Podcast appearances and mentions of colton boushie

On this episode of the podcast, Hilary Young and Robert Danay are joined by constitutional litigator and self-styled "Blackademic," Joshua Sealy-Harrington. The discussion primarily centred on the recent decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in R. v. Chouhan, which was a constitutional challenge to Bill C-75, a law that removed the ability of an accused (or a prosecutor) to remove potential jurors peremptorily. This law was passed in the aftermath of Gerald Stanley's controversial acquittal in the murder of Colton Boushie, a 22-year old Indigenous man in Saskatchewan. Joshua represented the intervener BC Civil Liberties Association in Chouhan. The discussion also touched on the recent decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in Fraser v. Canada (Attorney General), 2020 SCC 28, which was a constitutional challenge to an aspect of the RCMP's statutory pension scheme that disproportionately affected women. It was the first decision in which the Court found an unjustifiable breach of the right to equality in s. 15 of the Charter on the basis of "adverse impact" discrimination. In obiter dicta, Hilary recommended the songs of Tom Lehrer, which the math professor/satirical musician recently released into the public domain. Rob recommended the CBC show You Can't Ask That! and Joshua recommended The Alchemy of Race and Rights by Patricia J. Williams. Find us on Twitter and Facebook!

In 2018, the public outcry around the Gerald Stanley case, where a white farmer was acquitted in the killing of Colton Boushie, a young Indigenous man, paved the way for the creation of Bill C-75. It's legislation meant to address racism in the jury selection process. But some say it actually does the opposite. The dispute made its way to the country's highest court this week. And while the court upheld the law, opinions remain divided on its usefulness. Today, we hear from two lawyers with different points of view on this jury reform legislation. Peter Thorning and Caitlyn Kasper both intervened in this week's hearings. Thorning represented the Canadian Association for Black Lawyers, and Kasper represented Aboriginal Legal Services.

Season 1, Episode 13Tasha Hubbard: Telling Indigenous StoriesTasha is an award-winning Cree filmmaker. Her documentaries primarily focus on social issues faced by Indigenous people in Canada. In 2004, her first solo project, the documentary Two Worlds Colliding, won a Gemini Award. It looked at starlight tours– a practice where Saskatoon police would abandon Indigenous men in freezing winter conditions.And Tasha's most recent film, nîpawistamâsowin: We will Stand Up, tells the tragic story of the Colton Boushie case. It's been receiving positive reviews and was named the Best Canadian Feature at the 2019 Hot Docs Film Festival where it opened the festival and made its premiere. Most recently, it won the Ted Rogers Best Feature Length Documentary Award at the 2020 Canadian Screen Awards.In this episode:We hear about how Tasha got her start in the industry, the story behind Two Worlds Colliding, and the impact it had on her career and those around her. Next, we hear about the Colton Boushie case, the storytelling decisions behind nîpawistamâsowin: We will Stand Up, and the premiere of the documentary. After that, Tasha explains her goals and experiences as a filmmaker, the relationships that are developed between filmmakers, and her current projects. Finally, we hear Tasha's three tips for starting out in the film industry.Links: Birth of a Family nîpawistamâsowin: We will Stand Up Two Worlds Colliding 7 minutes Big Bear

This episode is the first part of a three-part series on “Homelands and histories.” In this episode, Dr. Dylan Miner—an artist, scholar and activist who teaches at Michigan State University—discusses his work in relation to land use, cultural heritage, and indigenous activism. Miner identifies as Wiisaakodewinini, or Métis, a person of mixed ancestry with ties to indigenous communities in the U.S. and Canada. Transcript:   Jolie Sheffer:                          Welcome to the BG Ideas podcast, a collaboration between the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society and the School of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University. I'm Jolie Scheffer, an associate professor of English and American culture studies and the director of ICS. This is the first episode of a three-part series entitled Homelands and Histories, in which we talked to people making big impacts on local communities through their work on land use and cultural heritage. Jolie Sheffer:                          The word homeland can evoke comfortable feelings of patriotism or cultural identity, but it is also used to justify expulsion or even genocide. Similarly, the word histories is meant to call attention to the many points of conflict, debate, erasure of violence, and silencing that accompany efforts to describe and interpret the past. Today, we are joined by Dr. Dillon A. T. Miner, an artist, scholar, and activist, who identifies as Wiisaakodewinini or Metis, a native person of mixed ancestry with ties to indigenous communities in the US and Canada. Jolie Sheffer:                          Dylan is an adjunct curator of indigenous art at the Michigan State University Museum as well as the founder of the Justseeds artists collective and a board member of the Michigan Indian Education Council. He recently commenced the Bootaagaani-minis Drummond Island Land Reclamation Project, a de-colonial initiative to acquire land and establish a cultural center for Metis, whose ancestors were forced to leave the island during the War of 1812. Dylan is also the director of American Indian and indigenous studies at Michigan State University and an associate professor of transcultural studies in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State. Jolie Sheffer:                          He's the author of the book Creating Aztlan: Chicano Art, Indigenous Sovereignty, and Lowriding Across Turtle Island, in