WATCH: Matthew James Weigel and Liz Howard on the Colonial Project of Historicizing Genocide
From the Border Crossings' ORIGINS Festival
Border Crossings’ ORIGINS Festival celebrates the world’s First Nations in an explosion of art, performance and debate. ORIGINS creates a unique opportunity to engage with Indigenous artists and activists at the cutting edge of cultural resistance, environmentalism and spiritual tradition. Working with some of the most significant cultural institutions in London, ORIGINS brings the world’s Indigenous artists and cultures to the heart of the former Empire.
In this conversation, First Nations Canadian poets Matthew James Weigel and Liz Howard read from their work and join a discussion with Prof. Peter Jaeger.
From the conversation:
Matthew James Weigel: There’s this real tendency in the colonial project to historicize things and to make them a thing of the past—this contained, singular event that is no longer attached or a component or part of what we’re experiencing today. That’s a big move that happens a lot. A lot of my work, to put it bluntly, is an excavation of genocide as an ongoing process.
