tāpwēwin (speaking truth)
by Cheryl L’Hirondelle and Leah Decter
Cheryl and Leah:
This chapter is a reflective interchange that explores what inspired the performance video Founder and what flows from the conversation it embodies. We contend that our collaborative work in Founder demonstrates the generative relationalities that can result from critical practices of gathering and illustrates and the ways themed artist residencies can foster collaborations and strengthen ‘right relations’. We also suggest that Founder extends beyond the recognized limitations of (re)conciliation, in part by exercising refusals stemming from each of our distinct positionalities; Halfbreed for Cheryl and white settler for Leah. Founder reflects “survivance stories” that reject colonial dominance and Indigenous victimry through “active presence” that is “more than survival, more than endurance or mere response…” (Vizenor 1994, vii, 15). At the same time, it signals white settler reckoning that recognizes complicity while interfering with assumptions of colonial orders. In this sense, Founder performs parallel and intersecting refusals from each of our perspectives.
Founder takes place on a lake in “cottage country,” adjacent to Treaty One in Treaty Three territory, the territories of Anishinabewaki ᐊᓂᔑᓈᐯᐗᑭ and Michif Piyii (Métis)[1]. From a dock at the lake’s edge Cheryl performs kitaskīhkanaw, a ‘pīcicīwin’ (round dance) song inspired by Woody Guthrie’s legendary protest song This Land Is Your Land. Out in the bay, Leah kneels in a canoe, bailing water in until it sinks. These actions, in conversation, honour a continuum of active and embodied resistance, and highlight the imperative for Indigenous survivance and for variously situated non-Indigenous peoples to undertake acts of critical un/doing and un/learning. Further, they gesture towards the ways resistance can be enacted from a range of perspectives – individually, collectively, collaboratively, and sometimes incommensurably, toward imagining new, more equitable decolonial futures in this land. Both Leah and Cheryl’s roles within the video production were conceptually formative and literally and figuratively performative[2] vis-à-vis their
Figure 1: Leah Decter, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Founder (video still) 2015
embodied presence and, in Cheryl’s case, through her song. Leah had a conceptual premise and a basic plan for the actions to be depicted in the video, as well as a location in mind when she first approached Cheryl. It is important to note, however, that Cheryl’s original contribution in the ideation of the performance/video began before this when she told Leah about the creation of the song kitaskīhkanaw.
There is no formula for collaborations. They can be complex, ranging from being very deliberate, pre-planned, and defined to being unexpected, responsive, fluid, and intuitive, and they can certainly function through any combination of these features. The same might be said about some forms of conciliatory action. It may go without saying that the crux of collaboration (or conciliation) lies in spaces of interchange, the in-between spaces where differing cultures, experiences, minds, approaches, and expertise meet and come into a dialogue. As Māori scholar Kuni Jenkins and Pakeha (settler) scholar Alison Jones suggest, when collaborating across cultures in unbalanced contexts as currently exists in settler colonial states, it is important to “work the hyphen” – the spaces in between – and to be aware of the productive tensions inherent in difference that resides there rather than erasing or evading it (2008, 473). When collaborating in this context, it is imperative to acknowledge the significance of sharing stories or narratives and the ethical responsibilities in doing so. The listener must be attentive without being consumptive or extractive; without engaging in what Stó:lō scholar Dylan Robinson describes as “hungry listening” (2020). In being offered a narrative, it is also vital to respect the conditions of the telling, even if they are informal. If attended to ethically, the offering and reception of a narrative, as understood in relation to the hyphen or the spaces in between, forms a lasting bridge that can be counted on to accommodate multiple crossings and passages without negating or erasing difference. A series of exchanges can be built on the assurance that the bridge will be there and will be maintained. In our discussions about collaboration, we frequently come back to this notion of trust and duration. In this sense our collaboration is not isolated to a particular project, but rather is a matter of being-in-relation and committing to a sustained and sustainable relationship that extends outside of artistic practice and creative products. It is also a matter of trust built through a respectful working relationship, as well as a real sense of the ways lives and experiences are both interconnected and divergent and how this, in turn, allows for a generative interstice. These approaches are part of working together in ways that reject colonial patterns of transactional relationality. With this in mind, we suggest that, like non-colonial collaborations, meaningful forms of conciliation may require deep and durational commitments as well as critical attention to the interstitial spaces – the bridge, the hyphen and the in-between.
