Assistant Professor Gabrielle Moser has written an article titled, Settler Colonialism鈥檚 Container Technologies: Photographing Crates in the Canadian Arctic (1926-1953), that was featured in Settler Colonial Studies, a peer-reviewed academic journal which is published four times a year. The research for this article was completed during a residency at the Ryerson Image Centre and a Fulbright Visiting Scholar position at Brown University.
Abstract:
鈥淲ooden crates are a recurring subject in the visual archive of settler colonialism in Canada鈥檚 Arctic, appearing on the shores of eastern Baffin Island throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Reading some of the hundreds of photographs that appear in the holdings of Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa, this essay charts the symbolic and political work that crates performed in the settler colonial imaginary. It draws on David L. Eng鈥檚 call to examine the 鈥渃olonial object relations鈥 that have split Indigenous subjects into 鈥済ood and bad objects鈥 in the liberal imaginary to propose that wooden crates are symptomatic of settler colonialism鈥檚 unconscious drive to make and unmake Inuit subjects into citizens in response to the demands of national and transnational political events. Tracing the intersection of crates, photography and ballot boxes in the archive, the essay examines the settler colonial state鈥檚 attempts at imposing and consolidating power, but also points to the practices of continuity and resistance enacted by Inuit subjects.鈥