which he shows that Chicano art needs to be understood in the context of indigenous history, anti-colonial struggle, and Native-American studies. I'm very pleased to welcome him to BGSU as a part of ICS's 2018 Spring Speaker Series. Thanks so much for being here. Dr. Dylan Miner:                 Thanks for having me. Jolie Sheffer:                          One of the things that we're interested in at ICS is discussing the relationship between different kinds of knowledge and different modes of activism, so scholarship, art, grassroots organizing. Can you start us out by telling us a bit about your particular path of negotiating those three? What set you out into trying to do all three? Dr. Dylan Miner:                 Sure. So I kind of come into the work I do. I grew up in punk rock circles and kind of crusty anarchist, Zeen-making circles. Much of the work I do kind of emerges from that space. I also, as you said, I'm a Wiisaakodewinini or a Metis person, and one of the Cree words for Metis is [foreign language 00:02:57]. That's a Cree word which means the people who own themselves are the people without bosses. Dr. Dylan Miner:                 So much of the work I do thinks about the ways of dismantling hierarchies in all of its forms. So I don't see a distinction necessarily between the scholarly work I do, the community-based work, the arts practice, or even kind of the familial and community work I do outside of or in spite of the institution or university. The more I get involved in various projects, the more I see all of them intermingling and intertwined into a holistic whole. So kind of what I'm doing, say with the Bootaagaani-minis Land Reclamation Project is not that much different as with what I'm doing say in the pedagogical practices in the classroom, working with the urban indigenous youth and the Native Kids Ride Bike Project, Anishnaabensag Biimskowebshkigewag. To me, they're all intertwined and all part of the same holistic way of thinking about building a better and more socially-just world. Jolie Sheffer:                          So how do you then decide kind of what the praxis is that goes with the project, right? Because your audience are going to differ depending on which mode you're working in. So when you're taking on a new project, how do you decide which path or paths to follow? Dr. Dylan Miner:                 Sure. Part of the reason I went to graduate school in art history was because I wanted to think about the ways... I had gone to art school for a year. I had gone to the College for Creative Studies in Detroit for a year and dropped out, partially because I felt that art school wasn't giving me some of the larger social or cultural worldviews to understand more engaged making of work. So I kind of went to graduate school in studying the history of art, particularly focusing on arts of the Americas, kind of indigenous, and Mestizo, or Metis practices throughout this hemisphere as a way to inform my own practice. Dr. Dylan Miner:                 The further I get away from needing to write academic and scholarly texts, the less I do. I felt there's a very colonial way of framing arguments that exist within academic writing. Part of the reason I've been writing more creative nonfiction, more poetically is because I think that engages with the themes I'm engaging within a much more nuanced and way that actually matches the work itself. Dr. Dylan Miner:                 So when I write now, much of what I try to write, I like to think about ways that the form of the writing can actually reproduce the ideas within it. I think that when I'm engaged in creative practices, whether it's something like The Elders Say We Don't Visit Anymore, which emerged in conversations with retired Ojibwe auto workers. So I started to employ that, what I started to call the methodology of visiting based on what they'd shared, in all aspects of what I do and what I've been doing. So I started thinking about, "What would it mean to slow down, to actually engage more intimately and more critically in all moments, in all practices that I'm engaged in?" Jolie Sheffer:                          You've worked with a wide variety of media in your art. You've done silk screening to building a decorating bicycles. You've talked about the pennant as a form. Can you talk about some of those examples, and how you selected that particular form, and how that helped convey the thematics that you were interested in? Dr. Dylan Miner:                 Sure. So I came up. I used to identify as a printmaker. I would make prints, and that's what I would do oftentimes relief prints, woodblock, and linoleum block prints. More recently, maybe the last decade or so, I've identified it as an artist who engages in projects. I think that in some ways, it comes from those conversations with elders where I'm at a place and I think that there's something liberatory about arts and creative practice. There was an interview or a small essay I read, I think it was in e-flux a number of years ago by the Mexican curator, Cuauhtemoc where he said that contemporary galleries were one of the last places for radical politics left. While I don't fully believe or agree with Medina on that point, I have some commitment to understanding and thinking about art as significant and important. Dr. Dylan Miner:                 So when I engage in projects now, I just have ideas and begin to call them artistic projects, call that a project. So for instance, my grandfather's grandmother was an herbalist. She was known for particular forms of herbal medicines. That's knowledge that didn't get to my generation, or my father's generation, or my grandfathers, or grandparents generation. So what I'm interested in doing is, "Okay, how can we frame that as a particular form of project and move forward with it in that way?" So many of the projects that come to begin there, "What is a knowledge form or practice I'd like to learn, and how can I, as an artist, as a Wiisaakodewinini person, how can I engage in that?" Dr. Dylan Miner:                 