The two of us initially got to know one another through a series of gatherings (symposia, exhibitions, and artist residencies)[3] that brought together Indigenous, white settler, and non-Indigenous BPOC artists, curators, and scholars who were actively working on questions of critical (re)conciliation, resurgence, survivance, Indigenization, and decolonization. These gatherings had structured elements, however, they were also fluid and open-ended allowing for the participants to create work individually and collaboratively and, importantly, to get to know one another through sharing everyday activities. Participants cooked and shared meals, lived and worked in proximity, engaged in extended conversations, learned about the territories on which the residencies were situated and enlisted one another in their projects. For example, Cheryl was working on a video installation from her ongoing Why the Caged Bird Sings project entitled Here I Am (Bless My Mouth) in 2013, and enlisted residency participants as stand-ins for the original (and incarcerated) songwriters. The particular balance struck at these residencies created a solid ground from which to build real connections that have evolved into numerous long-term collaborations and friendships. Our collaboration came about as a direct result of the particular ethic of sharing space, time, and creative practice that was built into these gatherings, the space for listening and learning, and for the creating and socializing they provided. However, demonstrating the unexpected and often unconventional trajectories collaborations can take, the ideation of elements of the video Founder traces back to another gathering of artists.
Cheryl:
Because of my lack of having a regular material-based studio practice, thematic residencies have been one of the best ways for me to produce new work. In 2006, I was the senior fellow for a Storytelling residency at the Banff Centre and was making the digital assets for my net.art project wepinasowina.net v2. Because of the theme, half of the visual art studios were filled with Indigenous storytellers alongside the regular, non-themed winter visual art residency participants. One participant was Vancouver-based artist, Ruth Beer, who I recall wanted to make a video piece that would incorporate as many of the artists from both residencies as were willing. She was looking for a song that she figured everyone knew and decided on Woody Guthrie’s This Land – though the canadian amended version. I decided -as I usually do- to subvert her request and change the melody into a pīcihcīwin (round dance) song form, still using the English lyrics, like a 49er.[4]
My long-time singing/songwriting partner, Joseph Naytowhow, was also at the residency and he decided to similarly do his own amendment. Keeping the same melody as Woody’s, he translated the lyrics and sang the song in nēhiyawēwin (Cree language). His original lyrics (translated approximately into English) were: “Our land together/my land here/from the place of the sunrise/and also toward the sunset/from the north place/also the south place/our mother, our land.” Neither of us knew what the other had done until after we’d both recorded our session and met up for supper. I was quick to realize we had essentially composed a new song. I added Joseph’s lyrics to my melody, and, following the residency, I took it back to Vancouver, where I was in the process of recording an album with my then-singing group M’Girl, and we added it as the final track of the CD.
It wasn’t until Joseph and I were in a matotisān (sweatlodge) a couple years later and we sang it during the ceremony that the lodge-keeper, an eloquent Cree speaker, joked afterward that Joseph had “made up a word.” This prompted an ongoing conversation between us and, with it, a decision to amend the lyrics and re-record the song as a bonus track for the re-release of our Nikamok album. The word in question was kitaskīnanaw, a word Joseph had translated to mean ‘our land’, and we decided kitaskīhkanaw, meaning ‘this fake land’, would be more salient and nuanced since this is one of the terms used to describe a reserve or reservation and, by our estimation, also a good term to use when referring to the fake nationhood of the land now known as canada (one of my favorite qualifiers from where I am from).
