The radio is a tool. Through receptive listening and attention there is potential for the creation of a community of receivers. In the act of transmission, there is agency and responsibility that is at once collective and individual, that works with echoes, waves, reverberations, repetitions, cycles, and is only meaningful when received. This Is An Emergency Broadcast connects Indigenous political advocacy with the forms of communication offered by community radio, countering power chronicles of state and corporate media and, in its self-determination, offering space for reignited narratives.

Artist Lorna Brown will lead a collective listening experience in This Is An Emergency Broadcast, offering an opportunity for witnessing in a context of advocacy and oral tradition.

This Is An Emergency Broadcast connects Indigenous political advocacy with the forms of communication offered by community radio, countering power chronicles of state and corporate media and, in its self-determination, offering space for reignited narratives. A project with artist and activist Marianne Nicolson (Musga̱maḵw Dzawada̱’enux̱w), This Is An Emergency Broadcast occupies the Belkin space with audio recordings that clarify a history of Indigenous articulation, collective organization and opposition to colonial forces.

As part of Critical Image Forum's Dialogue Series, this online conversation with Althea Thauberger, Musgamakw Dzawada’enuxw artist and activist Marianne Nicolson helps us understand how particular photographic acts, although initiated by Canadian colonial photographers, were used, by those depicted, as opportunities for assertions of political, cultural and territorial sovereignty during the potlatch ban in the early twentieth century.

Commissioned for the exhibition To refuse/To wait/To sleep (January 13-April 9, 2017), Marianne Nicolson reworks the British Columbia provincial flag by repositioning and inverting the Union Jack below a setting/rising sun that has been recreated with a Pacific Northwest Coast Indigenous aesthetic.