Your changing campus

Many Professors at the University of Dundee divide their time - either between the classroom and the laboratory, the city and the countryside. Gavin Renwick, Professor and Chair of Art & Policy at Duncan of Jordanstone, divides his working time between Dundee and the far reaches of Canada. For over a decade Prof Renwick has been developing research, cultural and community development projects with communities in the Northwest Territories. These communities are the Canadian equivalent of Australia's aboriginal people, known as First Nation people. The Arctic links with the university are growing, and now also include an ever-increasing number of PhD students supervised by Gavin who are from the Northwest Territories.

While in Canada works with a group known as Gameti, a Tlicho First Nations hamlet north of the territorial capital of Yellowknife. As a government and resource town (diamonds has now replaced gold as the primary mining activity) it is much busier than its isolation would suggest, and research plays a major role in this. Indeed, it has the highest per-capita income and most qualified population in Canada! It is one of the coldest cities in the world with a yearly mean temperature of -5.4 and sits on the shores of the Great Slave Lake, the 11th largest lake in the world (approximately the size of Scotland!). Travelling there throughout the year means he encounters climatic extremes, from 25 degrees in the short summer to minus 40 during the long winter months.

Professor Gavin Renwick was born in Motherwell in 1964 and studied design at Napier College Edinburgh. He went on to be awarded a prestigious scholarship which allowed him to undertake an MA in architecture at the Royal College of Art, London and then came to Dundee to undertake a PhD. Through his doctorate studies, and a subsequent AHRB fellowship, he was able to develop his links with the Tlicho Dene people of the Northwest Territories. His role as an artist-researcher attempts to bridge the gap between two cultures, that of the people who had lived in the area for thousands of years and the infrastructure and policies of the all too dominant Euro-Canadian society. As a Tlicho elder summarises this dichotomy, we need to be "strong like two people".

One of his projects is named Gameti Ko and is now a community-led society dedicated to translating First Nation traditional knowledge into modern infrastructure. The Tlicho, by tradition, live and work in one place, the land, for it is their home, their livelihood and is woven into their entire being. Modern life - the five day 9.00 to 5.00 week can be seen as a colonial imposition within First Nation communities - is often at odds with the realties of living at such high latitudes.

Gameti elder Romie Wetrade describes their way of life. "When we say home it is as if the land is that home. This is why we worked hard and took care of our home, and it is still like that today. Now we live in a white man's house and now there is garbage all around. It's the white people's fault for bringing their things onto our land. We try to keep things clean but there's still too much mess around, what can we do about it? When we say 'our home' it is as if the land is home. Now I think about it this has been since the beginning of time, since the earth was created. Long ago our ancestors lived on this land within the spruce-bough tepee, which was always clean. There was no white man's stuff around, we were self-sufficient. Because this land was as home we kept it clean."

For First Nation communities, the government's policies - their design for towns, for homes and their social policies - have all created a problem because they separate the people from their land, their homelands.

The world in which the Gameti live may seem remote to us. There is no road to the community, other than in deepest winter when the ice is sufficiently thick to plough a path over the frozen lakes. But as Philip Zoe, a Gameti elder, has said: "To us this country is not remote; all around us is where people have lived. It is our home"

Today's Gameti elders learned from their elders, and they from their own previous generation, but their concern is that the knowledge will eventually be lost. Most of all the elders worry that the younger generation are losing what it means to be Tlicho. Romie Wetrade, a Gameti elder, is referring to this when he comments: "We can't afford to have English dominating our thought". This is why the elders encouraged Gavin to develop projects that can help them show the youth how they "can be modern in their own language". This includes ways of making their homes sustainable in the modern world without losing their traditions. The trick being to keep what is important to the Gameti people while not rejecting twenty first century life.

With the help of the federal government sponsoring annual workshops the elders have now given Gavin the permission to run with some of the knowledge given to him. Currently he is working on a publication detailed the elders vision for the community that will add to the sustainable planning work already undertaken, and is drawing up designs for a prototype house that will be built. The government will also use this structure to test appropriate environmental technology in a northern environment. Importantly, all this activity is being done in parallel to the Tlicho having achieved self-governent and land claim, the most far reaching between an aboriginal society and the federal government to date.

Gameti Ko also shows that the elders are not cut off from modern life - they want to meet and take on new technologies and traditions, but on their terms. After all it is in the interests of a hunting society to improve their efficiency. It has always been the presumption of Tlicho elders that if an outsider, like Professor Renwick, is to work with them it is the collaborators responsibility to acquire a sensitivity and working knowledge of Tlicho traditional knowledge - in other words to meet them halfway. This provides the catalyst for being 'strong like two people' - for maintaining a cultural vitality into the 21st century.

This work will be presented as part of the 'Home Office' exhibition at the University of Dundee next year. Another aspect of this will be a group of Tlicho elders and youth visiting Dundee as part of the printmaking collaboration between the Chief Jimmy Burneau High School and the Visual Research Centre (a exhibition of prints originating in Gavin's visual research with the Tlicho, done in collaboration with Paul Harrison of the VRC, is presently touring Canada).

Professor Renwick is also bridging the gap between Scotland and the First Nation people of Canada by helping bring back to the Tlicho homeland a collection of objects from the National Museum of Scotland. The Athapaskan collection of 280 Tilcho pieces, collected between 1858 and 1862, provides a unique snapshot of their culture at a time when modern influences were starting to cause great changes.

During this era of change art had its role to play in assimilating people to the new ways of life. Contemporary Dene craftwork owes much to the missionary school, particularly the floral motifs that now dominate 'traditional' artisanship.

It is no coincidence that there is no traditional word for art in First Nation societies, the closest term being not a noun but an appropriated verb, 'to work on'. What is presented here is not, therefore, art as something merely pleasing to the eye, but art as utility.

The collaborative development of DZ T'a Hoti Ts'eeda has also provided opportunities for "listening" to elders' stories about the objects. Cultural biographies provide unique interpretations that inform us about both the 'past' and the 'present' of objects within a modern cultural context. This relationship between living story and historical artefact will also be the substance behind the associated educational program that will bring Tilcho elders and youth together. The project was originally presented in Yellowknife and will open in Ottawa this month; it will then be shown in Edinburgh next July. It is collaboration between the Tlicho Government, the National Museums of Scotland, the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre and the University of Dundee.