In this conversation cultural practitioners from different Indigenous territories and peoples share their practices and engagement working within and beside Western understandings of institutions, in order to maintain and create structures that hold the memory and situated knowledge of their communities. This continuous work keeps the fire of ancestral knowledge ablaze, transferring what has been received to face current challenges.

Through their various practices, Léuli Eshrāghi, Jessie Kleemann, and Aura Pieski create other ways of instituting/gathering together by developing new approaches to the archiving, transmission, and education of Indigenous memory and knowledge.

Pieski is a Sámi educator and activist who teaches children and adults, artists and other activists the land based pedagogies of her people, in which knowledge is born, nurtured, and transmitted within a living relationship with the land. She works within the legacy of successful efforts to transform the educational systems to teach culture and language in the different national states that hold the region of Sápmi. Kleemann is a Greenlandic actress, poet, director, visual and performance artist who has contributed significantly to reshaping local professional education to include Greenlandic Kalaallit Inuit performing arts practices, significantly aiding in revitalising and maintaining their presence. Artist, writer, and curator Eshrāghi, belonging to the Sāmoan Seumanutafa and Tautua, serves as Curator of Indigenous Practices at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, seeking to achieve through every exhibition a way to advance land back, a space to move from looking to listening to the works, and exercising collective responsibility and subjecthood.

During the session, the three practitioners articulate and converse through questions around how to create and facilitate accessible archives of the writings, works, and perspectives of Indigenous people. They reflect also on the fundamental importance and particularities of the relational emergence and living existence of knowledge. They also call on institutions to stop extracting knowledge and cultural belongings, and to put their work in the service of Indigenous communities.