This conversation between Camille Georgeson-Usher, ICCA executive director, Emma Steen, community relations manager, and myself, happened, as it does, over Zoom\u200a\u2014\u200ame in a caf\u00e9 in Tioti\u00e0:ke\/Mooniyang\/Montr\u00e9al escaping domestic life, them in their respective homes in Tkaranto\/Toronto. We talked about how the persistence of \u201ccollective\u201d in the name creates a productive tension both among those who comprise the core staff\/organizers and those who look to them for support, pushing the ICCA to think through the many forms that collective work can take, how it relates to their roles in an Indigenous-led organization, and how \u201cdecolonization\u201d is often (mis)used to describe alternative working models\u200a\u2014\u200aparticularly the absence of hierarchy\u200a\u2014\u200aoften upheld by collectives, and, more recently, non-profit arts organizations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sarah Nesbitt :<\/strong> The collective model is really idealized. It\u2019s quite utopian, but in reality, things don\u2019t often function the way they are envisioned. How have your expectations matured over the years?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Camille Georgeson-Usher :<\/strong> When I first started in this role, I really struggled with the idea of us as a collective because we function more with the idea<\/em> of collectivity versus the structure<\/em> of collectivity. In our day-to-day workings we\u2019re very much a non-profit, but any of our larger decisions are possible only because of our membership. If we want to make any changes, they need to be approved by our membership. In this way it still functions as a collective. The thing I struggled with in the beginning is the messiness of being labelled a collective but not traditionally functioning as one. That was very awkward for me, but now I love the way that collectivity is complicated through what we do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Emma Steen :<\/strong> The way we have successfully functioned as a collective is also to acknowledge that being a collective doesn\u2019t mean non-hierarchy. It means that we are all valued equally and our opinions are all being brought to the table, but we recognize that we need to have structures that allow decisions to be made in a reasonable way and that people can have roles and lead. I think a lot of collectives try to exist horizontally, where every person has the same influence or status; often that structure ends up being destructive because there isn\u2019t a clear system for who is taking care of what, how to work in a cohesive way, and in our case how it extends to our membership.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n SN :<\/strong> I totally agree. Leadership doesn\u2019t necessarily have to mean hierarchy. It can mean actually caring for the people you are collaborating with by filling a role that others don\u2019t feel as comfortable with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CGU :<\/strong> I\u2019ve been hearing a lot lately about equalizing pay in collectives and lowering hierarchy as a decolonizing effort. And I\u2019m going to be really blunt about that: I have a big problem with it. Especially using the term \u201cdecolonization\u201d in terms of levelling hierarchy. Most Indigenous nations have never had a horizontal structure, so the idea that you\u2019re being \u201cwoke\u201d by flattening hierarchy isn\u2019t necessarily the end goal. If I\u2019m being even more blunt, I think it creates confused spaces. In the case of how that impacted the ICCA and our membership, for a few years our members just didn\u2019t know how we were supporting them. The collectivity of Indigenous folks working in the arts sector is our membership and we are working for you whether you are a formal member or not. And that, to me, is how we\u2019re able to make an impact. Because we\u2019re still doing the work, even if you don\u2019t know who we are, or that we exist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n SN :<\/strong> You started to talk a little bit about the ICCA\u2019s vision and how important it is to be clear about what you can do within the collective space of your membership. Can you talk a bit about who your members are? Who defines what you think of as the \u201cC\u201d for \u201cCollective\u201d in ICCA, and what your vision is for how to interface with them?<\/p>\n\n\n\n ES :<\/strong> Until January 2020 we only had one strand of membership, which was Community Membership; this is a free membership. You become a member simply by handing over your email, which is one of the reasons it has been so complicated, because it\u2019s very informal. We are an Indigenous organization geared towards Indigenous folks. We always prioritize Indigenous community members first and foremost, but as a collective, what we have been discovering is that we need to be working with specifically Black folks, but also all racialized and marginalized peoples. We need to be more aware of how we work in solidarity and allyship with other groups who are going through similar struggles. Also, broadening what membership can look like by prioritizing other voices, so that within the collective itself we are constantly challenging our expectations or understandings; and actively trying to grow and develop as an organization that is more aware of what Indigenous peoples look like and experience, to go beyond the traditional expectation of North American First Nations\/Indigenous understanding of Indigeneity. That has been a very beneficial part of our more recent programming and membership