So sometimes it takes the form of print. Sometimes it takes the form of community collaborations. There's been lots of conversations in the last number of years about what people call social practice. There's lots of critiques of social practice. How does this all intertwine together? Sometimes it's particular forms. Sometimes it's conceptual. Jolie Sheffer:                          You talked about sort of the elders, but you've also done a lot of work with children and youth. Could you talk to us about some of those projects and why you think that's a particularly important audience to engage with? Dr. Dylan Miner:                 Sure. I do a lot of workshops with youth, primarily with indigenous youth, but also lots of urban youth, and rural youth, Latino youth, Chicano youth in the U.S., Canada, [Bit-Wasame 00:08:27] communities in Northern Scandinavia, [inaudible 00:08:29] indigenous communities in Australia, and to some extent in Latin America as well. As somebody who's interested in weird stuff, who's interested in certain kinds of punk, and hip hop, and certain artistic practices, and the creation of alternative social institutions, many of the collaborations with youth come from that space. So Anishnaabensag Biimskowebshkigewag, Native Kids Ride Bikes comes from wanting to interact with youth and have them interact with fluent speaking Ojibwe elders. Dr. Dylan Miner:                 So in Lansing, Michigan, we have some of the largest numbers of fluent Anishinaabeg speakers in the state of Michigan, but on the U.S. side of the border. But there was a disconnect between them and youth. So building bikes became an intentional time to gather people together around a particular thing of doing a doing and making. If in the end, people only learned how to make a bike, great. But it hopefully became something more than that. Jolie Sheffer:                          You're talking about the sort of colonial forms that so much of knowledge production in its institutionalized ways operates. So it's really interesting to hear you talk about these projects that are designed to sort of function outside of those frameworks. How do you in your own workshops and practice work to get outside of that habit of the kind of colonialist resource extraction of you go in or you're brought in, and it's like, "Now, you're going to be our native informant"? Then, everyone goes back to doing things the way they always did them. Dr. Dylan Miner:                 So my partner is Estrella Torrez who runs a project in Lansing called the Indigenous Youth Empowerment Program, IYEP, which is a native youth program. She co-directs with some friends of hers. She also coordinates a project with Latino youth called Nuestros Cuentos, which is Writes Stories with Youth. But one of those things is that she develops is this idea of kind of reverse resource extraction. What does it mean to be inside institutions within the university? In what ways can we extrapolate and build upon the resources and relationships we have in institutions to benefit communities, particularly communities we're a part of, but also communities we might not be a part of? How can we make those benefit communities, particularly communities of color, indigenous communities, and other communities, immigrant communities, et cetera? Dr. Dylan Miner:                 So I do a lot of work against resource extraction, anti-mining stuff, anti-pipeline stuff. So one question I've been asking in thinking through is, "What is the opposite of extraction? What would that look like? What is the opposite of actually mining and/or having pipelines for fossil fuels? What would that look like?" Just as a rhetorical question, "What would that look like for those of us in places who have access to particular resources? How can we kind of reverse those pipelines?" Jolie Sheffer:                          Your book is on Chicano art and movements, and you also work on indigenous Metis art. So can you provide an overview of some of those histories and convergences? Dr. Dylan Miner:                 Yeah. I'm really interested in the detribalized to histories that happen at both the intersections of both settler-colonial nation-state borders, whether it's the U.S.-Canada border or the U.S.-Mexico border. I grew up as a white-coated, indigenous person in the state of Michigan in a community that had a migrant farmworker community, a Chicano, and Mexican-American, and Mexican farmworker community and from an early age was seeing the linkages between the Metis histories of the Great Lakes, and the plains, and prairies of the U.S.-Canada border lands and some of the Chicano or Mexican-American forms of indigeneity that you see in Texas in New Mexico. Dr. Dylan Miner:                 My partner, her family, comes from Genizaro communities. Genizaros are folks in New Mexico and Texas that were basically taken detribalized indigenous folks that were then kind of put into servitude for Spanish settlers. So thinking about the ways that both colonial projects happen, whether it's the U.S. colonial project, the Canadian colonial project, the Mexican colonial project, and what they do to indigenous folks and to detribalized a non-recognized indigenous folks. So in that book, in particular, I look at Chicano or Mexican-American artistic practices after 1968 in relationship to a concept called Aztlan. Aztlan is the [Chica 00:12:54] or Nahua origin story that before the so-called Aztecs founded Tenochtitlan, or what is now Mexico City, they came from this cave on an Island. That place was called Aztlan. During the 1960s, during the Chicano power era, activists began to talk about the U.S. Southwest as that location. Dr. Dylan Miner:                 So one of the things I articulate in that book is thinking about Chicanos or Mexican-American folks as an indigenous nation and as a nation of movement, and what does it mean to slowly move across land? So using the metaphor of lowriding, whether it's lowriding in cars or lowriding in bikes that is, we all know lowriders. Some say they started in