Abstract
This essay reflects on the potential that deepened reflexivity around cultural diplomacy has to radicalize the study and practice of diplomacy through engagement with academics and practitioners in the field of cultural relations. It explores culture’s role in cultural diplomacy as an expression of Eurocentric dualist constructions of nature and culture that reproduce a Western episteme and reassert universalizing claims that deny other ways of knowing and relating to the world. It aims to unsettle settler diplomacy by engaging with contemporary artists who mobilize understandings of the wampum belt as a function of diplomatic relations to give voice to the political consciousness that animates the Indigenous practice of place-based internationalism. In so doing, it advances a methodology toward increased reflexivity and critical space for discussion across disciplinary formations that currently function to separate the cultural and the political in centering Western statist diplomacy as the taken-for-granted field of diplomatic activity.
Our interest lies in tapping the potential of a critical Cultural Diplomacy to connect North America globally, understanding that North America is, properly speaking, Turtle Island – not a set of states in a universalizing international community but the site of many epistemic worlds.
brison and jessup, 20211
Unsettling Settler Diplomacy
In this essay, we locate ourselves in relation to the Codex Canadensis, a material expression of a time and place that animates the argument we make about a field of diplomatic activity currently occluded by state-based understandings of cultural diplomacy. The Codex is a technology of Western science; a late-seventeenth-century album of natural history illustrations depicting the fauna and flora of New France and containing among its depictions of Indigenous peoples of the region a drawing of a diplomatic actor (fig. 1).2 The caption to the right of the page identifies this figure as an emissary of Gannachiouavé, a Haudenosaunee village located on the north shore of Lake Ontario close to the present-day site of Queen’s University at Kingston, the Euro-American academy where we practice as cultural historians.3 The page speaks to the incommensurable worldviews informing the encounter between French Jesuit missionary Louis Nicola, who is credited with the drawing, and the envoy, who met Nicola as the delegate was leaving on a diplomatic mission to the Haudenosaunee settlement of Gandaouagué, in the northeastern part of lands now claimed by the United States (fig. 2). As the Codex attests, Nicola considered the Haudenosaunee as subject matter for a natural history – a scholarly expression of Jesuit missionary strategy that denies Indigenous spiritual and ritual practices associated with the mobilization of natural knowledge. The Jesuits cultivated cross-cultural intimacy and trust conducive, not to mutual understanding, but to the appropriation of Indigenous knowledge in the production of natural histories for consumption by Christendom – a community that perceived the emissary, like Indigenous people globally, as pagan.4
A drawing attributed to Jesuit missionary Louis Nicolas. The caption reads, “This is an emissary sent by the village of Gannachiouavé on his way to invite the gentlemen of Gandaouaghaga to a game. They believe that the snake is the god of the game. They invoke the god by holding the snake in their hands while dancing and singing.” Codex Canadensis, c. 1700, Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa OK.
Citation: Diplomatica 6, 1 (2024) ; 10.1163/25891774-bja10121
A drawing attributed to Jesuit missionary Louis Nicolas. The caption reads, “General map of the great St Lawrence River, which has been explored more than 900 leagues inland in the West Indies,” Codex Canadensis, c. 1700, Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa OK.
Citation: Diplomatica 6, 1 (2024) ; 10.1163/25891774-bja10121
needs to start with our intelligence systems, or what Dene scholar Glen Sean Coulthard calls “grounded normativity” – the systems of ethics that are continuously generated by a relationship with a particular place, with land, through the Indigenous processes and knowledges that make up Indigenous life. … Grounded normativity generates nations as networks of complex, layered, multidimensional, intimate relationships with human and non-human beings. Our societies work very well when those relationships are balanced.8
Replica of Two Row wampum belt.
Citation: Diplomatica 6, 1 (2024) ; 10.1163/25891774-bja10121
courtesy the wampum shopUnderscoring the implications of this onto-epistemology, King points out that even the briefest survey of Indigenous diplomacies demonstrates a “radically divergent approach to the international” than that emerging in the Westphalian state system at the time of the Codex’s creation.9
We use King’s observation as a touchstone for the intellectual space necessary to activate the field of diplomatic activity now occluded by the normative power of this Western, state-based diplomacy.10 We do so cognizant of the Eurocentric drive to incorporate such reflection into a historical narrative that positions it as revisionist, and thus as a progressive step in a story that begins with the so-called invention of diplomacy by the West – “the first resort of kings”11 – and the state-based protocols and practices of twentieth century international relations against which the global era’s network diplomacy positions itself as “new.”12 We ask what political work is needed to push against this persistent recentering of statist diplomacy in the diplomatic field, and suggest three moves toward establishing the critical space to engage with it. We have already explored two of these suggestions elsewhere, and rehearse those arguments only briefly here to frame discussion of the third move we advocate for radicalizing current discussion of cultural diplomacy.13
First, we suggest including in the Euro-American academy’s consideration of cultural diplomacy thinking generated by the disciplines and corresponding practices that actively foreground critical approaches to understandings of culture. Currently, those engaged in the study and practice of diplomacy understand cultural diplomacy in terms of diplomatic practice, and so its academics are in Political Science, Policy Studies, International Relations, and Diplomatic Studies, and its practitioners are diplomats, policymakers, politicians, and foreign ministry officials.14 We advocate for the inclusion of academics and practitioners on the cultural side of cultural diplomacy – that is, for analyses of cultural diplomacy informed by the methodologies and approaches of those identified with the Euro-American academy’s “cultural disciplines,” among them such fields in the Creative Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences as History, Philosophy, Art History, Communications Studies, Cultural Sociology, Cultural Geography, Cultural Studies, and the Fine Arts. Our primary interest involves taking cultural diplomacy from an affirmative activity mobilizing a relatively unproblematized “culture” to a reflexive practice that engages fully with scholarship and experience-based knowledge generated by those trained in what Australian scholar David Carter refers to as “critical culture.”15
We argue this position to advance what has been called the “epistemological soul-searching” triggered by the disintegration of diplomacy as the Western world has conceived it,16 which entails a rigorous interrogation of diplomacy based in Western liberal constructions of the self and the world. Working from the premise that this diplomacy is epistemically bounded, we want to use its interrogation to deepen self-reflexivity as a relational practice. Cognizant of recent scholarship on the “new diplomacy,” the “new public diplomacy,” and, particularly, “relational diplomacy,” we advocate for increased attention to the cultural relations approach to diplomacy, which is identified with the cultural sphere and the activities of practitioners in arts organizations and advocacy groups, cultural institutions and associations, activist networks, non-governmental organizations (ngo s), and other civil society actors.17 Perceived as removed from diplomacy proper and its concern with the short-term interests of states and their policy goals, cultural relations practitioners emphasize people-to-people relations, reciprocity, non-governmentalism, and a long-term outlook as they work to bring a critically informed understanding of culture to their activities. They do so perhaps to the same degree that they remain largely uncritical of their concomitant engagement in the diplomatic field, which for its part brings a relatively unproblematized understanding of culture to the practice and study of International Relations.18
Second, we suggest interrogating state-centrism and the centrality of nation-state-based understandings of culture in the study and practice of cultural diplomacy and of global relations more broadly. We want to foreground the experience of nation-state formation on the development of the modern academic disciplines to prompt consideration of the reproductive relationship between methodological nationalism and “the hegemonic universalization of European ideas and practices”19 that characterizes the Euro-American academy today. Our aim is to generate conversation across these institutionalized knowledge formations – the academic disciplines, which currently function to separate the cultural and the political. Our hope is that their new proximity to one another troubles discussion on at least two counts: first, by foregrounding the myth of culture’s neutrality; that is, the diplomatic field’s perception of culture as a benign entity through which cultural relations practitioners advance long term goals seemingly independent of the strategic interests of the state. And second, by making apparent that cultural workers are always already involved in the politics of culture that underpin the building and management of global relations. In short, we want to bring urgency to the cultural sector’s awareness of its implication in affairs of state.
