'Under Trying Domestic Circumstances': Reproducing Settler Identity and Resisting Indigenous Dispossession in Twentieth-Century Saskatchewan. Issue 1 (2nd January 2017)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Gaudet, Manon
• Is Part Of: Third text. Volume 31:Issue 1(2017)
• Page Start: 31
• Page End: 48
• Publication Date: 2017-01-02
• Subjects: Manon Gaudet -- Settler-colonial art history -- colonial collecting -- contact zones -- Plains Indigenous beadwork -- gender roles -- twentieth-century Canada -- residential schools -- Indigenous women -- settler-colonial literature -- colonial intimacy; Art and society -- Periodicals; Art -- Developing countries -- 20th century -- Periodicals; Developing countries -- Intellectual life -- Periodicals; 700.91724
• DOI: 10.1080/09528822.2017.1362835
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0952-8822

Abstract

Abstract: This article considers a collection of Plains Indigenous beadwork donated to the Royal Saskatchewan Museum by the Canadian author and collector Mary Weekes (1884–1980). Taking the rural cottage where she acquired her collection as a contact zone, the analysis considers how Weekes developed unusually intimate settler–Indigenous friendships that forced her to confront her complicity in colonial practices of dispossession and assimilation. It also interrogates how her dedication to Saskatchewan's marginalised Indigenous peoples at times irreconcilably conflicted with her own marginalised status as a woman with persistent professional ambitions. Moreover, the article contends that Weekes's domestic circumstances and exchanges of labour therein offer insight into the reproduction of settler identity in twentieth-century Saskatchewan and the simultaneous (and not necessarily oppositional) resistance of Indigenous dispossession.