A final amendment to the lyrics happened a few days before recording the song when we were doing some vocal preparation. We decided to interpret rather than translate the lyric section of the final pushup[5] into English. It is not a direct translation, but a way that we thought we could both decipher and encode our worldview.
| pushups one – three | translation | fourth pushup |
| kitaskīhkanaw | our fake land | this land, o canada |
| nitaskiy ōma | our land here | without reservation(s) |
| wāpanohk ohci | from the place of sunrise | from the edge of sunrise |
| pahkisimotāhk mīna | also to the place of sunset | to deep, dark blue sunsets |
| kiwētinohk ohci | from the north place | from whence the north wind blows |
| mīna sāwanohk isi | also to the south place | to our southern ancestors |
| kikawīnaw kitaskīnaw | our mother, our land | for us she’s mother earth, our home |
English translations of lyrics originating in nēhiyawin (Cree worldview) would be a long-story-short-story-long, to try to understand an inkling of the cosmology. Lyric-wise, this is intentionally just a hint as to what is truly intimated.
Figure 2: Leah Decter, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Founder (video still) 2015
Leah:
In 2013 I began working on a series of artworks that considered practices of creative counter-appropriation, or what I think of as “un-appropriation,” from a white settler perspective. I was thinking about the potential and limits of refusing, from this positionality, the myriad of appropriated visual, material, and technological culture that is sutured into the white settler imaginary,[6]
and into the dominant canadian culture it conjures. This body of work engaged with the ways artistic methods can be mobilized to refuse the assumptions of colonial sovereignty that are embedded into these commonplace expressions. It also considered how such creative refusals might be generative in consort with Indigenous movements.
Around this time a neighbour offered me an old canoe that had belonged to a relative. I walked over to have a look, and when they pulled off the tarp, I saw a battered, tinny-looking canoe with stiff black foam floats running along its length below the gunnel. Aluminum ribs framed the boat’s interior, holding the thin sheet of black foam lining in place. It was the imagery on the boat’s exterior, however, that drew my attention. The span of its thin metal skin was printed with an awkward birch bark design, faded and scratched in places but still recognizable. On either side of the bow there was a large logo consisting of the brand name and a stereotypical depiction of an Indigenous man’s head in profile wearing a version of Plains-style headdress – the kind of image that is common to appropriative branding on all manner of products. By branding a form of Indigenous technology (the canoe) that has already been recast as an emblem of “Canadian-ness” with an all-too-common visual referent that subsumes a multiplicity of Indigenous identities into a reductive colonial trope, this brand of canoe adds appropriation onto appropriation. As I soon learned, although this particular canoe was decades old, the brand was not a relic of the past. Rather it is currently being produced with this branding intact.
Even without the imagery featured in this particular brand, the canoe is itself an appropriated cultural object. One could argue there are few examples of “Canadian” material culture more demonstrative of the colonizer’s appetite for cultural appropriation writ large than the canoe. It is perhaps the way in which the canoe ties the settler so insistently to this land, and to the quintessentially canadian conception of (empty) wilderness, that instills it with such a powerful resonance in colonial culture. Historically, the canoe is tied to the consumptive tide of trade, resource exploitation, and territorial expansion that perpetuated settler colonial dis/possession. In contemporary terms, the canoe has been instrumentalized as a defining feature of national identity. For example, Prime Ministers Trudeau, both Pierre and Justin, have enlisted the canoe (and their prowess within it) in ways that signal their naturalized connection, belonging and entitlement to, and authority over, this land. Not long after revelations about his penchant for brownface and blackface were exposed during the 2019 federal election campaign, Justin Trudeau was featured paddling a canoe in a photo op in Sudbury. Whether or not this was planned in advance of these revelations, it can be read as an attempt at recuperation that seeks to recast PM Trudeau, the son, as a relatable, regular “Canadian-Canadian” (Mackey 2002, 20) whose life and persona, like his father’s, are inextricable from this land. While a white person paddling a canoe does not, in and of itself, amount to “redface,” it can be seen, in this case and elsewhere, as contributing to a lineage of white settler canadians performing the “appropriation of Indigeneity for nationalist ends” (Knowles 2017, 386). In keeping with the central desire for the white settler to become legitimately emplaced within colonized Indigenous lands, the performance of white settler “Indigeneity,” as a form of psycho-social camouflage, can be understood as an appropriation of place itself.