Third, we suggest folding the insights gained from these moves into critical reflection on culture’s role in cultural diplomacy as an expression of Eurocentric dualist constructions of nature and culture that reproduce a Western episteme and reassert universalizing claims that deny other ways of knowing and relating to the world. As Nicholas Onuf argues “claims that international relations make up a bounded and distinctive social reality” are only plausible “if they are taken to refer to the ensemble of activities engaged in by a bounded and slowly changing set of entities conveniently denominated by the term ‘states’ in the historic constellation we know as the ‘Western state system.’”20 While there has been a recent move to unsettle scholarship in public diplomacy from its Western roots, and even as the field begins to engage with non-Western theory and practice, assumptions buried deeply in Euro-American disciplinary formations continue to reinforce the universalizing tendencies of the West.21 The occlusion of Indigenous diplomacies – their historical presence and practices – by the Euro-American Academy draws attention to the hegemony of interpretation exercised by the West’s statist diplomacy and informs our move in this essay beyond the self-referential literature of Eurocentric diplomacy in order to engage with the work of Indigenous scholars and practitioners who bring attention to the theory and practice of Indigenous diplomacies. Drawing out Indigenous diplomacies may be understood as an attempt to bring attention to a field of diplomatic activity within which statist diplomacy and its subtending structures of knowledge is but one type. More to the point, it also foregrounds this expansive field of diplomatic activity as one within which Indigenous nations interact with one another, and with what Kanien’kehá:ka political anthropologist Audra Simpson refers to as “still settling” liberal democracies.22 With this situation as a focus, we argue for the potential to energize practice, research and advocacy at the convergence of culture and diplomacy. Our contention is that greater reflexivity is needed to radicalize analysis of the Eurocentric epistemic constraints currently exercised by the statist tradition which mitigate against critical reflection on the foundational role of culture in diplomacy as an expression of an ontological separation of the human and natural worlds that denies other ways of being in and knowing the world.
In the next section, we make this argument in a sequence of three discussions, each of which engages with the work of an artist who draws on the visual-oral tradition of Indigenous diplomacy to give voice to the political consciousness that animates the Indigenous practice of place-based internationalism. Using aesthetics as a vehicle, Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) artist Alan Michelson, Kitigan Zibi Anishinaabeg First Nation artist Nadia Myre, and Ononta’kahá:ka (Onondaga) artist and curator Jeffrey Thomas mobilize understandings of the wampum belt as a function of diplomatic relations to engage viewers in the political field where Indigeneity pushes against the colonializing drive of the West’s universalizing worldview.
In our concluding section, we foreground a key implication of our discussion: that our consideration of Indigenous diplomacies speaks directly to the field of diplomatic activity currently obscured by the uncritical participation of cultural relations practitioners in settler diplomacy and its normalizing discourses. We argue that the critical engagement of those on the culture side of the culture/diplomacy divide must experience a long-overdue loss of innocence in this regard, and with increased reflexivity create space for discussion across the institutionalized knowledge formations that currently function to separate the cultural and the political in centering statist diplomacy as the taken-for-granted field of diplomatic activity.
Putting Diplomacy in Its Place
Something of a Trojan Horse, our attention to “the cultural” in diplomacy – to cultural relations, to cultural diplomacy, and to the cultural boundedness of diplomacy itself – surreptitiously allows those trained as academics and practitioners in the cultural disciplines into a discussion in which they would otherwise be perceived as lacking authority by those already on the inside. Once smuggled in, those from the cultural disciplines are challenged to self-reflexively examine their taken-for-granted understandings and practices through a diplomatic lens, to recognize themselves as political actors and as such, collaborators with academics and practitioners on the diplomatic side in the “epistemological soul searching” that Western statist diplomacy faces. In advancing this process, the cultural relations approach is not recuperative; we are not advocating a cultural relations approach to diplomacy. Rather, we are pressing for increased awareness that, as a subfield of cultural diplomacy, which in turn is a subfield of diplomacy, the study and practice of cultural relations speaks to the institutional breadth of Western knowledge production that, in centering the state in diplomatic practice, obscures a larger diplomatic field.
