Despite the impressive list of honours and achievements under Eve Tuck’s belt, the first words she uses to describe being awarded Emily Carr University’s 2021 honorary doctorate are “surprised” and “humbled.”

Tuck, who is Unangax̂ and an enrolled member of the Aleut Community of St. Paul Island, Alaska, is currently the Associate Professor of Critical Race and Indigenous studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) of the University of Toronto. She is also the Canada Research Chair of Indigenous Methodologies with Youth and Communities, a recent William T. Grant Scholar (2015-2020), and a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow (2011-2012).

“It feels like a very unexpected recognition,” Tuck says, adding that it’s meaningful because Emily Carr University’s discipline and practices are seemingly disparate from her own. As a writer, teacher, and researcher, her work centres Indigenous social thought, and the ways it can be “engaged to create more fair and just social policy, more meaningful social movements, and robust approaches to decolonization.”

For those who have had the pleasure of even a short interaction with Eve, “humble” feels like an appropriate description of her character. She’s quick to credit the work of others, and notes that it’s her collaborations that are most important to her.

It’s these collaborations that she says the honorary doctorate reflects, including those with creators who consider the role of research within their art and design practice. “It’s almost like its tapping into a secret wish I had for myself to be able to work with artists or make work that is conversant with artists and people who are thinking about design and visuality and recording and installation as other ways of making meaning.”

Full article by Perrin Grauer: https://www.ecuad.ca/news/2021/eve-tuck-helps-students-become-more-like-themselves

A spectacular film featuring multidisciplinary Tlingit artist, cultural lead, community engagement specialist, language speaker and regalia creator Megan Jensen (BFA 2020) creating a monumental artwork in the snow is all the more spectacular for the many threads it draws together off-screen, Megan says.

Produced along with a team of artists for Travel Yukon, Megan says she was still feeling awed by the experience more than two months after filming had wrapped.

“Starting out, I had no idea it was going to turn into something so beautiful and meaningful, with so many different layers,” she tells me from her home Whitehorse, where she moved after graduation and now works as an art media specialist with the Yukon First Nation Education Directorate. “This video made me really believe in how things happen for a reason.”

The film, titled How Raven brought light to the world, features Megan telling a creation story about Raven. By transforming himself, the Raven tricks a great Chief into giving him three coveted boxes, containing the sun, moon and stars. Once opened, the celestial bodies are released spinning into the sky, bringing light to a dark world.

Megan’s telling of the story is spoken in Lingít (Tlingit). Megan is of Dakhká Tlingit and Tagish Khwáan Ancestry from the Dahk’laweidi Clan (killer whale) which falls under the wolf/eagle moiety. And while Megan is the focus of the film, she stresses the project was a team effort, with each member’s contribution a vital part of the epic work.

Full article by Perrin Grauer: https://www.ecuad.ca/news/2021/film-snow-artwork-myriad-influences-megan-jensen

Full article by Perrin Grauer: https://www.ecuad.ca/news/2021/2021-honorary-doctorate-emily-award-recipients#about-eve-tuck

Caribou fur, porcupine quills, sinew, cedar, glass beads, and hides for drum- and rattle-making. These are just a few of the many materials carefully packed into handsome bags and arranged on nearly every flat surface at the Aboriginal Gathering Place (AGP) at Emily Carr University.

These “material practice kits,” more than 50 in total, are destined for Prince George. There, they’ll be distributed to participants in a series of upcoming virtual workshops. The workshops are part of the ongoing Decolonizing Healthcare System through Cultural Connections project.

“It’s been really interesting trying to conceptually picture teaching and making drums and rattles without being together, without being there with our actual hands to support them,” Brenda Crabtree, Director of Aboriginal Programs at ECU and Special Advisor to the President on Indigenous Initiatives, says. “But we’re very connected with all the folks from the Prince George community — the elders and the Indigenous artists up there. So, this is a pilot project. Our first virtual pilot material practice workshop.”

The Decolonizing Healthcare project aims to transform Indigenous people’s experiences in the BC healthcare system. In BC, as in Canada more broadly, Indigenous people of all ages experience far poorer health outcomes than non-Indigenous people. This disparity is linked both to Canada’s colonial past and to barriers, including systemic racism, which continue to permeate its healthcare system.

