To me, being an Indigenous artist is about creating, healing, and sharing while resisting erasure.  I process through making and connect to the world around me through camera lenses, written words, illustrations, and music. My understanding of my Indigeneity is a path with much hurt and disconnection. It is a relationship I am actively trying to rebuild and reconnect with after living an isolated life away from family. The center of this project is about reconnecting to where I’m from despite the pain that caused me to leave.

Creating helps me weave a sense of myself into the world around me when I feel unseen. Engaging with other artists and writers work with similar themes of cultural disconnection and isolation has helped me feel less alone while I’ve been at low points.

This project is about strengthening my sense of self, having time and space to travel to where I’m from as the visibly queer person I am today, and reconnecting to these lands to see my place in them. I feel this is a story and experience that is not unique but not often shared. The intersections of queerness and Indigeneity is complicated and deserves to be investigated and shared.

I’m the first of my family to graduate high school, graduate university with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, and the first to approach the painful process of healing. Being an Indigenous artist feels like a gift to not only process and heal but also to share that with my relatives and relations who don’t have the capacity, language, or ability.

I feel more connected to land than to people or community because my brain was originally wired to survive the harm from the people around me, not be held or loved by them. This is a wound I am actively challenging and working on, to allow trust of others, to allow myself to feel love without the ache of worry for bad to come.

The land has held me in all these years of feeling lost and alone. It is with the wind, river, and the birds that I feel most connected, and they help ground me when everything is overwhelming chaos.

Now that these places (Fort St John, BC and Grande Prairie, AB) that did hold me are literally on fire, I’m desperate to muster up the courage and return as the person that I’ve become, this post-top surgery Indigiqueer artist who has the bravery to be seen and create and share my story after all of this erasure and silence.

I lack a connection to my home nation of Big Stone Cree Nation in Treaty 8. My mom and many of my cousins are registered band members with Big Stone Cree Nation. I started the application process a few years ago but then was hit with barriers because of my gender marker on my ID being different than my birth certificate. During this point in time there were other traumatic things going on because of said gender marker which took my focus away from the pursuit of status. This is another route I wish to revisit and finish the process.

My relationship to culture, ceremony, and community is one that I have the desire and responsibility to forge, I want to continue building the sense of belonging to culture and what it means to be Cree beyond the hurt, as that has been missing in my life.

My practice is the endless pursuit of making meaning via a variety of methods to scratch an itch. I was a self-taught smartass from an early age and being left entirely to my own devices lead to drawing, writing, photography, video, and music. I’m enamored with patterns, creating compositions of the hard shapes and lines that jump out from my surroundings of urban geometrics with the flow and flux of water and breath.

Creation is processing. Making a mark, desperate to believe that I do in fact exist. Attempting to heal and let myself connect to others, fighting the fear of being seen and instead feeling proud to persist even when these systems are designed for destruction. It is important to me to share, be seen, and see others in these moments when we feel most alone.

I approach my work with curiosity and honesty. Endless questions for myself that I share with others to ask themselves. Utilizing shape, line, word, photo and sound to share a feeling and a need for healing. I’ve felt great suffering and it’s a privilege to share the triumphs and the hurts along the way with other folks who also feel alone.

Sometimes I feel directly inspired in one medium. As with my work in EMDR to reintegrate all the separate senses of self that I feel in all of these compartments, I’m beginning to utilize the various angles of making together in ways that make the most sense to me. For example, interacting with the world with a camera in hand allows for the ability to take a specific slice of the moment with the help of light and composition. These photos are often then used as inspiration for illustrations and/or prints (as if seen in the building print). Words can be the first reach but can be limiting when my logic mind is trying too hard to ‘make sense’ of feeling instead of just feeling it.

This project is directly about me being an Indigenous artist, the intersections of queerness and Indigeneity, and how I can process and make meaning of that through my specific creative means.

A primary artistic goal of mine is to see myself in the work I create and share my voice. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to provide love, care, and understanding for others when I felt I was lacking it for myself and was craving it. This project involves a lot of personal growth, but additionally this is an opportunity to enhance my artistic ability of research and writing, utilizing my photography skills in the places I could never previously capture, and designing 2 rough drafts of a 8.5 x 11 inch perfect bound book consisting of photos, illustrations, and writing of my journey.

When trying to understand identity, I’ve usually turned to public spaces to try to find connection. I hosted a radio program (award winning) for nearly three years that was about trying to broadcast a sense of belonging to others because I did not feel it and desperately wanted it.

The relationship building in this project is largely personal, finally turning inward after a lifetime of running. Through travelling to my places of origin, I wish to connect to those lands and reintegrate myself into these spaces as a visibly Trans Indigiqueer person.

Creating and sharing such a personal journey is an offering to those around me to investigate their own stories and feel held in the hurt because we all deserve to be heard and seen accurately.

I directly share a lot of my process online via Instagram reels and writing. It’s been helpful for myself as a means of record keeping and documentation, but more so I wish to share what I’ve learned along the way because I always wish I had someone to help me. This project isn’t directly about mentoring another, but it is about sharing truth and hoping to inspire others to investigate and honour their own truths, especially when they’re widely denied experiences. I make a lot of videos about printing and showing the process as it’s a very specific medium that has many ways to do it and I’ve learned a lot of what I know from online.

A lot of what I do is trying to be the mentor and guide I didn’t feel I had as a young indigenous trans person growing up in Northern Alberta. Right now is a scary time for Trans youth in our province and I believe that highlighting stories of resistance in the face of erasure is needed for young people to see themselves in other stories just as I have seen myself in others’.