#métis writer

[piizunn]

“Knowing You Has Made Me a Better Settler Person”: Tokenizing the Métis Identity 

View my work: A Spectacle of Me for You 

By riel 

My name is riel, I am a Red River Métis artist descending maternally from the historic Métis families by the names of Berthelet, Caron, St. Germaine, Dubois, Dazé, and Larivière, who come from the communities of Pointe à Grouette, now St. Agathe, St. Norbert, and St. Vital, now modern-day Winnipeg, and the historic Batoche, Saskatchewan. My Berthelet ancestors, notably my third great grandfather Joseph Berthelet Sr. was a community leader of Pointe à Grouette, and my fifth-great uncle Jean Caron Sr fought at fifty-two years old in the battle of Duck Lake, Saskatchewan of the North-West Resistance of 1885. His house is now a historic site in Batoche. My mother is a Métis academic with a background in education and my father is a settler of British ancestry, and an archaeologist-turned-locksmith. I introduce myself in this way, in the traditional way of Métis authors, such as Chantal Fiola and Jean Teillet, to contextualize my knowledge and experiences, as well as my connection to this land.  

Earlier this year, 2022, as the winter semester wrapped up, and spring was beginning to rear its big green head, I finished building a Red River cart. It was four months of research and physical labour. I taught myself methods of wood joinery that my ancestors would have used, the hand tools they had access to pre-industrial revolution, as well as the power tools we as modern Métis have access to now. After the cart’s completion I installed it in the Ivan Gallery at school. That is when and where it happened. A classmate of settler colonial ancestry approached me. We had spent two semesters at odds. Her work focused on the climate crisis but came from a place of doomism and borderline eco-fascism. She regurgitated colonial narratives regarding our “doomed world” and the inherent violence of humans, and when she was corrected and shown the harm in her words she doubled down.  

She said to me “knowing you, has made me a better person.” I do not know this woman and she does not know me, but I believe I knew her in that moment. To her, I am an encyclopedia, a fountain of knowledge for her to drink from whenever she wants to feel a little less guilty. I realized what she meant. 

“Knowing you has made me a better settler person” 

What does it take to know a person? Who defines knowing? In that moment, I knew my classmate, but she could not have known me less. To her, and many others I have met in my life, my culture and I represented an outlet for settler guilt. I was the “real Indian” she took a photo with to prove her proximity and understanding of Indigeneity (James Luna). Because in settler minds, every Indian is every Indian, and every Indian is an encyclopedia to test knowledge against. I am a measuring stick for settlers to compare their thoughts and actions to. 

I began to really consider how settlers were tokenizing me; sexually, intellectually, culturally, spiritually, to settlers I am a fantasy Métis academic. I am an all knowing all sensing wise Indian who can track a man through all terrains, who can tell you your spirit name by just looking at you, who will save your life when you are caught unprepared on my land, and who will scalp an enemy with no mercy. That is what people want from me, not the stories of the Métis resistance leaders who tried to overtake your settler ancestors in the Northwest Resistance, who could spit bullets and toss gunpower directly into their guns all while on horseback. They do not want to hear about The Old Wolves who fought in the Northwest Resistance and years later met in St. Vital to lovingly and meticulously document our young nation’s history, who hated the word “rebellion” (Jean Teillet). 

A Spectacle of Me for You is an installation containing a series of sculptures, photographs, prints, and found objects arranged in a “spectacle” of the Métis identity. The work is the result of experimentation with materials and engagement with Métis theory on self-governance and our history. Being named after Louis Riel often feels like an invitation for settlers to give me their unsolicited opinion on whether my ethnic group should have rights, and if Louis Riel was a madman or not, with most of the conversations quickly becoming anti-Indigenous and/or ableist. To my people, however, it is an honour to be named after Riel, the man who, with Gabriel Dumont successfully won the Red River Resistance of 1869, and commanded my ancestors in the Northwest Resistance of 1885. In this work I employ Indigenous humour- our ability to make fun of ourselves, remaining in control of the joke in order to remove that power from settlers, who are suddenly uncomfortably aware of their perception of Indigenous peoples. I have been heavily influenced by artists like Jesse Ray Short who dressed as Louis Riel in a drag-esque performance, and James Luna’s performance Take A Picture with a Real Indian (2001) and Artifact Piece (1987), Dayna Danger’s Big ‘Uns series, specifically for their reclamation of explicit Indigenous sexuality, and their ways of incorporating Indigenous, specifically Métis and Salteaux material culture into representations of Indigenous sexuality. Finally, I also would like to reference Rebecca Belmore’s piece Artifact #671B from 1988, where Belmore implicates her own body as an artifact in similar ways that James Luna has.  

The viewer enters the room to find a table at the back of the room, seemingly an in-use workspace, with a sewing mannequin dressed in brown pants, a red and black flannel, a Louis Riel shirt, and a beaded leather strap on placed over the pants. There is also a half-deflated mask of Louis Riel placed on the table. On the table there are postcards- free for the viewer to take with two different designs to choose from. On one side of the room a log has been placed on the ground and another rests a few feet away, seemingly more haphazardly than the carefully placed log.  

A Spectacle of Me for You is a staged representation of what a beader’s workspace might look like. A series of props that vaguely reference the Métis but does not actually represent the workspace of the artist. It is a highly curated idea of the Métis identity, playing on well-known stereotypes. Among the workspace set-up there are two stacks of postcards, one with a shot of the artist posing with two logs they personally harvested in January of 2022, left over from building a Red River cart, one of the logs positioned suggestively between the legs of the artist. They are dressed in stereotypical lumberjack clothes as well as a t-shirt with Louis Riel’s face and a slogan that reads “keepin’ it Riel”. The artist also wears a latex mask of Louis Riel, tying the fantasy together.   

Otipemisiwak Voyageur Fantasy Husband is a series of postcards as well as a costume worn by the artist to comment on different aspects of tokenization. The leather strap on harness worn over their clothes is an overt reference to the fetishization of Indigenous people, specifically Indigiqueer and Two Spirit community members, and a comparison of Indigenous and settler masculinity. The harness is paired with a lumberjack style flannel and a shirt with an image of Louis Riel that reads “keepin it real”, and a latex mask of Riel, worn on the artist’s head, obscuring their face. The postcards and the mask are a reference to modern Métis material culture and our infatuation with objects with Louis Riel’s face. The mass-production of these items has both caused a massive inflation of Louis Riel-kitsch, but also a larger awareness of our presence as Métis people, and what Riel means to us. Akin to the presidents' masks used by the Ex-Presidents gang in the 1991 film Point Break, the artist uses their Riel mask to draw attention to the way real historical figures, particularly politicians become caricatures of their actual selves in the eyes of the public, allowing them to be immortalized in popular culture. On a smaller scale, something similar has happened to Louis Riel where many settlers deem him a violent mad-man, and reduce him to a caricature of himself, while the Métis have reclaimed this treatment, and have found ways to honour him in our material culture. 

References/Works Cited 

BELMORE, REBECCA. ARTIFACT #671B, 1988. 

BIGELOW, KATHRYN. POINT BREAK. TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX, 1991.  

BURNS, CLARISSA. VOYAGEUR GAMES DEMONSTRATION. https://metisgathering.ca/classroom-resources/classroom-voyageur-games/. MÉTIS GATHERING. 2022.  

LUNA, JAMES. TAKE A PICTURE WITH A REAL INDIAN, 2000.  

