Remixed methodologies in community-based film research

This paper explores how remixed methodologies can inform research in Indigenous communities using short films, combining archival and contemporary footage. Drawing on the lineages of Indigenous and feminist community-based research methodologies, we develop a three-part conception of remixed methodologies. We emphasize, first, the need to resituate the process of knowledge production within relationships between researchers and Indigenous community members. Second, we stress the importance of reconsidering the intended outputs of community-university collaboration to centre community goals. Third, we underscore how remixed methodologies can disrupt the narratives surrounding settler colonial archival resources, resituating historical footage with relation to contemporary Indigenous contexts. We apply this framework to our collaborative work with the Witsuwit'en Cultural and Language Authority and the Office of Aboriginal Education at British Columbia School District #54, combining archival and contemporary films to create Indigenous education resources. Specifically, we remixed footage of Witsuwit'en traditional activities from two 1927 National Museum of Canada films with contemporary interviews and footage of Witsuwit'en governance and land use activities. We highlight how making archival films relevant to contemporary Indigenous community goals required disrupting the conventions of scholarly authority, designing collaborative outputs to suit community aims, and resituating knowledge production within the context of Witsuwit'en resilience in the face of colonialism.     

CANDID DISCUSSIONS ABOUT FIELDWORK: The New Ethnographer pre-field training workshop

In this conference review, the author reviews the first The New Ethnographer (TNE) pre-fieldwork training workshop for doctoral students that took place over two days at the London School of Economics and Political Science in February 2020. TNE's approach to pre-fieldwork training runs counter to institutionalized approaches of risk management: it acknowledges fieldwork's inherent messiness and ethnographers’ emotional and embodied entanglements, while inviting participants to rethink the language of ‘risk’ and ‘danger’. TNE's contribution lies in facilitating frank and experimental conversations between early career researchers, first via its digital platform, and now through scenario-based learning in the classroom.     

Indigenous sovereignties: relational ontologies and environmental management

Indigenous nations have always and continue to assert their sovereignties to resist colonialism. This paper makes explicit the ways in which environmental management has been and continues to act as a tool of colonialism, particularly by privileging Western science, institutions, and administrative procedures. We argue that to decolonise environmental management, it is crucial to understand and challenge the power relations that underlie it—asking who makes decisions and on what worldview those decisions are based. Indigenous ways of being deeply challenge the foundations of environmental management and the colonising power structures that underlie it, and invite further thought about posthuman and relational ontologies. We provide a range of case studies that showcase the role of Indigenous nations in redefining and reimagining environmental management based on Indigenous sovereignties, knowledges, and ways of being. The case studies emphasise the crucial connection between Indigenous decision‐making authority and self‐governance for the enhanced protection and health of the environment. We argue that Indigenous agency, grounded in Indigenous governance and sovereignties, is driving innovation and decolonising environmental management by making space for new ways of thinking and being “in place”.     

Provenance of Weeden Island “sacred” and “prestige” vessels: implications for specialized ritual craft production

ABSTRACT

Weeden Island mortuary ceremonialism united distinct cultures across the Late Woodland social landscape. The Weeden Island pottery series is central to recognizing regional ceremonial parity, with prestige (elite) and sacred (cult) wares showing strong similarities among distant sites. Finely made vessels and their ostensibly shamanistic themes led archaeologists to consider the liturgical and political roles of ritual specialists, whose tasks might have included vessel manufacture in centralized locations. This research evaluates the prospect of craft specialization and centralized production of sacred and prestige wares through comparisons of the provenance of vessels from three Florida localities: Palmetto Mound (8LV2), the mounds at Melton (8AL5, 8AL7), and McKeithen (8CO17). Results of Neutron Activation Analysis and petrographic analysis show that the majority of the sampled vessels were made far from the mounds in which they were deposited, from a variety of locations but especially within the area between Kolomoki and the Tallahassee Hills. We argue that production was not centralized but may have been specialized to the extent that an integrated ritual network was necessary to coordinate rules of manufacture and use that were evidently observed by all participants.     

Building Bridges of Trust: Child Transports from Finland to Sweden during the Second World War

Seventy thousand children were moved to Sweden from Finland during the Second World War with the purpose of giving them a break from the calamities of war. Moving children for this reason was common practice in the Western world during the twentieth century. Officially, the motives have always been humanitarian, but political motives have often played an important role — commonly, to foster suitable citizens within planned societies. Political goals were important in the moving of Finnish children, but in a different way. In this article, I suggest that the children were used as ‘commodities of compassion’ in a Swedish politics of indemnification.