In other words, the promise of a cultural relations approach lies not in providing a way out of the problem but in suggesting a way into a deeper understanding of it. Acting on this promise constitutes a first step; a potentially productive intervention into current discussions of state-centric diplomacy and its place in the pluriversal field of diplomatic action. It enables a larger conversation directed to enacting the three moves we set out at the opening of this essay in our discussion of cultural diplomacy’s potential: first, including in the discussion the disciplines and corresponding fields of practice that actively foreground critical approaches to culture; second, interrogating state-centrism and the centrality of nation-state-based understandings of culture in the study and practice of cultural diplomacy and of global relations more broadly; and third, folding insights gained from these moves back into critical reflection on constructions of nature and culture that reproduce a Western epistemic universalism that denies other ways of knowing and being in the world. Generating the critical space necessary to do this decentering involves accepting autonomous worldviews as such, rather than trying to assimilate other ways of living and knowing into Eurocentric frameworks and practices (as has been the Western practice to date).
This opening up would necessitate the kind of commitment to the self-determination of peoples with distinct worldviews that is conceptualized in the Kaswentha, which we introduced above as one of the earliest accords between Indigenous peoples and Europeans in North America. A living treaty fostered through trade between the Haudenosaunee and newcomers to their territories, the Kaswentha is visualized in the form of the Two Row wampum (fig. 3): two rows of purple beads separated by three rows of white represent the parallel courses underpinning the two peoples’ agreement to an ongoing relationship of mutual autonomy and non-interference based on recognition of the other’s distinct ways of life. New York-based Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) artist Alan Michelson argues that the Kaswentha is central to understanding the ways in which the vitality of these autonomous realities animates Haudenosaunee consciousness today. He deals with the treaty in three major works, most recently Blanket Refusal (fig. 4), which represents the Two Row as the background against which to read the text of a December 30, 1924 letter to U.S. President Calvin Coolidge from the chiefs of the Ononta’kahá:ka (Onondaga) reaffirming Ononta’kahá:ka sovereignty in refusing the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act and its assignment of U.S. citizenship to all Indigenous people within the borders of the United States.23
Alan Michelson, Blanket Refusal, 2020. Laser print on double-sided fleece blanket, 80 x 60 inches.
Citation: Diplomatica 6, 1 (2024) ; 10.1163/25891774-bja10121
Wampum is part of the intergenerational exchange of knowledge … the way that our people have come into the twenty-first century as Haudenosaunee …. [Michelson] push[es] it to really communicate on this other level that it’s part of our culture that we speak through. … I view [his] work as having multiple responsibilities, in that for people who know nothing about this history, it’s an introduction to them, but then for people who are deeply invested in it, it provokes this other idea.25
Viewers may be more or less conscious of the presence of this “other idea,” but as Rickard suggests, it is operative nonetheless: the 1924 letter set against the belt/blanket background telescopes time so that Blanket Refusal speaks of past injustice as formative of the present. Used in diplomatic relations – to seal agreements and as mnemonics when carrying their meanings forward in recitation – wampum belts are part of the Indigenous Oral Tradition system.26 As Anishinaabe political theorist Dale Turner puts it: “The main political significance of wampum was to represent – materially – the morally binding nature of an agreement or promise …. Wampum belts served as the ‘text’ in the sense that they materialized the agreement itself. What made the wampum belts valuable was that each had a story attached to it.”27 The Kaswentha story is that of two vessels – the European sailing ship and the Haudenosaunee canoe – traveling side by side down a river, neither interfering with the course of the other. In Blanket Refusal, the precedent the Kaswentha established becomes the background against which to understand the text of the letter. It is a move on Michelson’s part that Julie Gough addresses more broadly. She points out that “the use of alternative visual vocal language forms may help in offering other interpretations of stories without the inherent historical/cultural boundaries of the English language … [I]f used within these possibilities,” she adds, “the English language will appear the interloper rather than the omniscient inventor.”28
Thus, if there was a “structure” of settler colonialism that was discernible through time, there was also a structure of refusal. These refusals were symptomatic of that structure and manifested in the games of settler colonial governance, and in particular, the play that would signal consent. Paramount among these refusals is citizenship itself, the aforementioned actions that would signal consent and belonging within a settler political system and would move Mohawks out of their own sovereignty into an ambit of “consent” and with that, settler citizenship and the promise of whiteness. All of this pointed analytically to the deeply unequal scene of articulation that people were thrown into and were remaking through the quotidian and the grand.32
As Michelson and Simpson make clear, refusal is a political stance coming out of the Haudenosaunee’s ongoing engagement with another political order, that of still settling liberal democratic states. It is a political stance that speaks of treaties, diplomacy, and wampum as formative of, and in, the present; or as Rickard puts it, of “the way that our people have come into the twenty-first century as Haudenosaunee.”33 Beyond the Haudenosaunee, it implicates treaties, diplomacy, and wampum in the political consciousness of Indigenous peoples in the Eastern Woodlands more broadly. For Montreal-based artist, Nadia Myre, who locates her interest in wampum as an Anishinaabe practice, a grand accord such as the naagan ge bezhig emkwaan – A Dish with One Spoon – is formative of people’s everyday engagement with one another at the interface of Indigenous refusal and colonializing effacement. An Algonquin member of the Kitigan Zibi Anishinaabeg First Nation, Myre refers to A Dish with One Spoon in her work to speak to the process of “remaking through the quotidian and the grand” that Simpson describes. “What I love about A Dish with One Spoon,” Myre explains, “is that I think of it as Indigenous to Indigenous protocol – how we inhabit and how we share the space together: negotiating – protocol – is about resituating the understanding between all the different players in the area.”34
Myre’s use of the present tense in her comments speaks to the vitality of not only the Indigenous diplomatic canon and the naagan ge bezhig emkwaan, but also the relational epistemology she brings through them to her piece, Where the Beavers, Deers, Elks and such Beasts Keep (fig. 5).35 Recently installed in Joni restaurant in the historic Park Hyatt hotel in Toronto, Where the Beavers is part of Myre’s larger research-creation program foregrounding A Dish with One Spoon, which occupies a foundational place in the Eastern Woodlands as a centuries-old agreement between the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee to protect hunting, fishing, and gathering grounds and to share them through diplomacy and respect for one another’s sovereignty as nations.36 This political concept has informed international relations among Indigenous Peoples in the region since its inception, but also, given the Oral Tradition system of Indigenous diplomacy, those forged in treaties with Europeans, key among them, the 1701 Great Peace of Montreal where A Dish with One Spoon was affirmed as part of the cessation of almost a century of hostilities between the Haudenosaunee and the French arising from competition in the fur trade.37 Pointing to the need to deepen settler engagement with the conceptualization of territorial understandings between the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee Peoples, Myre foregrounds Indigenous relationality in land recognition statements, which have become increasingly ubiquitous in North America since the release of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission report in 2015.38
Nadia Myre, Where the Beavers, Deers, Elks and such Beasts Keep, 2021. Beaded Weaving, glazed ceramic metal wire, nylon thread felt, wood & mesh backing, 58" x 98", Joni Restaurant, Park Hyatt Toronto.