Espanola, New Mexico, some say they started in East Los Angeles. Either way, whatever the origin story is, it's an anti-capitalist form of movement. We think of muscle cars, we think of the automobile. I grew up in Michigan, kind of the birthplace of the automobile. That's about getting places quickly. Dr. Dylan Miner:                 But when you lowride through place, you intimately know the territory, begin to talk to the land, relate to the land, and it's a big F-you to capitalism where time is money, you're intentionally inverting that system. So for me, making these linkages are important as we both resist violent state practices. We're in a moment in time where the U.S. government is moving in certain ways. I've been advocating kind of for DACA and understanding of the linkages between U.S. immigration policies and what they do as a component of the same settler-colonial forms of appropriation, and appropriation, and violence that happened kind of as Anglo America pushed westward with manifest destiny. Jolie Sheffer:                          Well, and that sort of speaks to our theme of homelands and histories and the ways we think very differently about our own moment if we lengthen the window of time in which we're operating and to think about... I'm very interested. My own scholarship is on the history of immigration. So much of the rhetoric that circulates now is on legality and illegality. When, in the longer window of history, the laws changed around people. It's not that people are illegal or not. So what do the terms like a homeland and history connote to you? Dr. Dylan Miner:                 When I think of homeland, I think we all live in an era where we think of homeland security. I link it to certain kind of state practices, certain moves by the state towards a certain form of patriotism, a fascistic form of patriotism, that in its very creation creates borders that are solidified in certain ways. To link this back to the last question. One of the things I've been thinking about, and I think many, many scholars and activists, indigenous and Chicana activists have been thinking about this are the ways that communities, and indigenous sovereignties, and indigenous forms of governance and territoriality exist in relationship inside and outside of the forms of territoriality that Western nation-states have. That means that the U.S., Canada, Mexico have to have solidified borders. Those borders cannot be shared. A territory has to be one or the other. Dr. Dylan Miner:                 But when you look at longer-term histories of land use and land practice in Western spaces, but particularly in indigenous communities, there's always been conflicted spaces but also shared spaces. That the notion of territoriality that we see in this particular moment that arises from a form of polity that that happens and emerges in Western Europe at a particular moment of time is only one form of governmentality and territoriality that exists or that has to exist. If there's anything that I'd like my work to engage with as an activist, as a scholar, or as an artist is thinking about thinking otherwise, imagining other possibilities. The Zapatistas in the '90s, shared with us that, "[foreign language 00:16:50]. Another world as possible." When they think about, "What other worlds are possible, and do we have to be so constricted by the particularities of the worlds that we've been given?" Jolie Sheffer:                          I think that's something that the older I get, the more you realize that even in our own lifespan, that there were other ways of being. I remember what it was like not to have a cell phone, not to have social media. Or, thinking on the issue of borderlands, growing up in Michigan, you would just cross over into Canada. I was thinking about this very recently. I have a young son and I was like, "Oh, this summer, maybe we'll go to Canada." I realized, "I can't do that. I have to get him a passport." The way the state intrudes on those things. We take for granted that like, "Oh post-9/11 for many of our students, that's the only way of being they've experienced." Again, taking that longer view reminds you there have been other ways of being, and there could be yet again. Dr. Dylan Miner:                 I teach an undergraduate senior seminar, and one of the questions we ask is, "Is another world possible? Can we imagine a world beyond, or outside, or after, or in spite of capitalism?" Each time I've taught it, when we get to the end, it becomes nearly impossible for anyone in that class to think beyond, or outside, or in spite of capitalism, that as an economic and way of organizing social relationships, it has such a power on all of us that imagining something outside of it has been nearly impossible. Jolie Sheffer:                          We'd love to hear some of your questions. You ready? Alexis:                                        I just want to say, first, thank you for coming and I appreciate this dialogue that we get to have with you. My name's Alexis [Ribertino 00:18:33]. We're apart of a class, all of us here. It is a studio seminar in the arts school, and we read the beginning of Creating Aztlan and other things regarding Native Kids Ride Bikes, specifically. That's kind of where our collaborative questions come from, just to give you a background on where we're coming from. Alexis:                                        So you say in your book, Creating Aztlan, "Once you know the story, it is your collective responsibility to tell it." In thinking about this, I've noticed a trend in socially-engaged art to rely on the audience or participators in order to be the ones that enact with the change or artists put their trust in the participators in order to be provoked and then to think enough in order to pursue the change. This tactic then replaces the artist's direct involvement in policymaking or direct change. My question is, is this tactic enough or the best way of enacting social change and engagement? Or, is this possibility of inspiring in numbers more enticing