Changers: A Spiritual Renaissance - Recentering Indigenous Women's Self-Determination, Artistic Sovereignty and Excellence in the 1980s and 1990s.

This thesis builds upon an Indigenous feminist archive by analyzing the exhibition Changers: A Spiritual Renaissance within the social and political art climate of the 1980s and 1990s. Changers is the first contemporary art exhibition in Canada highlighting work by Indigenous women artists from the perspective of an Indigenous woman curator. It was organized by the Indian Art Centre (now the Indigenous Art Centre) in 1989 and curated by Wolastoqey elder, artist, and writer Shirley Bear of Neqotkuk (Tobique First Nation). The systematic disempowerment of Indigenous women provided the grounds for women’s activism, which paved a path for self-determination and amplified women’s political voice beginning with the “Indian Women’s Movement.” Changers represents a specific expression of feminism initiated by Bear’s activism in the 80s and 90s. Her exhibition text an instrumental tool to Indigenous women’s art history, as it addresses colonialist and patriarchal narratives imposed on Indigenous peoples, specifically how these systems impact the women. The exhibition serves as a counter-narrative and strategy to recenter Indigenous women’s art, experience, and excellence. Bear’s exhibition advanced discussions around visual sovereignty, survival, refusal, decolonial aesthetics, by drawing on feminist scholars such as Jolene Rickard, Sherry Farrell Racette, and Julie Nagam. The exhibition demonstrates Indigenous relational aesthetics – an Indigenous feminist framework from Jas M. Morgan (previously Lindsay Nixon) – that centers relationships and care through kinship networks

Eugenics and Modern Biology: Critiques of Eugenics, 1910-1945

Eugenics in most western countries in the first four decades of the twentieth century was based on the idea that genes control most human phenotypic traits, everything from physical features such as polydactyly and eye color to physiological conditions such as the A-B-O blood groups to mental and personality traits such as “feeblemindedness”, alcoholism and pauperism. It assessing the development of the eugenics movement – its rise and decline between 1900 and 1950 – it is important to recognize that its naïve assumptions and often flawed methodologies were openly criticized at the time by scientists and non-scientists alike. This paper will present a brief overview of the critiques launched against eugenicists’ claims, particularly criticisms of the American school led by Charles B. Davenport. Davenport’s approach to eugenics will be contrasted to his British counterpart, Karl Pearson, founder and first editor of Annals of Eugenics. It was not the case that nearly everyone in the early twentieth century accepted eugenic conclusions as the latest, cutting-edge science. There are lessons from this historical approach for dealing with similar naïve claims about genetics today