Colonial Blanket for Peoples Who Refuse to Vanish

Abstract

Granger and Weissman’s piece discusses a video/performance/sewn art piece comprising a variety of documents. The performance took place at the Vancouver Art Gallery, previously the provincial courthouse. While the steps of the gallery are a popular site of public protest and performance, access to the interior gallery is guarded—historically, as an exercise of colonial hegemony and currently, by the general exclusion of ethnic, sexual, and/or social minorities. The essay stitches together the fabric of indigenous struggles worldwide and the utopian impulse that motivates them; it is an ironic substitution of the smallpox-ridden colonizer’s gift and a questioning of the historical claiming of land and the elimination of the right of certain bodies to occupy that land.