Writer.
Researcher.
Theorist of Visual Politics.
Danielle Taschereau Mamers writes about art, documents, & visual politics.
Taschereau Mamers holds a PhD in Media Studies and is the Managing Director of the Critical Digital Humanities Initiative at the University of Toronto. Previously, she has held a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at McMaster University, as well as Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wolf Humanities Center and the University of Toronto’s Jackman Humanities Institute.
Taschereau Mamers’ first book, Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing (Fordham UP, under contract), investigates legal and identity documents as a technology for reproducing the category of Indian status and how Indigenous artists have critically and creatively responded to these documents. Across her research, she brings together art and media theory as methods for analyzing the politics of documentation, archives, and images in settler colonial contexts.
Taschereau Mamers contributes essays and criticism to a variety of publications, teaches in media studies and political science, and reflects on creating joy and surviving academia in a series of hand-drawn zines.
Recent Publications
Looking at Law: Refusals of Settler Colonial Politics in Nadia Myre's Indian Act
Nadia Myre’s Indian Act appropriates the Canadian colonial legislation by the same name, transforming it into a hand-beaded serial work. The accumulation of stitches and beads mirrors the overlapping paperwork practices of state agents that bring Indians into being, reworking the appropriated Indian Act text in ways that analyze how the law works. This article presents Myre’s artwork is a method for critiquing the ways of seeing activated in the Indian Act as a legal text. Further, the work generates a counterdocument that materializes the relations the legislation sought to destroy.
This peer-reviewed article was published in CR: New Centennial Review.
Reintroducing Bison to Indigenous land is a Small Act of Reconciliation
Written for the Opinion section of The Globe and Mail, this column reflects on how bison reintroduction offers modest hope for reconciliation efforts and, crucially, presents an opportunity for reflecting on the settler colonial politics that fomented their extermination more than a century ago.
‘Last of the Buffalo’: Bison Extermination, Early Conservation, & Visual Records of Settler Colonization in the North American West
A souvenir booklet of photographs and essays documenting the 1907 round up of the last free-ranging bison herd in North America is also a visual record of settler colonization in practice. Using archival and visual studies methods, this article examines how the round up of these animals converged with processes of enclosure, dispossession, and the disavowal of Indigenous sovereignty. Settler logics and framing transformed bison into material and symbolic objects of consumption.
This peer-reviewed article was published in Settler Colonial Studies.
Disrupting the Register: TreatyCard.ca & Indigenous Counter-Archives
The Indian Register is a documentary technology that materializes the category of Indian status, as defined in the Indian Act. Not only a key site of colonial law’s archival work, the Indian Register takes on counter-documentary form in Cheryl L’Hirondelle’s (Cree/Métis) TreatyCard.ca. The counter-archival disruption of TreatyCard.ca creates a radically open register wherein participants author and authorize their own identities at a remove from the state’s sovereign archival desires.
This peer-reviewed article was published in the Archive/Counter-Archive issue of PUBLIC: Art|Culture|Ideas.