LUNA, JAMES. ARTEFACT PIECE, 1987. 

   RIEL, LOUIS. FINAL TRIAL STATEMENT. http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/riel/rieltrialstatement.html. JULY 31ST 1885.  

SHORT, JESSIE RAY. WAKE UP!, 2015. 

  TEILLET, JEAN. THE NORTH-WEST IS OUR MOTHER : THE STORY OF LOUIS RIEL’S PEOPLE, THE METIS NATION. PATRICK CREAN EDITIONS, AN IMPRINT OF HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS LTD., 2013. 

[giiwedinongkwe]

Remember Your Asemaa

There was once a boy. He lived by a creek with his grandmother. In the early evenings, he would go out before the sun set to look for things.

His grandmother had a gift. She was a maker, and she always transformed anything he brought home to her into something magical.

His grandmother taught him from very young the importance of laying your asemaa down as an offering, to say miigwetch for what you are taking from the land.

One time, the boy went out looking, offered his tobacco, and brought home a big partridge miigwan. He gave the feather to ookomisan, and she made a beautiful dreamcatcher to hang above his bed by the window.

Another time, he found a nice birch tree. He put down some asemaa and began peeling the bark. When he got home, his grandmother spent the whole weekend weaving a strong basket so they could pick more miinan.

This time, though, the boy went out and found a short, smooth piece of driftwood. As he was examining it, something else down by the water caught his eye. A small, rounded rock with a hole in the center. The boy, now excited, took the piece of wood and the rock back with him in a hurry as the sun was beginning to set.

The next morning, his grandmother admired the piece of wood he brought back before deciding what it would become. She began working and the boy sat in the corner playing with the small rock he found. He looked up, and saw a transformation take place before his very eyes. His grandmother tossed the whittled bits from her lap into the fireplace and came over to the boy with mitigo-jiimaan. He took it from her and they headed outside to the creek to test it out.

He placed it down onto the water. It worked! It could float! The boy jumped up and hugged his grandmother to thank her. The boy stayed outside awhile to play with his little wooden canoe.

The next morning, the boy's grandmother was upset. She explained that when she woke up she found the small canoe she had worked so hard making had been broken in half.

The boy begged his grandmother to believe that he would never break it. She thought for a moment, and asked him to calmly explain what happened the day before. When he was done, his grandmother instantly knew what had gone wrong. He had forgotten to offer tobacco. She sent the boy out with some asemaa in one half of the broken canoe, and some maple taffy in the other to offer up to memegwesiwag. She told him that the little people would accept his apology if he made sure to always offer his tobacco.

Early the next morning, the boy went to grab his special rock to take with him to go see what had happened to his canoe down by the creek. It was gone! The boy raced down to the water, hoping for some good news. His canoe wasn't there anymore, either!

The boy ran back home to his grandmother and started crying. She hugged him and told him to calm down, and that she would make him some cedar tea. The boy went to his corner by the fireplace, and couldn't believe his eyes. There was his now-fixed mitigo-jiimaan, complete with tiny, ornate carvings along where the crack had been. Inside the canoe, he found his rock turned into a necklace. His grandmother told him that he should wear it every day, to remind him to always remember his asemaa.

Chi-miigwech for reading and sharing my story.

asemaa: tobacco

miigwetch: thank you

miigwan: feather

ookomisan: [his] grandmother

miinan: blueberries

memegwesiwag: little people (dwarf spirits)

mitigo-jiimaan: wooden canoe

[the-aila-test]

Indigenous History Month - The Anthology

[fllagellant]

*🏔️Julek • Artemy

*☀️ it/its pronouns , no exceptions , 2spirit indigiqueer

*🌿 Métis indigenous + Gadjo sinti , reconnecting

‿.‿.‿.‿.‿.‿.‿.‿.‿.‿.‿.‿.‿.‿.‿.‿.‿.

*📯 your good friend ArtemyJulek ( my full name ! ) on the internet .. 21 year olds on the internet rejoice ! Artist , Writer , etc etc .. me with my niches in fandom spaces . Canadian planning on going into school for medial technician once I manage to settle down a bit more ..

*🌻 no side blogs no extra urls I post everything here and that is that … I attempt to tag everything so you can block tags to avoid seeing something you’ re not into for whatever reason . You have to forgive me if you followed for something specific then I stopped posting about it a week later . I promise I will return . Main fandoms are the witcher , darkest dungeon , dungeons and dragons , baldur’ s gate 3 , pathfinder , mass effect trilogy and andromeda , dragon age , darksiders , dead space , red dead redemption … etc etc these are the main culprits

‿.‿.‿.‿.‿.‿.‿.‿.‿.‿.‿.‿.‿.‿.‿.‿.‿.

[blackberrysummerblog]

I liiiive! I cannot believe how long it’s been since I’ve posted an excerpt on here, but it’s been a pretty spoonless month (cue lengthy attempt at discussing the situation followed by a quick delete, because seriously? Whine moar 🙄). Thank you so much to all you lovelies who have kept tagging me; it’s been so nice to feel remembered! @wellbelesbian, @j-nipper-95, @orange-peony, @you-remind-me-of-the-babe, @youarenevertooold, @alleycat0306, @artsyunderstudy, @prettygoododds, @shrekgogurt, @larkral, @valeffelees, @fatalfangirl, @facewithoutheart, @nightimedreamersworld, @rimeswithpurple, @forabeatofadrum, @confused-bi-queer and @cutestkilla all tagged me recently and I’ve been so delighted to see what you’ve all been working on! This fandom really has the most talented writers and artists <3

As for me, I’ve been working on a few things as well! Some of you may have seen a woeful post last week when I realized I’d been writing one of my CORBs in a file I’d unwittingly created on my work account. *chef’s kiss* Beautiful. The upshot of that is that I lost thousands of words after hastily and permanently deleting the file, then buried myself under six feet of rocky soil in the backyard. But I’ve since climbed out and have been recreating it! (In my PERSONAL documents this time!) I’m not sure I’m allowed to say who I’m collaborating with or how much of the summary I can share, but I don’t think it’s giving away too much to say that it’s an AU where Baz is a demon nobleman in hell and Simon is a mortal merman who catches his eye. It’s a really creative concept and I’m excited to be working on it! Here’s a few more than six sentences (and some other fic excerpt shares) under the cut:

I’m lost in the dream again when Métis buzzes in my ear, and I try my damnedest not to hear her. I roll over and pull the shadows closer, but she burrows in nonetheless. “No,” I grumble as blue eyes and golden scales slip away from me once more, leaving nothing but ripples in the fluidity of retreating sleep. As I sit up and scowl at my father’s right hand pest, I can just about recall the setting sun limning bronze curls with a reddish halo.

Halo—ha.

“He wantsz to szeeee you,” Métis hums, settling alight in her favorite spot atop the curve of my left horn. “Sayszz it’s important.”

There’s just the barest fog of despair weaving around my ankles as I make my way to Father’s chambers, nurturing the chill that always permeates my corporeal form. An unexpected meeting seldom brings good news, but I wouldn’t say speaking with him is the last way I’d want to spend these early hours—the hypocritamus pools need sieving, after all. Depending on their recent diet and the subject Father wishes to discuss, the difference may be vanishingly slight.