than using more time and less minds to pull out the direct work? Dr. Dylan Miner:                 That's a good question and one that I'm not certain I have a full answer to. I will say that I'm of the perspective that unfortunately we live in a time when artists are brought in to fill in voids and other social services. So why is it that artists are engaging in certain kinds of projects when there's been a reduction in funding of social services that should do that exact same thing? I think that at a policy level and at an institutional level, I think that's a problem. Dr. Dylan Miner:                 Do I think that art is the best way to enact, or to initiate, or to be the change itself? As I said earlier, I do hold onto something that our art is liberatory in certain ways. I'm not certain what it is. I think that with the various avant-gardes you've seen throughout history, I think many of them have held onto that belief, whether rightly or wrongly, probably wrongly. But I do think there's something liberatory about it. There's a way... For instance, the majority of my work, I don't sell. I don't make work for the market. I've been criticized, and rightfully so, because I have I come from an institutional space of privilege where I teach at university and don't need to make work to pay my bills. Therefore, I can make work that's gifted or given away. I think that's significant about what I'm trying to do is make work outside or beyond the marketplace. Dr. Dylan Miner:                 So in terms of social practice or socially-engaged art, I think there's some very good examples and I think there's some very bad examples. I think that, at its best, community collaboration is just that. Like, when I engage in a project, it's that. I don't imagine that it's something beyond that. The Elders Say We Don't Visit Anymore, that's using my access to institutional spaces to create momentary spaces of visiting. Do I think it's going to fundamentally change those institutions, or indigenize them, or kind of transform them? No. I know that it's a momentary thing, and I know that the results will be fleeting. Dr. Dylan Miner:                 The same thing I'd say with Anishnaabensag Biimskowebshkigewag, Native Kids Ride Bikes. That's really about building social relationships, and making connections between existing community members, and one another. If it goes beyond that, that's wonderful. But I don't think it always will or always has. But I do think there's moments in time where we live in a moment when so many different institutions for public good have been dismantled, and so now we're turning to artists to do the work that something else should do. I think that's a fundamental larger problem. Nick:                                           My name's Nick. Thank you for coming. For my question, in your interview with America Meredith that we read, you provide a quote from Ryan Red Corn stating, "We're Indian. We're political by default." I was struck by the idea that even in a not-overtly political project, the aesthetics become politicized. Do you see this as being an issue for indigenous artists or a distracting element if their work tends to be viewed through a specific lens? Do you find that your work strives to have a singular identity, or do you feel like is split serving two different purposes regarding an indigenous and a outside audience? Dr. Dylan Miner:                 Good question again. So the quote by what Ryan Red Corn, and Ryan Red Corn's a graphic designer and Osage guy. He's also in the comedy troupe 1491, so he was just visiting East Lansing and I had dinner with him a few weeks ago. So it's good to see you brought that quote up from the interview with America Meredith, who's a Cherokee painter, who is also the editor for First American Art Magazine. So if you're not familiar, put a plugin for that to really exciting and interesting article or magazine that she publishes. Dr. Dylan Miner:                 So I think this is a problematic both for contemporary indigenous artists, but for artists of color, for queer artists, for many other artists, who there's a certain kind of reading that when work becomes biographical, people only read it in that way. I think that happens to certain artists and not to all artists. Why is that? That said, my work is always political even when not politically. It's intentionally political, and I have some that is overly agitprop. It's fine to be read one-dimensional. Dr. Dylan Miner:                 In the class I was just meeting with, I showed them a Line 5 pipeline Risograph poster that I recently produced. My own politics, I'm vehemently against that pipeline, Line 5. Enbridge line 5, of course, was created in 1953. It's a approximately 700-mile pipeline that brings tar sands from Western Canada through Wisconsin and Michigan to be processed and refined in Sarnia, Ontario. Of course, Sarnia is right by a First Nations, an Anishinaabek First Nations community that has some of the largest cancer rates of any community because of the processing of so many chemicals and particularly oil refineries there. Dr. Dylan Miner:                 But with this image, it is a unidimensional reading of it. A poster kind of demarking, or discussing, or showing the 20 plus... I don't remember the exact number, the nearly 30 oil spills that have happened since that pipeline opened in 1953 and spilling 1.1 million gallons of oil. There's not a lot of readings that can be read into that poster. It's intentionally one advocating for the dismantling and shutting down of that pipeline. So I'm okay with a one-dimensional reading of that. Dr. Dylan Miner:                 Other works, particularly in museums and galleries, kind of text I write, they need to be more nuanced and understanding of them. I think that with indigenous, with artists of color, oftentimes the work becomes read as biographical. I think that's a hard dynamic, and hard dialectic, or hard tension that people who aren't part of that community have when engaging with that art. There's been scholars and