little resistances investigates and celebrates the small and critical histories that serve as pathways for reassertion and reclamation of Indigenous sovereignties, wherever they might be found. The image paired with the photograph of Benesiinaabandan’s grandmother depicts a violent moment in the 1999-2001 Burnt Church Crisis during which a Department of Fisheries patrol boat ran over Mi’kmaq fishermen setting traps on the waters of Miramichi Bay.

The crumpled photographs seem at first to indicate an act of anger and violence against the image itself—but the physical gesture of crumpling paper is also a gesture of holding and embrace. It is in fact an act of sovereignty and love; a reconnecting and configuring of histories and stories—those we are told, and those we tell ourselves. With this gesture, the photos move from two dimensions (as representations of singular and detached events) into a multidimensional space—a space that intimately combines and connects the two events or relationships. Each of the images in little resistances breaks the photograph’s insular place in Western history; collapsing time and space, provoking a remembrance of connection.

Each historical event and photograph found in little resistances was formative to Benesiinaabandan’s idea of who he was as a young man. Each instance was a teaching about how to resist; about how both the micro and macro resistances were inextricably woven together—the individual, the community, the nation.

The crumpled paper forms a topology of its own history, a map of where it’s been and how it got there. The project is a self-reflective metaphor for the intricate and intimate ways we all continue to engage with and discover our own little resistances.