Project(ed) Canadian Identity, creative project by English and Creative Writing major, Tyler Fey
The option of completing a term project with either a standard analytical essay or a creative project is not something that is available to all students on campus, but professor Dan Keyes feels that offering these options allows students the flexibility to leverage their own particular skills and talents.
Dan Keyes teaches a range of courses in English and Cultural Studies that deal with media. This past term he taught a course on English-Canadian Screen Culture, and gave students the option of handing in a final research paper, or producing a creative piece for the final class project with an artist statement explaining how the creative work leveraged the critical material.
“Being in a faculty of creative and critical studies, it seems important to allow students to leverage both modalities to consider how they create knowledge.” says Keyes.
While the standard research essay is a valuable tool for communicating knowledge, a creative option allows students to see that there are other ways to build on prior-knowledge and skills to convey their message or ideas to a wider public who might not read a scholarly article in a scholarly journal.
One of the students in Keyes’ English class this year, Tyler Fey, an English and Creative Writing major, chose the option of producing a creative piece instead of a traditional essay.
“Many classes only offer students the standard essay for their term project, because Dr. Keyes was willing to offer a creative avenue of expression for our research papers, I jumped at the opportunity to produce something creatively.” says Tyler
Tyler’s creative project involved the creation of an unglazed rounded white vase split into two pieces and woven together with sweetgrass and sinew with the help of First Nations friends, who taught him how to work with this material and generously supported the project. Tyler worked with Shelley Isaac, Wendy Huggan (Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation), and Jean-Anne Copley (Cowichan Nation, Vice President of the Kelowna Friendship Society), who provided the vase with its own little medicine bundle as an exercise in cultural healing. Tyler is acutely aware of the politics of appropriation, but sees the necessity of working together to think through issues of decolonization in relation to contemporary and modern national forms.
close up of the maple leaf dream catcher in Tyler’s project
Perhaps the most striking part of the vase is the creation of a dream catcher inside the negative image of the iconic maple leaf, which like the vase itself hints at how Canadian identity is woven together using First Nations culture in a way that should acknowledge various forms of appropriation.
There is etched writing both inside and outside the vase. The outside text contains jingoistic nationalism Anglo white pride texts taken from mass media texts while the inside hidden part of the vase contains etched texts from mass media dealing with outstanding land claims, Canada’s recent 150 celebrations as exercises in national forgetting, residential schools, and murdered and missing aboriginal women.
Tyler writes “Even though the words on the inside are printed plainly, it becomes an effort to see, read, and understand them. In the same sense, I thought of the 2014 Jeff Barnby film Rhymes for Young Ghouls, as it deals directly with residential schools and living on reservations, but we learnt it was not broadly released into Canadian theatre despite its impactful and timely message.”
Tyler wants the vase to serve as a metaphor for how some screen texts that challenge decolonizing forms of cultural productions are hindered and hidden while other exalted white forms of popular entertainment like Labine’s Mountain Men (2016) available on Netflix offer examples of unfettered and exalted whiteness. The vase with its negative maple leaf image woven together with a dreamcatcher woven out of sinew serves as a metaphor for Canadian identity, the outside being what is projected to the world through dominant mass media and the inside being issues that are largely ignored by the media.
“Over the years, I have developed this assignment, I have seen students leverage this assignment to graduate and pursue careers in journalism, or documentary film making, “ notes Keyes, “I am astounded by the work and effort students apply to this assignment, which tends to attract a particular student keen to reveal their critical and creative vision.”