Errant Podcast – The Rematriation Imperative: Returning Ts’msyen Songs – with Robin Gray

For this conversation - of which an edited version is published in Errant Journal No. 5, 'Learning From Ancestors. Epistemic Restitution and Rematriation' - I speak with Ts’msyen and Mikisew Cree Assistant Professor of Sociology Robin Gray about the work she has done on the rematriation of Ts’msyen songs. Gray's research centers primarily on the politics of Indigeneity in settler colonial contexts and consists of community-based research that foregrounds Indigenous laws, ethics, and protocols and applies an Indigenous feminist lens to analyze the poetics and politics of Indigenous return, including the implications for Indigenous nationhood. Gray tentatively defines rematriation as an Indigenous feminist concept, and because of this it offers an antithesis to repatriation that she describes as a ‘legal concept rife with colonial baggage that develops from Euro-Western ideas about nationhood, personhood, property, and ownership’, and a ‘cog in the wheel of settler law that operationalizes the “possessive logics” that underpin “patriarchal white sovereignty”.’