From the Gallery:
Hononga connects an, as yet, unconnected group of Indigenous artists through their experience of indigeneity and creative practice. The diversity of practice among the selected artists is intended to dismantle preconceived notions of what Indigenous artwork can look like and what the indigenous lived experience is. Despite the inability to connect physically, due to the global pandemic, the international artists will be able to contribute using digital technologies. Exhibiting artists: Chevron Hassett, Sheri Osden Nault, Melanie Tahata, Pounamu Wharekawa and Afatasi The Artist.
Additional Information:
Incorporating performance documentation, a video of the beading process, colorfully painted walls, and the unique and powerful ngā karu o papatūānuku gallery space where the projection is shown – this installation was planned remotely and in active collaboration with the gallery and curator.
Text written for exhibition catalogue:
miina kawapamitin (‘until we meet again,’ in Michif) is an act of labor, love, and embodiment in the form of ongoing research, beading, piercing, and naming. It is a hopeful gesture towards healing for those Indigenous to Turtle Island who have been taken from us in so-called ‘Canada’ by the violence of policing.
This work is created with care, community consultation, and is continually cared for with sacred medicines.
Please be aware, the following paragraphs discuss police violence, colonial violence, death, substance abuse, murder, suicide, and my own connection to these things.
In Canada, there are no publicly available records of police-involved deaths. Further, no records of the ethnicity of victims are kept. One news organization has started to track these deaths, but their records do not include in-custody deaths, deaths because of police neglecting to aid someone, that occur during attempts to evade police, traffic accidents, death by suicide following police encounters, or murder by on or off duty police officers.
My paternal grandfather died by suicide when my father was young, my mother has told me that the police were harassing him in the preceding days. Near the end of February in 1998, my father’s alcoholism peaked in a night of crisis, there were weapons present in the house, and I have often been in awe that he survived. I had thought my mother called the police on him – a situation that very often ends in death for Indigenous people here. Last year, I learned she had waited to the next day to call police. My father survived this night and has now been sober for over 23 years.
In July 2020, in response to global movements against police violence, I began to research and archive any police-involved Indigenous deaths in so-called Canada that I could find record of, from my father’s crisis in February 1998 to present day. This research is ongoing and it is my hope that it will one day be a tool to help to disrupt police violence.
Alongside this research, I create a small red beaded piece for each person whose name I am able to find. These pieces are used in the performance component of this work, to symbolize wounds and healing, and kept with sacred medicines outside of this. After a period of time the beaded pieces will be burned as spirit offerings.
At the end of July, 2020, I had found 110 names from February 1998 onward. At the beginning of October in 2021, I had recorded 144 names. Because of social media, it is much easier to find records of recent years, though names are withheld during internal police investigations. What I have been able to record is, without a doubt, only a fraction.