Citation: Diplomatica 6, 1 (2024) ; 10.1163/25891774-bja10121
Where the Beavers, Deers, Elks and such Beasts Keep makes these ideas accessible to viewers by amplifying the materialization of the naagan ge bezhig emkwaan represented by A Dish with One Spoon wampum. Myre rightly describes her piece as “beadwork on a large scale” (58” x 98”). The central motif is a magnification of the lozenge-shaped dish or bowl identified with A Dish with One Spoon (fig. 6), which is a relatively small wampum belt consisting of seven rows of white, tubular beads with a dish or bowl of purple wampum in the center.39 The tubular beads in Myre’s work are ceramic – more than 12,000 of them, each rolled by hand and glazed in one of 63 custom formulated glazes. The individuation of the beads, inspired by that of wampum shell beads, not only results in a range of tones and depth of color in the final weaving, but also effects the subtle unevenness of the textile’s surface necessary for its animation by ambient light.40 Myre explains that her strategy is to create a lasting moment for the viewer using “aesthetics and labour and process as a way to do the difficult work of engaging the viewer over a period of time. So, even if they are looking and they get the idea right away,” she says, “the fact that there is quite a lot of labour involved … [entices the viewer] to sit with it … because [they] are having a moment in relationship to the work.”41
Replica of Dish with One Spoon wampum belt.
Citation: Diplomatica 6, 1 (2024) ; 10.1163/25891774-bja10121
courtesy the wampum shopThe moment Myre creates is not simply an aesthetic one, it is also fundamentally political. The aesthetic is a means of achieving the political, and as she points out, it comes out of “a delicate balance”; there is always “a pitfall of making something too beautiful that the ideas get lost.”42 In this instance, balance comes with the gravitas her work brings to the naagan ge bezhig emkwaa – the combined effect of the beadwork’s bold materiality, the quiet stability of the grid that binds the white symbol to the dark ground, and the imposing presence of the enormous dish. It is not difficult for viewers to read the dish motif in relation to the title as representing the place where the beavers, deers, elks and such beasts keep, and perhaps, given the archaism of the language of the title, as one with deep historical resonance.43 Myre cites a land acknowledgement given in Vancouver that included A Dish with One Spoon as having informed her insistence on place: “that’s what seeded the idea to think about what the Dish with One Spoon is, and to reterritorialize it to the territory that we’re really talking about so that it can’t become something that [is] exported to Vancouver or to Japan.”44 So Myre created the large beadwork in relation to its place in the restaurant, in the hotel, in Toronto, in the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin, in the Eastern Woodlands.45
In doing so, Myre addresses the deterritorialization of A Dish with One Spoon that occurs more broadly in the way land statements popularize the treaty as a metaphor – whether for multiculturalism, environmentalism, or some other present-day preoccupation – blurring the territorial rights of individual Indigenous nations.46 Audra Simpson argues that such refusal “pushes on the settler colonial present” and the colonialist drive to “move on from the past” by denying the incorporation of Indigenous Peoples into the settler political system through the workings of “consent” and “citizenship.”47 It denies the implicit consent to be governed embedded in the electoral system that contemporary settler states proffer as the only means of representation and recognition of rights, despite its reality as a colonializing tool of articulation. As Simpson explains, the work of electoralism toward the incorporation of Indigenous people into colonialist narratives of acceptance and belonging – into “a flat dehistoricized pluralism”48 – is “challenged by the counter that Indigenous people represent simply by (a) living and (b) knowing this.” Their presence speaks to other political orders, authorities, traditions, and structures of thought “away from and in critical relationship to states.”49
What we are calling “grounded normativity” refers to the ethical frameworks provided by these Indigenous place-based practices and associated forms of knowledge. Grounded normativity houses and reproduces the practices and procedures, based on deep reciprocity, that are inherently informed by an intimate relationship to place. Grounded normativity teaches us how to live our lives in relation to other people and nonhuman life forms in a profoundly nonauthoritarian, nondominating, nonexploitive manner. Grounded normativity teaches us how to be in respectful diplomatic relationships with other Indigenous and non-Indigenous nations with whom we might share territorial responsibilities or common political or economic interests. Our relationship to the land itself generates the processes, practices, and knowledges that inform our political systems, and through which we practice solidarity.50
In this sense, the formative relationship to place expressed in A Dish with One Spoon speaks to the ontological continuity between humans and the natural world as a point of origin for territorial understandings among Indigenous Peoples materialized in wampum belts more generally. Onondaga artist Jeffrey Thomas, who references the Hiawatha wampum in his photo-based storytelling, argues that such visualizations of ontological oneness with the land – with territory – are foundational in “creat[ing] conversations where they don’t exist.”51 He explains that his photograph of a Hiawatha belt graffito at the side of a two-lane highway (fig. 7) was sparked by this reality: “It reignited my feelings about what my elder had told me about the Two Row Wampum … the document confirming the respectful coexistence of the then emerging … colony near Albany, New York, and the Mohawk people living in that part of the state.” He pictured the parallel lines (the “two rows”) of the highway against a rock cut bearing the graphic reference to the Hiawatha belt, whose geometric pattern of white shells on a rectangular mat of purple beads represents the confederation of the five nations of the Haudenosaunee – the “people of the Longhouse” (fig. 8). “Wampum is probably the earliest form of negotiation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people on Turtle Island,” Thomas explains, “so [to me] it is significant … to see the symbolism of the Hiawatha wampum in relation to the highway – to what today looks like – and how we negotiate that.”52
Jeffrey Thomas, Hiawatha Wampum Belt Graffito, gps coordinates: 45.44685, – 76.5552006. Pigment print on archival paper.
