Abstract: Reconstructing the nearly forgotten history of the Anderdon Day School (c. 1846–1886), an Indigenous-run school built and administered by the Wyandot of Anderdon Nation near Amherstburg, Ontario, was sparked by a fragmentary reference in a 2004 local heritage pamphlet. The project explores how colonial archival systems—structured around federal and church oversight—render Indigenous educational authority largely invisible. Situating Indigenous-run Day Schools within the broader history of Indigenous education in Canada reveals the limits of homogenizing accounts of colonial schooling, distinguishing between Residential Schools, federally operated Day Schools, and community-governed institutions. Methodologically, it advances community-engaged research as essential for recovering these histories, drawing on Indigenous archival theory to treat oral testimony, family collections, genealogies, and community-held newspapers as archives in their own right. The Anderdon case demonstrates how collaborative, nation-centered research re-centers Indigenous agency and locates education as a strategy of cultural continuity, adaptation, and survival across generations.
Abstract: Rez gothic aesthetics sit at the intersection of rez aesthetics and the gothic and speak to Native American and Indigenous experiences of the world. Their location in everyday Native life produces an ambivalence about binaries like good/bad, beauty/ugly, and comfort/fright that prevent simple associations between the rez and tragedy and Native American and Indigenous peoples themselves from being understood as flattened stereotypes or victims. The socioeconomic conditions of the reservation are sometimes interpreted by onlookers as terrifying. Rez gothic aesthetics show how Native people interpret and transform those so-called horrors to show that the true horror is not of Native life, but of the centuries of settler colonial strategies weaponized to eliminate it. I study the rez gothic aesthetics in Trickster , a 2020 fantasy drama television series that was embroiled in an ethnic fraud controversy. I suggest that we view Trickster as a text with multiple authors and create space to celebrate the work of the Native American and Indigenous writers, producers, actors, designers, choreographers, and musicians who worked together to create art worthy of critical attention.
Abstract: Almost no aspect of the intertribal Ghost Dance has been more misunderstood than the decorated shirts and dresses created by Lakota dancers. Outsiders' failure to inquire into and acknowledge Lakota statements about their meanings had disastrous consequences in 1890 and continues to cause suffering in the present. This article argues that Lakota Ghost dancing, including its innovative production of garments, served to restore and protect extensive kinship relations that had been compromised by colonial invasion and occupation. Lakota Ghost Dancers made ritual clothing as an enactment of what Dakota scholar Christopher Pexa calls thiospaye ethics. Based on the Dakota term for extended family or kinship groups, thiospaye ethics posits a "relation of care" encompassing human relatives, as well as land and nonhuman relations. While not Lakota people's only anticolonial strategy, Ghost Dancing affirmed their connections to each other and the lifeways that sustained those ties. The production, wearing, and circulation of Ghost Dance clothing signified these connections and drew on long traditions of meaningful symbols and forms of exchange. While the end of the movement was accompanied by significant questions about the capacities of Ghost Dance garments, descendants continue to care for their relations through campaigns to repatriate dance clothing worn by their ancestors.
Abstract: In this article, I discuss a corpus on the Mapuche diaspora, written by Mapuche intellectuals Pedro Mariman Quemanado, José Ancan Jara, and Margarita Calfio Montalva in the 1990s. I bring attention to this robust Mapuche intellectual production to focus on its situated analysis of colonialism, structural oppression, and anticolonialism. I examine how these authors theorized the long-standing Mapuche migration and urban settlement in the Chilean capital of Santiago as an effect of the recursive processes of Chilean colonialism, which have aimed to disarticulate the Mapuche people since the late nineteenth-century occupation of their ancestral territories. I also show how these authors' analysis of the Mapuche diaspora contributed to the creation of a "utopia of return," in which the recuperation of ancestral territories could only be accomplished through the resignification of Mapuche dispersal as a unifying anticolonial politics of national emancipation.
Abstract: Scholarly debates often question how Indigenous art effectively supports land-based decolonization. Applying Cree architect Wanda Dalla Costa's "placekeeping" framework to five specific public art installations illustrates how these works revitalize and reinterpret the aesthetics and use of Lower Columbia River art while asserting an active Indigenous presence in the landscape. Foregrounding land-centered Indigenous public art projects also helps establish a rigorous set of parameters for assessing cultural placekeeping. These guidelines, generated through a collaboration with David Harrelson, Cultural Resources Manager at the Confederated Tribe of Grand Ronde, provide a roadmap for enhancing the impact of Indigenous cultural acts. My analysis identifies a critical balance between internally facing community-building and external, public-facing engagement. By centering placekeeping principles, I highlight hurdles faced in reasserting Lower Columbia aesthetics within a region currently dominated by commercialized formline art styles. Effective placekeeping must be culturally centered, anchored to specific cultural spaces, and committed to ecological and relational responsibilities. Done well, acts of placekeeping also facilitate a secondary engagement with non-Native communities that builds toward decolonial futures through expanded relationality. By prioritizing tribal histories and relational duties, I show how public art installations can become essential tools for "doing" sovereignty and jumpstarting land-back movements.