Decolonizing Healthcare offers a leading-edge model for dismantling these systemic and historical barriers. The project employs Indigenous-led arts and material practice as an entry-point to encourage dialogue, relationship-building, and knowledge-sharing between Indigenous people and healthcare practitioners.

Brenda heads the project alongside Caylee Raber, Director of Emily Carr’s Health Design Lab(HDL). Decolonizing Healthcare first got the go-ahead in 2019 after receiving a Systems Change Grant from the Vancouver Foundation. It was initially slated to unfold over roughly three years. But the pandemic has forced the team to make adjustments on the run.

“It’s created challenges for us because we’re so used to the hands-on approach,” Brenda says. Conducting the material practice workshops virtually was not in the original plan, she notes.

“More than anything, we love engaging with the community. So this was new and challenging for us. But I think we rose to the occasion. We’ve been really innovative with the way we put together this programming and all the resources that go along with it.”

Full article by Perrin Grauer: meaningful-connections-with-prince-george-created-virtually-through-material-practice

If you’ve walked by the Wilson Arts Plaza at Emily Carr in the last couple of months, chances are you’ve noticed the giant screen projecting a video of an animated landscape evolving throughout the course of a day: a smiling sun gradually giving way to a shifty-eyed moon, followed by three people having a discussion over a campfire in an unfamiliar language. There are no subtitles to satisfy your curiosity as to what is being said. Instead, Cole Pauls (BFA 2015), the artist behind the animation, entitled K’ānäthät​ (Thinking), is inviting the audience to be an active participant rather than a passive spectator. “I want you to project your own thoughts into maybe what they’re talking about and what they’re discussing throughout the middle of the night into the morning,” he says.

Premiering last October, K’ānäthät (Thinking) is a project Cole was commissioned to create by the City of Vancouver’s Public Art Program for Emily Carr University of Art + Design’s urban screen. Since its inception, the outdoor screen, which is an initiative in conjunction with the Libby Leshgold Gallery at ECU, has shown the works of Barry Doupé, Dana Claxton, and Marina Roy, making Cole the latest in an illustrious line of notable artists to have been commissioned by the city.

After previously collaborating with the city on the artwork for a handful of utility boxes around Vancouver, Cole’s creation of K’ānäthät​ (Thinking) is a natural and inevitable progression. “I guess I developed a relationship with them [so] that they thought of me when they were inviting people to submit to this project because I believe that there were only five or six of us that were invited to pitch,” he says, adding, “And I just luckily was chosen.”

Full article by Perrin Grauer: cole-pauls-kānäthät-thinking-plays-on-ecus-outdoor-screen

In 2015, at the opening for her Nerman Museum solo exhibition, To Honour the Unidentified, artist Gina Adams was approached by a friend, who hung a gift around her neck — a Grover Cleveland 1885 peace treaty medallion.

“I immediately felt the weight of it,” Gina writes in a statement recounting the “life-changing” experience. Gina is descended from Ojibwa Anishinabe and Lakota peoples of Waabonaquot of White Earth Reservation in Minnesota, as well as from settler Americans.

“I felt the weight of the years that had passed since the medal was made, but most importantly, the weight of the fact that very little has changed in 135 years. The words on the back read ‘peace and friendship,’ but they are hollow. The promises of truth and honour the medals were supposed to represent were never kept.”

Peace treaty medals were given to “deserving Indians,” Gina explains, where “deserving” most often meant obeying U.S. government agents — agents representing a settler government which did not uphold the treaties it signed; forcibly removed Indigenous peoples from their ancestral territories onto reservations; and took Indigenous children from their family homes and placed them into residential schools, oftentimes never to return.

Gina, who is now an assistant professor at Emily Carr University, first became interested in the objects in 2013, after discovering photographs in the archives of the Spencer Museum in Lawrence, Kansas, depicting “chiefs of the plains” wearing the medallions. Having researched their histories in the years following, Gina drew on her Broken Treaty Quilts for inspiration.

Full article by Perrin Grauer: gina-adams-broken-treaty-medallions-help-create-change-through-awareness