Virtual Roundtable Series Indigenizing the Museum: Voices, Stories, and Languages July 22nd, 2020
“to be able to play with the object in its highest sense, is the key to stirring up these memories and songs, and the procedures and protocols around their use”
(Dr. Bonnie Devine)“Editing the digital material is like beading and had the same resonance, the same effect”
(Dr. Bonnie Devine)
On July 22nd, 2020, Wapatah: Centre for Indigenous Visual Knowledge hosted its second Virtual Roundtable as part of the Virtual Platform for Indigenous Art (VPIA) project and its latest Indigenizing the Museum event series.
Inviting back Bonnie Devine, Stephen Inglis, and Arni Brownstone of the first Roundtable, Language, Vernacular, and Lexicon, this discussion, moderated by Gerald McMaster, focused on reexamining the institutional language which surrounds Indigenous artwork with Indigenous knowledge and perspective in mind. This Roundtable expanded upon the previous discussion and focused on how Indigenous language and visual ways of knowing can reconceptualize Indigenous art in an institutional setting, further analyzing the relationship between community and museum.
The VPIA is a custom digital platform currently in development by Wapatah at OCAD University, designed to facilitate Indigenous access and contributions to Indigenous artworks in museum and gallery collections around the world. Using a wiki-style approach, the VPIA allows institutional artwork records to be transformed into living documents that integrate Indigenous knowledge, language, and protocols.
The Roundtable Series, Indigenizing the Museum, has been developed as a way to increase Indigenous community and institutional awareness of and involvement in the VPIA as a resource and a knowledge building tool.
Our Guest Panelists
Bonnie Devine is the Founding Chair of OCAD University’s Indigenous Visual Culture Program, and in that role has developed curriculum, taught classes, built ancillary programming, and developed student services to support OCAD’s growing population of Aboriginal students and provide a critical Indigenous perspective within the art and design academy. She is an installation artist, curator, writer, and educator, and a member of the Serpent River First Nation of Northern Ontario (Anishinaabe/Ojibwa).
Arni Brownstone is the assistant curator of Plains Culture and the curator responsible for the ethnographic collections from the Americas at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto, Ontario. His scholarly focus is on the visual culture of the northern Plains with a special interest in Plains pictographic painting.
Stephen Inglis served as Executive Director of the Aanischaaukamikw Cree Cultural Institute from 2010 until 2015 and previously worked as a researcher, curator and then Director-General of Research and Collections at the Canadian Museum of Civilization and has taught both anthropology and art history at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario. He continues to work on his research, publication and teaching, lecturing at universities and participating and organizing conferences internationally.
Wapatah Team
Dr. Gerald McMaster
Dr. Michael Rattray
Natalja Chestopalova
Brittany Bergin
Mariah Meawasige
Rezvan Boostani
Yiyi Shao
Maya Filipp
Panya Espinal Clark
Alessia Pignotti
Jananda Lima