Thinking Community: Place, Story, Performance
Moderator: Martha Langford
The final panel of the conference brought together scholars, educators, artists and creatives to discuss the meaning of community and how their work “enriches our perceptions of communities past and present,” as moderator Martha Langford put it. The varied work presented by panelists highlighted the diversity of historic and contemporary communities in Atlantic Canada, and the myriad axes of identity, culture, and experience that can bring communities together. Amid this diversity, however, each presentation highlighted the richness of communities as repositories of knowledge and ways of knowing, and the obligations researchers and creatives hold in relation to communities.
Natasha Simon (l’nu, Elsipogtog First Nation) discussed how she understands “community as a treaty relationship” in her capacity as the Director of the Mi’kmaq-Wolastoqey Centre (MWC) at the University of New Brunswick (Simon is also an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education at UNB). Simon offered a powerful interpretation of Indigenous understandings of treaty relationships woven into the two-row wampum belt, the oldest known treaty agreement between Indigenous peoples and Europeans on Turtle Island. For Simon, the significance of the white beads, formed from shells collected and crafted by Indigenous women from biologically rich intertidal zones, speaks to the significance of the water as a third party to the agreement. As border spaces where land and water meet, and fresh water and salt water mix to create life, Simon argues that estuaries symbolise the proper balance of power in treaty relationships. In the same way that imbalances in the intertidal ecosystem can smother life, the dominance of western knowledge systems over Indigenous ways of knowing, which is common in university settings, not only violates the terms of the treaty relationship; it also stifles possibilities for common understanding. In her work at the MWC, Simon strives to emulate the Mi’kmaq water walkers who attempt to restore balance, to revitalise the obligations woven into two-row wampum belt and to “restore and reaffirm all our relations.”
Fredericton-based photographer (and the first Black artist to have an exhibit at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery) Gary Weekes reflected on the role that cultivating community relationships has played in his creative process. Refuting the idea of the photographer as an outside observer that can be detached from the subject of their photography, Weekes embraces intersubjectivity, forming relationships of trust and mutual understanding with the people he photographs. Weekes describes this process in terms of actually becoming a temporary member of a community, during the period of time that he is working with and photographing them, in order to tell their stories as effectively as possible. Weekes observed that this interactive and relationship-driven approach to photography has proven to be particularly valuable when photographing intimate, domestic moments within Black families in New Brunswick for Still Here: Preserving our Legacy, a project that seeks both to document Black history in New Brunswick, and to celebrate the present-day vitality of the community.
Sara Spike (Instructor, History, Dalhousie) presented on her recently completed postdoctoral work connected to a large interdisciplinary research project, led by oceanographers, focused on improving mapping of the benthic seafloor. As a historian, Spike worked with a group of humanities and social scientific researchers who asked: “what is the human experience of the seafloor?” and how can this knowledge be brought into conversation with scientific understandings of the benthic environment? Spike argues that coastal communities offer unique insights into near-shore spaces as historic and cultural landscapes, due to their positioning in the liminal space between land and sea. She observed that “coastal communities are not bounded by the ocean, they extend into it … and the seafloor is actually a culturally significant sone of attention and engagement.” Much of Spike’s research has therefore centred around community-engaged research, including one project, called Living with the Seafloor, that documents “lifelong, multigenerational knowledge” of the seafloor within Nova Scotia’s Eastern Shore communities. Returning to Zurba’s comments from the morning, Spike’s presentation emphasised the importance of community-engaged research being reciprocal rather than extractive.
