commitment to members of
Indigenous communities, it is all the more striking and hopeful that Anishinaabeg: Art
and Power proved to be extremely popular with non-Indigenous visitors. That it did so
is a testimony to the successful alignment of multiple curatorial and design strategies.
The exhibition was compelling both on the cognitive level, through the responses
evoked by interpretive and historical labels, and on the aesthetic level, though responses
elicited both by historical ‘belongings’ not originally made as art works but, nonetheless,
with practiced skills that realized form and affect, and by modern and contemporary
works created within the Western paradigm of art to be hung on walls and displayed
in museums.
While Corbiere stresses the curators’ freedom to define the exhibition’s themes he is
also open about his disappointments. Brownstone prevailed in wanting to feature the
62 Journal of Material Culture 27(1)

Figure 3. Nineteenth-century Anishinaabe dress as exhibited in Anishinaabeg: Art and power.

Photo courtesy of Arni Brownstone. Outfit courtesy of Minnesota Historical Society Collections
and historical photo of Kaydu-egwonay-aush (Julius Brown) courtesy of Smithsonian National
Anthropological Archives.
Phillips 63

visually dramatic Western Anishinaabe beaded bandolier bags as ‘travelling objects’

that demonstrate patterns of Anishinaabe movement, migration and trade. As a result,
quillwork on bark, a major artistic genre produced in Corbiere’s own eastern Great
Lakes community was edited out. In accordance with common museum wisdom, simpli-
city won over complexity. Both Corbiere and Brownstone speak forcefully about the
power differentials between guest and staff curators that result from the need to be on
the spot day by day to negotiate with different museum specialists the many decisions,
large and small, that impact the final representation. In light of this reality Canadian
museums are currently engaged in strenuous campaigns of affirmative action whose
goal is to hire Indigenous curators into permanent positions. As this comes to be, the para-
digm shift that occurred in Anishinaabeg: Art and Power will develop further. It will,
however, retain the hybridity inherent in the triangulation of Indigenous Studies with
the art and artifact traditions built into the physical fabric of the museum. The
Indigenous curators and scholars who take the helm are trained in the Western disciplines
and draw on them in their decolonial work.
Two images I came across while writing this article seem to me to capture this histor-
ical and present reality. In one, made around 1913, an unnamed Sioux schoolchild drew a
past battle scene in a traditional but Westernized graphic style. At the top of the page defi-
nitions of anthropology and zoology are penned in clear cursive script, probably by a
white teacher (Figure 4). In a second image, entitled Dominion, made by
Kwakwaka’wakw artist Mary Anne Barkhouse, a wolf moves forward determinedly
despite the overwritten Biblical text declaring man’s absolute domination over nature26
(Figure 5). Both images instantiate the irreversible process of colonial inscription and
the equally long history of Indigenous resistance. The child and the professionally
trained artist use Western modes of representation, both anthropological and artistic, to
affirm, respectively, Indigenous historical memory and a non-binary concept of nature.
The new museum paradigm, I have no doubt, will inhabit and resist modern modes of
museological inscription in much this way.
As noted earlier, the decolonial energies that informed Anishinaabeg: Art and Power
have, like all such projects, local and temporal specificity. The ROM has housed and dis-
played archaeological and ethnographic collections since it opened in 1914. Its ethno-
graphic exhibits largely conformed to standard modernist conventions until the
late-twentieth century when, along with other North American museums, they began
to respond to the reflexive critiques being developed within anthropology and other dis-
ciplines. In 2005 the museum opened its new Gallery of Canada: First Peoples, developed
through close consultation with six Indigenous advisors.27 It features rotating modular
displays that present specific collections and collecting histories, frequently curated in
collaboration with Indigenous communities and individuals (Adams 2020; Nicks 2003,
2013; Willmott 2008). One corner of this large gallery focuses on modern and contem-
porary Indigenous art.
The concentric ordering and intermingling of art forms created across thousands of
years in Anishinaabeg: Art and Power thus contrasted with past and present First
Nations installations at the ROM. As guest curator Alan Corbiere wrote:
“Ethnographic exhibitions oftentimes add contemporary works as a discrete, secondary
section. This is not the case with Anishinaabeg: Art and Power …. Most exhibitions
64 Journal of Material Culture 27(1)

Figure 4. Sioux child, drawing, collected by Episcopalian missionary A. McGreevey Beede,

1913–14 at Fort Yates, North Dakota (Edward Ayer Collection, Courtesy of Newberry Library,
Chicago).

