ARTIST STATEMENT
SURVIVANCE brings acrylic paintings, medicines, mixed media pieces, and traditional artforms together to weave stories of personal and collective Indigenous survivance. Intentionally challenging and shifting colonial deficit narratives that serve to perpetuate oppression and attempted genocide, “Native survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, tragedy and victimry” (Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners, 1999, p. vii). Dominating colonial stories serve to suppress and undermine the tremendous wisdom Indigenous people and communities have to offer the world today by telling us we are pathological, labeling us as disordered, disabled, diseased, dysfunctional, too Indigenous or not enough, inheritors of genetically encoded trauma, the list goes on.  

SURVIVANCE directly confronts these narratives through works that centre my experiences and understandings of personal and collective Indigenous wisdoms that emerge through: resistance to violence and oppression; surviving over 500 years of attempted genocide; countless generations of thriving with the land and traditional teachings pre-colonialism and since; and contemporary Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and doing that are continually (re)emerging and evolving. The pieces featured in this exhibit are all pieces that have manifested through sôhkahtwâwin, âhkamêyihtamowin, and miyo-pimâtisiwin – accessing, honouring, and manifesting the personal and collective medicines that have come during times of hardship and challenge, and through my commitment to live our Indigenous ways in a dominating Eurocolonial capitalist society. These works have come to me in dreams, meditation, prayer, and ceremony, bringing together traditional and contemporary cultural teachings and medicines with the personal, ancestral, and collective trauma wisdom that emerges through struggle. The pieces in this exhibit challenge colonial deficit narratives of mental health, address survivance in my own Indigenous relationality, and centre personal and collective healing through Indigenous ways. These pieces incorporate imagery that reflects Cree and Métis style beadwork interwoven with relationships with land, the cosmos, and all our relations.  
 

we have always been here