Film and television scholar Jennifer VanderBurgh (Associate Professor, English Language and Literature, Saint Mary’s University) engaged with the idea of community on two levels: first, as a concept she interrogates in her research; second, as a key component of her research process. VanderBurgh’s work is interested in how audiovisual media (particularly film and television) “represented places and place-based communities” and how those representations in turn “affect places and the communities that they represent.” The capacity of television to represent place-based communities – and, to a certain extent, to imagine those communities into being – is the subject of her recent book, What Television Remembers: Artifacts and Footprints of TV in Toronto (2023). Here, VanderBurgh problematises the CBC’s ideal of “Canadian television” and the cultivation of a national culture by analysing how a particular place (Toronto) has been made to stand in for the nation in television productions throughout the twentieth century. The second strand of VanderBurgh’s presentation addressed community building as a necessary feature and byproduct of Canadian television research. Given that television programming has been poorly preserved and archived in Canada, VanderBurgh argues that film and television scholars rely on informal networks for mapping and consolidating records across the country, many of which reside in private collections. VanderBurgh frames this work in cultivating interdisciplinary relationships, and developing scholarly and archival networks, as essential labour in her field. Her recent work with the films of Margaret Perry at the Nova Scotia Archives has centred around making the films accessible to the public and creating “a community of interest” around Perry’s films. This project reflects VanderBurgh’s view that community building around audiovisual collections is “an activist opportunity and an obligation” for scholars.
Andrea Terry’s presentation expanded the panel’s discussions of community by reflecting on how she adapted her curatorial practice, as Director of the St. FX University Art Gallery, to continue to produce community shows during COVID. In 2022, Terry curated three exhibitions (titled Legacies: The Pride of Nova Scotia; Black Love, Joyful Lessons; and Nurturing Netukulimk) which aimed to make the artworks as accessible as possible by blending online and in-person components. Terry pointed out that each of these community exhibitions was rooted in cultivating her own relationships with advisors at the university’s Diversity Engagement Centre, who facilitated the gallery’s connections with local LGBTQIA+, Black, and Indigenous communities. Her presentation also attended to the tremendous amount of emotional labour involved in putting on community shows, which requires building foundations of trust with artists from marginalised communities who may not have much experience working with institutional galleries. Echoing Sharon Murray’s comments about the limited resources afforded cultural institutions in Nova Scotia from the first panel, Terry’s presentation offered an honest assessment of what it has meant to be the only full-time employee at the gallery engaged in this community-based work, and the emotional and physical toll that this work has taken on her.
Spoken word poet and 7th-generation Black New Brunswicker Thandiwe McCarthy discussed his community research project, Still Here: Preserving Our Legacy, which aims to document, preserve, and celebrate the history of Black New Brunswickers. McCarthy’s work, like that of Batt and Marr, grew out of the experience of struggling to find records and histories that spoke to his experience and the history of his community. In expanding and contributing to the literature on the Black historical experience, McCarthy also noted that his objective is, like Nickerson, to challenge simplistic and even false narratives around the history of enslavement in New Brunswick by citing irrefutable archival evidence. These archival records, which McCarthy notes often reflect the perspectives of community outsiders, will be juxtaposed with a counter-archive of community knowledge, retained in the private family albums and memories of Black New Brunswickers. Importantly, for McCarthy, the process of community engagement is reciprocal, rather than extractive. In addition to producing digitised copies of families’ photographs and records, the culmination of the research process is a photographic session with Weekes, when the family gathers to have group photos taken. McCarthy’s process of community engagement therefore documents the histories of Black New Brunswickers on their own terms, while also celebrating the resilience of Black families, and their ongoing presence in the province today.
The conversation that followed these presentations reflected a collective optimism regarding the prospects of community-based projects. Martha Langford, Andrea Terry, and Thandiwe McCarthy began the discussion by suggesting that community research and creative projects can actually help to engender or revitalise the very communities being studied or represented. Building on this, Graham Nickerson emphasised the importance of bringing research on marginalised communities, like African Nova Scotians, to the attention of organisations representing the interests of those communities, so that they may have agency in managing community knowledge. A growing interest in localised, community-centred studies and creative projects was noted by Langford, who pointed to the Beaverbrook Art Gallery’s forthcoming exhibition of Weekes and McCarthy’s work on Black New Brunswick families. Alongside the optimism, the discussion evolved to address challenges associated with community-based work, particularly when undertaking work in communities one does not belong to. Natasha Simon also offered an important cautionary note on the obstacles to sharing knowledge and mutual understanding between First Nations and western academic institutions, given the inequality of relations between these communities in Atlantic Canada today.