After showing me the canoe, my neighbours informed me that it had some slow but persistent leaks, which they had attempted to repair on more than one occasion, suggesting further that it might be something I could fix. I immediately decided that if I were to take this boat, I would sink it as a project of un-appropriation. As a form of generative refusal, the practice of un-appropriation is part of the “intergenerational responsibilities” (Dylan Robinson 2016, 47) that flow from being-in-relation in territories impacted by settler colonialism and white supremacy from which I inherently benefit. It is an activation that demands that I stay implicated and for this reason, I envisioned sinking the canoe while in it. I also recognized that it should sink not simply as a result of its persistent fissures. Instead, it should do so as a result of my labour. I would bail it in so that I would both actively sink it and go down with the ship. If one is in a small boat that is leaking, one bails it out. Bailing out also refers to freeing someone from jail. Both of these references suggest a reprieve; one from sinking and the other from being locked up while awaiting judgement. In the context of this video, the reprieve recalls the ways dominant canadian mythologies invoke settler innocence to absolve the canadian state and its white settler citizens of complicity with ongoing colonial inequities and the responsibilities of sharing place in a just manner. My bailing in and sinking is an activation that refuses this reprieve.
As mentioned earlier in this text, it was during the Reconsidering Reconciliation Residency that Cheryl told me the story of making kitaskīhkanaw, detailing the extended process of re-creating Woody Guthrie’s song This Land to speak from a Cree worldview. This was months before I was offered the canoe. Once I started to think about the canoe and how I would sink it, I recalled this story. As an Indigenization of a song that itself had previously been depoliticized from its original form, and subsequently instrumentalized as an anthem of settler ownership and belonging on Turtle Island, I felt this reinterpretation, kitaskīhkanaw, and Cheryl, would make profoundly resonant conversational partners to my sinking of the canoe. I approached Cheryl with the idea of her bringing her voice, presence, and the song to this project.
Cheryl:
I had consciously stopped making performative work, first as a performance artist following my participation in the exhibition Speaking in Language Tongues (2009)[7] and then later as a performing singer/songwriter in 2013. My reasoning at the time was multi-fold: as my expanding understanding of the phenomenal capabilities that the sounds of Cree language exemplified and my songwriting ability expanded, these superseded my then ongoing practice of including time/place specificities, various materials, and my moving physical body to elicit a performative lexicon. Then, as my songwriting ‘chops’ developed and I explored how I could contribute to the Indigenous music world, I became aware of how competitive the music world was and how inextricably tied to the ‘entertainment industry’ any creation in that field could be experienced. Also, as a senior artist, I was aware of the huge wave of the next generation of Indigenous artists and – knowing the glass ceiling present in the arts generally – decided to begin a move towards academia and other ways to contribute to the greater, life-affirming wellbeing.
Because, as mentioned previously, so much of my work has been about subverting norms, I decided that any forays into contemporary music would need to continue this mission. For instance, co-writing songs with incarcerated women, men and detained youth, and then managing the publishing of these songs with equal ownership [8] was, on some level, the subversion of how songs are managed and ‘exploited’[9] by music publishers. I also couldn’t parse out the creation of a song from the setting within which I would hope people to experience the sonic expression. This naturally led to creating installations with a song being the sound environment to be experienced. My very first experimental video, 40 Blocks (1994), subverted the music video as a promotional device utilized within the music industry (I first edited the footage, then sang along to the edit, recording my vocal performance acapella in my living room). Singing live on a dock while Leah sank a boat in the bay nearby (when the song had already been recorded and part of an album of songs) was a perfectly good continuation of experimentation and subversion.
