From 30 November to 20 December 2023, you can participate in online meetings on the Zoom platform with representatives of indigenous cultures from the Northwest Coast of Canada.
A lecture “Dancing Our Archive: Bringing to Life the Photography of Tsimshian First Nations Benjamin Alfred Haldane,” by Mique’l Dangeli will be held on 7 December 2023 on the Zoom platform.
The lecture focuses the work Tsimshian First Nations photographer Benjamin Alfred Haldane (1874-1941). Known by a nickname composed of his first two-initials “B.A.,” he was born to Matthew and Ada Haldane on June 15, 1874, in Metlakatla, British Columbia. At thirteen-years-oldhe participated in the mass movement of 823 Tsimshian people who, accompanied by lay missionary William Duncan, established the community of Metlakatla, Alaska in their quest for government-sanctioned land rights in 1887. Having opened a portrait studio there in 1899, B.A. is one of the first Indigenous people to become a professional photographer in North America.
Using archival, community-based research, and Indigenous research methodologies, this lecture demonstrates the complex and subversive ways in which B.A.’s photography was utilised by First Nations people in Alaska and British Columbia to resist colonial oppression of their cultural practices. This lecture also focuses on the reclamation of B.A.’s photography through dance and ceremony by the Git Hayetsk Dancers and his descendants in Metlakatla, Alaska.