I Was Arriving: Exploring Healing and Knowing in My Own Creation(s)

Abstract

Aniin. Boozhoo. Tansi. I identify as Anishinaabe and Metis on my late mother’s side and of Celtic-Germanic ancestry on my father’s side. I was arriving: exploring healing and knowing in my own creation(s) is a métissage, sharing moments of a life lived in longing to become a good relation, a useful medicine, to the beings in this world of anguish and dis-ease. This is a re-presencing of some teachings I have received from the interstitial spaces of making, and writing poetry, allowing me a place to fall into when I don’t know where to go or what to do. This work is an honoring of the oral/storytelling tradition—a sharing of what I have come to know in this walk—the medicines living in me. Making puts us in our bodies where we are forced to feel the suffering and joys of others. In this embodied walk, we, hopefully, become models for others to do the same, thus creating spaces where folx are invited to grow their capacity to answer the calls to justice for All Our Relations.

Curatorial Statement

Aniin. Boozhoo. Tansi. I identify as Anishinaabe and Metis on my late mother’s side and of Celtic-Germanic ancestry on my father’s side. I am honored to live and work on the ancestral, traditional, and unceded territory of the Katzie and Kwantlen peoples.

This work is a métissage, sharing from moments of a life lived in longing to become a good relation, a useful medicine, to the beings in this world of anguish and dis-ease. Through my work, I have witnessed abundant suffering in the attempt to reckon with the demise of our planet, our communities, our languages, and in our spirit. I am learning from the young ones with whom I walk in my family life, my learning life, and my teaching life how to be useful to them (and myself) in the deep healing (Marya & Patel, 2022) of these wounds. The only way I know how to do this is through the embodiment of longing and reaching found in creating. The only way I know how to offer spaces of healing and honoring for the youth, adults, and All My Relations is to open our learning spaces to the transformative pedagogies of weaving, drumming, singing, beading, and painting. These practices offer pause in the pressures of colonial education, creating space for Indigenous ways of being, knowing, and doing which not only re/humanize education but invites the medicine of Spirit, re/spiriting education, learning communities, families, and ourselves.

I was arriving exploring healing moments in my own creation(s) seeks to share the power of creation as the threshold to our own medicines, transformation, and coming to know how best to be a good relation to those who have gone before, walk with us now, and for the generations to come. What you are about to witness are the images of my walk, the re-presencing of teachings I have received from the interstitial spaces of making, and the words which have arrived on my paper by candlelight—mostly poems—allowing me a place to fall into when I don’t know where to go or what to do. This work will be in three sections: knowing and grieving, making and knowing, and arriving and answering—containing a couple of written pieces recorded over images, speaking to the theme. These are the medicines living in me. These are the teachings of becoming from spaces of creating:

Video Métissage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmcsW8sqEGY (Leggo, 2018; Rabke & Rabke, 2021; Vukelich, 2017).

This particular representation of my work is an honoring of the oral/storytelling tradition—a sharing of what I have come to know in this walk. The making puts us in our bodies where we are forced to feel the suffering and joys of others. In this embodied walk, we, hopefully, become models for others to do the same, thus creating spaces where folx are invited to grow their capacity to answer the calls to justice for All Our Relations.