2022 Domitor Student Essay Award

The winner of the 2022 Domitor Student Essay Award is Meghan Romano (University of Toronto) for “Following Caribou Via Rupta: Re-tracing Lines from the Hunting Film to Indigenous Media.” Romano’s insightful essay convincingly argues that a contemporary video installation by Mi’kmaw artist Jerry Evans, Apaja’lujik—Bring them Back(2019), can tease out the conceptual foundations of an early film commissioned by Newfoundland’s first railway company, Stalking and Shooting Caribou, Newfoundland (F.A. Dobson, American Mutoscope & Biograph, 1907). By combining archival research, textual analysis, and theoretical inquiry, the essay manages to demonstrate that Evans’s art piece unsettles the linearity that was both promoted by the railway and used as a formal device by the makers of the 1907 film. Congratulations to Meghan for her wonderful contributions to the field!