Cheryl and Leah:
Aleut scholar Eve Tuck and settler scholar Marcia McKenzie argue for place to be considered through a lens that emphasizes the relevance of Indigenous histories, contemporary presence, situated knowledge, and Indigenous sovereignty while also advocating for attention to the ways Indigenous existence is undermined by settler colonial systems, beliefs, and narratives associated with place. In this sense, they suggest place(s) can be read as multidimensional site(s) of “presence, futurity, imagination, power and knowing” that are relational and aspirational (Tuck and McKenzie 2014, xiv). Given the ways place, and attitudes towards place, inform the ways lives are lived, Founder is impelled by decolonial imperatives that surround questions of place within our current moment. Its setting is not simply a backdrop for our actions. It acts as a launchpad from which to, as Michi Saagig Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson suggests, “disrupt the noise of colonialism” (2017, 200) and affirm Indigenous sovereignty and futurity.
The location is a lake typical of recreational sites across canada, with a shoreline dotted by cottages and beaches, and waters populated by canoes, kayaks, speedboats, and jet-skis. Leah chose it for a number of reasons. In part, because it is the only place with which she has a history that extends throughout her life. It’s also the bay where she learned to canoe. These attachments, and memories that have formed alongside them, implicate her in both the dispossession of Indigenous land and the use of the canoe as rite of passage that connects the white settler to place and wilderness in the lands we now call canada. This place is not named in the video credits so as to draw attention to the way the desires for settler emplacement are perpetuated and entrenched through leisure activities in such sites across the nation.[10] This also highlights the fact that the questions of land and place that lie at the root of decolonization span across the territories of Turtle Island. Cheryl was intrigued by this site when she found out that the lake is one of the deepest lakes in this land now known as canada and, as such, the great chasm that lay deep below the horizon was possibly created when a meteor hit the earth. The singing for the sinking took on many symbolic imaginings. These provided an inner dialogue with imagined and sensed beings and their stories and were important since Cheryl had no familial land connection to the lake or the land around it. In addition to these imaginings, she did what was part of her teachings about customary laws and offered prayer cloths and tobacco to the spirits. Although these elements are not perceptible to the viewer, they are important underpinnings that inform both Cheryl and Leah’s actions and that we are choosing to share.
Figure 3: Leah Decter, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Founder (video still) 2015
In Founder, instead of bailing the canoe out Leah bails it in, filling it with water, bucket by bucket, until it sinks with her in it. This gesture of
bailing in is intended to convey a deliberate act of un/doing, un/learning, or subverting colonial logics – an implicated refusal of both these logics and the moves to innocence that often characterize the colonial reprieve. Cheryl disrupts the rupture caused by the enforced colonial silence with the singing/drumming of kitaskīhkanaw and through her presence. This is a refusal in and of itself manifesting unremitting Indigenous knowledge, presence, survivance, and resistance; a still intact worldview that refuses colonial conceptions of this land. The interventions within Founder can be seen to “create an elsewhere in the here; a present future beyond the imaginative and territorial bounds of colonialism” (Martineau and Ritskes 2014, iv). Cheryl’s actions transform Leah’s and vice versa. In this way, our actions – our respective refusals – form a series of echoes that reverberate through time and place and across cultures and experience.