The second thing I’ve been working on is from an anon prompt on @carryonprompts, which I’m going to paraphrase as “post-awtwb Simon getting kidnapped and Baz (plus Penny and Sheperd) having to be the one to play the hero to Simon’s damsel for a change.” Here’s six sentences:

I pull him up to his knees and kick his legs apart, stabilizing him.

Baz is so far out of this one’s league; I’ve never known what he sees in this deformed, ill-mannered, working-class mage.

He’s handsome enough in spite of the wings though, I suppose—in a brutish way. His eyes flash at me when I knot my fingers in his dirty hair to pull his head back, lifting his face. Square-jawed and broad through the shoulders and chest, thick-thighed, what we would have called a bit of rough, once. The faithful common laborer you could count on to throw you down on top of the bed for the pounding of a lifetime—is that all that Baz wants him for?

Lastly, a good bit more than 6 sentences from my still-unpublished crucible marriage AU, just because. I know I once posted a paragraph where Baz was taking Simon clothes shopping after being scandalized by the state of his drawers, and this is a resulting scene:

“Baz!” Snow shouts from the changing room. Balthazar’s balls, what’s the issue? He can’t want me to go in there. “Baz, c’mere!” He…wants me to go in there. I take a deep breath and push open the door fractionally.

“What, Snow?”

“Come in here!”

“I swear to magic, if you’re naked—” Oh. Oh, Crowley. This may somehow be worse. Simon is wearing the snug fitting blue knit shirt I sent him in with, and it would be showing off his biceps and chest enough to blow what’s left of my mind even if he didn’t have it hitched halfway up his abdomen. He’s changed into a pair of the short new boxer briefs we purchased in the last store (ordinarily I’d recoil at the notion of not washing them first, the heathen, but—Simon) and he’s gripping the waistband of a pair of soft grey trousers that he’s pulled halfway up his arse.

“I thought you might want to check out the new pants,” he says casually, nodding toward his backside as if I could pry my eyes away with a crowbar. “Do these get the seal of approval, then?”

I can’t speak. I think I may be salivating. Simon grins at me then, dragging one side of the trousers up while letting the other drop below the curve of his world-ending arse. He shimmies the exposed cheek in my direction, working himself into the trousers one centimeter at a time.

“You menace,” I hiss, unable to modulate my voice to a normal speaking level.

“What?” He finishes hitching the trousers up and leans back against the wall, not bothering to do up the flies. “Do I look OK?”

“No.” His face falls and I can’t bear it, even for a joke. “You look delicious. Absolutely debauched.”

“Debauched?!” Simon’s offended moue melts into something else as I slink toward him purposefully. “I don’t look debauched.”

He does. Trousers open, shirt still pushed up over his navel, curls in disarray from his habit of manhandling them when frustrated. I lean over him, my feet on either side of his, and he’s even farther beneath me than usual because of how he’s slouched back against the wall. He gasps softly when I take hold of his waistband and fasten the button of his trousers, my knuckles grazing the soft hair on his belly.

“Baz…nngh.”

I’ve drawn the zipper up carefully, but not so carefully that I’m not palming him over his trousers. I’ve barely touched him, but I note with satisfaction the goose flesh rising on his forearms. “Shh, love,” I murmur in his ear, tugging down his shirt so that it covers his stomach. Once he’s no longer indecent, I run both hands up under his shirt, squeezing at his thick, firm waist. Simon moans, tipping his head back to expose his long neck, and I’m dropping kiss after kiss there when I hear a sudden clearing of someone’s throat behind us.

It’s the changing room attendant, scowling in through the door that I foolishly left open. “Can I bring you gentlemen any different sizes?”

And that’s about it! I’d tag people if I hadn’t gotten to post this so late in the day, but as it stands I think most everyone’s already posted today. I hope everyone’s had a great week and that the next one is even better! :)

[mittenlady]

Hi. I am bored and also wanting to bother you specifically. Which theory is better? Athena Cykes being a robot (evidence being widget, how did she never get hurt/see blood, Métis “studying” just being working with her code, autism) or her dad being the Phantom (this evidence is more Métis based like how would the psychological profile work without a match, why didn’t she just kill him, why doesn’t Athena see Bobby as weird, Athena gets double autism genes) Both work well in any context. I like Phantomdad cause Athena and Apollo can bond over terroristic fathers <3

omg me specifically… such an honor… ok lemme think this thru (this is a long one)

robothena:

• actually how does widget connect to her emotions… bc there is a way to judge how someone’s feeling based on bodily signs like pulse, temp., etc., but even at that a lot of emotions have very similar bodily reactions and part of determining how u feel is like… from the mind. if i remember my AP psych 5 correctly 😎 but also even at that widget wouldn’t logically have access to her thoughts that does not make sense unless metis like… chipped her??? or something????? which is still impossible

• i think if she’s sheltered enough then at 11 when she saw metis die, she might not have recognized it? but i feel it’s very implausible that she as a child would be so that intensely cautious + NEVER get into an accident + absolutely always be supervised enough to never get hurt. it is odd that her perspective would be that warped so that she’s unable to recognize it but idk. if she has no frame of reference is it human instinct to recognize blood… (i will not do further research at this time i am lazy)

• last two points u bring up i don’t think it’s mentioned what metis does specifically so no comment also elaborate on what you mean by the autism point because athena is giving neurodivergent but like what do you mean in context of that being evidence 😭

• she does seem to enjoy orange juice and little girl treats tho so how would that work… robots don’t really need to eat…

• also based on the navigation companions (ponco and clonco; only reason i know the proper term is for CAYA) why would her machinery be so more advanced than theirs? if aura and metis r capable of creating something so lifelike then why are ponco and clonco, made after her (i think) so far behind?

phantom dad ??:

• metis likely wouldn’t have a match for the phantom’s identity but it was simon who brought her the audio recording of the phantom’s voice i believe so that’s how she composed the psych profile knowing that. 95% sure because i had to look this up for CAYA

• tbf the phantom was wearing a jacket, but also yeah she likely could have done something in self-defense… but if they used the sword on her it’s likely any attempts @ self-defense wouldn’t have gone well regardless. there’s not really enough information in the game i don’t think to say whether or not there was an attempt or not

• bobby was able to fuck w his emotions in game and put on the appearance of emotions, if i remember correctly that was an aspect during the cross-examination/mood matrix part during it, so that’s likely why she didn’t find it off. and if she did, the game didn’t think to actually foreshadow anything by having her mention it either in passing or in her own narration during turnabout academy

i think athena and apollo both having terrorist fathers would be funny tho lol

but based on my minimal research as i consider this, the robothena one seems more plausible as it does better explain some of the illogical parts of the game. ofc it’s in the “future” but literally this made me realize that widget doesn’t make much sense with his ability to literally know what she’s thinking. like unless there’s some wack-ass science shit the writers just didn’t think necessary to share like… what is going on with that

[panther-os]

[beats forehead on table]

Iridonian Zabrak - Eeth Koth, Agen Kolar, Maris Brood, Sugi, etc

Dathomirian Zabrak (mixed Iridonian Zabrak and Dathomirian) - Darth Maul, Savage & Feral Opress, Akaavi, etc

Dathomirian - Mother Talzin, etc

Rattataki - Kaliyo, etc

Most likely mixed Rattataki and Dathomirian - Ventress

I get it. I understand the confusion, I really do. If we take the show at face value and don't look at Legends or the lore from other canon sources, either the Nightbrothers are all Zabraks and the Nightsisters are all Dathomirians or there's some really weird sexual dimorphism going on involving extra or missing bones. It's a combination of the writers not thinking and the animators being so overworked.