initiatives, which are bringing in more diverse voices and also more globally Indigenous voices. In January 2020 we launched our Institutional Membership Program, which is a paid membership. When the collective was founded in 2005, the whole reason it formed was because Native peoples said they couldn\u2019t get work. It was this constant issue\u200a\u2014\u200aIndigenous people weren\u2019t being hired to curate their own work, or lead their own narratives. Now, sixteen years later, the culture looks so different. There are endless jobs for Native people, but those jobs are exhausting and not well paid for the work. You\u2019re expected to come in as a cultural ambassador for every single Indigenous person in the world, and there is so rarely a succession line to a leadership role. So, often the jobs we\u2019re seeing come up are grant-based jobs, or contract jobs. We\u2019re seeing extremely high burnout rates. Something like 74 percent of Indigenous curators are freelance because it\u2019s mentally healthier to do the awful job of freelance work than to be on a salary at an institution, because they are just not doing the work of being safe, culturally aware spaces. When we developed the Institutional Membership, it was with this focus on making institutions better places for people to work. It\u2019s inherently an accountability program, really talking bluntly about the issues we\u2019re seeing. Talking with institutions that are now publicly [by joining the program] saying, \u201cWe are trying to have best practices. We are working toward best practices.\u201d It involves a lot of resource sharing, and research, and data collection. Another thing we\u2019re constantly realizing is that institutions\u2019 boards are often the most obvious place where you see people come up against walls because boards don\u2019t often have a lot of turnover even if the staff does. We\u2019re trying to host conversations so Indigenous or racialized people can actually take leadership positions and won\u2019t burn out by the time they\u2019re thirty-four. This new membership program is changing things in a big way. We\u2019re doing a lot of data research and collection to show boards and governing bodies that statistically people want to see new work, people want to see change, they\u2019re excited by change. As we know, one person saying this rarely does anything, but if we can point to numbers, if we can point to the success that other organizations doing this work have had, it\u2019s an amazing way of showing the broader Canadian audience and the folks working with us that this is actually a really noble and important goal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n SN :<\/strong> It\u2019s really amazing work that you are doing. This is activist work, if you want to call it that; it\u2019s cultural work, and you\u2019re basically creating culture for everyone. It\u2019s an Indigenous-led and -driven institution, but, as we know, the better off Indigenous folks are the better off we all are.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n CGU :<\/strong> A trend that I\u2019m seeing that is not a surprise, but I think is good to point to, is that institutions won\u2019t bring up an issue until it\u2019s public\u200a\u2014\u200alike what we\u2019re seeing at the Royal BC <\/meta>Museum.<\/meta>3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Following the resignation of Lucy Bell, The Royal British Columbia Museum\u2019s inaugural head of the First Nations Department and Repatriation Program, in February 2020, the Indigenous Collections curator Troy Sebastian very publicly resigned, posting on Twitter: \u201cI am happy to leave that wicked place behind. Yet, as long as the museum continues to possess my family\u2019s sacred items that were taken from us during residential school, I can never truly leave.\u201d<\/meta><\/span> That it took somebody working there who was so harmed that they quit, and that the only place they could go\u200a\u2014\u200abecause nobody was listening to them\u200a\u2014\u200awas to the public. It\u2019s only because of this that the Royal BC Museum is doing an investigation into it. I think most people could read into that situation that this person probably wasn\u2019t happy for a number of years, but it was the public spectacle that put the institution on a pedestal\u200a\u2014\u200aeverybody is looking at them, and not for the right reasons. I think there is a huge hesitancy for institutions to embrace being messy, which isn\u2019t a surprise, but the only way to move forward and to rethink how an arts institution functions is going to be really messy; people are going to make a ton of mistakes. Through the Institutional Membership program, we\u2019re offering a space for those awkward questions. Just looking at a job call, for example, can indicate so many inequities in an institution. I think that the idea that an institution is unchangeable is coming to an end. Institutions really need to take account of how they are continuing to harm people and how they perpetuate colonialism today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This interview was edited for brevity and clarity. Sarah Nesbitt would like to thank Camille Georgeson-Usher and Emma Steen for their generosity, and Simon Wake for transcribing the interview.<\/p>\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/104_DO_NESBITT_ICCA_RGB_02-C-scaled.jpg\")
Photo : Jessica Sabogal, courtesy of ICCA<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/104_DO_NESBITT_LOVECARE-CABARET_RGB-scaled.jpg\")
Photo : courtesy of ICCA<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n