Michael Belmore’s Bridge: Signature Image of MISHI 2017

To inspire us to focus on finding connections, the signature image of MISHI 2017 is Anishinaabe artist Michael Belmore’s Bridge, a wampum belt modelled on ancient material treaties that were typically made from quahog shells, and, as Belmore reminds us, historically distributed to establish and reinforce social and political agreements between and within Indigenous nations. The piece Bridge, however, is made of copper and aluminum beads arranged to represent the 1’s and 0’s of ASCII binary coding typically used in the operations of computers, cell phones, and video game consoles. According to Belmore, the braiding of traditional format with an often obscured digital language highlights “the forgotten codes that are the basis of contemporary realities that serve to connect, and sometimes divide, our communities.” The piece allows viewers to contemplate the supposed dichotomies between past and present, traditional and modern, analog and digital, and Indigenous and non-Indigenous technologies. Reading this piece requires active engagement, and like traditional wampum, insists on a responsibility in that interaction. Through its disruption of supposedly mutually exclusive knowledges and technologies, the Bridge piece is an instructive mechanism for thinking about the links this summer’s community-engaged field school drew across disciplines, across knowledge systems, across institutions, and across generations.

Michael Belmore, “Bridge,” 2014

MISHI 2017 focused on understanding how place-based knowledge shapes an Anishinaabe-centred history of Manitoulin Island and its environs. Co-sponsored by the History of Indigenous Peoples (HIP) Network, a research cluster embedded within the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies at York University, and the Ojibwe Cultural Foundation (OCF), an organization devoted to Anishinaabe history and culture, the summer institute brought together 25 established and emerging historians, graduate students, administrators, artists, Elders, and knowledge-keepers to explore the history through landscapes, stories, and documents. The OCF represents six First Nations (Aundek Omni Kaning, M’Chigeeng, Sheguiandah, Sheshegwaning, Whitefish River, and Zhiibaahaasing) and is dedicated to nourishing and preserving Anishinaabe history, arts, language, and spirituality. MISHI seeks to break down historically, socially, and spatially made boundaries between knowledge systems, people, and communities for the purposes of engagement with Manitoulin’s Anishinaabeg-centered history and culture. MISHI 2017 ended up being a lesson in building bridges.