But it still irks me beyond belief so.

Dathomir has a long history of ship crashes and assimilating any survivors into their clans - Dathomirian Zabraks are the descendants of the largest known event, a whole fleet of settlers headed for a completely different planet. The closest real world equivalent I know of are the Métis, a distinct ethnic group and cultural identity who originated with mixed Natives and became their own thing. But Dathomirian Zabraks make up a small fraction of the overall Dathomirian population.

Nightbrothers are not the only male community on Dathomir and not the only community of Dathomirian Zabraks. The reason all Nightbrothers are Zabraks is that a) male Dathomirian children are returned to their father's clan and b) there are literally no canonically mixed people I can think of in The Clone Wars. Saw and Steela may be Black with blue eyes, but they're still distinctly only human. Once again, it's the writers not thinking and the animators being so overworked, with a bonus of both white-washing and non-whitewashing racism.

Nightsisters are not the only female community on Dathomir and are actually ostracized by the other clans of Witches because of their history with the Sith. (This doesn't make other Witches pro-Jedi, it just makes them anti-Sith.) Nightbrothers are also not the only male community on Dathomir that the Nightsisters reproduce with - though from what we've seen, they do only reproduce with Nightsisters.

Zabraks 👏 have 👏 horns.

Are there Dathomirian Zabrak Nightsisters? Yeah, definitely. With the hoods that go way over their foreheads, it could be almost any of the background Nightsisters we see on screen. But we can clearly see that Mother Talzin doesn't have horns unless they're only on the sides and back of her head - and with her super tall forehead and black sclera, she's either pureblood Dathomirian, mixed with something else, or stupid enough to tattoo her eyeballs - and Ventress definitely doesn't have any horns at all.

Dathomirians in general and specifically Nightsisters 👏 are not 👏 automatically 👏 Zabraks.

Thank you for coming to my tedtalk

[ponko-tsu]

hello #1 metis cykes fan. i ask humbly for your expertise on her character (because i have to write her and have no fucking clue how because she is dead in the source media). as an offering, i leave a single bowl of rice (because i got a rice cooker and it’s life-changing).

Okay. Okay. Here’s the first part. You need to understand that Métis’ had to sacrifice her time. Considering the age she had Athena, I’m saying she never had time for Athena or her time was very very limited. (She had Athena at age 22, in which she would be working for her doctorate)

If you really want to take that last part into account, consider how kids feel during a divorce. With that situation, Athena would have been way closer to her father. She probably resents Métis a little over that fact that she lives with her and not the parent she prefers.

You also have to consider thinking of the fact she LOVED her daughter. Ponco and Clonco were not only just an experiment of replicating feeling robots but they were also friends for Athena, ones who wouldn’t hurt. She spent what time she could to keep her daughter safe and happy.

I’m not a great writer, I just love Métis. She’s yet another example of a character believing the end (Athena living a halfway normal life) justified the means (Her giving up almost every minute she has with her)

Edit: She is also an Otaku. Don’t forget that

[ashleysingermfablog]

Wk 8, March 29th, 2024 Research

Thoughts and writings by María Iñigo Clavo

Tz’utujil artist Antonio Pichilla’s 2007 sculpture Envoltorio (Wrapper) is an unknown object wrapped in red fabric.

From the text: Mysticism as Traces, Signs, and Symptoms of the Untranslatable... Thoughts and writings by María Iñigo Clavo, 2020…

In the 2000s, concepts such as Bonaventura de Sousa Santos’s “ecologies of knowledges” began to signal a shift in approach to artefacts and their spirituality noting that each epistemology had its own wisdom to share, making evident the weaknesses of translation that uses just one specific epistemological frame. Clavo unpacks how today (2020), a new generation of thinkers are taking up the question of translation as a reliable space of negotiation in a framework of spiritual artefacts. Scholars such as Métis Zoe Todd and Anishinaabe Vanessa Watts have written on how non-Western epistemologies have been misappropriated or abstracted in historical and some contemporary and still prominent museum spaces, galleries and by collectors of these artefacts.For example, Watts takes up Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory—which popularized the notion of the interconnection between humans and nonhumans—to argue that Latour nonetheless maintains a hierarchy of beings with humans at the top. According to Watts, this misunderstands the Amerindian sense of nonhierarchical confluence between humans and the “natural”/nonhuman world.

Robin Wall Kimmerer in her Braiding Sweetgrass text, unpacks life as in alignment with the 'Web of Life' (Native American philosophy). She aligns with the text above by also interacting that no human stands at the top or centre of the life web. The life web acts as a way of seeing that all animals, plants, micro-organisms and even soil sub-straits are dependant on one another.

José Carvalho calls this attempt to adopt or assimilate non-western cosmologies in an hegemonic frame the creation of an “epistemological counterpoint,” in which new concepts are only allowed to be part of the “score” as long as they follow a principal (Western) melody, a melody that disregards life as web but prevails with humans or 'man' has having dominion. 

This critique of textual and conceptual translation is equally applicable when it comes to the visual arts and their modes of display:

In Mayan cultures, there is a tradition of wrapping things for various purposes. Food, personal belongings, and objects with special spiritual energy such as bones, the objects of ancestors, or stones, might be wrapped in textiles that serve as protectors of the object’s magical energy. Each community has its own traditional textiles of different colors, and knowledge about them is ancestrally passed through generations. The textiles operate as the connectors between two worlds: the magic/spiritual/unknown and the material human realms. Wrapping is an act of secrecy, and this privacy and opacity carries a sacred sense.

In this decolonical text, the footers as written by art writer María Iñigo Clavo provide a wealth of information not only the article on spiritualism, decolonisation and being the other, or otherness. This is my favourite footnote and I would like to add it here...

On an author that has studied decolonial thought... "I am not an anthropologist and am not attempting to write as an expert on indigenous cultures or cosmologies. I would like to state that I do not believe that non-indigenous people cannot address indigenous spirituality, or research or make art about it. Rather, I think that an utterance from any place can contribute to the processes of collective healing and learning from each other, and thus, I assume that the place from which my utterance (as any place) comes involves its own blind spots."

[laresearchette]

Friday, December 08, 2023 Canadian TV Listings (Times Eastern)

BREAKING NEWS “The Daily Show” is now exclusive to Paramount + Canada and, as far as I know, not airing on broadcast or cable networks in Canada.