The objects we use to undertake them also perform subtle conversational echoes. The drum and the pail have associations within nêhiyawêwin. The term for drum, mistikwaskihk, if spelled without the ‘w’ translates as wood pail. It is the ‘w’ that I think implies ‘wēw,’ which means ‘to sound’ the pail-like belonging. The drum and the pail are linked linguistically in this way through their role as belongings, and as containers for their functionality. In addition to these linguistic correlations, resonances of care and utility pass between drummer and bailer. Both Cheryl’s drumstick and Leah’s pail are mended with silver-grey duct tape. Rather than being a design element, this was a result of the need for repair in the short and long term. Demonstrating labour and care, deterioration and repair, these remedies account for the vigilance and commitment beyond purely aesthetic concerns that accompany making difficult
Figure 4, 5, 6: Leah Decter, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Founder (video still) 2015
but necessary change and being-in-relation. On the one hand, the everyday unassuming practicality of duct tape points to the everyday-ness of enacting refusals to colonial dominance and the myth of the colonial “founder.” On the other, it signals the resourcefulness of adapting to continue since ‘time immemorial’ as is reflected in the nēhiyawēwin term “āsay mīna,” which refers to continuing versus recreating. Referencing Kwagu’ł scholar Sarah Hunt and settler scholar Cindy Holmes’ argument for addressing what decolonization might “look and feel like” in everyday life, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson states: They [Holmes and Hunt] ask us to actively take up decolonization in intimate spaces – with friends and family and in our homes – and encourage us to engage in critical conversations within these spaces as a mechanism to see, hear, and think differently. (191)
The everyday-ness embedded in the actions, location, and material objects in Founder are a reminder that, just as settler colonial ways of being are replicated in the everyday, Indigenous and decolonial alternatives must be enacted in the daily actions of our intimate and familiar spaces.
Figure 7: Leah Decter, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Founder (video still) 2015
Ultimately, in Founder, the waters claim the canoe and its iconography as symbols of colonial appropriation and dominance that are inherently tied to colonial conceptions of land as a source of economic and psychological power. The waters also claim the colonial body as an echo of white settler certainty and, in doing so, gesture toward practices of unflinching reckoning and remaining implicated. Cheryl remains on the dock with the song propelled toward the present and future of Indigenous sovereignty – of productive refusal; individual, collective, incommensurable, and otherwise. Likewise, she has not been iconographically cast as a ‘traditional’ Indigenous person, remaining visually ambiguous, contemporary and, as previously discussed, her rendition of the song is not the commodified, pre-recorded version, but lives in real-time responding to the place and actions at hand. Founder works to create “tiny islands of Indigeneity in spite of … settler colonial spatialities” (Simpson 196). Our collective actions are not simply a song and its performative reflection, a sinking and its resonant accompaniment. Rather, they are a conversation of refusals, of doings and undoings that speak back and forth through the air, land, and water. They are un/doings that simultaneously reveal, resist, insist, and extinguish through repairs with duct tape and the relationship between a bucket and a drum, through bubbles floating to the surface of the water and sound waves skipping through the air, through hands that keep the beat and that bail in, and through bodies that insist reverberations of refusal and regeneration into the land.
Figure 8: Leah Decter, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Founder (video still) 2015
We are both makers and thinkers with different experiences, expertise, and perspectives. In collaboration we’ve trusted one another to do our parts, to recognize the echoes and dissonances that inhabit the hyphen – the spaces in between, and to commit to the critical rigour that brings them to life. And as friendships deepen, in the spirit of tāpwēwin – the act of speaking the truth – what we’re willing to lend our voices and actions to becomes ever more layered and meaningful.
Dedication
The residency where we first worked together that we discuss in this text was in Tk’emlúps te Secwe̓pemc territory near the Kamloops Residential School where, as we were beginning to write this text, the remains of 215 children were found in a mass grave. Through IRS survivor testimony and accounts we know that there are thousands of children’s remains yet to be found all over Turtle Island. We want to acknowledge the impact of these profound losses and re-traumatizations, and express our gratitude to the sovereign Indigenous nations and lands where we’ve been welcomed as guests and have been able to come together to collaborate.
Notes
[1] Whose Land website. https://www.whose.
[2] Cheryl: This term has largely become demonized in most contemporary media and discourse to denote an empty gesture. Since I have long used the term in relation to my body of performance work, I reclaim a more fulsome definition in my essay: “Toward an acknowledgement of embodied lexicons of performativity,” in The Routledge Companion to Performance Art, edited by Lucian O’Connor, Graciela Ovejero Postigo, Natalie Loveless, and Jennie Klein. Forthcoming Spring 2025
[3] This series included the symposium and artist residency Reconciliation: Work(s) in Progress (2012), held at Algoma University on the site of the former Shingwauk Indian Residential School, and the Reconsidering Reconciliation Residency (2013), held at Thompson Rivers University, among others.
