Introduction

0:00

[Music] [Applause]

0:05

[Music] [Applause]

0:11

[Applause] without further delay thank you so much for joining us as a part of the feminist

0:17

art field school and i wonder if we could start with the broadest question which is would you mind introducing

0:23

yourself and telling us a little bit about what you do sure well thank you so much for the invitation to talk with you all um uh

0:30

white project request [Music]

0:38

uh so i’m tammy willard i’m an artist and curator i’m greeting you here from my home territories uh and we refer to

0:46

our land base as support luke which refers not only to the geography of the

0:51

land but to our culture and language as taught to me by gary godfordson’s

0:56

poet so it’s the center of a lot of my practice these days so i want to also introduce

1:03

you to my lands that are beaming into you in this zoom format

1:10

thank you so much um i wonder uh i mean i could could sort of ask this

1:17

question in a leading way based on my knowledge of what you do i want to ask

1:23

you to talk about bush gallery and your work at ubc okanagan

1:28

but i also just want to sort of broadly ask you to talk a little bit about your practice

1:35

so that so that everybody can get [Music] a sense of all that you do there’s

1:41

probably a lot that i don’t even know about so feel free to expand on

1:46

beyond bush gallery and and your teaching if if uh you feel so inspired

Bush Gallery

1:53

sure uh teaching is recent maybe i’ll talk about that last um but uh bush

1:58

gallery yeah you’re reaching me at my heart and at my home which is this project that is collaborative in nature

2:05

um called bush gallery that i collaborate with uh other artists

2:10

including peter morin gabriel hill and janine freyna judly as well as my family

2:16

as well as the you know non-human and the land here itself so i really think through

2:22

an animate and interrelated lens when i think about this project of bush gallery and it really started

2:30

from being able to you know it started from a kind of an opportunity in terms of

Cultural Economy

2:37

having the recognition and the um shows that were

2:43

touring so i was curating i had curated a show for example beat nation art hip-hop and aboriginal culture and it

2:50

toured and that was fantastic and brought lots of artists to the gallery but i also felt like

2:56

how was what was going on in major city centers in terms of the tour

3:02

relating back to home and were it was not easy for me to draw those

3:08

threads together and so uh there’s a lot of reasons why people are displaced from their home

3:14

communities and an indian reserve is certainly not the entire context of our territory but we find ourselves uh in on

3:22

reserves with very limited employment opportunities economies uh you know

3:28

people are reeling now from the kinds of impacts that covid19 has had which are very

3:34

serious but uh we’ve had rates of unemployment on reserve over 50 for and

3:39

higher for many many many many not years but generations

3:44

so the work was meant to point to the ways in which uh

3:51

the cultural economy operates entirely almost entirely outside of uh

3:57

indigenous territory well it operates within indigenous territories in terms of like on indigenous lands but not on

4:04

reserves and and there’s still such a um a kind of uh gap between uh

4:12

these places with places that i found myself and so i wanted to try to

4:18

find ways that both interrogated that space uh but also for myself tried to make

4:26

that space uh you know perhaps more woven together and so uh as

4:32

a mom with two young kids it also was impractical traveling for these shows you know i am an adherent to

4:40

what they call attachment parenting which is i think many of the ways that people parented and indigent and

4:45

continue to apparent in indigenous and you know localized communities and so you know we don’t necessarily

4:52

have this space we don’t necessarily make the space in galleries for breastfeeding and i found myself like needing to take breaks was curating to

4:58

breastfeed um you know having to do a talk and then my child being really upset at five months and so i just i

5:05

decided to breastfeed while i was doing the talk with an audience which is great but was actually a struggle for me in

5:11

terms of the ways in which expectations you know mean that i thought like i

5:16

didn’t you know i was nervous about doing that or shy about doing that um and so all these things sort of

Moving Back Home

5:22

culminated uh in wanting to move back home um in my territory and wanting to

5:28

make and really questioning well why can’t i make space for art here you know in the rural on

5:35

reserve you know those spaces that’s not new york and paris right these ways in which we still locate like the center of

5:42

kind of cosmopolitan art uh and i you know i have big questions about that

5:47

what what does that mean who does that leave out when we kind of adhere to those um