WHERE CAN I FIND THOSE PREMIERES?: BABY SHARK'S BIG MOVIE (Paramount +) THE SACRIFICE GAME (Shudder) A VERY DEMI HOLIDAY SPECIAL (The Roku Channel) MAGIC IN MISTLETOE (W Network) 8:00pm

WHAT IS NOT PREMIERING IN CANADA TONIGHT? BACKYARDS GONE WILD (TBD - HGTV Canada) OWN CELEBRATES THE NEW COLOR PURPLE (TBD - OWN Canada) MR. MONK'S LAST CASE: A MONK MOVIE (TBD)

NEW TO AMAZON PRIME CANADA/CBC GEM/CRAVE TV/DISNEY + STAR/NETFLIX CANADA:

AMAZON PRIME CANADA DATING SANTA MERRY LITTLE BATMAN SILVER AND THE BOOK OF DREAMS UN STUPÉFIANT NOËL WORLD'S FIRST CHRISTMAS (O PRIMEIRO NATAL DO MUNDO) YOUR CHRISTMAS OR MINE 2

CRAVE TV ABOUT MY FATHER ALMOST PARADISE (Season 2) ANGEL FALLS CHRISTMAS COMFORT FOOD WITH SPENCER WATTS (Season 1) CONAN THE BARBARIAN (2011) FORD V FERRARI FURRY VENGEANCE KRAMPUS LEMONADE MARY MAKES IT EASY (Season 3a) MY CHRISTMAS HERO OÙ ES-TU CÉLINE? PONTYPOOL ROYALLY WRAPPED FOR CHRISTMAS SPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE SURREALESTATE (Season 2) TAKE THIS WALTZ VENOM THE YOUNG ARSONISTS

DISNEY + STAR DIARY OF A WIMPY KID CHRISTMAS: CABIN FEVER

NETFLIX CANADA BLOOD VESSEL (NG) LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND WOMEN ON THE EDGE (AR)

NHL HOCKEY (SN) 7:00pm: Penguins vs. Panthers (TSN5) 7:00pm: Sens vs. Blue Jackets (SNWest) 9:00pm: Wild vs. Oilers

NBA BASKETBALL (SN1) 7:00pm: Raptors vs. Hornets (TSN/TSN4) 8:00pm: Warriors vs. Thunder (SN Now) 8:00pm: Cavaliers vs. Heat (SN Now) 9:00pm: Rockets vs. Nuggets (TSN3) 10:00pm: Nuggets vs. Suns (SN1) 10:00pm: Clippers vs. Jazz

ABOUT MY FATHER (Crave) 7.25pm: Encouraged by his fiancee, a man and his father spend the weekend with her wealthy and exceedingly eccentric family. The gathering soon develops into a culture clash, allowing father and son to discover the true meaning of family.

AMPLIFY (APTN) 7:30pm: Celebrated Mohawk rock star Tom Wilson crafts a powerful song based on a famous painting by Métis artist Christi Belcourt. In conversation at a diner, the two remarkable artists explore their creative processes and sources of inspiration.

NCAA MEN'S HOCKEY (TSN3) 8:00pm: Colorado College vs. North Dakota

HAPPIEST SEASON (CBC) 8:00pm: A young woman agrees to go home with her girlfriend for Christmas, but discovers she hasn't come out to her conservative parents.

7TH GEN (APTN) 8:00pm: Jordan and Brandon Nolan, born and raised in Garden River First Nation, are part of an NHL legacy. Discover how these brothers are sharing their love of hockey with Indigenous youth across the country.

CHRISTMAS ON WINDMILL WAY (CTV Life) 8:00pm: Mia Miejer expects that her Mimi will win the Christmas Market Dutch Bake-Off competition, but her Mimi has difficult news to share: she must sell the deed to their Windmill Way property, which has been in their family for generations.

THE REAL HOUSEWIVES OF JERSEY (Slice) 8:00pm: Sass in the City

THE CASE OF THE CHRISTMAS DIAMOND (Super Channel Heart & Home) 8:00pm: Blue-collar Andy finds herself accused of theft when a multimillion-dollar gem suddenly goes missing from her rich friend's estate. With the help of a famous mystery writer, Andy must find the real culprit amid the litany of wealthy guests.

OWN SPOTLIGHT: OPRAH & NICOLE AVANT (OWN Canada) 9:00pm: Oprah has an intimate conversation with filmmaker and philanthropist Nicole Avant; Nicole shares the terrifying moment of learning that her beloved mother, Jacqueline, had been killed in her own home, and how she navigated that devastating loss.

DEVIL IN THE OZARKS (Investigation Discovery) 9:00pm: A brazen sexual assault shocks a small town, but goes unsolved for 20 years, until a nearby murder produces a suspect with matching DNA.

THE YOUNG ARSONISTS (Crave) 9:00pm: Four girls form an intense and obsessive bond while reclaiming an abandoned farmhouse in an isolated community.

W5 (CTV) 10:00pm: The Baby in the Snow

CRIME BEAT (Global) 10:00pm (SEASON FINALE): The Deadly Contract

[piizunn]

a personal reflection on decolonization

riel s. | 2022

Tansii kiiya (hello, how are you?) my name is riel starr and I am a Red River Michif artist and academic. my history on his land begins thousands of years ago among the peoples of the great plains, and my written history begins in the late 1600s with my first French ancestors and their unnamed first nations wives. my first First Nations ancestor is an unnamed woman referred to in my grandmother’s family tree as “Cree Woman”. I am Red River Métis on my mother’s side. Our historic Métis family names are Berthelet, Caron, St. Germaine, Dazé, Larivière and Dubois, and we come from the communities of Point à Grouette (now called St. Agathe), St. Norbert, and St. Vital (now modern-day Winnipeg) as well as the historic Batoche, Saskatchewan. My Berthelet ancestors were notable community leaders in Pointe à Grouette and my Caron ancestors including my fifth great uncle jean caron sr. fought in the North West resistance of 1885 at the battle of Duck Lake when he was fifty-two years old. Jean Caron Sr’s house is now a historic site in Batoche. As for myself my mother is a Métis educator and academic and my father is a settler archaeologist-turned-locksmith. I introduce myself in this way, the traditional way of Métis writers to contextualize my family, my knowledge and experiences, as well as my place on this land.

Natually, my native mother and my settler archaeologist father never married and split before I was old enough to form any memories. Museums and history have always been a fascination to me; the Royal Terrell Museum in Drumheller, which I dubbed “the dead dinosaur museum” and the Royal Alberta Museum which I called “the dead mouse museum” after my favourite display. The display was a larger-than-life diorama of a mouse, it’s intestines showing, the organisms that helped decompose the corpse were also displayed, massive daddy long legs, gigantic ants, worms thicker than my arm. The RAM is an interesting place. A few years ago, it was moved into a new building downtown and I could no longer spend hours finding fossils in the limestone exterior of the original museum. The place had changed drastically. As I reminisce on what I loved about the RAM I realize that all the things I disliked were their representations of Indigenous people; the uncanny wax figures with placid skin that did not resemble a single Native person’s skin that I had met. and the artwork they portrayed as artifacts. What makes a beaded bag so different from a Van Dyck if they’re the same age? And honoured the same amount by the people who made them?

Another place of importance growing up was Fort Edmonton Park. Like Heritage Park, Fort Edmonton has costumed interpreters, who teach visitors history as if the interpreters were of that time. In the summer of 2017, my lifelong dream came true, and I became a volunteer costumed interpreter with my mentor Sheldon Stockdale, another Métis person, and we were able to teach our history in the way we felt was right, something deeply important to the Métis people. An experience we had that stands out vividly is working on Fort Edmonton’s 1920 Street, and educating visitors on the history of pemmican, a sort of ancient protein bar made from berries, dried meat, and animal fat. Pemmican was a staple of survival for the Métis, and we were asking visitors to help us in redesigning the packaging for the bar. The historic package had a representation of an Indigenous person on it, a caricature of a race. We asked visitors if turning Indigenous people into mascots should be accepted, and sadly many people didn’t see the problem. Sheldon and I borderline argued with a man who seemed to see no problem in reducing us, the people speaking to him, to caricatures. In a similar vein, someone once gave me Chicago Blackhawk’s stickers when i was six, and not knowing a thing about hockey I asked my mother who the stickers were of. I’m guessing my mother did not want to explain the history of colonization and caricatures of Indigenous people, so she dismissed my question by telling me that the man in the tacky illustration was my ancestor.

