Leah Decter
     








Founder
2015

perforamcne video
collaboration with Cheryl L’Hirondelle


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 non-Indigenous peoples to undertake critical un/doing and un/learning individually, collectively, and collaboratively towards non-colonial futures in this land.


Produced with the assistance of Video Pool’s Meida Art Production Fund


︎  ︎