5:53

expectations or um you know preoccupations in our field

5:58

and so uh it’s the for me the bush gallery project was a much as much about

6:04

being in place as well as questioning those ideas and so i always thought of

6:10

it as like you can kind of make your own bush gallery space wherever and i didn’t think i was doing anything

6:15

totally new just building on the ways in which you know people still harvest materials and make baskets and do things

6:22

that are with the land as a kind of um you know if i really think through my

Bush Gallery Project

6:27

prosthetics and ideas that i’ve learned i realized that the only gallery the

6:33

only kind of concept of gallery would would be the land and i’ll just add this that recently i

6:39

had a chance to translate uh this manifesto we first wrote for busch gallery

6:45

and you know we used a number of kind of art terms and ideas in there and i tran and i worked with uh elder flora sampson

6:52

and language instructor janice dick billy to translate what we wrote into squat mix gene so

6:59

into my language and into the language of the land here and it was really interesting to get around these ideas

7:04

and we were translating just the idea of bush gallery and flora sampson came up

7:10

with um a phrasing that kind of in english means like a place you go and

7:16

harvest uh and you know the the way in which these parallels were drawn um

7:22

harvesting materials for artwork or materials for our sustenance the parallels between that kind of

7:28

holistic way of engaging with our lands is something that you know i really work towards and it’s

7:34

an opportunity for me as well to kind of make space for resurgence in my work you

7:41

know we have we have to all negotiate space and time and money right and so i just um i just said this is what i’m

7:47

going to do this is where i’m going to make space because these are things that i believe in

7:53

oh thank you so much and i want to immediately ask you questions about the bush manifesto but i’m going to hold it

7:58

i’m going to say it out loud and hold it and start with a broader question and then move toward the more micro

8:04

questions that are animating my thinking since i had the opportunity to read everything that you’ve offered to us for this

8:10

conversation and you know my question is you know you think out loud about the categories of pedagogy and field and

8:18

land-based practice and art and aesthetics and feminism and i was wondering could you

8:25

tell us in the context of this conversation in some of the ways that those terms categories

8:30

modes of political being relate to you and your work yeah well part of that translating i’ll

8:35

get back to the manifesto quickly because part of translating it was translating the word feminism because we

8:41

write in the manifesto bush gallery as feminist and you know because i start from this place as a mother um as uh

8:48

wanting to make space um you know within the kind of push and pulls of the domestic as well and so i tried to

8:55

translate this idea of feminism which was an interesting one to think about and we came up with like

9:01

[Music] which is a kind of like it’s kind of like an importance and a

9:07

strength and a um sacredness for women at busch gallery

9:13

um and so uh those you know those are just deeply

9:18

intertwined for me the importance of in the space of um feminism you know i’ll say that not without a critique of

9:25

feminism right in terms of the ways in which it didn’t in the earlier stages

9:30

kind of make enough space for um indigenous black people of color uh

9:36

within those practices but uh it’s still something that

9:41

i think is really important that that allows us to question the kind of impacts of patriarchy and colonialism

9:47

uh within our communities so um i might be losing track of your question

9:52

now i wanted to tell you about translating feminism and then yes it’s spectacular

9:58

and then i wonder you know perhaps i can prompt you to think too about the the way in which school or pedagogies relate

10:05

to your bush gallery based initiatives yeah well i’ll say that you know bush gallery

10:12

pre-exists my kind of well my engagement with formal pedagogy in terms of the in

10:17

terms of the institution so um i come from doing a lot of community work and socially engaged practice uh

10:24

and so busch gallery was really also just the logical and practical way to engage

10:31

a project in a rural area that it would involve other people and communities um that’s just how i work

10:38

but then i started teaching about three years ago with ubc okanagan which continues to be a journey and uh

10:46

learning uh and but with which gallery we were already doing pedagogy in terms of

10:51

um not only i think the overall philosophy that that we were proposing that i think is you know important as a

10:58

both a critique and uh opening up of different kinds of space and ways of thinking um but also we would do like

11:06

projects we in in one year we had peter morin and gabriel hill come up and

11:13

we did a project i wanted to do a bit of a like a field trip speaking of field school a field trip to where daphne ogig

11:20

painted her work uh indian in transition and she lived in my territory um she for

11:27

the rest of her life when she passed she was in the uh okanagan territories but um for many