have a linear storyline, whereas ours plays out like a musical refrain with neither begin-
ning nor end’ (Brownstone et al. 2017: 26). A rigorous assessment of this and other dif-
ferences would require a more extensive and systematic comparison with the ROM’s
history than space allows. It would also be illuminating to compare exhibitions produced
through parallel movements of decolonization in progress in other settler societies (e.g.
Lonetree 2012; McCarthy 2011), for global Indigenous networks have grown and
become increasingly active in the twenty-first century, ensuring cross-fertilization in
both museological and artistic communities and putting increasing pressure on modernist
paradigms. Arguably, for example, the foundational formulation of Indigenous Studies,
much cited in Canada, was Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing
Methodologies (Tuhiwai-Smith 1999).
Not everyone, of course, will agree that incorporating aspects of Indigenous Studies
approaches accomplishes the desired paradigm shift. Influential Indigenous scholars
have mounted sharp and important critiques of the collaborative processes that have
become established in Canada and elsewhere. Glen Coulthard (2014) denounces ‘inclu-
sivity’ and the politics of recognition as neoliberal solutions; Zoe Todd (2016) argues that
the ‘ontological turn’ is yet another appropriative strategy, and Eve Tuck and K. Wayne
Phillips 65

Figure 5. Mary Anne Barkhouse, Dominion (2011) photograph, 91.4 × 121.9 cm. Digital
enlargement displayed in Ottawa in 2018 as part of Resilience, The National Billboard Exhibition
Project.

Yang (2012) write that decolonization in the cultural sphere assuages white guilt and
evades actual returns of stolen lands. While their arguments remind us of real dangers
entailed in the work of decolonization, they are, if read literally, defeatist in their rejection
of the potential for incremental change toward ‘indigenization’ within institutions. We
cannot undo the historical fact of colonization or the shared legacies of the modernity
we all today inhabit together. Recent experiences in Canada and elsewhere do,
however, show that power can be transferred within institutions in meaningful ways
that allow individuals and communities to work together to realize projects they identify
as useful and, in so doing, co-create representational modes that can better serve a
new era.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.

Funding
The author’s research on Indigenous arts and museum representation has been supported by grants
from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Pariticpation in the confer-
ences discussed here was made possible by funding from the sponsoring institutions.
66 Journal of Material Culture 27(1)

ORCID iD
Ruth B. Phillips https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2019-6448

Notes
1. Wodehouse 1932: 77. Quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary online https://www-oed-om.proxy.
library.carleton.ca/view/Entry/122014?isAdvanced=false&result=4&rskey=MyoAf6&, accessed
April 2018.
2. Among settler societies, New Zealand/Aotearoa has particularly strong parallels with Canada
and has generated important theoretical and institutional models (Smith 1999, McCarthy
2011).
3. See for example multi-part articles that appeared in Museumskunde between 1907 and 1910 by
Otto Lauffer, “The Historical Museum: Its Character, Its Work, and How It Differs from
Museums of Art and Applied Arts” and Oswald Richter, “On the Ideals and Practical Tasks
of Ethnographic Museums,” translated by Annika Fisher (Miller 2020).
4. https://www.queensu.ca/ctl/teaching-support/decolonizing-and-indigenizing/what-decolonization
indigenization, accessed 7 January 2021. See the useful discussion from which this definition is
taken on the Queen’s University Centre for Teaching and Learning website and two of its key
sources, Coulthard 2014 and Tuck and Yang 2012.
5. The report investigated the history and impact of the enforced removal of Indigenous children
to missionary-run residential schools between the late-nineteenth and late-twentieth centuries
and made 94 Calls to Action needed to repair the damage done by assimilationist laws and poli-
cies. http://caid.ca/DTRC.html , accessed 20 July 2019.
6. https://www-oed-com.proxy.library.carleton.ca/view/Entry/122014?isAdvanced=false&result=
4&rskey=MyoAf6&, accessed 20 July 2019.
7. The participants were art historians David Freedberg, Hans Belting, Ikem Stanley Okoye, Janet
Catherine Berlo, Suzanne Preston Blier, Sarah Brett-Smith, and Jonathan Hay; and the anthro-
pologists were Franceso Pellizzi, Howard Morphy, Steve Bourget, Anna Grimshaw, and Shelly
Errington. I served as respondent and my detailed comments on the conference are published,
along with the papers, in Westermann ed. 2005.
8. The painting is entitled Richard Moreton, Esq, of Tackley with his Nephew and Niece John and
Susanna Weyford. 1757. Clark Art Museum 2001.1.6 https://www.clarkart.edu/Art-Pieces/
1368, accessed 21 July 2019.
9. This brief exchange clarified for me the divergent agendas of postmodernism and
postcolonialism, for the remark was made by Hans Belting, the author and editor of
widely read books arguing that the postmodern was bringing about ‘the end of art history’
(Belting 1987) and urging the importance of world art history (Belting, Buddensieg and
Weibel 2013).
10. The speakers were museologists and academics: William Fash, Thomas Lentz, Marla Berns,
Homi Bhabha, Christopher Brown, Anne d’Alleva, Diana Fane, Christian Feest, Michael
Herzfeld, Viola König, Richard Kurin, Steven Lavine, Natalia Majluf, Mary Malloy, Moyo
Okediji, Francesco Pellizzi, Jeffrey Quilter, Jolene Rickard, Kay Kaufman Shelemay,
Ngahuia Te Awkotuku, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Irene Winter, and myself.
11. The images and the discussion of Warburg were omitted from the published version of this talk.
12. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada was formed as a result of the Indian
Residential Schools Settlement Agreement with a ‘mandate to learn the truth and what hap-
pened in the residential schools and to inform all Canadians about what happened in the
schools’ and expanded its mission to recommend broad processes of restitution and healing
Phillips 67

for many aspects of colonial oppression. http://www.trc.ca/about-us.html, accessed 7 January