critics who've looked at the ways that, particularly with indigenous art, when you come to it, you have to both understand the particularities of the knowledge system the artist is working with as well as the understanding of the discourses and structures of contemporary art. Dr. Dylan Miner:                 That's high expectations. It's a lot to expect of audiences, whether indigenous or not, whether a member of that individual artist's community or another indigenous nation. There's a lot of expectations there. So with that, I think there'll probably be a lot of misinterpretations. When you make something and put it in the world, you have to be open to understand and think through its possible multiple readings, whether they're ones you want or not. Jolie Sheffer:                          That seems like the focus of your work that is very process-oriented seems partly designed to break down that singular reading because you have to kind of engage with the work and help create it. That seems in itself kind of an anti-capitalist way of being that you can't just sort of, "Okay, now I'm going to absorb the art and the artist, and then get out." Dr. Dylan Miner:                 I think time, non-capitalist, nonlinear time is very significant in my work. If you come to my talk tonight, and I've said it a number of other times, but I'll talk a bit about this term [foreign language 00:26:59], which is a Anishinaabemowin term meaning one's ancestors but also one's descendant. So it's referencing in particularly one's great-grandparent or one's great-grandchild, but it's the same word for both. But it breaks down linear notions of history that past is behind us, kind of the future's in front of us, and actually creates a relationship with one's ancestors and one's descendants that is very intimate and very real. To do that, you have to engage in a long-term, nonlinear notions of time. Dr. Dylan Miner:                 So much of my work, whether studio or otherwise, I think I'm trying to evoke and employ this particular notion of temporality that isn't linear, that doesn't somehow put past behind us, future in front of us, and somehow we can get to this attainable future of some sort. Dr. Dylan Miner:                 When you were talking a moment ago, I was thinking of a project I do called Michif–Michin, The People The Medicine, which is a collaboration with plants where I actually have conversations, learn from and with medicinal plants, and then harvest them, and then make prints from them. I print them in inks I harvest. Inks I make from berries I harvest and then give them away. They're not sold. So there's a long-term relationship between me and the plant, but also between me and the people who share knowledge about the plant and then who receive these prints. So lots of ways of thinking through and around these questions. Maria:                                        Hi, my name's Maria. I also wanted to say thanks for coming and spending time talking to us. My question is that you mentioned that one of the long-term outcomes of your lowriding project was both the inclusion of native tradition, culture, and history, but also a commentary on sustainability within transportation. How do you envision the lowriding project impacting within the relationship that exists between native and colonialist values? What type of conversations do you think that this will spark between the two groups, and do you foresee an impact or a change being made on colonialist viewpoints of sustainability and conversation from projects similar to this? Dr. Dylan Miner:                 Another good question. For me, it's hard to say, or hard to predict, or hard to judge kind of what impacts or relationships they have. As someone whose practices fundamentally about building relationships and engaging with other people, I think that I want to put that in play. I want that to happen. If you'd have asked me this two years ago, I think various conversations were happening about sustainability, and about climate change, and resistance to climate change, and understanding potential transformations that needed to happen at a dominant structural level. At this point in time, I'm a little less... I don't think those are happening at the upper echelons of state and capitalist institutions. So because of that, I'm concerned. Dr. Dylan Miner:                 This is a slight aside, but I think that what we see is that there's very powerful systems of violence and oppression, whether it's violence to the land, whether it's oppression of other individuals, whether it's the creation of patriarchal systems. Those are all intertwined. If you look at the scholarly text and the creative text as well, part of what I'd like to put in place is how all of these are intertwined together. You probably haven't heard it as much on U.S. news, but I've been kind of attentive to it is that in Western Canada, just last Friday, there was a court case that came through. This was a young Korean man who was in his 20s, Colton Boushie, who was shot three times in the head by a Saskatchewan farmer a number of months ago. That ruling came down on Friday. Stanley, the individual who shot him three times in the head, was acquitted for murder and or manslaughter. Dr. Dylan Miner:                 This is to say that there's institutional forms of violence and oppression that become reproduced within structures and systems, that whether or not we control them. So when I make things and when I'm engaged in practices, I put them out there in the world. How they operate within these existing systems, to some extent, is outside my control. Tyler:                                          My name's Tyler. So my question is, as artists, we want to avoid cliche and heavy-handed work crafted without intention. Sometimes this want can lead to work made with intent by the artist, but that isn't understood by anyone who isn't familiar with the piece. So for socially-engaged art, how blatant do you find that art needs to be in order to actually be an effective piece of social