This project is about strengthening my sense of self, having time and space to travel to where I’m from as the visibly queer person I am today, and reconnecting to these lands to see my place in them. I feel this is a story and experience that is not unique but not often shared. The intersections of queerness and Indigeneity is complicated and deserves to be investigated and shared.
I’m the first of my family to graduate high school, graduate university with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, and the first to approach the painful process of healing. Being an Indigenous artist feels like a gift to not only process and heal but also to share that with my relatives and relations who don’t have the capacity, language, or ability.
I feel more connected to land than to people or community because my brain was originally wired to survive the harm from the people around me, not be held or loved by them. This is a wound I am actively challenging and working on, to allow trust of others, to allow myself to feel love without the ache of worry for bad to come.
The land has held me in all these years of feeling lost and alone. It is with the wind, river, and the birds that I feel most connected, and they help ground me when everything is overwhelming chaos.
Now that these places (Fort St John, BC and Grande Prairie, AB) that did hold me are literally on fire, I’m desperate to muster up the courage and return as the person that I’ve become, this post-top surgery Indigiqueer artist who has the bravery to be seen and create and share my story after all of this erasure and silence.
Grande Prairie, Alberta
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Section 2