La voix du territoire : représentations territoriales plurielles dans l’œuvre d’Eruoma Awashish
In the indigenous way of thinking, territory (Nitaskinan) is an important and multidimensional notion; it includes the historical, geographical and political territory, which is reclaimed, as well as the cosmological territory inscribed into rituals and ancestral beliefs. This thesis will present how the atikamekw artist Eruoma Awashish articulates and harmonizes this multiformal territory. It aims to address the way in which the artist represents this territory, both with the will to anchor it into traditions, and to contemporarily re-actualize it under a diachronic perspective. The artist displays a frank and colored aesthetic. She is working to shift colonial codes and to develop strategies in order to contribute to current claims and territorial affirmations of the First Nations. Through a politicized artistic production, Eruoma Awashish applies a decolonising lens: she reinvents colonial history by offering indigenous symbols and narrations a central and active place in her work. This thesis puts subsequent emphasis on the capacity of indigenous nations to adapt, self-define and self-represent. The artists are the witness and vectors of this affirmation and search for sovereignty which, for Awashish, is visual, cultural and territorial. This study deploys an interdisciplinary approach, faithful to the production of the artist. It is also based on the writing of indigenous thinkers in order to present the artistic process and production of an artist rooted into a complex contemporary context, exposed to political, cultural and territorial challenges. If the art of Awashish transmits and spreads territorial claims, it is because they are, before all else, the reflection of the territorial Atikamekw history and beliefs.
Eruoma Awashish Atikamekw Art autochtone Indigenous art Territory Cosmology