11:33

years she lived in the shu schwab and uh in fact she’s the first artist i ever

11:38

sort of heard of so my auntie and uncle were engaged in um political work in our community and i

11:45

remember them talking i must have only been five or six talking about daphne oh jig and talking about her and saying

11:51

yeah artists think quite differently than us and you know i don’t really remember all the conversation but i

11:56

remember that for some reason and so i wanted to i had never been out she had a cabin on shoeshop lake

12:02

and which is also interesting because most of those cabinets are non-native folks um and within our territories and

12:08

there’s definitely issues there but so we went out and uh and it was kind of this performative

Performance Work

12:15

pedagogy where we visited the cabin where she painted this work and i later learned that like people from our

12:21

community helped drum that painting out when because it she had to like bring it out in sections it now hangs in ottawa

12:28

um and so we called that performance work which wasn’t for an audience but just uh we had some documentation

12:40

from that painting stage where it was about the indian in transition and all these pressures of like modernizing and

12:46

all the loaded colonial ways of thinking about that and then so we decided that we were um on vacation for that

12:53

work um so like pedagogue so we always have this kind of and in other

Pedagogy

12:59

instances we looked at some of the the conversations and gatherings that in dart produced with

13:06

gerald mcmaster and i think edward patras and stuff years ago out in um

13:13

saskatchewan i believe and so there’s these different ways in which we engage with indigenous art

13:18

histories uh more specifically at busch gallery but i think that really my kind of

13:24

pedagogical kind of pull comes from um activism and community work

13:31

you know that natural way in which you just are a conduit for um

13:36

bringing people together and for learning things together and uh and so my approach in terms of

13:43

my approach is always like to share the knowledge that each of us carries and certainly not to think that i can

13:49

necessarily um speak as some kind of expert in any area i continue to be a

13:54

learner in my home territory as a learner of language a learner of the land and that’s you know that’s

14:00

many other ways in which pedagogy has occurred in my work is also through

14:05

just experience on the land so uh and that informs this interest in

14:11

um in land-based ways of working uh in terms of like a research focus which is

Black Feminism

14:17

only the words i use now right before it was just what i was doing as an artist and what i was doing as a community member and then i have these new

14:23

vocabularies too um to gain within the institutional space

14:32

um well maybe speaking of vocabularies and um thinking about what you said earlier

14:39

on in um that answer about feminism and it’s um

14:47

sort of sometimes failure to recognize um

14:52

the struggles of different kinds of women whether black whether indigenous

14:58

i’m thinking about two of the articles that you have shared with us um leanne

15:04

simpson’s land as pedagogy nation of egg intelligence and

15:09

rebellious transformation and a black feminist statement

15:15

by the and it’s funny because this is the second time somebody has given me this this

15:21

statement to read and i have no idea how to pronounce the name of the collective is it kombahi river collective that’s what

15:28

i’ve heard it as kombahi um and

15:35

thinking about you know i read the black feminist statement and was there was a lot of like yeah right

15:41

on in my head as i was reading it um you know it’s really quite a kind of

15:46

brilliant uh analysis of the failures of second wave

15:52

feminism and an expression of the needs of black feminists in the 70s

16:01

and there’s a line in that statement where they write

16:07

if black women were free it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the

16:13

destruction of all the systems of oppression and um

16:19

when i started to read leanne simpson’s [Music]

16:25

writing i realized that the black feminist statement it

16:31

expresses a lot of the failures of

16:36

white feminism in a language that is very similar to the way white feminists of the time

16:43

wrote and leanne’s writing is a kind of

16:49

a call for a completely different way of thinking writing

16:56

of being feminist and i guess i’m wondering [Music]

17:02

what you think about this particular line from a black feminist statement and

17:08

on a on a sort of theoretical level of course if all

17:16

systems of oppression were eliminated we would all be free but

17:21

were they speaking from [Music] a very particular american perspective

17:29

and do you think that there is um something

17:34

very specific about the kinds of oppressions that indigenous people experience from the canadian nation

17:41

state that we really have to think through and make sure is on the table when we talk

17:46

about dismantling oppression

17:52

i mean uh i would say like yes and no and maybe

Resurgence

17:57

i’ll i’ll get into that but i want to ask this comment again from translating rece i just did this just recently so

18:04

i had this line in the which was busch gallery is an autonomous space for birds

18:10

anyway and we were trying to translate it and like this idea of autonomy or freedom wasn’t something that the

