JOHN MOSES

John is a member of the Delaware and upper Mohawk bands from the Six Nations of the Grand River territory. As a manager of the combined Objects, Paper, and Archaeology (OPA) conservation labs of the Canadian Conservation Institute (CCI) in Ottawa, John specializes in the conservation of cultural property within the Department of Canadian Heritage. From 2009 to 2017, he was a policy analyst on Indigenous cultural policy and modern treaty implementation at the Department of Canadian Heritage. With an extensive background in artifact conservation and years of doctoral research on the topic of Aboriginal perspectives in Canadian culture, John has reflected on the role of the Indians of Canada pavilion (IOCP) at Montreal ‘s Expo 67 as “a watershed moment in the representation of Indigenous perspectives before global audiences of world’s fairgoers”. He also investigated the representation of Indigenous perspectives in the Canadian History Hall of the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau. John inherited his late father Russ Moses’ legacy of Aboriginal representation in Expo 67’s IOCP. Mr. Russ Moses was the deputy general commissioner of the IOCP who played a major role alongside other fellow Indigenous commissioners in charting the planning and the implementation of the pavilion. In carrying forward his father’s legacy as well as the IOCP’s, John highlights the importance of Indigenizing museums and gallery spaces in Canada, and considers the Indigenous pavilion a “ground zero” for kickstarting the decolonization of Indigenous cultural representation. Despite the ephemerality of the IOCP exhibitions, the activism of Indigenous artists and cultural representatives at the time has laid a much-needed critical eye on Canada 150 commemorations. Furthermore, it brought about changes in envisioning the representation of Indigenous heritage, whereby Indigenous experts reappropriate the narrative about indigenous issues and “provide direct unfiltered indigenous perspectives on important matters of the day without having to rely on third party curatorial narrators or facilitators”.