engagement? How much of the artist needs to be present, and how much of the activist? In your own practice, how do you balance these two sides? Dr. Dylan Miner:                 Good. Julie and I were talking earlier about balance and the fact that balance doesn't exist. It's a process. But at any moment, we're going to fall off as we're trying to balance anything. I have no intention to balance. I come to my work as someone with particular political motivations. Some of the work, particularly the print-based work that exists in poster and print form, is freely downloadable off the internet. That has an agitprop positionality. That is intended to agitate and provoke, to make people think about particular issues, oftentimes indigenous issues, oftentimes environmental issues, oftentimes immigration issues, and how all of these are linked together. Dr. Dylan Miner:                 The other work, what could be called the socially-engaged work or the work I'm doing oftentimes in galleries or in museums, you're right, is less heavy-handed. Yet, the ways that those are read, I think, are going to differ greatly based on the baggage, and the knowledge, and the information people bring to them. The more I do things, the more I understand that and I'm open to that. With Anishnaabensag Biimskowebshkigewag, Native Kids Ride Bikes, I've done that a number of times with communities that I know and a number of times with communities I don't know. Some of them have been very successful, and some of them have been very awful based on existing relationships between me and people in those communities and people in those communities and the institution that brought me in. Dr. Dylan Miner:                 So I think a lot of times, it's not even necessarily on the actual social engagement but rather the relationships, the networks, the interactions that exist outside, and beyond, and around those particular engagements. As an artist, as much as I'd like to say I'm against hierarchies in all forms, which I am, as an artist, sometimes we bring our own ideas into things. I think that the more engagements I do, the less I have to have particular ideas of what I'd like them to be. So building bikes, those emerge out of collective conversations. Clearly, we're there to build a bike, but what will that be? Jolie Sheffer:                          Following up on that question. So you're an artist, you present your work in these different venues, but you're also a curator, right? So how do you think about your role in positioning? What are the kinds of decisions and conversations you have with yourself and with artists whose work your career curating in the museum context? Dr. Dylan Miner:                 Sure. So I have this adjunct curator title and position, and I don't do a lot of curatorial work in that museum. But I am curating a show at a university gallery in March, which is on land and water, thinking about what those topics, concepts mean. Again, sometimes it's bringing in activist projects into the museum context. I think Nato Thompson, the curator who was with Creative Time for some time, is probably most well-known for that kind of integrating activist projects into the art world and kind of reciprocally bringing art world projects into activists' world. Dr. Dylan Miner:                 So one of the works that's going to be in the show is some of the ephemera from Lee Spragge, who is a Anishinaabeg activist, and he's kind of most well-known for his knowledge on wild rice. He's a wild ricer. He's a former chief of one of the First Nation communities in Michigan. He was leading one of the canoe brigades at Standing Rock, and his canoes were stolen by the state and destroyed. But what we're going to have in the show is some of his ephemera paddles, and life jackets, and things like that. Clearly, he was, kind of some time ago, living in Berkeley and doing performance art and kind of identified as an artist in that point in time. But this is clearly taking some of that more ephemera from activists' projects, placing it in the context of an art gallery and museum. I think that you can create various interesting conversations and projects around that. Jolie Sheffer:                          What's next? What are you working on now, or what are some upcoming projects? Dr. Dylan Miner:                 So I'm working on a number of things, trying to do less and less academic writing. I have a number of shows coming up. One is a new project for the Grand Rapids Art Museum doing large-format cyanotypes. So the year the cyanotype was invented as a photographic process was actually the same as the last treaty was signed in the state of Michigan, the Treaty of La Pointe. So I'm doing a series of landscapes, and waterscapes, and skyscapes using this process to think about the relationship between the materiality and the form itself. I think this goes back to some of your earlier questions. I'm really interested in the relationship between materiality, and the form, and how those all are intertwined. Dr. Dylan Miner:                 I have another solo project building bikes. I might be doing lowrider canoes for a gallery at Western University in Ontario, and then I'm just trying to do some more writing, and do some more working, and just be a human being, and build a better world that in this moment in time, it seems that it's really hard to be a good human being. So if I can try to be a better human being, I'll go that route. Jolie Sheffer:                          Thank you all very much. Dr. Dylan Miner:                 [foreign language 00:37:02]. Thanks for having me on. It's been fun to listen and engage in conversation. Jolie Sheffer:                          Thank you all again so much. So today, our producer is Chris Cavera. Research assistance is by Lauren O'Connor and Elizabeth [Brownlow 00:37:16]. With special thanks to our co-sponsors, the School of Cultural and Critical Studies, the School of Art, and the department of English at BGSU. Thank you all. Dr. Dylan Miner:                 [foreign language 00:37:24].

