Indigenous Speaker Series: Jordan Wilson c̓əsnaʔəm, the city before the city (online)

Jordan Wilson belongs to the Musqueam Indian Band and is a curator and writer based in his ancestral homelands—what is now Vancouver, BC. He is a PhD candidate in anthropology at New York University.

Wilson will discuss his experiences and observations as a Musqueam community member and co-curator involved in producing the multi-site exhibition c̓əsnaʔəm, the city before the city. He will examine the issues present in the curation of a contemporary ethnographic (and ostensibly archaeological) exhibit, and the role of the curator—particularly a curator from the community represented—in such an endeavour. His talk will explore the question of balancing a community’s desire to right inaccurate historical representations of itself, while maintaining its privacy and control over knowledge. He will detail the challenges of respectfully approaching the representation of a collection of 10,000+ belongings (‘artefacts’) obtained through colonial displacement. Throughout, he will touch on Musqueam’s relationship with their ancestral territory and extensive history in this place.