Citation: Diplomatica 6, 1 (2024) ; 10.1163/25891774-bja10121
Replica of the Hiawatha wampum belt. National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution (26/9056).
Citation: Diplomatica 6, 1 (2024) ; 10.1163/25891774-bja10121
photo by nmai photo servicesAs Rickard would put it, Thomas speaks to the value of wampum in the intergenerational transmission of knowledge that has brought him into the twentieth-first century as Haudenosaunee – specifically, an “urban Iroquois,” as Thomas calls himself. He sees the Hiawatha belt as a prototype in this regard and models his practice of “mapping” on the wampum’s visualization of Deganawida’s journey through ancient Iroquoia. Known as the Peacemaker, Deganawida founded the Confederacy by bringing the five warring nations together under the Great Law of Peace (Kaianere’kó:wa), the guiding principles of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.53 So, for Thomas, “The belt is, in its own way, a map of the Iroquois Confederacy and the tribes that agreed to join Peacemaker’s path of peace.”54 Its white geometric pattern maps the Confederacy – “the metaphorical and geographical longhouse that extended across what is now the Northeastern United States.”55 In the center of the pattern, the Ononta’kahá:ka (Onondaga), the central nation in the confederacy and place of the council fires, is represented by a motif symbolizing the Great White Pine or Tree of Peace – the symbol of the Confederacy – and is flanked on either side by white rectangles representing the other constituent nations or territories – to the west, the Kahoniokwenhá:ka (Cayuga) and the Tsonontowane’á:ka (Seneca), who are regarded as Keepers of the Western Door, and to the east, the Oneniote’á:ka (Oneida), and the Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk), Keepers of the Eastern Door – all joined to one another by a line of white wampum representing the path of peace.56
Thomas explains his practice of mapmaking – whether “Mapping Iroquoia” (2012, fig. 9) or more recently “Mapping Turtle Island” (2022) – as an expression of the journey he has undertaken following the path of the Peacemaker. This journey, both physical and metaphorical, is visualized in his pictures, which he codifies in the form of photo-based “belts” using a rectangular format to create panels of two to seven photographs, each photo bearing gps coordinates that conflate Thomas with place – a means of enunciation he adopted early in his career in his series “I Am Here” (c.1982).57 He describes his as a journey of self-discovery grounded in intimate relationship to the land – and his practice as one of solidarity:
Jeffrey Thomas, “Mapping Iroquoia.” Installation photograph showing Cold City Frieze and Homeland & Security (left to right) and samples of tagged panels, McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton, Ontario, 2012. Hiawatha Wampum Belt Graffito appears at right in Homeland & Security.
Citation: Diplomatica 6, 1 (2024) ; 10.1163/25891774-bja10121
Maps have shown where Indigenous people now live on reserve lands but do not include those who live in cities and towns, they are invisible on maps. I wanted to change that and use mapping as a means of showing my survey of the land and sites that provide me conversation material. When I was still a teenager, as I prepared to begin university, my elder said: Don’t forget where you come from.58
Thomas locates the meaning of his Elder’s words in her handwritten copy of the story of the Peacemaker’s journey through Iroquoian territory, which she gave to him with instructions to make a handwritten copy of his own. It was her response to him as he grappled with being “an urban born and raised Iroquois.”59
The journey Thomas embarked on coming out of this moment is thus a product of the Kaswentha relationship represented in the Two Row wampum – of the vitality of the autonomous worldviews that animates Haudenosaunee consciousness today. That Thomas understands his self-discovery – himself – as the product of a journey undertaken in conversation speaks as well to the relationality of the worldview informing Iroquois understanding of behavior as following not from a process of individuation, but from grounded normativity fostered by the ontological continuity of human and natural existence.60 Using his photographic belts to draw viewers into conversation (in “Mapping Iroquoia,” for example, by enticing viewers to tag his panels), Thomas challenges settler time and settler governance, foregrounding the past as formative of the present – of “what today looks like.” He is interested in “how we negotiate that” – in opening a place-based conversation that calls up the Kaswentha relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people as acknowledgement of shared space and commitment to remain on separate paths in shared territory.61 “What does it mean to record [a] site?” Thomas asks us. “It is a reminder … each place or site I record builds upon the [advice] of my elder – to not forget where I come from.”62 So, he taps his viewers on the shoulder, the title of his recent show opening the conversation with the deceptively simple question: “Where Are You From?”63
Thomas, like Myre and Michelson, mobilizes understandings of the wampum belt as a function of diplomatic relations to entice viewer engagement in the political field where Indigeneity pushes against settler colonialism. Perhaps more to the point is the artist’s vitalization of the wampum belt as a historically-embedded material expression that is at once mnemonic, political, and aesthetic – that communicates, as Michelson puts it, through “an economy of means and gesture”64 to make the existence of this interface apparent, and with it, the presence of autonomous worldviews in this “scene of articulation.” To follow on Julie Gough’s conceptualization, this use of an alternative visual language form without the inherent historical/cultural boundaries of statist diplomacy speaks to the existence of a field of diplomatic action in which the settler’s practice appears “the interloper rather than the omniscient inventor.” It re-instantiates an expansive, pluriversal world of diplomatic activity by denying the universalizing drive of Western liberal thought and decentering the settler’s statist diplomacy as the given context for diplomatic activity. So, it opens the possibility of generating critical space by challenging viewers to examine their taken-for-granted understandings and practices through a diplomatic lens, and to recognize themselves as political actors in the quotidian practice of colonialism and refusal.
Resituating the Understanding
We ask at the outset of this essay what political work is needed to push against the persistent recentering of statist diplomacy in the study and practice of diplomatic activity. Now, at its conclusion, we suggest at least one task at hand by pointing out that, on a planet comprised of multiple epistemic worlds, the difficult process of coming to terms with pluriversality has political implications for those currently holding epistemic authority. Viewed unselfconsciously through the lens of Eurocentric frameworks and practices, for example, Indigenous understandings of diplomatic action might be seen akin to a cultural relations approach, with its emphasis on interpersonal relations, reciprocity, and a long-term perspective. However, this would be a misreading, one that ignores culture’s implication in cultural diplomacy as an expression of Eurocentric dualist constructions of nature and culture. In contrast to widely shared Indigenous understandings of the oneness of humans and nature, the study and practice of cultural relations gives expression to the ontological distinction between human life and the natural world informing a Western episteme, and perhaps more to the point, the universalist assumptions that deny Indigenous understandings of the place of human life in the natural order, and with this denial, the autonomous worldview Indigenous knowledges represent. A function of Western knowledge systems, the cultural relations approach to diplomacy speaks to the political order of still-settling liberal democratic states in critical relationship to which Indigenous refusal is enunciated.
