Gift of art/gift of place: boundary work for Indigenous coexistence

Abstract

ABSTRACT Collaborative art is an important kind of “boundary work” in decolonizing relationships to self, others, and land in today’s settler societies, or the multinational states that formed as a result of European settler colonialism. This article tells the story of a children’s book co-produced by the Cheslatta Carrier Nation in British Columbia and two undergraduate students at the University of Missouri (MU) along with their faculty mentor and his son at the 2018 Cheslatta Camp Out. The Camp Out is a time when the Cheslatta Nation returns to Cheslatta Lake, the homeland from which they were forcibly evacuated in 1952. The process of doing art for the children’s book together in place at the Camp Out facilitated the trust and rapport essential for the collaborative creative work, and ultimately helped the participants co-discover the storyline for the book. The co-produced artworks for the children’s book (watercolors, photographs, illustrations, stories) became gifts that trace the circuits and complicities of entangled relations. As a gift, artwork brings disparate communities of practice fully into reckoning with place, understood in the Indigenous sense as the relationship of things to each other through land. This is the gift of art, the gift of place.