Resonant Ecologies: Seminar 1, Dylan Robinson

Dylan Robinson is a xwélmexw (Stó:lō/Skwah) artist, curator and writer. From 2015-2022 he was the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Arts at Queen’s University. Dr. Robinson’s curatorial work includes the international touring exhibition Soundings (2019-2025) co-curated with Candice Hopkins. His current research project xoxelhmetset te syewa:l, Caring for Our Ancestors, involves working with Indigenous artists to reconnect kinship with Indigenous life incarcerated in museums. His book, Hungry Listening (University Minnesota Press, 2020), examines Indigenous and settler colonial practices of listening, and was awarded best first book for the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, Canadian Association for Theatre Research, and the Labriola Centre American Indian National Book Award. Other publications include the edited volume Music and Modernity Among Indigenous Peoples of North America (Wesleyan University Press, 2019); and Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action in and Beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016). As co-chair of the Indigenous Advisory Council for the Canadian Music Centre, he is currently leading a process for the reparation and redress of music that appropriates Indigenous song, and misrepresents Indigenous culture. The Flow of Sensate Sovereignty In this presentation I ask what—as a Stó:lō/xwelmexw writer, with specific relationships to our waterways in their different forms—we might learn about resurgence through a consideration of Indigenous sensory and affective relationships with water and water-related sound art by Indigenous artists. How might we centre the liquid materiality of water and our relationships to its surging and resurging movements, as starting points from which to theorize a sensory politics, or as I’ve called it elsewhere a “sensate sovereignty” of Indigenous resurgence?