Take Care’s fourth circuit, Stewardship, decentres the isolated individual as the privileged recipient or the primary site of care. Against the calamitous futures wrought by extractivism and the state forces that enable it, this circuit explores stewardship as a potential counter-modality of caretaking. Relationality, shared responsibility, custodianship, interdependency, community governance, and intergenerationality: the contested lexicon of stewardship is difficult to avoid in efforts to respond to the crises of care cascading across multiple domains of life—ecological, social, cultural, political. Stewardship scales up care, and names the relational work of tending to a world, a resource, an artefact, a memory, a community, a knowledge system, an institution, a future. Stewardship forefronts ideas and practices of care that centre upon relationships to land, territory, and water, and that undo hierarchies between human and nonhuman. While irreducible to stewardship alone, this circuit’s exhibition—#callresponse—repositions the crisis of care within and against the intersecting forces of the nation state, colonialism, land dispossession, and patriarchy. As co-organizer Tarah Hogue writes in relation to #callresponse, “the resistance of Indigenous peoples exposes the precarity of settler sovereignty and opens possibilities for alternate conceptions of care and responsibility towards one another.”11Tarah Hogue, engaging the work of Audra Simpson, in “#callresponse: presence across platforms,” MICE 02, ed. Radiodress (2016): http://micemagazine.ca/issue-two/callresponse.

—Letters & Handshakes

To support the work of Indigenous women from across Turtle Island through art commissions that drive dialogue and mobilize action on the topic of reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples. To stand together across sovereign territories as accomplices22We take up the term “accomplices” as a politicized alternative to “ally,” following Jaskiran Dhillon’s “On Becoming an Accomplice.” Paper presented at Accomplice & Art Practice—Indigenous Feminist Activism & Performance, Yale University, New Haven CT, March 2016. in awakened solidarity with all our relations, both human and non.

Blackwood Gallery invited the co-organizers to engage with the institution’s collection of Inuit Art as a site-specific response to the thematic of Stewardship, the fourth circuit of the Take Care project that occasioned this iteration of #callresponse. The co-organizers invited Beatrice Deer, an Inuk singer from Nunavik, to select works from the collection to be hung on the University of Toronto Mississauga campus. These works are accompanied by textual responses written in English and Inuktitut from Deer’s own perspective as an Inuk woman. A number of other local responses have also been commissioned, including a “visitation” of Ursula Johnson’s durational song-based performance Ke’tapekiaq Ma’qimikew: The Land Sings with Cherish Violet Blood and Rosary Spence, song workshops for youth led by Cheryl L’Hirondelle and Ursula Johnson in partnership with Peel Aboriginal Network Friendship Centre, a “writer-in-residence” who will take over the project’s social media platforms, and a panel discussion unpacking the concept of stewardship in relation to Indigenous and artistic considerations.