18:17

translators could articulate because people lived free we don’t you know we

18:25

don’t have a word because there wasn’t like that was that’s life was

18:32

to be free on the land you know um to be free to have your own governance your

18:37

own spirituality your own systems and so when leanne simpson in her

18:43

writing you know really talks about that importance of resurgence and cultural resurgence and you know it extends to

18:50

the forms she uses in her practice i think and she continues to be a great inspiration

18:55

and yes you know things like the kombahe river statement are located

19:01

in a specific time and place but i really think that those times and

19:07

places echo through time that you know they carry ripples and so i was when i was first

19:14

i’m gonna try to i can’t remember who introduced that to me um

19:19

maybe kasmir check um but somebody put it um you know sent it my way

19:25

and i thought it was really interesting to think about because i think that

19:30

so often there can be preconceptions about um both indigenous and people people of color black people in

19:37

urbanized places and i have worked with artists um black artists who um have pointed to the

19:46

invisibility of like uh not only blackness but also you know uh black

19:52

women within a kind of canadian view of canadiana landscape

19:57

you know not to mention that canadiana landscape kind of invisibilizes everyone also but um

20:03

but and so that criticalness it was a student um whose work uh was part of a

20:08

project i did and she was talking about the um the criticalness of uh of black

20:14

presence um black women within the canadian landscape and it’s just stuck with me to like think about that and so

Black Presence

20:21

to think about that um you know happening uh in a way that there was more affinity to the land in

20:27

some ways in that statement um from that group was just really exceptional to kind of

20:32

think about and to kind of uh you know i i try to try to think about the space of bush gallery which is

20:38

also my home which is also this that’s a kind of already complicated um and then but i also want it to be this

20:45

inclusive space but it’s also not a publicly accessible space and so

20:51

and it’s not a funded project that i you know it’s like funds in different little streams of um money

20:58

for a certain thing over time so the tension between that and the kinds

21:04

of thoughts about um when lands are inclusive or not not accessible

21:11

and that question of um we only know freedom as something to

21:17

compare being unfree against and i also remember lev the elder haida

21:23

elder lavina white talking about it was during the augustus and lake standoff and the tibetan

21:28

defenders were touring um in victoria actually this happened to talk um and she was saying

21:35

uh she was yeah her talk was really beautiful and she was like i remember being free as a kid you know she talked

21:41

about being a child and um that this memory of freedom

21:46

was something that carried her through uh her struggle today you know that

21:53

she um she knew that things were different and could be different

22:00

um and i was on this talk some time ago with um the uh trans uh artist american

Freedom Dream

22:06

artist um tourmaline and uh and um she was talking about uh

22:13

i really just really loved the way she framed it this idea of like what is your freedom dream uh and this idea that um

22:21

you know looks kind of like ask the impossible i’m probably not doing a great job of kind of summarizing but just the way she um positioned that

22:29

uh was so so beautiful to talk about the you know i think in her work she talks about sometimes the politics of pleasure

22:36

and um you know when you’re uh in in a marginalized group right that

22:42

um often people see as victims like claiming a space for pleasure and joy which in part has some impact on bush

22:49

gallery you know one of the reasons i wanted to bring people here and stuff was that it was easier to have my kids run around you know it was it’s what

22:56

brings me joy um to be on the land to learn language to learn things about the plants around me um but that’s kind of

23:03

an uh you know an abundance when often times otherwise

23:09

we’re in different uh kind of austerity and scarcity and i

Abundance

23:14

think we’ve come to believe that under capitalism and so uh you know so for me to like sit here and

23:20

think like just this morning there was a bear back here um and just where i’m looking right now

23:26

but like to think about um that level of freedom that comes with responsibility right and

23:33

comes with respect with reciprocity and all these things uh you know that i i’m learning as much

23:40

from that experience um it’s like this idea of like decolonial

23:46

anti-colonial and then like pre-colonial as in like we don’t even have a way to describe that as against

23:52

because it’s just the way we were and um that’s that’s and and can be and that’s

23:58

kind of a beautiful thing to just be right when we have all these complicated things around um politics and identity and

24:05

oppression like sometimes the joy is just to be and i think at least sometimes i i think that i can

