The Day My Photographs Danced: Materializing Photographs of My Anishinabe Ancestors | Pedri-Spade | Visual Ethnography
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The Day My Photographs Danced: Materializing Photographs of My Anishinabe Ancestors

Celeste Pedri-Spade

Abstract


This research explores the role of Anishinabe photographs as distinct material things, in Anishinabeg memory production. Through the materialization and transformation of six (6) photographs of her ancestors, the author as an Anishinabekwe (Ojibwe) artist/ researcher, draws upon performative and embodied aspects of Anishinabeg ways of knowing, emphasizing the agency of the materials worked with in the process of meaning-making. Research findings stress the importance of conceptualizing Anishinabeg memory as a visceral, relational, intuitive, creative, and sensorial experience to strengthening relationships to the ancestral past, now and into the future. By locating Anishinabeg photographs as distinct Indigenous things—things that can be worked with as opposed to simply “read”— the author transcends ontological and methodological limitations often associated with photographs in order to trace or “stitch” through the different relationships between actuants made visible, sensible and knowable through a material and phenomenological oriented approach that is informed her identity and cultural teachings.

Keywords


Anishinabeg; photography; materiality; memory; regalia; Indigenous; Ojibwe

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References


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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12835/ve2017.1-0078

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