Canadian Studies Announcements
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In This Issue:
News from Berkeley
- Berkeley Art Museum opens survey exhibition on Canadian Cree artist Duane Linklater
Upcoming Events
- Book talk: Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America
- Workshop: “North American Cities in Changing Times: Rethinking the Urban Core for the City of the Future”
External Events
- Canada Seminar: “What Brought Us Here, Won’t Take Us There: The Rewiring of Canadian Healthcare”
- Canadian films at the UN Association Film Festival
- Cosponsored performance: Ewako ôma askiy. This then is the earth.
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Berkeley Art Museum Opens Survey Exhibition on Canadian Cree Artist Duane Linklater
A new exhibit at the Berkeley Art Museum (BAMPFA) showcases the work of Ontario-based Omaskêko Cree artist Duane Linklater. Titled mymotherside, the show collects 30 diverse works spanning the artist’s multidisciplinary career.
Linklater’s art explores the complexity (and contradictions) of living as an Indigenous person in a settler society. He also grapples with the fraught relationship between Indigenous communities and museums, which have too often displayed Indigenous artworks stripped of their cultural context. Memory is a constant theme in Linklater’s work, concerning not just what we remember, but what we forget.
Linklater was born in Moose Factory, Ontario, and currently lives in North Bay. He completed his undergraduate education in Native studies and fine arts at the University of Alberta, and received his MFA from Bart College in New York. He has exhibited works in numerous galleries and museums across Canada and the United States.
The new exhibit, originally presented at the Frey Art Museum in Seattle, is the first major survey of Linklater’s work, and includes sculpture, painting, textiles, and video. The exhibit contextualizes the work within the last decade of Linklater’s career, as the artist “interrogates” the concept of the museum, and exposes the historical exclusion of Indigenous voices from gallery spaces. The pieces include works that recall ancestral traditions, alongside references to the artist’s own childhood and contemporary Indigenous life. Above all, Linklater refuses a “reductive” understanding of Indigeneity. He asserts his right to define himself, as an act of “sovereignty and self-determination” in the face of the historical and ongoing erasure and dispossession of First Nations people.
Duane Linklater: mymotherside will run in Berkeley through February 25, 2024. Guided tours of the exhibition, led by UC Berkeley graduate students, are available on select Wednesdays and Sundays.
From November 1-4, Canadian Studies will also cosponsor Ewako ôma askiy. This then is the earth., a series of performances in dialogue with the exhibition led by the artist’s wife, artist and choreographer Tanya Lukin Linklater. Please see below under “External Events” for more information.
Exhibition image courtesy of BAMPFA. |
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Book Talk: Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America
Tues., Oct. 17 | 12:30 pm | 223 Philosophy Hall | RSVP
20th-century Black history cannot be understood without accounting for the influence of Pan-African thought. In the early 1900s, Marcus Garvey’s followers saw North America, particularly Canada, as a base from which to liberate the Black masses from colonialism. Then, after World War II, Vietnam War resisters, Black Panthers, and Caribbean students joined the throngs of cross-border migrants to denounce militarism, imperialism, and capitalism. As revolutionaries from Oakland to Toronto dreamed of an “African world”, the prospect of coalitions among the Black Power, Red Power, and Quebecois Power movements inspired U.S. and Canadian intelligence services to infiltrate and sabotage Black organizations across North America.
In his new book Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America (University of North Carolina Press, 2023), Dr. Wendell Adjetey explores how twentieth-century global Black liberation movements began within the U.S.-Canadian borderlands as cross-border, continental struggles. This work reveals the revolutionary legacies of the Underground Railroad and America’s Great Migration, and the hemispheric and transatlantic dimensions of this history.
Dr. Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey is assistant professor of post-Reconstruction U.S. and African Diaspora history at McGill University, where he holds the William Dawson Chair. A first-generation high school graduate, he earned an PhD, MPhil, and MA from Yale University in history and African American studies. He completed his BA in history and political science at the University of Toronto (University of St. Michael’s College), where he also earned an MA in political science and ethnic, immigration, and pluralism studies.