Put another way, the contemporary practice of cultural relations might speak to a different moment in the processes of colonializing effacement that our historical actors bring into focus at the opening of this essay, but it is worth noting nonetheless that, just as Louis Nicolas’s encounter with the emissary of Gannachiouavé made him an agent of colonialism, the cross-cultural intimacy commonly identified as a goal of cultural relations work today – whether couched in terms of relationship building, mutual understanding, or developing trust – does not stand outside the structures of settler colonial governance. The idea of culture’s neutrality is a projection, and cultural workers are always already involved in the politics of culture that underpin the building and management of “international” relations. This is how the liberal order functions. The liberal international community locates the efficacy of the cultural relations approach in the perception of an arm’s-length relationship between the interests of its practitioners and those of the state policy sphere and its diplomatic branch. But, even though their interests may be ostensibly at odds, they coalesce at the ideological level precisely because they are perceived to be working independently of, if not in tension with, one another. Resituating the understanding of those who study and practice cultural relations requires that they engage in a critical consideration of their participation in reproducing the geopolitics of the international community through which their understandings are naturalized as universal.
This demand to remember that we also participate in what we critique is a consequence of coming to know where we stand in taking up this engagement with the existing social order. It brings the study and practice of cultural relations into an active critical relationship to knowledge, which we argue earlier in this essay involves not only the full range of disciplinary knowledges constituting the Euro-American Academy, but also attending to the formative relationship between the academic disciplines and modern nation-state formation that centers the state in our structures of thought. As Audra Simpson puts it: “[T]he arc of critique runs through a field of ideas that are tied to actions. Coloniality, however, shapes so much of this field. And there the specter of the state, of dealing with and perhaps thinking like a state, lurks ….”65 In foregrounding cultural relations as a subfield of cultural diplomacy, which in turn is a subfield of diplomacy, we argue for the value of smuggling those trained as academics and practitioners in the cultural disciplines into a conversation currently dominated by those trained in disciplines on the diplomatic side of the culture/diplomacy divide. We argue for the potential to bring the study and practice of statist diplomacy into a more active critical space by disrupting the self-referentiality inherent in discipline-based critiques and decolonizing efforts. Generating critical space for deeper understanding of the intellectual basis of state-based diplomacy is key to locating its particularity in the larger field of diplomatic action.
Brison, J., and L. Jessup. “Towards Cultural Diplomacy as Critical Practice.” In Cultural Diplomacy as Critical Practice: Summit Report (Kingston and Toronto: North American Cultural Diplomacy Initiative, 2021), 26.
Gagnon, F-M, ed., with N. Senior and R. Ouellet. The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011); De Asúa, M. “Natural History in the Jesuit Missions.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Jesuits, ed. I.G. Županov (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 4.
Kingston sits on the traditional lands of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe peoples, whose precolonial treaty, A Dish with One Spoon, symbolizes their shared territory and ecology in southern Ontario. See Simpson, L.B. “Looking after Gdoo-naaganinaa: Precolonial Nishnaabeg Diplomatic and Treaty Relationships.” Wicazo Sa Review 23 (2) (2008), 29–42. As white settlers resident in Kingston, we are uninvited guests on Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe territory. Lynda Jessup is a citizen of the settler colonial state of Canada and Jeffrey Brison is a citizen of two, the United States of America and Canada.
Harris, S.J. “Jesuit Scientific Activity in the Overseas Missions, 1540–1773.” Isis 96 (1) (2005), 76; O’Malley J.W., et al., eds. The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999); Deslandres, D. “Exemplo aeque ut verbo: The French Jesuits’ Missionary World.” In The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773, eds. J.W. O’Malley et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 258–73; see also Gagnon, F-M, ed., with N. Senior and R. Ouellet. The Codex Canadensis, 74–75.
The preferred names of the Haudenosaunee peoples are used in this essay. The English terms for the five nations are Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca, respectively. The Skarù∙ręʔ – Tuscarora – joined the Confederacy in 1722.
King, H. “The Erasure of Indigenous Thought in Foreign Policy.” OpenCanada.org, July 31, 2017, https://www.opencanada.org/features/erasure-indigenous-thought-foreign-policy/.
Lyons, O. “Indian Self-Government in the Haudenosaunee Constitution.” Nordic Journal of International Law 55 (1–2) (1986), 117–21; cited in King, n.p. See also Williams. K.P. Kayanerenkó:wa: The Great Law of Peace (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2018); Parmenter, J. “The Meaning of Kaswentha and the Two Row Wampum Belt in Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) History: Can Indigenous Oral Tradition be Reconciled with the Documentary Record?” Journal of Early American History 3 (2013), 82–109; Turner, D.A. This Is Not a Peace Pipe: Towards a Critical Indigenous Philosophy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006).
Simpson, L.B. “Indigenous Resurgence and Co-resistance.” Critical Ethnic Studies 2 (2) (2016), 22–23.
See also: Simpson, L.B. As We Have Always Done (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017); Simpson, L.B. “Indigenous Resurgence”; Simpson, L.B. “Looking after Gdoo-naaganinaa”; Coulthard, G., and L.B. Simpson. “Grounded Normativity/ Place-Based Solidarity.” American Quarterly 68 (2) (2008), 249–55; Osiander, A. “Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Westphalian Myth.” International Organization 55 (2) (2001), 251–87.
We write as founding members of the North American Cultural Diplomacy Initiative (nacdi), a network of scholars and practitioners ranging across the cultural, international relations, and policy fields who share an interest in reframing current debates around culture and diplomacy, specifically, their relationship to one another in the study and practice of global relations. nacdi is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Queen’s University and the Royal Ontario Museum, Canada; Center on Public Diplomacy and Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California, U.S.A; Universidad Iberoamericana Cuidad de México, Mexico; Wilson Institute for Canadian History, McMaster University, Canada; International Council of Museums Canada (icom Canada); and Global Affairs Canada (gac).