Decolonizing art history seems like an impossible task, and perhaps it is. You cannot separate someone like Emily Carr from art history in Canada, however you can change the way you teach her work. Perhaps decolonizing art history means recognizing the ways in which “art history” as a field of study is deeply Euro-centric, and how the way of teaching this history is the same. I took my first semester at AUArts in the fall of 2020 after transferring from MacEwan after completing a two-year diploma at MacEwan University. I had a sculpture class a media arts class an art history class. The more I consider how to decolonize our history the more I understand that it is not the history that can be decolonized, it is the way we are teaching said history. It is the way that so much of our education is taught to us through a colonial lens, rather than a multifaceted history with a multitude of perspectives and peoples contributing until an entire picture is formed.

In the fall of 2020 in my media arts class my professor Kurtis Lesick was discussing an artist, a black artist who had him and others participate in a performance in which in that space the black artist allowed the participants to say the N-word. Rather than describing the piece in the way I just did removing the slur, Kurtis Lesick made the conscious decision to say the N- word twice. A person I had once thought to be an ally of mine, who knew the language of decolonization. Earlier this year a classmate in this class who was also in my sculpture class in the winter of 2022 told me that ‘knowing me has made her a better person’, this woman does not know me, and I do not know her, but I knew her in that moment. I knew that she wanted me to absolve her of her settler guilt. White settlers love referencing Tuck and Yang’s Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor but sometimes I wonder if they truly understand that it is simply not enough to know the language of decolonization, that you must be actively anti-colonial in a field that is built on colonization.

I spent a lot of time at Fort Calgary this semester for my FINA class, critiquing their exhibitions wondering how they can be improved if they can be improved, and I learned that given their budget that it is not possible. Fort Calgary, like other institutions cannot afford to replace their current exhibits and entirely redesign the way they teach history. What they can do is acknowledge the missing pieces, they can acknowledge the gaps they can acknowledge the fact that there’s more than one canon of history. Sometimes I wonder if the mosaic of history is too complex to decolonize; knowing that we will never return to a world like the one that existed pre-colonization. I think about my one classmate who tokenizes me, who knows how to use decolonial language to appear one way, but who never puts those concepts into practice. I think about the settlers who think that decolonization is re-colonizing the Americas but with “the Indians” in charge this time.

I now understand that decolonizing art history cannot happen without first decolonizing institutions. I have learned that we cannot forget that we once taught art history in an i way we cannot forget the way colonization has infiltrated every aspect of the education system down to the teaching styles of each professor. if we forget how colonial art history is in the first place, we will forget why we need to decolonize. Considering the hand that art history is hard in colonization around the world, I consider about the way southeast Asian women’s bodies are talked about in my textbooks versus European odalisque paintings. Brown people’s bodies were inherently sexualized and seen as dirty, while white people’s bodies were adored and deemed Classical.

Maybe colonization is another movement in the worldwide canon of art history. Another period in the bar graph of history- as google images seems to see art history. Perhaps Emily Carr and Paul Gauguin are the faces of this genre. Just as colonization cannot be forgotten among its victims, it cannot be forgotten by its perpetrators, who still believe they are a superior culture and race. Genres of literature such as post-colonial writing from India and Sri Lanka may suggest, there was a period of colonial art and literature, perhaps it is ongoing, possibly dying out, maybe here to stay. There will always be an antithesis, an attempt to view art and art history from a different perspective, and that is how we can decolonize art history.

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 11.16 (before 1950)

951 – Emperor Li Jing sends a Southern Tang expeditionary force of 10,000 men under Bian Hao to conquer Chu. Li Jing removes the ruling family to his own capital in Nanjing, ending the Chu Kingdom. 1272 – While travelling during the Ninth Crusade, Prince Edward becomes King of England upon Henry III of England's death, but he will not return to England for nearly two years to assume the throne. 1491 – An auto-da-fé, held in the Brasero de la Dehesa outside of Ávila, concludes the case of the Holy Child of La Guardia with the public execution of several Jewish and converso suspects. 1532 – Francisco Pizarro and his men capture Inca Emperor Atahualpa at the Battle of Cajamarca. 1632 – King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden was killed at the Battle of Lützen during the Thirty Years' War. 1776 – American Revolutionary War: British and Hessian units capture Fort Washington from the Patriots. 1793 – French Revolution: Ninety dissident Roman Catholic priests are executed by drowning at Nantes. 1797 – The Prussian heir apparent, Frederick William, becomes King of Prussia as Frederick William III. 1805 – Napoleonic Wars: Battle of Schöngrabern: Russian forces under Pyotr Bagration delay the pursuit by French troops under Joachim Murat. 1822 – American Old West: Missouri trader William Becknell arrives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, over a route that became known as the Santa Fe Trail. 1828 – Greek War of Independence: The London Protocol entails the creation of an autonomous Greek state under Ottoman suzerainty, encompassing the Morea and the Cyclades. 1849 – A Russian court sentences writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky to death for anti-government activities linked to a radical intellectual group; his sentence is later commuted to hard labor. 1855 – David Livingstone becomes the first European to see the Victoria Falls in what is now Zambia-Zimbabwe. 1857 – Second relief of Lucknow: Twenty-four Victoria Crosses are awarded, the most in a single day. 1863 – American Civil War: In the Battle of Campbell's Station, Confederate troops unsuccessfully attack Union forces which allows General Ambrose Burnside to secure Knoxville, Tennessee. 1871 – The National Rifle Association of America receives its charter from New York State. 1885 – Canadian rebel leader of the Métis and "Father of Manitoba" Louis Riel is executed for treason. 1904 – English engineer John Ambrose Fleming receives a patent for the thermionic valve (vacuum tube). 1907 – Indian Territory and Oklahoma Territory join to form Oklahoma, which is admitted as the 46th U.S. state. 1914 – The Federal Reserve Bank of the United States officially opens. 1920 – Qantas, Australia's national airline, is founded as Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services Limited. 1933 – The United States and the Soviet Union establish formal diplomatic relations. 1938 – LSD is first synthesized by Albert Hofmann from ergotamine at the Sandoz Laboratories in Basel. 1940 – World War II: In response to the leveling of Coventry by the German Luftwaffe two days before, the Royal Air Force bombs Hamburg. 1940 – The Holocaust: In occupied Poland, the Nazis close off the Warsaw Ghetto from the outside world. 1940 – New York City's "Mad Bomber" George Metesky places his first bomb at a Manhattan office building used by Consolidated Edison. 1944 – World War II: In support of the Battle of Hürtgen Forest, the town of Düren is destroyed by Allied aircraft. 1945 – UNESCO is founded.

