11 June 2024
Written by Ying Han
In the face of persistent metaphors of death and a focus on damage in academic research on Indigenous languages and communities, Dr. Bernard Perley has learned to develop and advocate for more future-oriented ways of thinking both in and outside of the academy. From his dissertation work on Indigenous language revitalization to his current projects using the graphic novel as a form of Maliseet storytelling; to his position as Director and Professor in Critical Indigenous Studies and advisory board member of the Public Humanities Hub; Dr. Perley weaves together practices of art, storytelling, and scholarship in constantly creating worlds anew through his work, from within a polycrisis reality seemingly irrevocably engulfed in flames of wildfires, war, and waste.
In this interview, we talk about doing community-based research and the crucial role art plays in both scholarship and activism.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Ying Han: How would you define the public humanities? You have mentioned before that maybe you do not think of it in the usual kind of way.
Dr. Bernard Perley: When I think about public humanities, there is a particular kind of engagement with the public outside of the university that really does speak to humanities as it is typically oriented through the creative (e.g., performative, graphic, literary) arts, that manifests in things like writing workshops or participatory art projects. I do not find myself doing that kind of work as much as my training in art, architecture, and anthropology brings different skillsets to how I engage the public. Rather than “a humanities scholar doing public humanities work,” I prefer to think of myself as a person who reaches out to engage the public through whatever creative means that I can.
YH: What do community-based research and public engagement mean to you?
BP: As a scholar working on language revitalization for Indigenous communities, I prioritize working with community. There are always multiple publics involved in this kind of project. You have the scholarly public at the university, where scholars use their academic training to support community members in revitalizing their languages. You have the communities themselves who are doing that learning.
I also like to address the communities that are supportive of these efforts. For example, I co-created an installation piece with colleagues from English, History, and Education on an installation piece promoting language revitalization, that also represented the local effigy mound culture in the Milwaukee area. Once it was complete, we showed this piece at a conference for educators networking for social justice, with teachers working in elementary, middle, and high schools who want to be able to share with their students different aspects of language and social justice. Inside the installation piece, we had a thanksgiving prayer represented in four different Indigenous languages. Outside, we depicted four different phases of colonial suppression of Indigenous communities.
As the public began to interact with the artwork, participants were saying, “I felt a kind of anxiety in reading and looking at all the artwork on the outside, but when I went inside, I got a sense of peace and strength.” That was really the point.
We can talk about it, we can write about it, but when we invite people to physically experience what we experienced as Indigenous peoples, there is clearer communication. By being open to multiple communities and publics, the installation piece was able to accomplish that. For me, that is key.
Read more about this project here.
YH: What did that kind of collaborative practice look like, working with different colleagues on this art piece?
BP: It was a lot of fun. One of the most unifying aspects of the collaboration was that, as guests in that ancestral territory, we wanted to celebrate and give proper acknowledgement to the place we were all working in. How do we use our different scholarly expertise to inform the public of the importance of acknowledging ancestral lands, while also promoting ancestral languages? As an anthropologist, I am really invested in this work, and of course, my colleague in History is as well. My collaborators in English and Education were especially interested in the pedagogical framework of teaching the Anishinaabemowin language. We wanted to create this installation piece as a kind of experiential pedagogy, where we took our different disciplinary backgrounds and put it all together to create this installation piece.
YH: I took a class last term where the professor taught us different forms of embodied ethnography and methods of engaging all senses. When you mentioned experiential learning, it reminded me of that sort of whole body learning. How do you take this idea into your pedagogical practice?
The wooded area behind the Museum of Anthropology at UBC. Photo courtesy of Heather Tam.
BP: That is where I try to encourage my students to go out into the landscape here. The way I frame it is that I am from the East Coast—Wabanaki from New Brunswick. Wabanaki means the “Dawn Land.” We are the People of the Dawn. Now, being here on the West Coast, I see the sunset instead of the sunrise. It is a different orientation, but also an invitation for me to take the experience I have about my own homeland, and then compare it to what I am learning here. I want to be a good guest, to learn the knowledge and sensibility that the Musqueam have towards their own homelands. Speaking of embodiment, something I recognize right away is that the wind sounds different here when it goes through the trees. These are 200-foot cedar trees here. Back home, we have pine and fir trees—there is a different sound to the wind. Of course, birdsong is also different here; the smells of the forests as well. Similarly, I try to alert my students to be attentive to what they are smelling, sensing, feeling. The whole world is a sensory field.