Arndt, R.T. The First Resort of Kings: American Cultural Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, Inc., 2005).
Kelley, J.R. “The New Diplomacy: Evolution of a Revolution.” Diplomacy and Statecraft 21 (2010), 286–305; Kelley J.R. Agency Change: Diplomatic Action Beyond the State (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014); Constantinou, C.M., N. Cornago, and F. McConnell. Transprofessional Diplomacy (Leiden: Brill, 2017); Rosenau, J. Distant Proximities: Dynamics Beyond Globalization (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Melissen, J., ed. The New Public Diplomacy: Soft Power in International Relations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); La Porte, T. “The Impact of ‘Intermestic’ Non-State Actors on the Conceptual Framework of Public Diplomacy.” The Hague Journal of Diplomacy 7 (4) (2012), 441–58.
The thinking underpinning this essay took shape over the course of three research summits between September 2020 and May 2022, beginning with The Cultural Relations Approach to Diplomacy: Practice, Players, Policy. The first section of this essay summarizes arguments made in the online report of the first summit. See Brison, J. and L. Jessup. “Towards Cultural Diplomacy as Critical Practice,” 20–38.
For a discussion of the “uncomfortabl[y] intimate relation” between Political Science and International Relations in the American academy see Onuf, N.G. World of Our Making: Rules and Rule in Social Theory and International Relations (New York: Routledge, 2013), 6–7.
Carter, D. “Living with Instrumentalism: The Academic Commitment to Cultural Diplomacy.” International Journal of Cultural Policy 21 (4) (2015), 484.
Kelley, J.R. “The New Diplomacy,” 287; Rose, M. “A New Cultural Diplomacy: The Integration of Cultural Relations and Diplomacy.” ifa Input (March 2017).
See for example such key works as Kelley, J.R. “The New Diplomacy”; Melissen, J. The New Public Diplomacy; Rose, M. “A New Cultural Diplomacy”; and Zaharna, R.S., A. Arsenault, and A. Fisher, eds. Relational, Networked and Collaborative Approaches to Public Diplomacy: The Connective Mindshift (New York: Routledge, 2013).
Reus-Smit, C. “International Relations Theory Doesn’t Understand Culture.” Foreign Policy (March 21, 2019), https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/03/21/international-relations-theory-doesnt-understand-culture/; Reus-Smit, C. On Cultural Diversity: International Theory in a World of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
Stratton J., and I. Ang. “On the Impossibility of a ‘Global’ Cultural Studies: British Cultural Studies in an ‘International’ Frame.” In Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, eds. D. Morely and K.-H. Chen (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 380.
Onuf, N.G. World of Our Making, 16.
Zaharna, R.S. “Western Assumptions in Non-Western Public Diplomacies: Individualism and Estrangement.” The Hague Journal of Diplomacy 14 (3) (2019), 216–23.
Simpson, A. “The Ruse of Consent and the Anatomy of ‘Refusal’: Cases from Indigenous North America and Australia.” Postcolonial Studies 20 (1) (2017), 20.
Michelson, A. Blanket Refusal in “Citizenship, A Practice of Society.” Audio recording. Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. 2021, https://mcadenver.org/alan-michelson. In addition to Blanket Refusal, Michelson represents the Two Row wampum in Third Bank of the River (2009), a public artwork commissioned by the U.S. General Services Administration for the U.S. Port of Entry in Massena, New York, that features panoramic views of the St. Lawrence River intersecting Akwesasne Mohawk Territory, Canada and the United States, and in TwoRow ii (2005), now in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada. The latter work is a monumental, panoramic video installation showing the two banks of the Grand River that divide the Six Nations Reserve from non-native townships in what is now southwestern Ontario Canada.
Michelson, A., and J. Rickard. “Native Sovereignty.” Audio recording. Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver. December 7, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSrFZX1TQk4.
Ibid.
Williams. Kayanerenkó:wa; Corbiere, A.O. “‘Their Own Forms of Which They Take the Most Notice’: Diplomatic Metaphors and Symbolism on Wampum Belts.” In Anishinaabewin Niiwin: Four Rising Winds, eds. A.O. Corbiere, M.A.N. Corbiere, D. McGregor, and C. Migwans (M’Chigeeng, ON: Ojibwe Cultural Foundation, 2013), 47–64; Parmenter, J. “The Meaning of Kaswentha and the Two Row Wampum Belt in Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) History.”
Quoted in Stirrup, D. “Bridging the Third Bank: Indigeneity and Installation Art at the Canada–U.S. Border.” In Parallel Encounters: Culture at the Canada-U.S. Border, eds. G. Roberts and D. Stirrup (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier Press, 2013), 163–86.
Gough, J. “History, Representation, Globalization and Indigenous Cultures: A Tasmanian Perspective.” In Indigenous Cultures in an Interconnected World, eds. C. Smith and G.K. Ward (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2000), 94; quoted in ibid., 182.
McGranahan, C. “Refusal and the Gift of Citizenship.” Cultural Anthropology 31 (3) (2016), 334.
The Kahnawakeron:non are the “People of Kahnawà:ke,” a community located on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River across from Montreal in what is now Quebec, Canada. Simpson’s theorization of Kahnawakeron:non refusal has been taken up in discussions of Indigenous refusal more broadly. See McGranahan, C. “Refusal and the Gift of Citizenship”; and Simpson, A. “The Ruse of Consent,” 18–33, for related literature theorizing this position.
Simpson, A. “Ethnographic Refusal.” In Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 106; Simpson, A. “On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice’ and Colonial Citizenship.” Junctures 9 (December 2007), 73.
Simpson, A. “The Ruse of Consent,” 21.
Michelson, A., and J. Rickard. “Native Sovereignty.”
Miller, S. “Transformations.” Interview with Nadia Myre audio recording, Gardiner Museum, Toronto. November 9, 2021, https://hi-in.facebook.com/thegardinermuseum/videos/882818455544703/.
Ibid.
