Cheryl L’Hirondelle, nikamon ohci askiy: songs because of the land, grunt gallery, http://www.bruntmag.com/issue5/cheryl-lhirondelle.html
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Songlines, not Stupor by Dr. May Chew
Peer-reviewed article by Dr. May Chew
“Songlines, not Stupor: Cheryl L’Hirondelle’s nikamon ohci aski: songs because of the land as Technological Citizenship on the Lands Currently Called ‘Canada,’” Imaginations 8:3 (2017) [co-written with Jessica Jacobson-Konefall and Daina Warren].
Marshall McLuhan’s ideas have been foundational in shaping understandings about the role of media and mediation in landscape, identity, and nationhood. At the same time, his theories remain tethered to a liberal humanist schematic of citizenship and technological modernity, which advances—implicitly or not—colonial constructions of the land as terra nullius, and thus severely limits or frustrates attempts to enlist them in anti-colonial analyses. In response, this paper places McLuhan into dialogue with Cree artist and scholar Cheryl L’Hirondelle, arguing that such a move can begin to disrupt the settler underpinnings in McLuhan’s ideas, and also broaden the potential for these ideas to be applied within contemporary queries into decolonial citizenships on Turtle Island.