Remember Ktaqmkuk in Peace & Friendship is a place, memory, and archival response and call to remember in place on Codroy Island: a forgotten site of affirmation of the Peace & Friendship Treaty in South-West Ktaqmkuk.
Through movement, ochreing, and textile activation Megans project is grounded in ceremony in-place, in remembering and sharing in community, and results in continuing a body of work with projected photograph-based moving image and audio.
I was invited by the Bonavista Biennale to respond to the theme of Host in 02023; slowly, with intention made a work to bring forward truths and call attention to the widely destructive and wrong narrative of discovery and terra nullius. That place of early contact, where this idea landed on Turtle Island more than 500 years ago and where it still lives, has been instrumental in the violent unfolding of colonialism across so many Indigenous Territories, across borders. My home territory is an earliest site of first European colonial contact and the realities of this affected all of the continent; it continues to impact our lived realities now.
I created a flag dyed in the colour that our ancestors can see: the colour of our earth, blood and ground: ochre red. For a month the textile was engaged with the land, water, air, and animals on-site; when it returned to me it was a ghost. It represented the forgetting of relationship and knowledge.
In this phase of the work I will activate the flag and its message through movement with a critically important place in my home community, Katalisk, Ktaqmkuk, where I live. It’s uncommon knowledge that the Peace & Friendship Treaty was affirmed here, this performance will call attention to a reality in our history that should be commonly known and respected in the political development of first the republic of newfoundland, and then the province of newfoundland and labrador, and further the greater territory of Mi'kma'ki. The omission of this political and sacred negotiation and knowledge has been part of near complete erasure of our presence in Ktaqmkuk. This erasure of L’nu power has been part of fractured identity and Mi’kmaq access to Mi’kmaq Territory, to people, relationship, kin, and community. This erasure has caused disconnect, and ongoing violences. To be in ceremony with this place, in this way, is a call to remember Peace & Friendship, a sharing of our truth, and a means to cultivate connection.
Read Shannon Webb Campbell's article in Muskrat Magazine.