https://ia601502.us.archive.org/21/items/FemmeAMIndigenousIssues1/Femme%20AM%20Indigenous%20Issues%20%281%29.mp3 In this episode of Femme AM, the Women’s Collective discusses the structural and systemic racism that exists in Canada’s treatment of indigenous people. Topics include the MMIWG inquiry, the hearings that took place in Montreal last week, as well as the Tina Fontaine and Colton Boushie cases. Resources: Discussion Guide – Justice for Colten … Continue reading Femme Am || Ep. 11 || Systemic Racism: MMIWG, Colten Boushie & Tina Fontaine →

The buds reconvene post-snowmageddon on our first podcast after the NFL season. This week we talk about the horrific Parkland school shooting, the injustice surrounding the murder of Colton Boushie, NBA’s All-Star Weekend, and much more. Join us for a royal podcast!

On this two-hour episode of The Maskell Sessions, I discuss the 2018 Olympic Winter Games in South Korea, Marcone and my video on the proposed caribou protection plan in Alberta, the shooting of Colton Boushie, jury selection, self-defense versus murder, more victims of Toronto’s gay serial killer Bruce McArthur, a 21-year-old student who flushed her “emotional support” hamster down an airport toilet, a “bullying” scene from the children’s film Peter Rabbit, a poacher being killed by a lion and big cat attacks. Other topics include Logan Paul using a stun gun on dead rats, Paul’s skydiving mishap, Boston Dynamics, the future of robotics, threats to mankind, facial recognition software determining a person’s sexuality, Archie Bunker, the story of eight corrupt Baltimore police officers, comparisons to The Shield, the Florida school shooting, medieval MMA, former PM Kim Campbell bitching about women with exposed arms on the news, a girl opens a corked bottle with her ass and I try to determine what is worse: necrophilia or bestiality? Please subscribe to the Maskell Podcasting Network on iTunes, rate and review the network, like The Maskell Sessions and Maskell Podcasting Network on Facebook, and follow me on Twitter at @Maskell91. Check out Podbay, Stitcher and MASKELL.TV for all the podcasts, and to see how you can help support my network.

Joseph Neuberger is Global News Radio legal expert and a partner at Neuberger and Partners criminal defence lawyers, discusses comments made by the Justice Minister after the not guilty verdict in the Colton Boushie case.

On this episode of the toque podcast, Matt and Andres discuss some of the more compelling stories from the Winter Olympics so far including Mark McMorris and women's hockey. They talk about the weakening relationship between BC and Alberta over the TMEP project and examine the outcome of the Colton Boushie trial and what it might mean for the justice system. CBC's Unbroken - The snowboard life of Mark McMorris: https://olympics.cbc.ca/video/athlete-stories/unbroken-the-snowboard-life-mark-mcmorris/ Music is The Key by The Tall Pines

Listen live, weekdays from noon to 1, on Zoomer Radio!

Dellen Millard and Mark Smich are in court right now to hear what they'll be sentenced for the murder of Toronto woman Laura Babcock. Guest - Alex Pierson, host of On Point with Alex Pierson, Global News Radio Have North and South Korea been getting along amicably for the Olympics or could we see some cooling of tensions. As US Vice President Mike Pence was leaving, he commented that when North Korea is ready to talk, the US will talk. But was this a wasted opportunity by the US to try and urge for peace? Guest - Donald Baker, Department of Asian Studies, UBC (University of British Columbia) Should the Prime Minister and other ministers issued comments in the wake of the verdict of the Colton Boushie case?   Guest - Peter Graefe. Professor of Political Science, McMaster University