[4] Cheryl: I have heard many teachings about what constitutes a 49er song and there are many sources online to learn more, though none fully encapsulate nor honour my position as a female Indigenous drummer, singer or composer to be able to cite here.
[5] “The term “pushup” refers to the number of song repetitions.” Hoefnagels A. Northern style powwow music: Musical features and meanings. MUSICultures. 2004 Jun 1.
[6] Leah: Here I further delineate Pekeha scholar Avril Bell’s term “settler imaginary” from Relating Indigenous and Settler Identities: Beyond Domination (2014) in order to highlight the ways white supremacy and settler colonialism function in tandem to privilege white settler subjects, and so as not to flatten the different experiences of variously situated non-Indigenous subjects that result.
[7] The piece was entitled Tongue Tied, and the exhibition curated by Peter Morin, at Western Front, Vancouver BC, Sep 3 – Nov 18, 2009.
[8] Why the Caged Bird Sings is written up as my MDes in Inclusive Design at OCAD University, Toronto, ON. http://openresearch.ocadu.ca/id/eprint/287/
[9] The term is widely used in the field of music publishing.
[10] Leah: My practice has shifted in more recent works in which I am deliberate in naming and acknowledging the sovereignties and territories of distinct Indigenous Nations in which I create works as a decolonial relational and conceptual method.
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Cheryl L’Hirondelle (Cree/Halfbreed; German/Polish) is an interdisciplinary artist, singer/songwriter and critical thinker whose family roots are from Treaty Six – Papaschase First Nation / amiskwaciy wāskahikan (Edmonton) and Kikino Metis Settlement, AB. Her work investigates and articulates a dynamism of nēhiyawin (Cree worldview) in contemporary time-place incorporating Indigenous language(s), music, audio, video, VR, sewn objects, the olfactory, and audience/user participation to create immersive environments towards ‘radical inclusion’ and decolonization. As a songwriter, her compositions focus on nēhiyawēwin (Cree language) and Indigenous sound shapes, contemporary song forms and personal narrative songwriting as methodologies toward survivance. Cheryl was the national animation coordinator of the Minquon Panchayat, a group of Indigenous artists and artists of colour who radically challenged and changed the artist-run centre movement in the early 1990s. Since 2008, she has been co-writing songs with incarcerated women, men, and detained youth in federal prisons, provincial correctional centres, and municipal detention centres. Her work has been acquired for several permanent collections, and she exhibits, performs, and presents nationally and internationally. L’Hirondelle was awarded two imagineNATIVE New Media Awards (2005 and 2006) and two Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards (2006 and 2007, as part of M’Girl) and is a recipient of the 2021 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Art.
Photo credit: Tenille Campbell
Leah Decter is an inter-media/performance artist and scholar who divides her time between Treaty 1 territory and Kjipuktuk/Halifax, where she is a Canada Research Chair in Creative Technologies and an Assistant Professor in Media Arts at NSCAD University. Working from a critical white settler perspective her solo and collaborative art and research practices address and disturb social-spatial dynamics of settler colonial whiteness through ethics of intergenerational accountability and being-in-relation. Decter holds MFA in New Media from Transart Institute and a PhD in Cultural Studies from Queen’s University. She has received numerous grants and awards for her artwork and research, and has exhibited, presented and screened her artwork widely in Canada, and internationally in the US, UK, Germany, Australia, the Netherlands, Malta and India. Decter’s artwork has appeared in publications including Fuse Magazine, Studio, Craft and Design in Canada, C Magazine, Journal of Canadian Art History and Border Crossings. Her recent publications include texts in Qualitative Inquiry and Performance Matters, chapters in Making (Eco)Logical: Locating Canadian Arts in the Environmental Humanities, and, with Carla Taunton, Unsettling Canadian Art History and Settler Responsibilities Towards Decolonisation as well as a special issue of PUBLIC Journal co-edited with Taunton titled “Beyond Unsettling: Methodologies for Decolonizing Futures.”