[rielstarr]

a personal reflection on decolonization

riel s. | december, 2022

Tansii kiiya (hello, how are you?) my name is riel starr and I am a Red River Michif artist and academic. my history on his land begins thousands of years ago among the peoples of the great plains, and my written history begins in the late 1600s with my first French ancestors and their unnamed first nations wives. my first First Nations ancestor is an unnamed woman referred to in my grandmother’s family tree as “Cree Woman”. I am Red River Métis on my mother’s side. Our historic Métis family names are Berthelet, Caron, St. Germaine, Dazé, Larivière and Dubois, and we come from the communities of Point à Grouette (now called St. Agathe), St. Norbert, and St. Vital (now modern-day Winnipeg) as well as the historic Batoche, Saskatchewan. My Berthelet ancestors were notable community leaders in Pointe à Grouette and my Caron ancestors including my fifth great uncle jean caron sr. fought in the North West resistance of 1885 at the battle of Duck Lake when he was fifty-two years old. Jean Caron Sr’s house is now a historic site in Batoche. As for myself my mother is a Métis educator and academic and my father is a settler archaeologist-turned-locksmith. I introduce myself in this way, the traditional way of Métis writers to contextualize my family, my knowledge and experiences, as well as my place on this land.

Natually, my native mother and my settler archaeologist father never married and split before I was old enough to form any memories. Museums and history have always been a fascination to me; the Royal Terrell Museum in Drumheller, which I dubbed “the dead dinosaur museum” and the Royal Alberta Museum which I called “the dead mouse museum” after my favourite display. The display was a larger-than-life diorama of a mouse, it’s intestines showing, the organisms that helped decompose the corpse were also displayed, massive daddy long legs, gigantic ants, worms thicker than my arm. The RAM is an interesting place. A few years ago, it was moved into a new building downtown and I could no longer spend hours finding fossils in the limestone exterior of the original museum. The place had changed drastically. As I reminisce on what I loved about the RAM I realize that all the things I disliked were their representations of Indigenous people; the uncanny wax figures with placid skin that did not resemble a single Native person’s skin that I had met. and the artwork they portrayed as artifacts. What makes a beaded bag so different from a Van Dyck if they’re the same age? And honoured the same amount by the people who made them?

Another place of importance growing up was Fort Edmonton Park. Like Heritage Park, Fort Edmonton has costumed interpreters, who teach visitors history as if the interpreters were of that time. In the summer of 2017, my lifelong dream came true, and I became a volunteer costumed interpreter with my mentor Sheldon Stockdale, another Métis person, and we were able to teach our history in the way we felt was right, something deeply important to the Métis people. An experience we had that stands out vividly is working on Fort Edmonton’s 1920 Street, and educating visitors on the history of pemmican, a sort of ancient protein bar made from berries, dried meat, and animal fat. Pemmican was a staple of survival for the Métis, and we were asking visitors to help us in redesigning the packaging for the bar. The historic package had a representation of an Indigenous person on it, a caricature of a race. We asked visitors if turning Indigenous people into mascots should be accepted, and sadly many people didn’t see the problem. Sheldon and I borderline argued with a man who seemed to see no problem in reducing us, the people speaking to him, to caricatures. In a similar vein, someone once gave me Chicago Blackhawk’s stickers when i was six, and not knowing a thing about hockey I asked my mother who the stickers were of. I’m guessing my mother did not want to explain the history of colonization and caricatures of Indigenous people, so she dismissed my question by telling me that the man in the tacky illustration was my ancestor.

Decolonizing art history seems like an impossible task, and perhaps it is. You cannot separate someone like Emily Carr from art history in Canada, however you can change the way you teach her work. Perhaps decolonizing art history means recognizing the ways in which “art history” as a field of study is deeply Euro-centric, and how the way of teaching this history is the same. I took my first semester at AUArts in the fall of 2020 after transferring from MacEwan after completing a two-year diploma at MacEwan University. I had a sculpture class a media arts class an art history class. The more I consider how to decolonize our history the more I understand that it is not the history that can be decolonized, it is the way we are teaching said history. It is the way that so much of our education is taught to us through a colonial lens, rather than a multifaceted history with a multitude of perspectives and peoples contributing until an entire picture is formed.

In the fall of 2020 in my media arts class my professor Kurtis Lesick was discussing an artist, a black artist who had him and others participate in a performance in which in that space the black artist allowed the participants to say the N-word. Rather than describing the piece in the way I just did removing the slur, Kurtis Lesick made the conscious decision to say the N- word twice. A person I had once thought to be an ally of mine, who knew the language of decolonization. Earlier this year a classmate in this class who was also in my sculpture class in the winter of 2022 told me that ‘knowing me has made her a better person’, this woman does not know me, and I do not know her, but I knew her in that moment. I knew that she wanted me to absolve her of her settler guilt. White settlers love referencing Tuck and Yang’s Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor but sometimes I wonder if they truly understand that it is simply not enough to know the language of decolonization, that you must be actively anti-colonial in a field that is built on colonization.

I spent a lot of time at Fort Calgary this semester for my FINA class, critiquing their exhibitions wondering how they can be improved if they can be improved, and I learned that given their budget that it is not possible. Fort Calgary, like other institutions cannot afford to replace their current exhibits and entirely redesign the way they teach history. What they can do is acknowledge the missing pieces, they can acknowledge the gaps they can acknowledge the fact that there’s more than one canon of history. Sometimes I wonder if the mosaic of history is too complex to decolonize; knowing that we will never return to a world like the one that existed pre-colonization. I think about my one classmate who tokenizes me, who knows how to use decolonial language to appear one way, but who never puts those concepts into practice. I think about the settlers who think that decolonization is re-colonizing the Americas but with “the Indians” in charge this time.

I now understand that decolonizing art history cannot happen without first decolonizing institutions. I have learned that we cannot forget that we once taught art history in an i way we cannot forget the way colonization has infiltrated every aspect of the education system down to the teaching styles of each professor. if we forget how colonial art history is in the first place, we will forget why we need to decolonize. Considering the hand that art history is hard in colonization around the world, I consider about the way southeast Asian women’s bodies are talked about in my textbooks versus European odalisque paintings. Brown people’s bodies were inherently sexualized and seen as dirty, while white people’s bodies were adored and deemed Classical.

Maybe colonization is another movement in the worldwide canon of art history. Another period in the bar graph of history- as google images seems to see art history. Perhaps Emily Carr and Paul Gauguin are the faces of this genre. Just as colonization cannot be forgotten among its victims, it cannot be forgotten by its perpetrators, who still believe they are a superior culture and race. Genres of literature such as post-colonial writing from India and Sri Lanka may suggest, there was a period of colonial art and literature, perhaps it is ongoing, possibly dying out, maybe here to stay. There will always be an antithesis, an attempt to view art and art history from a different perspective, and that is how we can decolonize art history.

[batrainystudentkittylove]

Crew members on set during the filming of Treaty Road. The six-part documentary series is the latest project by Regina filmmaker Candy Fox. Photo supplied Filmmaker Candy Fox is shedding light on Canada’s untold history.  She is a director and producer currently working on Treaty Road, a new show airing this fall on APTN. “I’ve directed for other documentary series, but this series has a certain personal importance to it.” Fox has also written and directed her own short films, like ahkameyimo nitanis (Keep Going, My Daughter), a poetic look into the life of a young Indigenous family.  Treaty Road is a six-episode documentary series that explores the extensive and often overlooked histories of Treaties one through six. Each hour-long episode focuses on individuals and communities that reveal what it means to live with the effects of Treaty in the present day.  “[The hosts] speak with experts, Knowledge Keepers, Elders, historians, grassroots advocates, about the Treaties, the history and the current climate today,” said Fox.  The show’s two co-hosts are Erin Goodpipe and Saxon DeCoqc.  Goodpipe, from Standing Buffalo Dakota Nation, is a long-time television host and theatre artist. DeCoqc, a Métis writer and producer, was inspired to develop the show when he found out his ancestor James McKay was involved in the signing of the Treaties. “I discovered tha...

