Alicia Colson

I’m interested in the ways in which different perspectives influence how images are used and understood. Images have the ability to convey vast quantities of information. As a small child in a fishing village in rural Brazil, and later in Viana do Castelo, Madrid, and Lisbon, I observed adults reading images on walls of the churches. At the time I didn’t really think about what I’d observed. In my education, text was the predominant means of conveying information. Images, including moving and still images, and oral information, were sidelined.

Typically, rock art is dealt with by archaeologists in such a way that the information conveyed by an image is isolated into various disciplines and specialties. While this is convenient in some ways, it betrays the cultural baggage on the part of the analysts. In order to consider these images as an archaeologist and an ethnohistorian, I had to learn new techniques and methods. I could deal with what was at hand, rather than something merely fashionable. Digital tools enabled me to model the ways in which others viewed the same images. I could recognize that what is insider and outsider depends on one’s perspective, one’s background, and how it is expressed using text, images, sound and moving images. What people call rock art is really a painting or an engraving, an image on a rock surface. It may be as valuable as oral and textual information that is influenced by our world view, and the way we organize lives. Rock art has much to say – if we only look.

My collaboration with leading elders from the Lac Seul First Nation, in northwestern Ontario, enables them. The elders wish their voices to be heard, producing two academic articles. The first explains the meaning of their pictograph sites to local indigenous peoples and to outsiders. The second studies a birchbark scroll, created by a medicine woman who was a member of their community.