This event is cosponsored by the Center for African Studies, the Center for Race and Gender, and the Department of African American Studies & African Diaspora Studies. |
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Workshop: North American Cities in Changing Times: Rethinking the Urban Core for the City of the Future
Fri., Oct. 27 | 1:30-5:00 pm | Women’s Faculty Club Reception to follow | RSVP
The rise of remote work has upended traditional thinking about the role of the urban core and what society might need and want from urban spaces. Some cities have weathered these changes better than others by attracting new residents and investment from firms and other institutions. At the same time, cities across North America are grappling with widening inequality, soaring living costs, and uneven recovery. What might be causing these differences? How can cities take these opportunities to remake the urban core in a more just and equitable way so all residents can thrive – and what can cities learn from each other?
This workshop will bring together scholars and policy leaders from across the United States and Canada for a discussion about the future of the urban core in select North American cities. Using a comparative lens, two panels will examine how the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent economic recovery have shifted narratives around development in urban centers. We will speculate on future development possibilities, and propose possible solutions to current and potential challenges to urban revival.
Participants will include Dr. Karen Chapple (UC Berkeley/University of Toronto); Jennifer Barrett (Canadian Urban Institute); Molly Harris (London Borough and Lambeth and former Canadian Studies Hildebrand Fellow); Dr. Tom Kemeny (University of Toronto; Sujata Srivastava (SPUR San Francisco); Egon Terplan (UC Berkeley); Andy Yan (Simon Fraser University); Dr. Gordon Douglas (San José State University); and Eric Eidlin (City of San José).
Space is limited, so please RSVP if you plan to attend in person. All attendees are welcome to attend a public reception following the workshop at 5:00 pm.
This workshop is cosponsored by the Department of City & Regional Planning, the Terner Center for Housing Innovation, the Goldman School of Public Policy, and the Institute of Governmental Studies.
Image: Robson Square, Vancouver, BC. Author: Los Paseos on Wikimedia Commons. |
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Canada Seminar: “What Brought Us Here, Won’t Take Us There: The Rewiring of Canadian Healthcare”
Tues., Oct. 17 | 9:00 am PT | Online | RSVP
The Weatherhead Canada Program at Harvard University welcomes Dr. Alika Lafontaine (University of Alberta), for a discussion on the future of Canada’s healthcare system. Named Maclean’s top Healthcare Innovator of 2023, Dr. Lafontaine has been at the epicentre of healthcare system change for almost two decades. He is the first Indigenous physician and the youngest doctor to lead the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) in its 156-year history, and the first Indigenous physician to be listed on The Medical Post’s 50 Most Powerful Doctors. As an experienced health leader, Lafontaine speaks eloquently and passionately on the politics of healthcare, implementing and scaling equity, effective advocacy, and redesigning health systems. |
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Canadian Films at the UN Association Film Festival
Oct. 19-29 | San Francisco Bay Area | Buy tickets
Three Canadian documentaries will be shown at this year’s UN Association Film Festival in San Francisco. Entries include Bahati (Oct. 20), the deeply personal story of a Rwandan refugee’s journey of survival; To Kill a Tiger (Oct. 21), which explores the steep cost an Indian family pays for seeking justice for sexual violence; and Backlash: Misogyny in the Digital Age (Oct. 26), which documents an online culture of hatred for women. |
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Ewako ôma askiy. This then is the earth.
Nov. 1-4 | BAMPFA | Learn more
Canadian Studies is pleased to cosponsor artist and choreographer Tanya Lukin Linklater’s performance Ewako ôma askiy. This then is the earth. at BAMPFA. This cyclical series of dance rehearsals will respond to the exhibition Duane Linklater: mymotherside, and feature Canadian dancers Ivanie Aubin-Malo and Ceinwen Gobert. The public is invited to view the in-situ, unfolding processes of embodiment, gesture, and sensation. Lukin Linklater is compelled by audiences viewing open rehearsals, or the process of making dances. Through experimentation, structured improvisation, prompts from objects in exhibition, place, and writings, she facilitates a choreographic process. Lukin Linklater is staying with this slow unfolding, refusing to culminate these processes in finished performances. In this way, she centres the intellectual, affective, and physical labor – and relational aspects – of making dances. The open rehearsals are free to the Berkeley community with their Cal1 card, and included in the public’s entrance to BAMPFA. |
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Royal Canadian Legion, US Branch #25 