Sincere Irony and Crafting Critique: Institutional Memory in Ursula Johnson’s Mi’kwite’tmn (Do You Remember)

• Main Author: Merritt, Samantha
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2017
• Subjects: Mi’kmaq
• Online Access: https://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/id/eprint/982977/; https://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/id/eprint/982977/1/Merritt_MA_F2017.pdf

This thesis is an examination of the exhibition by contemporary artist Ursula Johnson entitled Mi’kwite’tmn (Do You Remember) (2014-2018), through three sets of sometimes conflicting forces: history and memory, nostalgia and irony, and active and passive viewer participation. The exhibition is analyzed through Mi’kmaq Elder Albert Marshall’s philosophy of two eyed seeing, which seeks to blend together Indigenous knowledge systems and Western knowledge systems in a way that benefits both ways of thinking. This thesis begins by exploring the historical evolution of museums as sites which reinforce colonialism, and how Johnson utilizes public familiarity with these institutions through mimicry in order to draw attention to this aspect of institutional spaces. From there, I analyze Johnson’s use of parodic irony and reflective nostalgia through the embodiment of the Indigenous figure of the Trickster both as a form of healing from colonial violence, and looking toward a future of Indigenous cultural resurgence. The final section of this thesis examines the role of the Mi’kmaq worldview of Netukulimk in Mi’kwite’tmn (Do You Remember), examining how the focus on connection in Netukulimk is utilized through viewer participation throughout the exhibition. This thesis ultimately concludes that Ursula Johnson’s Mi’kwite’tmn (Do You Remember) functions as a site of imagining ways in which the colonial institutions of museums can instead be used as a tool for decolonization.