Jacobs, D.M., and V.P. Lytwyn. “Naagan ge bezhig emkwaan: A Dish with One Spoon Reconsidered.” Ontario History 112 (2) (2020), 191–210; Simpson, A. “Gdoo-naaganinaa.” For a discussion of research-creation as a mode of knowledge production see Chapman, O.B., and K. Sawchuk. “Research-Creation: Intervention, Analysis and “Family Resemblances.” Canadian Journal of Communication, 37 (1) (2012), 5–26; Loveless, N. How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019); and Springgay, A.T., and S. MacLean. “Socially Engaged Art, Experimental Pedagogies, and Anarchiving as Research-Creation.” Qualitative Inquiry 26 (7) (2020), 897–907.
Jacobs, D.M., and V.P. Lytwyn. “Naagan ge bezhig emkwaan.”
Dunk, R. “sshrc Awards Concordia Researchers $100K for Indigenous Research Capacity and Reconciliation Activities.” Concordia University News, January 23, 2019. The practice was not mandated by the government of Canada coming out of the report, but was taken up by government agencies and officials, most notably Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, following the release of the report, which served to model the practice for adoption more broadly. For discussion of the distinction between settler colonialist “contractual thinking” and Indigenous relationality, see Simpson, A. Always Done, 25–27.
Corbiere, A.O. “‘Their Own Forms of Which They Take the Most Notice.’”
Miller, S. “Transformations”; Carter, S. “Art is a Permanent Guest at the Newly Renovated Gladstone House and Park Hyatt Toronto Hotels.” Toronto Star, December 27, 2021; Park Hyatt Toronto. “Where the Beavers, Deers, Elks and such Beasts Keep.” Art at Park Hyatt Toronto. 2021, https://art.parkhyatttoronto.com/art/where-beavers-deers-elks-and-such-beasts-keep; Park Hyatt Toronto. “A Dish with One Spoon.” Art at Park Hyatt Toronto, video of installation. 2021, https://art.parkhyatttoronto.com/locations/joni-restaurant.
Miller, S. “Transformations.”
Ibid.
Foregrounding the Oral Tradition within which wampum belts are utilized, Myre explains that the title comes from a speech recorded during a discussion of A Dish with One Spoon (see Miller, S. “Transformations”) made in connection with the signing of the Nanfan Treaty in 1701, https://www.sixnations.ca/LandsResources/NanFanTreaty.pdf.
Miller, S. “Transformations.”
See Park Hyatt Toronto. “Where the Beavers”; Park Hyatt Toronto. “A Dish”; Miller, S. “Transformations.” See also, Park Hyatt Toronto. “Art at Park Hyatt Toronto.” 2021, https://art.parkhyatttoronto.com/our-story. Where the Beavers, Deers, Elks and such Beasts Keep was one of ten works commissioned for the hotel as part of its renovation and rebranding as the hub of Toronto’s Bloor Street Culture Corridor. The hotel’s website programs the resulting “collection” much as an art gallery would. Visitors are encouraged to “Discover the Collection,” and each artwork and artist is individually profiled on the site, which also features a section devoted to the hotel’s “Curatorial Vision” in the context of its “purposeful celebration of the local culture and history.” Myre’s work in Joni Restaurant is introduced under the title, “A Dish with One Spoon,” with a link to a video that shows Myre’s installation of the work and a discussion of the piece, which functions as an artist statement.
Jacobs, D.M., and V.P. Lytwyn. “Naagan ge bezhig emkwaan”; King, H. (@Hayden_King). “Land Acknowledgement ….” Twitter, October 19, 2021, 12:21 pm ET, https://twitter.com/hayden_king/status/1450497268830949379; King, H. “I Regret It.” Unreserved, cbc Radio, January 18, 2019, last updated June 19, 2019, https://www.cbc.ca/radio/unreserved/redrawing-the-lines-1.4973363/i-regret-it-hayden-king-on-writing-ryerson-university-s-territorial-acknowledgement-1.4973371.
Simpson, A. “The Ruse of Consent,” 21, 23.
Ibid., 20.
Ibid., 22.
Coulthard, G., and L.B. Simpson. “Grounded Normativity/ Place-Based Solidarity,” 254 (emphasis in original). See also, Coulthard, G. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
Smith, S.E.K. “Always Already Players: Considering the Cultural Diplomacy of Artists.” Panel presentation at Cultural Relations Approach to Diplomacy: We are All Practitioners, North American Cultural Diplomacy Initiative, hosted virtually by the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, December 1, 2021.
Ibid.
See Bedford, D., and T. Workman. “The Great Law of Peace: Alternative Inter-National(al) Practices and the Iroquoian Confederacy.” Alternatives 22 (1997), 87. See also, Kaianerekowa Hotinonsionne: The Great Law of Peace of the Longhouse People, trans. Akwesasne, notes with R. Tehanetorens Fadden [1970] (Berkeley, CA: Oyate, 1999). The Great Law of Peace, encompassing 117 wampum, codifies the international relations of the Haudenosaunee and is dated from five hundred to a thousand years old.
Thomas, J. “Mapping Iroquoia: Cold City Frieze.” 2019, https://jeff-thomas.ca/mapping-iroquoia/.
Simpson, A. “The Ruse of Consent,” 31 (note 15).
Williams, K.P. Kayanerenkó:wa, 114. Also Kaianerekowa Hotinonsionne, 31. The central motif is also described as a white heart. It represents the Onondaga Nation and its territory, but “it also means that the heart of the Five Nations is single in its loyalty to the Great Peace, and that the Great Peace is lodged in the heart (meaning the Onondaga League chiefs) and that the Council Fire is to burn there for the Five Nations.”
Thomas, J. “Mapping Iroquoia.”
Thomas, J. Artist’s website. 2022, https://jeff-thomas.ca/.
Ibid.
Bedford, D., and T. Workman. “The Great Law of Peace,” 97.
Simpson, A. “The Ruse of Consent,” 30 (note 14).
Thomas, J. Artist’s website.
Thomas, J. “Where Are You From?” Artist’s Statement. Stephen Bulger Gallery, 2022, https://www.bulgergallery.com/exhibitions/221-jeff-thomas-where-are-you-from/press_release_text/.
Michelson, A., and J. Rickard. “Native Sovereignty.”
Simpson, A. “The Sovereignty of Critique.” South Atlantic Quarterly 119 (4) (2020), 695.
