My Failure With An Ojibwe Artist: Reflections On Initial Intercultural Relationships

In this article, I examine a first meeting with Ojibwe artist, Terry Kemper, during which I failed to initiate our meeting with the gift of tobacco. I explore failure in a relational event with Kemper and discuss the intentions of my ethnographic research, my researcher-identity, and my mistake of initially neglecting Ojibwe protocol during my first meeting with the artist, in addition to the role of tobacco in Ojibwe communities. Through aesthetic inquiry I reframe failure in an installation entitled, Toward Reconciliation” that has potential pedagogical implications, with hope that it avoids a static and impotent result. I intend the article and installation as a public engagement of my continued apology and hope for continued conversation with Kemper to reflect and revisit ongoing ethically and culturally appropriate relationships

Methodological Considerations for Intercultural Arts Research: Phenomenology, Ethnography, Collage Narrative, and Ethics

Living and working with Ojibwe participants in northern Minnesota informed a phenomenological approach to my three-month multi-sited ethnography. This research encompassed aspects of oral history and arts inquiry to investigate artistic processes, personal histories, and community relations of Ojibwe participants. I sought situational meaning generated between Ojibwe participants and my varied roles as an arts researcher, apprenticing artist, laborer, house caretaker, student and friend in order to articulate relational understandings of arts-mediated experiences. These experiences generated narrative content as collage and continuously directed the flow of the study, shifted my inquiry process, smudged my positionalities, and carefully informed my reflexive research ethics