Accomplice & Art Practice: Indigenous Feminist Activism & Performance

Event time: 
Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - 5:00pm
Location: 
WLH 309 See map
100 Wall Street
Event description: 

Accomplice & Art Practice - Indigenous Feminist Activism & Performance

Tuesday, March 8,  International Women’s Day, 5pm – 7pm
5:00pm, presentations and discussion in William L. Harkness Hall (WLH) room 309
6:30pm, a light reception and more discussion at the Native American Cultural Center (NACC), 26 High Street

Presenters: Maria Hupfield and Jaskiran Dhillon

Artist Maria Hupfield (Anishinaabe) and scholar and activist Jaskiran Dhillon will present their work on the integral connections between performance and activism in Indigenous political awareness and mobilization, including struggles against gender-based violence and struggles for territorial, cultural and intellectual sovereignty in ongoing settler colonial histories of the past and present.

Sponsors: Co-sponsored by the Yale MacMillan Center Committee on Canadian Studies, Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies (WGSS), and the Native American Cultural Center (NACC).

Information: For more information contact T.L. Cowan, Visiting Bicentennial Lecturer of Canadian Studies, t.l.cowan@yale.edu

Bios of presenters:
Maria Hupfield is a member of Wasauksing First Nation, Ontario, currently based in Brooklyn NY. She received recent national recognition in the USA from the prestigious Joan Mitchell Foundation for her hand-sewn industrial felt sculptures and a long term Canada Council for the Arts grant to make work in New York. Her nine-foot birchbark canoe made of industrial felt was assembled and performed in Venice, Italy for the premiere of Jiimaan, coinciding with the Venice Biennale. Upcoming projects include #callresponse, a multifaceted performance art based Canada Council for the Arts {Re}Conciliation Initiative Project that presents the work of First Nations, Inuit and Métis women as artists central to the strength and healing of their communities, and Free Play, Trestle Gallery with Jason Lujan. Hupfield is an advocate of native community arts and activism; founder of 7th Generation Image Makers, Native Child and Family Services of Toronto, a native youth arts and mural outreach program in downtown Toronto; co-owner of Native Art Department International and Assistant Professor in Visual Art and Material Practice appointed to the Faculty of Culture and Community, Emily Carr University of Arts and Design (2007-11). Hupfield is represented by Galerie Hugues Charbonneau in Montreal.

Jaskiran Dhillon is a first generation academic and advocate who grew up on Treaty Six Cree Territory in Saskatchewan, Canada. Her work spans the fields of settler colonialism, anthropology of the state, anti-racist feminism, and youth studies. Her writing has been published in The Guardian, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society, and Feminist Formations among other venues.  Forthcoming with University of Toronto Press, her first book, Prairie Rising: Indigenous Youth, Decolonization, and the Politics of Intervention, provides a critical, ethnographic account of state interventions in the lives of urban indigenous youth.  She is currently an Assistant Professor of Global Studies and Anthropology at The New School in New York City.