Settler Monuments, Indigenous Memory
Phillips, Ruth B. “Settler Monuments, Indigenous Memory.” In Monuments and Memory Made and Unmade edited by Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin, 281-304. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
This collection of essays titled ‘Monuments and Memory Made and Unmade’ examines the practice of monuments and collective memory across history and cultures. The book particularly looks at the larger historical of the monument and its function in society, how monuments are created, how they coalesce memory, and how monuments affect society once created.
The chapter highlighted is titled ‘Settler Monuments, Indigenous Memory’ and examines the role of the monument as a deposit of historical possession of power. Phillips sees monuments from the perspective of the processes of cultural construction and as a product of narratives. She specifically looks at the processes of decolonization – of building memories and forgetting in the aftermath of major shifts in regimes of power.
She addresses the kinds of negotiations that surround monuments betokening to settler societies like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. More specifically Phillips examines the particular issues that face internally colonized indigenous peoples within settler societies by examining several artistic projects undertaken during the 1990s by two First Nations artists working in Canada, the Saulteaux-Ojibwa painter Robert Houle, and the Onondaga-Iroquois photographer Jeffrey Thomas. She examines their work and argues their attempts to revise a historical discourse that has silenced indigenous memory, while countering a discourse that has traditionally constructed the indigenous artist as primitive and an outsider.