Decentering

24:12

just do that when i’m here i don’t have to be like oh i’m the

24:17

you know indigenous curator and i’m also of settler ancestry so i’m also mixed so i’m the indigenous curator and i’m like

24:23

trying to like sell you a new cars and like sell you dawn coming into the gallery and

24:29

like i just didn’t want to be in that role anymore i wanted to just center the work

24:34

differently and i think you know things like the um kombahi river statement leanne simpson’s writing

24:40

they center us differently and it can be easier to get

24:46

somewhere or to be fulfilled under that differential center than it is trying to

24:52

like move from a different center and like you know fight your way

24:57

out it’s like a gravitational pull or something a whirlpool maybe

25:02

i love this so much and you know it’s connected to my what was going to be my question about

25:08

the kombahi river collective statement and oh i see that i am frozen is that

25:13

true or are we back now you’re back um okay sometimes sometimes my connection will drop out

25:21

no problem oh is everything okay on your end michelle

25:27

it might be me too [Applause]

25:33

tanya just froze for me but you’re okay i’m back now i think my uh

25:39

satellite internet polluting the night sky with elon musk’s starlink oh my

25:44

goodness i know aren’t real um i’ll start my my

25:51

my question or statement again which is to say you know one of the things that i love so much

25:56

about your inclusion of the kombahi river collective statement and my reading of the bush gallery manifesto

26:01

and thinking about manifestos and and collective writing in general is just that they’re a poly vocal multi-authored

26:09

pursuit and it strikes me that’s another way to radically de-center or radically think

26:15

against some of these structures gallery-based structures institutional-based structures which tells you who can be where and at what

26:22

time and you know from the beginning of your self summary you talked about collaboration as a such a foundational

26:28

part of your practice and i would love to learn more about how collaboration functions and flourishes is some in some

26:34

of the artwork and art making that you do yeah well normally it’s under i mean

Collaboration

26:39

first of all i consider the collaboration like just in terms of like being in a space and placed in my home

26:45

territories and like you know i have um pets i have kids i have um ecologies

26:50

around me so that that’s like an ominous present thing but in terms of like the

26:55

practicalities of like making work that we may show later in an exhibition or something um that usually happens

27:00

through a res i like to say that because we’re on reserve residency model uh and

27:06

so i bring people together here for usually like um no more than a week

27:12

and so there’s an immediacy um to what we’re doing there’s like um you know a

27:19

time frame that’s tight um and we’re trying to negotiate that also with them

27:24

you know some artists have their own kids they bring and so we kind of negotiate the labor of being

27:31

together and in terms of like that being important to the process as well making

27:36

food together you know cleaning up um that kind of um what often gets you

27:42

know divided off as the domestic space uh is kind of

27:47

really important to our process um so we work in this way of like being

27:54

together quite kind of immersively for and in this place though we have done um

Citation

28:01

iterations of bush gallery which i then in my mind carve off as this other kind

28:07

of thing which i call citation s-i-t-e um so that plays with the ideas of um

28:13

text citation and this kind of comes from um [Music]

28:18

a kind of negotiation i did with not necessarily wanting uh to talk about

28:24

or bring bush gallery into the space of the institution but wanting to

28:29

bring some ideas present within it and so this idea of site site-specific

28:35

institute art practice but starting with a basis of indigenous territoriality

28:40

and then text you know the play on text citation made a lot of sense for me so when one bush gallery kind of um or this

28:47

in my mind is how we work is like what bush gallery does something in other indigenous territories where lots of the

28:53

times we don’t have time to necessarily create if we don’t already have them deeper relationships

28:59

with indigenous communities then we engage in this kind of practice of um citation where we do our we do

29:06

what we can to kind of put local indigenous territoriality um and

Local Indigenous Territories

29:12

people uh into some kind of frame within our work and sometimes that also means

29:18

um we did this toronto art biennial project and we hired like teenagers from the local reserve who had a company that

29:24

was like outdoor cinema and so you know we’ll do that instead of um institutions that may be easier to

29:31

source sometimes but for us it’s like well how how can we contribute if like

29:38

you know residencies can be great i’m thinking about banff presidency or something or you go and like there’s you know meals prepared and it’s this

29:44

amazing space and that’s fantastic but um first of all i can’t offer that

29:49

you know in this space but also i just then also think about like

29:55

the privilege of that i guess i mean i don’t mean to like artists absolutely deserve that but i think

