Congress 2021 blog edition
By Anurika Onyenso, Third Year General Management Major, University of Alberta, Augustana Campus.
The Canadian Association of University Teachers of German’s “Decolonizing Begins with Spirit” open event webcast featured a powerful presentation, organised around visual stories, by Lana Whiskeyjack, Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, University of Alberta & Multidisciplinary Treaty.
Whiskeyjack confessed that growing up, she was disconnected from her Indigenous Cree Creation stories, ceremonies, songs and laws. Through the residential school era, many Indigenous people were forcefully assimilated into the Canadian culture. According to her, due to the trauma from the Indian residential schools, many of her relatives had wounded spirits and this trauma led some of her relatives to raise their children with the same abuses they had endured. She concluded that the two historical events that had the greatest impact on who she is were:
- Criminalizing of ceremonies, and
- Indian residential schools.
Commencing her main presentation, Whiskeyjack explored the devastating history of Canada and acknowledged that by stealing the land from the Indigenous people, the Government was actually also denying and disconnecting them from their identities and spirits. In recent years however, art has become her way of reconnecting with her spirit and confronting and transcending her trauma.
Unlike the words people define for us, we have the autonomy to create meaning out of visual communications and languages, like art, that speak more than words can express. To her, art has been vital in decolonizing herself to critique the systems that have affected her.
Whiskeyjack spoke on how ceremonies reconnect us to our advocacy and our spirit fire. She identified art as her ceremony as it connects her to a higher intelligence and wisdom.
“Through my art practices of going into ceremony and connecting to my spirit, I’ve been able to see the roots and patterns of how colonization and cultural genocide affected my body”- Lana Whiskeyjack
Workshop Resources:
Artist Website: www.lanawhiskeyjack.ca
Spirit of Language Research: https://www.spiritoflanguage.com
Artist Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYTo8ZoaxIhabJjuF_xBtwg’
Sage and Sweetgrass Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmmOvY9kutX1Vat1ktUoRtA
Lana Gets Her Talk (film, 2017) is available for On-Demand viewing in the Congress open event auditorium.