Shattering glass boxes : museums and Dene resurgence against the colonial politics of recognition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In aiming to dispossess Indigenous peoples from their land and destroy their cultures, settler colonialism increasingly operates by “recognizing” and appropriating Indigenous identities into dominant national narratives. However, Indigenous peoples globally have found numerous ways to unsettle colonial powers, including claiming and reclaiming cultural practices in formerly colonial institutions such as museums. This dissertation examines the role of museums in perpetuating and opposing settler colonialism in Canada. First, I critique museums as forwarding settler colonial narrative and material violence against Indigenous peoples. Second, I examine the ways that Indigenous peoples have been engaging in museum spaces in order to “turn away” from the colonial politics of recognition. This dissertation engages with literature in political theory, critical museum studies, Indigenous political thought, and the colonial politics of recognition. In the first two chapters I examine three logics of settler colonialism: disappearance, appropriation and obfuscation. I put this theoretical framework in conversation with three case studies. I look at the 1988 exhibition “The Spirit Sings: Artistic Traditions of Canada’s First Peoples” to examine the turn towards the settler colonial politics of recognition. The second case study, a multi-sited exhibition called “De T’a Hoti Ts’eeda: We live securely by the land” (Yellowknife and Ottawa) and “Extremes: Life in Subarctic Canada,” (Edinburgh) is used to think through multiple experiences of collaborative exhibition. The third case study is the “Gwich’in Caribou Skin Clothing Project” (2000-2003), exemplifying the role of knowledge repatriation projects for supporting Indigenous decolonial resurgence. The final two chapters of the dissertation examine how Indigenous peoples relationships with museums counter the logics of settler colonialism. I use the collection of Athabaskan Dene objects at the National Museums Scotland (Edinburgh) and the “nation-to-nation” relationship established between the Tłı̨chǫ Government and the museum as exemplary of relationships exogenous to settler colonial domination. Second, drawing on Hegel’s master/slave dialectic I offer a theory of “labour against recognition,” where the process of making objects is generative of relationships that simultaneously turn away from the colonial politics of recognition and foster a decolonial politics of Indigenous resurgence.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.035 | 0.057 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".