One way I try to get them to pay attention would be going over to the Rose Garden on campus. When it is in full bloom, you can smell the roses. All these manicured gardens with the mountains in the background—it is just beautiful. However, all of that is a colonial imposition. So, where do we begin to recognize how the Musqueam understood their ancestral territories? I said to my students, the next time you go to the Rose Garden,
especially on a hot day, go next door into the cedar forest, because that is more like the Musqueam ancestral land. From that hot manicured rose garden into this quiet, cool, cathedral-like space, you immediately sense the differences between colonial landscapes and Musqueam ancestral landscapes. That is the kind of experiential learning I am trying to get my students to practice.
Rose Garden on campus. Photo courtesy of Ying.
YH: How do you connect landscape and language?
BP: One of the phrases I like to use is when I am talking about Indigenous languages is to describe it as the echoes of time immemorial. Indigenous knowledges are encoded in our languages and reflected in how we describe our landscapes. I am a Wolastoqiyik, People of the Peaceful River, the name of the river where my community is. When the settlers came here, they renamed it the St. John River. There are no stories in the Bible about St. John coming to New Brunswick, so, why bring that name to our Indigenous ancestral lands? What is important for us is that we call ourselves “People of the Peaceful River.” We do not own the river; in fact, we describe our relationship to it as mutually dependent, where we have to care for one another. This is how Indigenous languages can offer insights into how we can live responsibly and sustainably in these ancestral lands.
YH: That reminds me of how relationality and reciprocity are often used as key words in describing public scholarship. How do you weave advocacy and activism work in with your academic projects?
BP: While I was finishing up my PhD in anthropology, I hit this point where I asked myself, what am I doing here? My dissertation was based on research identifying what causes and perpetuates language endangerment. I diagnosed the factors involved and did the sort of technical analysis expected of academic research. I was able to report all that, but then I realized that is not enough. It is my own language. How do I help my community think about ways to revitalize the language? Knowing there is a problem was not enough. Doing something about it was imperative. One of the things I wanted to do with my dissertation, which then turned into a book on language revitalization, was that I wanted to shift the focus from language death to language life. By centering our communities and working on our own terms, we have a greater possibility of being able to revitalize our languages. Advocacy is really important in terms of providing opportunities and possibilities for the community.
Defying Maliseet Language Death (2011).
YH: A word that I use a lot in my own work is futurity, and the way you have explained language life and possibility makes me rethink what that idea means. Where does “ethnocosmogenesis” come into this?
BP: This is something that I have been developing for quite a long time since writing my dissertation. After doing my field work at home and then having to go back campus to write, I got homesick. Ethnocosmogenesis was a way of thinking about home so that I can recreate the Maliseet worlds wherever and whenever I am. One of the projects we worked on during my fieldwork was a coloring book to help children learn the Maliseet thanksgiving prayer for the elementary school on Tobique First Nation. I created artwork for each stanza of the prayer based on certain points on the reserve that, when people see the drawing, they would be able to tell exactly what viewpoint I had. The artwork is located in a particular space back home at Tobique First Nation and became an exercise that brought language, landscape, art, and religion together.
That project helps bring me home. Cosmogenesis is about being able to say that every time I tell the Maliseet origin story, I create Maliseet worlds anew. Cosmogenesis is not cosmology in the Western sense of trying to decipher how astronomy and our cosmos works. Cosmogony is more important. It is about origins. Cosmogenesis is about recreating those origin stories every time you retell them. It does not have to be just Indigenous communities. The “ethno” part is where this idea becomes applicable to other communities. I want to invite others to think about their origin stories, to be able to pass them down to their children, to retell them to their elders.
Right now, we are destroying this one world that we know. A popular perspective is that we are facing the apocalypse; however, one of the things that Indigenous scholars have been saying is that the apocalypse has actually been around for 500 years. Indigenous Peoples have had to constantly adapt to dramatic changes to their landscapes. In all of that, they are able to tell their origin stories, and we continue to make our worlds anew. While we need to recognize that we are facing serious challenges, if we focus on anguish and anxiety, we are doomed. You were talking about futurity. By thinking about the possibilities, we can create worlds anew. Ethnocosmogenesis is a way of approaching that.
YH: The university oftentimes privileges traditional scholarship, or single author and ownership-based research. How have you navigated this?
