2015
performance video
running time: 8:19
collaboration with Cheryl L’Hirondelle
(clip)
Founder: Noun- a person who establishes an institution or settlement. Verb- (of a ship) fill with water and sink. (of a plan or undertaking) fail or break down.
From a dock on a lake in the canadian shield - cottage country in Treaty Three territory - Cheryl L’Hirondelle sings ‘kitaskihkanaw,’ a song, inspired by Woody Guthrie’s ‘This Land Is Your Land,’ that foregrounds understandings of this land from a Cree worldview. Out in the bay, Leah Decter bails in a Sportspal canoe, an act that gestures towards both implicit complicity and willful subversion. These actions, in conversation, honour a continuum of resistance and survivance, highlighting an imperative for Indigenous and settler peoples to undertake critical un/doing and un/learning individually, collectively, collaboratively and incommensurably towards non-colonial futures in this land.
Produced with the assistance of Video Pool’s Meida Art Production Fund
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