Indigenous Peoples

A video work documents wolves and the Wolf Clan.

The writers on indigenous ancestry, playing with language, and maintaining public personas.

Working with the immediate environment.

Working between mediums.

The secrets are boxed within. That’s what I thought two years ago in Quezon City, where I was doing research at the University of the Philippines Center for Ethnomusicology.

A recording plays from somewhere high, / or low, through the falling dust-light: / I can’t tell you anything new about the river— / you can’t tell a river to itself.

From 1975 to 1979 I grew up in a temporary company town made up of trailers in the boreal forests of northern Manitoba. My father was one of the hydroelectric engineers working on a joint project between the Canadian and Soviet governments to dam the Nelson River at a place called Jenpeg.

The poet and artist invokes ancient matriarchal cultures, Indigenous folkways, and the speculative capacities of language so that we might rediscover our kinship with nature.

Beading images of deadly viruses and bacteria into enticing designs, Cuthand makes visible Indigenous communities’ exposure to disease from first colonial contact to today.

Nuanced identity and adolescent angst from Greenland.

Two artists drawing from punk, graffiti, and traditional Native American aesthetics, talk about protest art and the notion of the “Post-Smithsonian delinquent.”

Iñupiaq futures, language, and the spaces between performance and installation. 

It’s rare that as a writer I am left speechless by a performance. Writing becomes like swimming for the first time: relearning how to breathe. What can abandonment by words afford a writer besides drowning? Perhaps a lesson in listening. 

On August 16, the Hikianalia, a seventy-two-foot dual-hulled Polynesian voyaging canoe from Hawaii set out across the Pacific for California, powered by the winds, tides, two solar-charged propellers (for emergencies), and a thirteen-person crew.

Performance and community. 

Films that combine documentary and poetics.

Resetting the narrative of contemporary indigenous culture in the Americas.

Wheatpasting portraits on the Navajo Nation.

“Literature is a way of establishing the humanness of others. It’s interested in the relationships between people, between authenticity and truth. That in itself has to make us better disposed to each other.”

A modestly sized but nonetheless ambitious blend of catalog, monograph, and artist’s project, the book accompanies a touring exhibition of the same name which opened at the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, in March 2016.