We Have Stories Trailer from Hallenbeck Consultants on Vimeo.
‘My Name Is’…
‘What no one knew about Elizabeth Cornish is that she was not allowed back in the Bay. The old grandfather and Geordie would not allow it but the other Grandma’s helped her so she could come back and see her kids. That house in the pic of Emma is where her children would go to see her. The other old grandmas, maybe even Emma, would hang a white tea towel in the window and that is how they knew she was there. The old grandfather and his sons thought it was the women having tea. I used to hear this story from my uncles’. – Rosemary Georgeson
Our work seeks to disrupt the settler colonial archive by questioning ongoing academic and genealogical manifestations of the archive. We juxtapose interviews, academic research, and the settler colonial archive with lived experiences and histories that exceed it. In this process we gender the settler colonial archive, calling into question how processes of archival occlusion have erased archival subjects while simultaneously (and contradictorily) often facilitating conditions for resistance and survival.
Our presentation draws from fieldwork at the Victoria archives and archival work on the McKenna McBride Commission. We connect archival silences to the gendering of territory, water, labor, and Indigenous bodies. Arguing that these omissions have been reproduced in contemporary writing about settler colonialism, we draw from Rosemary Georgeson’s own personal knowledge of her ancestors lives to contest, resist, and reveal the ways in which colonial archives have sought, and failed, to control and erase Indigenous relationships to territory and family.
Biographies
Rosemary Georgeson: https://rosemarygeorgeson.wordpress.com/
Rosemary Georgeson is a Sahtu Dene / Coast Salish artist, writer, and storyteller. The recipient of the 2009 Vancouver Mayor’s Award recognizing her as an emerging artist in community arts, Rosemary has applied her talents in dozens of theater, film, and performance projects throughout Canada.
Jessica Hallenbeck http://hallenbeckconsultants.com/
Jessica Hallenbeck is a filmmaker, planner, and PhD Candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. Her PhD work involves the co-creation of a multimedia film project with Rosemary Georgeson.
