The Making Is the Story: Sovereignty, Sharing, and the Seven Sisters Cloak

Abstract

In spring 2022, the authors co-led an experimental course and artists’ residency called “Decolonizing Museums.” The major outcomes were a possum-skin cloak (the first of its kind made in the United States) and a series of high-art photographs of project participants wearing the cloak. This project is part of an initiative to imagine and forge a Living Archive of Aboriginal Art, based in Australia. The objective: to radically reimagine what archives are and what they do, from Indigenous perspectives. The authors argue that photography-as-documentary practice (artists reflexively take photographs to document every aspect of their work) and photography-as-high-art-practice (a way of insisting on Indigenous forms of knowledge transmission and aesthetic expression) are inextricable from each other. These understandings of photography are also inextricable from cloak making: all of the making is all part of the story. The making is the story. In a collaborative visual essay, the authors mobilize photographs as an invitation to readers/viewers to be in relation with Indigenous knowledge holders and to join in the work of amplifying Indigenous sovereignty. The authors emphasize matriarchal knowledge transmission: women are leading efforts to reclaim autonomy over bodies and lands. The authors also call attention to intercultural collaboration as a source of innovation in both contemporary culture making and in pedagogy