2021.
13. The Canadian federal government took a major step toward implementing UNDRIP in
December 2020 when it introduced Bill C-15 – the United Nations Declaration on the
Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act. A central provision requires the government to ‘take all
measures necessary to ensure the laws of Canada are consistent with the Declaration’. The
bill received royal assent in June 2021. https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/declaration/about-
apropos.html, accessed 11 January 2021.
14. Such projects are highly sensitive to electoral politics, as demonstrated by the fate of the
plans made in 2016 in response to the TRC report by the Liberal government of
Kathleen Wynne to introduce into the province of Ontario’s elementary and secondary
school curricula accounts of residential schooling and Indigenous historical perspectives.
These plans were immediately cancelled in July 2018 following the election of
Conservatives under the leadership of Premier Doug Ford. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/
toronto/ontario-education-truth-and-reconciliation-commission-trc-1.4739297, accessed April
18, 2021.
15. This agenda is not new. Rather, Indigenous artists and others have been promoting it for many
years. In a 1974 essay, for example, artist Jimmie Durham wrote: ‘When new things come into
our circle, it expands. When new things come into Western society another square is added’
(Quoted in Horton 2016: 25).
16. The exhibition opened on June 19, 2017 and closed on November 17, 2017.
17. Interview with Arni Brownstone and Luciana Calvet at the Royal Ontario Museum, 27 April
2018.
18. Alan Corbiere, “Permutations of Art and Power: A Reflective Review of Anishinaabeg: Art
and Power” Unpublished Paper, April 2018 Draft. All statements by Corbiere quoted in this
article come from this paper.
19. Corbiere was a consultant to the 2013 exhibition Before and After the Horizon:
Anishinaabe Arts of the Great Lakes, co-organized by the National Museum of the
American Indian and the Art Gallery of Ontario. At the same time that he was curating
Anishinaabeg: Art and Power he was also serving as a member of the Indigenous Advisory
Committee for the Canadian Museum of History’s new History Hall. (The author also con-
sulted on these projects and has been working with Corbiere since 2006 to develop the
Great Lakes Research Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Arts and Cultures [GRASAC]
and the GRASAC Knowledge Sharing Database of Great Lakes material and expressive
culture.)
20. Alan Corbiere, “Permutations of Art and Power: A Reflective Review of Anishinaabeg: Art
and Power” Unpublished Paper, April 2018 Draft.
21. Interview with Arni Brownstone and Luciana Calvet at the Royal Ontario Museum, 2 April
2018. Calvet worked with co-designer, Domenica Sforza, who was responsible for the
graphic component. All citations from Calvet and Brownstone regarding the design of the
exhibition are from this interview.
22. Brownstone is not Indigenous. A native of Saskatchewan, his research has aimed to foster
recognition of the cultural continuities between Anishinaabe peoples who moved west from
the Great Lakes into the Canadian prairies.
23. The full development of this component, planned at one stage to include an interactive map of
rock art sites, was not realized.
24. Murray Whyte, “At the ROM, Anishinaabe art, but whose power?” Toronto Star, 19 June 2017
https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/visualarts/2017/06/19/at-the-rom-anishinaabe-art-but-
whose-power.html (accessed April 2018).
68 Journal of Material Culture 27(1)

25. The curators contacted traditional knowledge holders but did not receive replies. They did
receive permission to show one recently discovered figure.from Walpole Island from that com-
munity’s cultural officer.
26. The image was enlarged and exhibited as an outdoor billboard in Ottawa during the summer of
2018 as part of Resilience, The National Billboard Exhibition Project, curated by Lee-Ann
Martin. This project was a response to Call to Action #79 of the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission Report:’integration of Indigenous history, heritage values, and memory practices
into Canada’s national heritage and history’. and received funding from New Chapter: 2017
and Beyond, a Canada Council grant program established to fund such projects. Barkhouse
has written of the image: ‘Counter to some depictions of the wolf as a ravening menace or a
noble savage, she maintains a somewhat contemplative demeanour. Secure in her position
as a sovereign entity, she continues on her way … a path that is marked by self-determination
and strength, characteristics she has both learned, and earned, as the matriarch of the pack.’
https://resilienceproject.ca/en/artists/mary-anne-barkhouse, accessed 13 August 2019.
27. The Gallery was renamed the Daphne Cockwell Gallery dedicated to First Peoples Art and Culture
https://www.rom.on.ca/en/exhibitions-galleries/galleries/world-cultures/daphne-cockwell-gallery-
dedicated-to-first-peoples-art-culture, accessed 18 April 2021.

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