Forced Migration: Bison stories and what they can tell settlers about a past, present, and future on stolen land

As uninvited guests on Indigenous land, we are continually told that national parks, and our conservation system in general, are a benevolent inheritance from our settler ancestors. The creators of parks and conservation societies crafted archives in the form of magazines and biographies to document the salvation of charismatic species like the bison. In this episode, artist and researcher Michelle Wilson mines these archives to create alternative stories of the bison's path to conservation. These audio essays reveal how ideologies around capitalism, human exceptionalism, and white supremacy have influenced settler relations to the more-than-human world. In this episode, we will hear from poet Síle Englert who helped distill Michelle's more extended essays into these shorter, affective pieces of prose, and musician and composer Angus Cruikshank whose score enriches Michelle's audio storytelling. Michelle's project seeks to extract narratives from a white supremacist, patriarchal written tradition and play with the immediate and affective possibilities of audio performance and sound design. The audio artworks featured in this episode were originally created as part of Michelle’s interactive textile map “Forced Migration”. It is on view at Museum London as part of the GardenShip and State exhibition until January 23rd, 2022.

SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.

Episode Producer:

Michelle Wilson is an artist, mother, and researcher currently residing as an uninvited guest on Treaty Six territory in London, Ontario. In her current work, she makes palpable the presence and absence of bison and their inseparability from the land and its people. In the Euro-American archive, bison bodies have been used to convey colonial knowledge systems, and their story of survival has been used to perpetuate myths of “settler saviours”. This is the legacy that Wilson, as a feminist of settler descent studying in colonial institutions, has inherited and is confronting. 

Wilson is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Art and Visual Culture at the University of Western Ontario and recently held her thesis exhibition and a corresponding symposium titled Remnants, Outlaws, and Wallows: Practices for Understanding Bison at the McIntosh Gallery.

Script Editing and Guest Interview:

Síle Englert is a poet, fiction writer and visual artist from London, Ontario. Her short stories have been shortlisted for Room Magazine’s fiction contest and longlisted for Prism International’s. Her poetry has placed second in Contemporary Verse 2’s 2-Day Poem Contest and has been featured in journals such as Room Magazine, Ascent Aspirations Anthology, Misunderstandings Magazine, The Saving Bannister Anthology, and Crannóg Magazine (Ireland), and is forthcoming in The Fiddlehead.

Sound Design and Guest Interview:

Angus Cruikshank is a musician currently residing in London, Ontario. He has played in numerous bands in Canada and abroad including Clock Strikes Music, Squids, and Telechasms. He is currently enrolled in the Bachelor of Science and Nursing program at the University of Western Ontario.  

Vocal performance:

Pat Rousseau and Paul Chartrand

Episode Links:

In the Spirit of Atatice: https://csktribes.org/more/videos/in-the-spirit-of-atatice/in-the-spirit-of-atatice

To Wood Buffalo, With Love, by Chloe Dragon-Smith and Robert Grandjambe: https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/to-wood-buffalo-national-park-with-love

Forced Migration: https://scalar.usc.edu/works/remnants-wallows-and-outlaws-a-multidisciplinary-exploration-of-bison/forced-migration

GardenShip and State at Museum London: https://www.gardenship.ca/exhibition

Buffalo Treaty: https://www.buffalotreaty.com/