• Mushhole

Mush Hole Project


 

To come closer to one’s own buried past, one must act like an excavator. Above all, one mustn’t be afraid of coming back to the same point time and time again – to spread it like one spreads the earth, to churn it like one churns the soil.

Walter Benjamin, Excavating and Remembering

The objective of the Mush Hole Project is to engage with the site of Canada’s first residential school as a space in which Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists and scholars can meet and 1) acknowledge the residential school legacy, 2) challenge the concepts of “truth” and “reconciliation,” and 3) practice interdisciplinary art and performantive methods of decolonization. Details of the three central objectives are as follows:

. Acknowledge Residential School Legacy: Blanche Hill-Easton, a survivor from “the Mush Hole,” explains “there's pain in remembering, but there's power, too.” When individuals seek accountability and the perpetrator does not acknowledge the wrongdoing, there is an empty space, a gap, and a shadow that haunts us. Acknowledgement, on the other hand, and the integration of Indigenous epistemologies is the beginning step across the chasm (of unknowing to knowing) in order to cast new light on histories that continue to be ignored. The segregated spatial language and logic of residential schools, in its naturalized homogeneity, separates out and eliminates individual identity, race, class, ethnicity, and gender; language authorizes states of power (science, church, and nation), unlimited access to private minds and bodies, and their subsequent misrepresentation with no public accountability. The concealed structure of the residential school thereby becomes a metaphor for its own history. This site- specific work intends to critique and make visible not only institutionalized violence, but also it will attempt to unshroud the negation of life and death by examining the complex separations that took place within and outside the walls of the Mohawk Institute, in order to find paths toward decolonization.

. Reflect, Question & Challenge: Differing perspectives between the colonizer and Aboriginal peoples require the surrendering of our pre-conceived notions of the very nature of history – that is linear, progressive, date-and event-oriented– and adapting our thinking to a fundamentally different Aboriginal world-view which is cyclical and ultimately timeless. The challenge to decolonize perspectives thus raises a critical question that is central to the Mush Hole Project’s objective: how can a creative intervention at a historical site generate new knowledges and methods of communication? How will the site activate the willingness to “surrender” pre-conceived notions of education, research, and practice. In this sense, the Mush Hole Project made space for expressions and articulations of agency, honouring, and sovereignty.

. Research-Practice: TheMush Hole Project intends to unfold as a ‘cultural lab’, where artists [and researchers] can struggle creatively with the contemporary world as well as with traditional forms. The combination of visual art, embodied knowledge, and a gathering of engaged participants make an experience that exceeds its colonial container. The container is the systemic structure imposed by the dominant culture. When structures are identified there is potential for openings, shifts, or cracks through which transformation might begin to breathe. Is the subversion of the colonial container an act of decolonization? Does refusing the dominant culture’s ideological or material constraints equate to conciliation? Or is this something else? Does it need to be something else? What happens when ‘the container’ is identified (located) not only externally but also in one’s self? These are among the questions the Mush Hole Project aims to address.

As a collaborative research-creation project, members from Indigenous and non- Indigenous communities from across institutions, fields, disciplines, and communities worked together for two years, forging sustainable relationships that came to fruition at the site. The outcomes from this site-specific event were presented at the Integrating Knowledges Summit (October 14, 15, and 16, 2016), which materialized meaningful and sustainable resources and methods of education in the process of decolonization. Visit the Truth and Reconciliation Response Projects website for more information: More information about UWaterloo Truth and Reconciliation Response Projects

.