New Red Order: Give it Back

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New Red Order, "Tank," 2020

courtesy the artists.

New Red Order: Give it Back

Audain Gallery, Hastings Street Windows

New Red Order (NRO) is a public secret society of rotating membership that works to re-channel settler desires for Indigeneity into supports for Indigenous futures. Formed in contradistinction to the Improved Order of the Red Men and The Degree of Pocahontas — North American organizations founded in the late nineteenth century exclusively for white men and women to “play Indian” — NRO imagines that the appropriative impulses at the heart of these societies might be redirected. Using strategies as diverse as calling out and calling in, recruitment, and cumulative interrogation, the work of NRO aims to shift potential obstructions to Indigenous growth.

In Give it Back, a street-facing window exhibition, New Red Order engages with moves toward Land Back, which involve calls to restore stolen Indigenous territories to Indigenous people. Occuring on unceded land of the Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm), Squamish (Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw), and Tsleil-Waututh (səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ) Nations, in the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood of so-called Vancouver, the project reveals instances where the repatriation of land, from settlers to Indigenous individuals or groups, has been promised or perhaps enacted. Beyond the necessary disruption of settler colonialism with the need to take back land, Give it Back  investigates, presents, and promotes another mode of return: through actualized gestures of land being "voluntarily" released to Indigenous people. Employing videos and a real-estate ethos, Give it Back unfolds to chart moments in a speculative future history of the movement.

Linking with NRO’s persistent deconstruction of the idea of an Indigenous informant — a term that describes a person who reveals too much of their own communities, in either legal or anthropological contexts — which involves acknowledging NRO members’ own complicity as informants, Give it Back  speculates on the recuperative possibility of calling in others, settlers included, to inform with them. In foregrounding voluntary practices and promises of land’s return, the work offers a potential — if partial — attempt to undo settler colonialism by those who stand to benefit most from its upholding.

For this exhibition, New Red Order core contributors Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, and Jackson Polys are joined by Virgil B/G Taylor. Working in filmmaking, performance and installation art, New Red Order have presented their work internationally, expanding the public secret society network across numerous institutional platforms.

Virgil B/G Taylor makes fag tips, an online speculative zine. He is one half of sssssssssSsss, a study-friendship with Ashkan Sepahvand, and a member of What Would An HIV Doula Do?, a collective of artists, writers, caretakers, activists, and more gathered in response to the ongoing HIV/AIDS pandemic. His work explores histories of care and crisis, magic, and toxicity. 

Presented in partnership with DOXA, Cineworks and the School for Contemporary Arts at SFU.

Curated by cheyanne turions

Pyro-concept accomplice: Kate August

Performing arm accomplice: Ashley Byler 

Wardrobe accomplice: Enver Chakartash

Labour force accomplice: Christopher Lacroix

Performing arm accomplice: Jeremy Pheiffer

SCREENING: Anti-Ethnography Presented online - Please register to receive a virtual ticket to access the program.

Presented in partnership with DOXA, and aligned with New Red Order’s exhibition Give it Back  at Audain Gallery, this screening program examines the violence inherent in the ethnographic impulse, unveiling the absurd fetishism underpinning the discipline.

For Indigenous peoples, the camera is a dangerous weapon, one that has been wielded against them since the device’s inception. Anthropology's obsession with preserving images of so-called vanishing cultures, through ethnographic films or, relatedly, archives filled with boxes of ancestral remains, has long been a tool used to colonize and oppress Indigenous peoples.

By relegating Indigenous identities to the past, and forcing Indigenous people to authenticate themselves through this past, their existence as contemporary individuals living in a colonized land is denied. It is in this sense that ethnography confines Indigenous agency.

The ethnographer's encapsulating gaze ignores the fact that, for Indigenous communities, tradition is not an immutable set of truths handed down by revelation, but a set of ever-evolving social practices whose continuity cannot be repaired by preservation, only elaborated through struggle and, finally, achieved under conditions of genuine self-determination. In the works assembled for this screening, the power of Indigenous people claiming the camera for themselves is explored.

The Anti-Ethnography screening is free and open to all regions. Please register to receive a virtual ticket to access the program. Once the program is unlocked, the viewer will have 24 hours to finish watching the program. 

Anti-Ethnography Program:

Land Acknowledgment, New Red Order, 2021

Sioux Ghost Dance, W.K.L. Dickson/Thomas Edison, 1894

Welcome to the Third World, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, 2004

Auntie Beachress — Are You Looking at Me?, Tonia Jo Hall, 2015

Overweight with Crooked Teeth, Shelley Niro, 1997

Instant Identity Ritual, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Gustavo Vázquez, 2007

Alphabet City Serenade, Diane Burns, 1992

Bizarre Thanksgiving Performance Ritual, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Gustavo Vázquez, 2013

Auntie Beachress — Lakota Language Challenge, Tonia Jo Hall, 2015

wawa, Sky Hopinka, 2014

Auntie Beachress — Only Boring People Get Bored, Tonia Jo Hall, 2015

Mobilize, Caroline Monnet, 2015

Dance to Miss Chief, Kent Monkman, 2010

Native Fantasy: Germany’s Indian Heroes, Axel Gerdau, Erik Olsen, and John Woo of The New York Times, 2014

The Violence of a Civilization without Secrets, Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, and Jackson Polys, 2018

We Only Answer Our Land Line, Woodrow Hunt and Olivia Camfield, 2019

Reclamation, Thirza Jean Cuthand, 2018

Auntie Beachress — Life's Struggles, Tonia Jo Hall, 2015

Curated by New Red Order