Unsettling Conservation Collective: Reworldings

Over the past two years, the Unsettling Conservation Collective has catalyzed a series of projects that challenge dominant understandings of how Land and Water are used, valued, and protected. Rooted in collaborative creative practice and Indigenous knowledge systems, artists Glenn Gear, Melaw Nakehk’o, Sheri Osden Nault, Adrian Stimson, and Michelle Wilson centre relationships of care, respect, responsibility, and reciprocity that underpin connections that have long been erased or obscured by settler colonial frameworks of conservation and preservation. Drawing together installation, video, audio, and material-based approaches, Reworldings speaks to living relationships with place and peoples, to the interdependence of species and systems, and to the urgent need to restore not only ecosystems, but also justice.

Across the globe, nation-states like Canada have made Land and Water their own by drawing, defining, and creating borders to mark the extent of their property and control. Conservation has often served this colonial agenda, justifying the displacement and dispossession of Indigenous communities by relying on an enduring fiction—that the places being protected exist empty, unmoving, and isolated from human presence or history. Reworldings unsettles this myth and the structures it supports, challenging the belief that environmental care requires human absence or top-down management. In contrast, the exhibition highlights the leadership of Indigenous communities who have long stewarded their territories through systems of governance grounded in kinship, balance, and accountability. These systems centre observation, listening, and reflection as essential to moving forward in a good way. Today, this leadership is further embodied in the movement for Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs), which represents a profound shift in conservation—one that re-centres Indigenous sovereignty, law, and knowledge.

Grounded in specific sites with layered and contested histories—Batoche National Historic Site (Nault), Waterton Lakes National Park (Stimson), Hopedale, Nunatsiavut (Gear), Thaidene Nëné Protected and Conserved Area (Nakehk’o), and Wood Buffalo National Park (Wilson)—Reworldings explores how art can repair relationships while imagining new and lasting ones. The exhibition is part of the broader work of the Conservation through Reconciliation Partnership (CRP), a network of Indigenous and non-Indigenous collaborators committed to supporting Indigenous-led conservation across Canada.