30:01

about it just in terms of like how i would arrive at those spaces but then i’d be back home living in a log cabin

30:07

you know my dad built on the res and those those again this kind of like space in between

30:13

um was difficult to navigate at times and

30:18

so i just like i’m just trying to pull things like closer together in a way

30:23

that makes sense for me sometimes

Collaborating

30:30

and so collaboration yeah we make we literally just make like things together so we’re in the same space and time

30:35

we’re often using materiality here whether it’s plant or natural material or like garbage and refuse and different

30:42

kinds of and or leftovers um different kinds of materials so

30:48

you know in that case there is uh it it can be hard to keep track of authorship at times

30:54

we’ll be like oh yeah who did that or who first said that or how to you know so um

31:00

but that’s like when i think collaboration is so deep is like you feel like you started thinking in somebody else’s mind and you’re like who

31:06

actually said that because we have a record of it and we’re doing it now but like i don’t remember

31:13

where it first kind of um came from you know mind and you said it too early on in

31:19

your engagement with the question about collaboration you said it’s actually about being together not doing something

31:25

and i think it’s so true mm-hmm yeah yeah and then often like what we can

31:30

only do so much grant writing about what we’re going to do because what happens when we come together is different like

31:36

in this most recent time we came together in july and when gabriel was traveling here with her

31:43

daughter they were coming through uh from the coast uh at night and

31:49

uh it was a lightning storm and a wildfire had broken out and she could see a you know a line of um flame on the

31:57

mountain and she was like uh should i be coming all the way through so we had to um make a pit stop

32:03

in kamloops which is nearby but you know so the works that we did most recently um

32:09

you know engaged with the experience of and this is not the only time of kind of wildfire

32:14

season here in the summer and that kind of um anxiety and experience um of that so

32:23

you know as much as it’s um what we’re doing together it’s like the big together together as humans together as

32:30

p as people with other beings in this uh landscape

32:36

like right now i don’t know if you can hear ravens in the background but ravens are really busy because the kidney are running in the stream nearby me

Joy and Hope

32:45

well um you took the conversation kind of exactly to

32:51

the place that i think my next question would have taken it because i was going to comment

32:57

on sort of how how much joy and hope there is in the way you

33:03

talk about bush gallery and your relationship to the land but that um

33:09

of course there’s there’s a narrative running underneath about what

33:16

is happening to the land [Music] represented in the form of

33:23

increasing numbers of [Music] fires wildfires and

33:31

you know there’s a huge protest at ferry creek on vancouver island which is sort of

33:37

really bringing into focus how complex this

33:43

situation is around the land because there are lots of people protesting the

33:49

logging of old growth forests but in so doing they’re questioning the rights of

33:57

the indigenous community whose territory that

34:02

growth of trees is on to make a living from logging those trees

34:08

so i wonder um if you could talk a little bit about

34:13

how you balance the the hopefulness and joy of your relationship to the land

34:19

with all of these things that are happening in the world and and um

34:25

threatening your territory and all indigenous territories yeah i mean

Balance

34:31

certainly i always struggle with like not doing enough and then i and then i have to go like

34:37

okay but i’m doing something and there are a lot of people doing nothing so you know

34:42

you have to kind of balance that all out at times because i don’t feel like i could ever do enough there’s so many

34:47

pressures and has been for you know um since the onset of settler colonialism in our territories um

34:55

you know uh we hear about things in the news like wildfires and we hear about things like um or hopefully we do about

35:01

the ongoing supplement protest against the canada owned tmx pipeline

35:07

and those are really serious and i contribute in ways that i can to those um

35:13

but i also want to acknowledge all the people that are doing the really difficult frontline work

35:18

that i um is extraordinary and that i think at times we only can do in bursts because

35:25

it’s really challenging work so they’re you know their work on front lines as

35:31

warriors is so important and but they need people behind that to support you know so

35:38

um fundraisers like building economies locally um speaking

35:45

out those are all things i hope that i’m contributing to do um too as well as language resurgence and

35:52

land knowing the land and practicing harvesting stuff on the land those are

35:57

subtler subtler more ongoing way completely subversive activities because

36:03

if you read through like supermarket histories like that’s what we’ve been fighting for