BP: It is a reality that as soon as we sign on to the university experience, either as professors or as students, we agree to play by the rules. As a young scholar, I knew that I had to produce the monograph, and it had to be single authored. That is the standard for my field. But that did not stop me from exploring other ways of thinking through my work. As I was writing the monograph, I was also working on a triptych.
Dr. Perley’s triptych.
The topic of language death was so visceral that the small movements for keystrokes on a computer did not capture adequately. I had to tear things apart, shred paper, slap paint on a canvas, and then try to weave it all back together. In a book, a person is going to have to read from page one to page 225; there is a long period of engagement with the ideas in the book, in a prescribed sequence. But with the triptych, the visceral aspect of language loss is more readily experienced. Working on that art piece was an important way of balancing the abstraction of small keystrokes movements required for writing a book with the construction of the triptych.
From the triptych, I then turned to multi-authored projects like the art installation piece that I talked about earlier. There were four of us working on it, but really, the participants and their reactions were co-authors as well. That is what is really great about these kinds of installation pieces. How do we bring those other unexpected community members into the conversation so that our colleagues can see that knowledge can be disseminated into the community in more legible ways? That is where we are right now at university: trying to make space for that kind of scholarship.
Watch Dr. Perley tell us about this art piece here.
YH: What are some challenges you have faced within interdisciplinary or community-based research?
BP: As the academic climate changes, there are different challenges that have to be dealt with. An ongoing challenge would be the “publish or perish” mindset. In the old days, the challenges were getting my artwork to even be seen. At a research university, publications are really important. Although there is now a growing awareness that other forms of research and dissemination should be included, the challenge remains in figuring out how to make that legible in the academy. How do we engage in conversations that allow our colleagues to think more creatively about what constitutes scholarship and academic merit?
When I showed the triptych for the first time in Milwaukee, one of the faculty members asked if I considered this “artwork.” That would require defining the terms of artwork. If we think about the content in terms of aesthetics, then in the creation of this piece I was trained in Western aesthetics. But is it artwork in the same way? Is it intended to be in a gallery? What if I wanted it to be something else? This is where the ethnography comes in, where it becomes about cultural sharing. That is the challenge: how do we take the categories that we have all been socialized in and trained to replicate and then begin to allow alternative perspectives to enhance our understanding of these phenomena?
YH: As you mentioned hoping colleagues can start considering more nontraditional, creative outputs, could you talk a little bit about your comics, Having Reservations and Going Native?
BP: This goes back to advocacy and activism. Dealing with all our current social injustices can be really weighty; people get nervous talking about social injustices that we witness on a daily basis. So how do I, as an Indigenous person, alert my colleagues about the kinds of daily traumas that I face? The way that I try to enact social change is by inviting my colleagues into the conversation. The comics are my efforts to be able to look at a particular situation and recognize the absurdity. For example, the imposition of these Christian holidays on Indigenous Peoples is one of those aspects of “quiet colonialism.” How do I help people recognize that? If I draw a comic where an Indigenous person is confused by the holiday, then maybe we can laugh about the absurdity. In the case of Easter, I am imagining an Indigenous person coming across a Puritan for the first time, and the Puritan is trying to explain Easter to them and why rabbits and colored eggs are a part of it. It is being able to capture those kinds of peculiarities and share them so that we can laugh together. If we laugh together about the problem then, together we can start solving some of the pressing issues and problems we are dealing with.
Learn more about Going Native here.
YH: What are some of your upcoming projects?
BP: I have been developing a prototype for a graphic novel, centering a traditional storyteller speaking about mythic time, or time immemorial. It is a book and has images, panels—things you would generally expect from the graphic novel as a form. However, I try to break apart conventional use of the frames, pages, and fonts to reflect different temporalities. Present time is in smaller boxes, compressed into small pieces. Conversely, I try to depict the sacredness of mythic time by having it cut across multiple pages, with frames in different arrangements.
In the background of all the pages depict sacred space. I imagine sitting on the Tobique Rock, in the middle of primordial space and time. If you connect all the pages and you sit in that circle, you see a 360-degree diorama of sacred time. The panels are then floating above that single representation of the landscape. This is the other important deviation from the book form: instead of a typical book like we have, it is a screen fold book. It is only one piece of paper that is folded, that you then have to open up; it is a different way of reading a book that allows you to construct the past and the present and see how the two are interwoven. The punchline, if you will, or the lesson to be learned, is that if we don’t pay attention to the stories of the past, then we are going to be ignoring the monster that we are all going to be facing right now. And that monster is climate change.