[yegarts]

Reflections on the Horizons Writers Circle by Naomi McIlwraith

Fourteen Alberta writers recently concluded their participation in the Writers’ Guild of Albera’s Horizons Writers Circle, its mentorship program for writers within the Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC) community, ESL, and underrepresented writers living in Edmonton. The program ran from October 2022 to March 2023, under the coordination of publisher and writer Luciana Erregue-Sacchi. Writers from diverse backgrounds in the early stages of their careers received mentorship from experienced writers in a series of workshops, panels and one-on-one activities. The program introduces new writers to the wider Edmonton community, helping them make new contacts in the industry, and thrive in their writing careers. We asked two of the participants, mentor Naomi McIlwraith and mentee K’alii Luuyaltkw to reflect on the experience for the EAC blog. (You can read mentee K’alii Luuyaltkw’s guest blog article here).

Inward Journeys and Saskatoon Pie by Naomi McIlwraith

Writing is a journey from an urge to an idea to a crafted composition. It’s this process that both intrigues and inspires me when I think of how the human brain goes from the tiniest little seed of a thought to a finished piece that has been nurtured with water and sun and love into a polished whole that is now a Saskatoon bush, bows bent with juicy fruit, in the full flush of the last two weeks of July. This to me is what mentoring looks like too, especially mentoring newer Indigenous writers with their own writing. When I went a few years ago to a strange bar somewhere in Edmonton for the 30th reunion of my high school graduation, I was struck by the bizarreness of it all. As I ruminated over the fact that we were all 48 winters old, a really rich guy from my high school days came over to commiserate with me that he’d had to settle for being a plain old doctor when he couldn’t invest all that time into being a specialist. Now it’s been 42 winters since I graduated high school, and I’m still fighting the same old battle of how to make a living as a writer, as my really rich doctor friend contemplates retirement. I am, however, the luckiest woman in the world with all the beautiful opportunities that have come to me because I chose writing, the most recent and most important a Mentorship opportunity with the Writers’ Guild of Alberta’s Horizons Writers’ Circle for BIPOC writers. A thinker, a teacher, a writer, a poet, – all these roles I love doing as I mentor new writers. I love how the Mentor/Mentee relationship is just another glorious example that the real world is better and infinitely more interesting than all being the same age at the same time. My need for Saskatoon bushes and rivers and mosquitoes and bright yellow warblers with skinny little red streaks on their feathery breasts means that I don’t fit well into a classroom with four walls. But I get to be a teacher in other creative ways. Writing has helped me find my voice, and I am vibrating with glee that I get to mentor new writers as they find their own voices. A speechless wisp of a girl 42 years ago, I’m not quite so wispy anymore and I’m not quite so speechless, and this is all because I have been blessed with the best of Mentors who have helped me not only find my voice but find myself. Voice is identity too. Part of my voice is Indigenous and part of my voice is Scottish, English, Norwegian, French, ….. And I now take quite seriously my responsibility to share all that I’ve learned and all that I’ve gained from my Mentors as I help my Indigenous Mentees find their voices and discover who they are. As a Métis woman, I am a peacemaker negotiating all of my identities, and to my role as a Mentor I bring my skills in negotiating and talking, listening and laughing and cajoling my Mentees into planting for themselves all the seeds that will ripen as their composition germinates and is refined into a delightfully finer form than the first draft. This is absolutely essential that the Mentor reject expecting perfection either from herself or from her Mentee. Perfection means paralysis: as a Mentor, therefore, I encourage my Mentees to get their words down onto paper in whatever form they land. As a Mentor, I am duty bound to show my Mentees the way to get their ideas down onto the first draft and then to point them in the direction down the trail through the second, third, fourth, and fifth drafts until they have nurtured their thoughts into the exquisite form that is now a Saskatoon bush reaching high into the sky. Writing is by nature an interior journey: thoughtful people we writers are. nêhiyaw philosopher Willie Ermine’s comment about the inner journey makes a great deal of sense to me:

The relentless subjugation of Aboriginal people and the discounting of their ideas have hurt those aboard the Aboriginal voyage of discovery into the inner space. The tribal crews, along with their knowledge and secrets, came precariously close to aborting their inward missions. Meanwhile, the Western world-view and the concomitant exploration of the outer space continued unabated for the next five centuries. Acquired knowledge and information were disseminated as if Western voyages and discoveries were the only valid sources to knowing. The alternative expeditions and discoveries in subjective inner space by Aboriginal people wait to be told (Ermine “Aboriginal Epistemology” 1995).

Subjective inner space indeed. This is what being a Mentor in an Indigenous artist context means to me, and I aim to help my Mentees find their voices and themselves in their own subjective inner spaces. My Indigenous Mentees’ stories are waiting to be told!

Nearly twenty years ago, I served as the Conference Scribe for an Indigenous Feminism Conference at the University of Alberta, and Dolores van der Wey, an Indigenous presenter, said something that became a gift and has stayed with me since. She spoke about “pause time,” which is the time a listener takes to absorb and process what she has heard from someone speaking to her. Rather than interrupt her duty to listen deeply, the listener maintains her commitment to attend to the speaker. The listener refrains from checking out of the conversation to think of how she will respond to what is being said to her, she resists the urge to impose her own thoughts on what she hears, and she accepts the invitation of the speaker to journey inward.

The listener listens, truly listens. What a gift!

This pause time is rich with potential, and this is another powerful motivator for me. I do fiercely believe that listening deeply is an Indigenous cultural practice that must continuously resist the noisy forces of a colonial world that makes it difficult to hear and to listen. I am a peacemaker, and I want to hear my Mentees thoughts fully and completely, so that I may coach them forward in the best way possible. This pause time is a gift that the listener gives to her interlocutor. It is a gift to be heard above the cacophony, and the Horizons Writers’ Circle offers Mentors and Mentees an important opportunity to hear each other deeply and meaningfully as they venture inwardly toward those tiniest little kernels of thought, thoughts as nascent as a cluster of seeds and help them grow into a beautiful juicy Saskatoon pie of a composition that we simply cannot resist!

Thank you to Ellen Kartz for being such a champion of writers and for inviting me to apply to be a Mentor, Luciana Erregue-Sacchi, Program Coordinator of the Horizons’ Writers Circle, Giorgia Severini, Executive Director of the Writers’ Guild of Alberta, and to Rona Altrows, the Edmonton Community Foundation, and the Edmonton Arts Council for supporting this important program that is so vital to the health of our community!

A writer, a teacher, a canoe paddler, a trail walker, and a deep street talker extraordinaire, Naomi McIlwraith is a Métis poet who reads and writes and listens and talks to figure things out. Moreover, Naomi writes to honour her ancestors both Indigenous and European, her Mom and Dad and the rest of her family. She also writes and talks to make peace in a dangerous world. You will find “Peacemaker” on Naomi’s resume. Her favourite words are “imagine” and “tawâw.”

Work cited Ermine, Willie. “Aboriginal Epistemology” in Southern Door: Connecting With and Maintaining Our Relations. Eds. Marie Battiste and Jean Barman. First Nations Education in Canada: The Circle Unfolds. Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 1995.

van der Wey, Dolores. “Pause Time.” Women Writing Reading: Indigenous Feminism Conference. Edmonton: University of Alberta, August 2005.