36:08

150 years is being fenced out of our territories you know and

36:14

that fight comes from our love and the joy that that brings right and

36:21

so i think the only way i can kind of be sustained in some of that work is um

36:27

is to have those experiences that are that are not um also not necessarily like

36:32

uh what do you want to say like it’s not like going on vacation or something right it’s not like

36:37

comfortable but you’re engaged and you’re challenged being out on the land and in the end those become really

36:44

valuable experiences you know sort of more valuable than complete leisure though there’s nothing wrong with people

36:49

taking vacations like go for it we all need it but um yeah so

36:56

uh like i think that this project has become more important because i need to

37:01

give it the space in order to um balance out what or what is um also hard

37:09

work and it’s totally imperfect also you know and

37:15

totally not meant to be romantic either like oh i’m living in harmony with the natural landscape i think some things

37:21

are really challenging at times right like um deer ate my entire garden

37:26

like at like 140 tomatoes like 40 cucumber plants like i need to build a

37:31

fence but i hate fences so you know and uh and i’ve tried the

37:37

whole this is for them this area and that doesn’t work so you know there’s there’s lots of practicalities too that

37:43

challenge ideologies i think out here that keep me humble which is a good so what my value is like

37:49

to be humble and to be on the same level as things so um but uh

37:55

yeah but uh there’s constant tension there’s constant conflict i probably have it

38:01

easier than my ancestors did [Music] and

38:06

i i need to be able to be in a place where i can not be self-destructive but i can

38:12

pass these things on to my family and you know that of course for many marginalized communities like that’s

38:18

already a win when we’re self-destructive right and it sometimes takes a little while um

38:24

communities just just that is like overcoming many um kinds of obstacles

38:33

that uh kind of hyper competitive capitalist economy kind of brings upon us

38:39

uh so you know it’s like i just keep trying

38:44

just keep going and um you know i also think about futurity in

38:50

that um even though this is a small piece of uh

38:55

land that is impacted um it is and can be

39:01

a future and is and can be abundance in the same way that here with the knowledge of it um

39:08

can be so you know i don’t know those are just things i carry with me in my being that

39:15

uh um i think give me so much

39:22

perspective that i think there’s something valuable for other people in it as well

39:28

140 tomatoes is not an insignificant amount of produce for a deer to eat

39:36

they eat the tops and then they don’t blossom out and make however you know they had a lot of

39:42

pressure all the wildfires and everything i’ve grown lots of cucumbers before i’ve grown even tomatoes before and they not

39:47

bothered them but this time a family found it and they they had a good time yeah have to get what you need

39:55

so you’ve alluded to the role of the institution and institutions in your life in a number of ways be it through

40:02

thinking through art institutions or your presence in academia and i wonder how do you think about the role of

40:08

institutions in the work that you do

Institutions

40:14

challenging like um so getting back to not just ideology like we have to make a living in world

40:21

and i was i’m resistant to push projects here into what i know which is like also

40:27

not for profits and arts organizations and ways of working and those things have an important place but um

40:33

[Music] they come with different kinds of pressures and needs to kind of fit into

40:41

models that i if i want to really challenge i need to create space from so i’m able to compartmentalize that

40:49

though i can kind of compartmentalize and let things overflow into

40:56

um more institutional practices but i mean there are i’m i am

41:03

excited about the idea of a lineage of knowledge that’s what excites me and and about valuing that that’s what excites

41:10

me about an institution it’s just that that lineage of knowledge um is still really racist

41:17

so uh you know i’ve experienced that institutions are um

41:23

are places of racism as much as they are also places of challenging racism and that can be

41:29

um difficult to be in um and it can be really rewarding in terms

41:37

of what we’re bringing in terms of just um what we’re bringing when we’re in those

41:42

spaces i hope uh and so

41:48

it continues to be a bit of an experiment for me um but i think as long as i can have

41:54

another um thing to balance it out um with uh like

42:01

in terms of my research in terms of my life here um it can balance out for me

42:06

uh that’s not to say i don’t value those experiences but uh you know i’m really

42:11

also inspired by projects like um dashinta center for teaching and technology colloquially called bush

42:17

university which i first heard about from a language instructor here and which probably

42:23

predates this idea of bush gallery for me and i

42:28

didn’t know a lot about the project i just heard her mention that and it set off all kinds of like um signals for me

