For two centuries, Canada has persistently reworked familial narratives through visual media to justify settler ascendancy at the expense of Indigenous dispossession (Veracini, 2015; Vowel, 2016). Consequently, memories of Indigenous resistance and resilience have been “written out” of national commemorations and replaced with pacified stories of settler homemaking (Johnson, 2022, p. 96). These erasures have further entrenched unequal relationships between Indigenous—settler acts of remembrance and continue to (re)shape contemporary imaginaries in deceptive ways.
This performance establishes an intercultural alliance between Logan Winchester, a participant-collaborator of Cree descent, and Teiji Wallace-Lewis, a participant-collaborator of settler descent, to confront the transitional space between Indigenous—settler remembrance. We ask: (1) how can the creative reframing of our familial material cultures into a connective body of work help bridge this interstice, and (2) how can this strategy serve as a blueprint for unsettlement?
We present an autoethnographic performance that discusses the challenges and outcomes of our year-long creative project. It examines several memory work sessions between us, lifestory interviews with our respective mothers, creative interventions into our family photographic albums, and a subsequent body of monotype prints. The results are tethered through Hirsch’s (2019) ‘connective arts of postmemory’ to generate an Indigenous + settler counter-history that details the disparities between our current social locations. By developing Hirsch’s theory within a new historical scale, we are not pitting Indigenous ‘memory’ against settler ‘story,’ nor premising our approach on guilt & shame. Rather. We embody Hirsch’s connective approach to argue that the space between Indigenous—settler remembrance has the potential to provide a relational site for decolonial un/learning. In effect, our project contributes to the emergent calls within memory studies to further engage with the ‘decolonising of memory’ by developing a strategy to confront the ongoing effects of settler colonialism together.
20260731T173020260731T1900America/Argentina/Buenos_AiresPERFORMANCE: Our Histories Are TetheredSV405 (ART)MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
