« ‘Indigenous’ vs ‘indigeneity’ (the revolutionary power of dialectics): Rafael Verbuyst, ‘Indigeneity, subversion, and the trauma of settler colonialism: A reply to Kurzwelly and Mullard’, Anthropological Theory, 2025
Contained, but still indigenous: Wafaa Rouissat, Dalila Senhadji, ‘The policy of cantonnement and the communal system in Oranie during nineteenth-century colonial Algeria’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2025 »

The art of settler misrecognition: Allison Rowe, ‘Settler Colonial Misrecognition in Story Collection Socially Engaged Art’, Studies in Art Education : A Journal of Issues and Research, 66, 3, 2025, pp. 349-364

14Sep25

Abstract: Story collection—the practice of generating art or research by gathering participant narratives and combining them into a single product—is a popular method used by socially engaged artists and art education researchers. This ethnographic case study germinated with the examination of a story collection artwork executed at a gallery in a co-governed Indigenous–settler community in northern Canada. It expanded to consider how both my ethnographic methods and social practice art enact extractive, settler colonial approaches to knowledge. Working from Indigenous studies scholarship, particularly Sean Glen Coulthard (Yellowknife Dene), I show how repeated misrecognition of what Indigenous (and even settler) residents valued contributed to a local phenomenon of storytelling fatigue. This is a form of exhaustion brought on by excessive requests from outsiders to contribute to a project or artwork. These findings signal the need for artists, galleries, educators, and researchers to scrutinize how their undertakings are informed by the settler colonial politics of recognition.


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