As part of this month’s New Constellations Digital Residency, we’re featuring some of the artists and mentors joining the nation(s)wide tour running from November 23 to December 20, 2017.
New Constellations is showcasing a new touring model – one that specifically incorporates Indigenous representation and mentorship. What kind of impact do you think is possible with this approach?
New Constellations has flowered its own media ecology it has cut across place to create an aggregate of artists, writers, activists and other personnel so as to build a creative world that is Indigenous. This is important not simply because it opens up an otherwise raced, gendered and classed industry to Indigenous peoples, but also because it widens our horizon of possibility, make our dreams more dreamable.
This tour blends a wide variety of artistic disciplines. How do you think that will affect the audience experiences across the country?
I think the multidisciplinary character of the tour will upend audience expectations. It will refuse them the ability to settle into the tempo of the “concert.” This is a social experiment, an aesthetic one. I can’t wait to feel its electricity.
Canadians seem to be gaining more of an awareness of issues facing some Indigenous communities, particularly those in remote regions of the country. How do you think this awareness can be transformed into positive, meaningful action?
Indigenous art, broadly construed, is one of the key arenas for something like political transformation. It flowers an image of us, a way of encountering us, that is counter to the narrow and fatal ideas about us that have circulated willy-nilly in the so-called Canadian imaginary. If non-Indigenous peoples are to care about a future in which we do not suffer disproportionately and in modalities that are lethal, then they need to shed any sort of desire for mastery, in the realm of ideas and elsewhere. Indigenous art motors that process of unknowing.
Was there a moment or performance early in your creative practice that confirmed you were on the right path as an artist?
I am somewhat of an unconventional poet, in that I didn’t seek out literary journals or poetry circles to share my work. I posted them on my blog, nakinisowin.wordpress.com, and there my writing caught the attention of those across the country. I had educators writing to notify me that they were teaching my work in their classrooms I received beautifully terrible emails from people like me who saw themselves in my writing. That to me was a sign that I was onto something.
Is there one stop on the New Constellations tour that you’re looking forward to most?
Edmonton! That’s where I’ll read and host a workshop. I am looking forward to talking with youth about freedom and its poetics.
Name one of your creative peers that you think audiences should see/hear/experience today.
Samantha Marie Nock, a Cree/Metis writer and poet based in Vancouver! Hers is poetry that invites us into the thick of Indigenous social worlds, big and small. Samantha is something of an anthropologist of the everyday, in the best possible sense of anthropology. She tackles the throes of the intimate in a way that is careful, incisive and, most importantly, humorous!
Are there any projects you’re currently working on that audiences should expect in the future?
I’m working on a collection of essays tentatively called THE CONSPIRACY OF NDN JOY. It is a part of an intellectual and creative project of mine to steer our optic towards joy and other liberatory feelings.
