Rising to the Occasion: Valuations of Indigenous Agency and Decolonization in Royal Tours, Historic Sites and Twelve Angry Crinolines in Thunder Bay, ON

This article examines Indigenous artist interventions challenging settler-colonial narratives at heritage sites, focusing on Rebecca Belmore’s Rising to the Occasion and Twelve Angry Crinolines during the 1987 royal tour of Thunder Bay. This performance is situated within a history of Indigenous resistance during British royal visits (1973 and 1987, respectively) to Old Fort William Historical Park that activates visual sovereignty. In their critique of the park’s Eurocentric fur trade narratives, the authors position Belmore’s performance as a conceptual ‘artist-history’ intervention, offering possibilities for rethinking curatorial responsibilities and advancing decolonizing practices in cultural institutions, particularly heritage sites and historic museums.