With the growth of extractive industries across the North coinciding with the worsening effects of the climate crisis and increasing geopolitical tensions, local support for cultural industries must be enhanced to ensure that Indigenous leaders shape the futures of their own communities and cultures. How can we transform the arts landscape so that Northern Indigenous Peoples control their own narrative sovereignty, resources, and cultural heritage in the face of such urgent threats to Northern communities?
A Partnered Research Training Program (PRTI) will support Circumpolar Indigenous emerging postsecondary scholars, arts professionals and artists to become the next generation of leaders through an innovative new training and mentoring initiative. “By supporting Indigenous Peoples to excel within academia and the arts in the North and beyond, we will empower them to navigate institutions, build personal and community capacity, have agency, and assert sovereignty over our artistic practices, cultural heritage, and knowledge productions.”
In our model, institutions don’t ‘cherry-pick' prospective candidates; instead, the students are paired with potential mentors from institutions through an innovative recruitment strategy based on relationality and reciprocity. Twice a year, we will conduct EDI-informed open calls for applications to short term thematic workshops (3–7 days) that will provide focused hands-on training led by a small group of expert mentors made up of Co-Apps and Collaborators. These workshops are primarily about knowledge-transfer and skill-building, but they also provide an opportunity for informal collegial relationships to build between mentors from Partner institutions and mentees, leading to future internships at mentor’s institutions.
We will hire, train, and enhance the capacity of emerging Indigenous arts leaders to engage in research and dissemination as knowledge producers and research-creators in agential roles. Our partners throughout the Arts Sector will train Northern Indigenous HQP to become critics, directors, graphic designers, curators or curatorial assistants, editors, collections managers, and more.
This Research Training and Talent Development Partnership unites a global network of Indigenous and settler curators, artists, scholars, students and community members of diverse practices, media, knowledges, backgrounds, and Nations to collaborate and innovate new approaches to decolonial mentorship in the arts. We have a unique contributions model that allows for strong, reciprocal exchange and mutual benefit between NIF and our partners.