42:34

of being like whoa right wait a minute like everything that my dad knows about

42:41

hunting taught to him by his grandfather is phd level

42:46

you know what i mean and and they really create those comparisons they have professors who know the land

42:53

um in that project and then they and they also work with you know leanne simpson teaches there glenn coulthard um

43:00

who you know glenn’s uh part of ubc vancouver so um you know that helps me see the kinds of

43:07

places that people can carve out that can be so completely revolutionary

43:12

even when contained in an institution uh you know the problem is that maybe

43:18

the institution doesn’t even recognize how great sometimes that work is and doesn’t let it kind of fully

43:23

um inform other spaces that are still very conservative but uh

43:29

but again you just just keep going

43:37

so um now is the time in the conversation when we get to ask you what

43:43

what you’re working on now what you’re working on next what you’re looking forward to

43:50

yeah well um i we just so from that residency in july

43:56

we created um a number of works as well as through a residency with york university um and some work with um

44:04

graduate research assistants we created an exhibition that’s on right now as um as part of momenta biennial in um

44:10

montreal and that’s been really uh fantastic because it ended up

44:16

bringing a lot of different things together so it’s a large show it includes this work in translations

44:22

we are finishing up a zine for that it includes translations of the manifesto in french

44:27

ghaniaga mohawk and supermax gene and i’ve learned so much through that

44:32

process of translating within my community that gives me so much more to think about for bush gallery

44:39

and a long overdue project which was funded through

44:44

a land-based community art fund at bc arts council that was delayed due to covid like many

44:51

things that i hope to hope to finally get time to move forward with and that

44:56

was learning cedar root basketry uh so as well as um soquel mixteen

45:03

language curriculum so we worked with uh elder dolores purduby who’s a brilliant

45:08

basket maker um and she uh did some tutorials uh that we recorded

45:14

and so we’re developing these kits so you know sometimes i’m inviting artists here and this part but once in a while i

45:20

also um have projects that are really kind of community based so we’ll have some honorariums for people

45:26

to learn both uh the so-called machine curriculum which will also contribute to the um society

45:32

that i’m a part of uh which is uh lang and asganluth based

45:38

also platmuk but um it’s particularly our reserve community uh language program

45:45

so um we will hopefully be making some yeah beautiful cedar root baskets which

45:50

some of my first projects when i came home was with elder dolores perduby

45:56

who’s a amazing artist in basketry and i learned birchbark harvesting and birchbark

46:02

basket making from her and so it’s so exciting to work with her again and to work in this other form of basketry

46:08

which continues to give me again so much insight um you know it’s uh uh

46:15

it’s um what i want to say like several textbooks in one or something you know you’re learning to harvest when to

46:22

harvest you’re learning about how things grow how things grow when they face the sun or which sides are sheltered and how to

46:28

then um form that into something like a vessel that then you can you know for me it’s i

46:35

use it a lot symbolically or metaphorically with bush gallery that because once you have that basket you

46:41

can store things in there right so um stores all these beautiful experiences ideas and stories so i hope

46:49

that that project is able to get um get going this fall and then

46:55

and then i don’t plan much further ahead than that that’s also the beauty of busch gallery i’m not writing a three-year grant right now though i’m

47:00

thinking about it these days but anyway um because i it can otherwise be difficult to hold to

47:08

that methodology where it’s like i i really celebrate and invite happenstance

47:14

or serendipity like when or letting things happen and people come together when is the right time

47:20

and um [Music] and that can be hard to do when you’re planning but you can there’s ways to do

47:26

it i think where you can make space but anyway um but that’s one of the things that was also

47:31

joyful and bush gallery for me is like not doing the same kind of logistics

47:36

administrative tasks that um were ah were ahead of me in curatorial work

47:43

it allows some freedom of like things just flowing and being um which is

47:49

uh yeah it’s a it’s a different way of working that has its own challenges but also i

47:56

think for me more rewards i think happenstance and serendipity are

48:03

extraordinary places to to leave our conversation today and to think about what’s possible

48:09

in that space i’m very grateful for the opportunity to to spend this time with you and to learn more about your

48:15

practice thank you for hanging out with us in this way oh such a pleasure i’m so excited to get

48:20

a chance to speak with both of you and to have others think through these things

48:26

so nice to see you again

No results found