[Event] 2021-02-24 Lecture on Ts’msyen Rematriation

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TS’MSYEN REMATRIATION: PROTOCOLS OF RELATIONALITY AND RETURN

ROBIN R.R. GRAY • THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO
February 24 @4:30P.M.
Rematriation is more than wordplay on the commonly used term repatriation. It is an Indigenous feminist paradigm, an embodied praxis of recovery and return, and a socio-political mode of resurgence and refusal. Drawing from my auto-ethnographic and community based research on embodied heritage reclamation, and a case study to repatriate Ts’msyen songs from archives, I apply rematriation as a paradigm, and center protocol as an analytic, to amplify the socio-legal aspects of Ts’msyen nationhood, the dynamism of international Indigenous relations on the northwest coast, and the poetics and politics of Indigenous return. How might this grounded explication recast questions of ownership, property, and rights on new terms?
SPEAKER BIO: 

Dr. Robin R. R. Gray is Ts’msyen and Mikisew Cree, and an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. Her research centers primarily on the politics of Indigeneity in settler colonial contexts such as Canada, USA, New Zealand, and Australia. Dr. Gray’s current research projects focus on the repatriation of Ts’msyen songs from archives, and foundational issues related to the preservation, management, ownership, access, and control of Indigenous cultural heritage. She is working on a book manuscript tentatively titled, Rematriation: Indigenous Law, Property and Nationhood. In it she is analyzing various forms of Indigenous repatriation to interrogate the colonial power dynamics engendered by the transformation of Indigenous cultural heritage into the property of people, states and institutions unrelated to the source community. Theoretically, it necessarily confronts the contested sites of archives, museums, law, ethnographic collecting practices, cultural appropriation, collective memory, intellectual property issues, and Indigenous rights, while it also disrupts totalizing discourses of Indigeneity, nationhood, law, and property—including the concept of repatriation itself.