greetings to all of you joining us today I am Susannah Clark director of the Mahindra Humanity Center and the Morton B Canal professor of Music at Harvard University welcome to the series art activism and climate change which is a collaboration between the Harvard Radcliffe Institute and the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University the series features leading figures in the Arts and Humanities who engage in conversations about their commitment to Art and activism as a means to combat cli
mate change about the origins of their interests and the hopes for the future with so much at stake for our planet the work of artists and activists is is essential in reaching and moving the public scientists policy makers and journalists such cross-disciplinary approaches are Central to both the Mahindra Center and Radcliffe Institute and our multi-year initiatives focused on climate change and environmental justice it is my very great pleasure to introduce our inaugural speaker in the series
Leanne Simpson who will be in conversation today with Tanya Willard Dr Leanne Simpson is a renowned Mississauga anishnabek scholar acclaimed writer musician and activist she is a member of the alderville First Nation she is a versatile artist presenting her activist storytelling in poetry prose song spoken word film and video Leanne is the author of several award-winning books essays and multimedia albums her most recent book is called rehearsals for living it is a book That Grew From A correspo
ndent she had with fellow activists and Scholar Robin Maynard during the covid lockdown their exchange offers a raw uncompromising view of the world we live in though its ethical message is one of Hope For A Different Way Forward published in 2022 it rapidly became a national bestseller in Canada and was named one of the cbc's best Canadian non-fiction books of 2022. Leanne has previously held numerous prestigious positions at McGill the University of Saskatchewan Ryerson University and Arizona
State University she is currently faculty at the deshinto center for research and learning I'm delighted to report that it was the postdoctoral fellows at the Mahendra Center who suggested we invite Dr Simpson to speak on her views on the environment and I have to say what an inspired Choice Leanne Simpson will be joined in conversation today by Professor Tanya Willard who is a multi-disciplinary artist graphic designer and curator Tanya Willard is from the sequois nation her work Blends traditi
onal indigenous Arts practices with contemporary thought and it has featured in numerous exhibitions across Canada including a solo exhibition claiming space her work touches on a number of topics but she has for example explored collaborations between nature and Technology highlighting the history of the land and water and natural and the natural movement of air one such installation liberation of the Chinook wind uses technology to translate wind into poetry Tanya Willard is an assistant profe
ssor in the faculty of creative and critical studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan today's event will proceed as follows we will first hear from Leanne who will then be joined by Tanya who will provide an artistic response and will engage in conversation with Leanne their conversation will then flow into the audience q a we encourage those watching Zoom to use the Q a feature to submit your questions at any time during the program and the speakers will address as many questions
as they can in the time that we have now before I turn things over to Leanne I would like to take a moment to acknowledge our donors the Mahindra Humanities Center gratefully acknowledges funding from the office of the vice Provost for climate and sustainability and the Heart Harvard Radcliffe Institute gratefully acknowledges the Ethel and David Jackson fund uh for the future climate your generosity keeps our programming free and open to the public and we thank you sincerely and with that it is
my real honor great pleasure to give the virtual floor to Leanne Simpson thank you for joining us regretch thank you so much for that kind introduction um anikinawaya get the garbage um make words for inviting me to visit with you all today thank you all for coming um English to Tanya Willard for sharing her artistic practice and creative Brilliance with us as well um and a shout out to those postdoctoral fellows who who suggested me and got me here to visit with you today um I'm in Michigan or
Ojibwe and I'm a band member of alderville first nation in our territory is roughly the North Shore of of Lake Ontario um I'm coming to you from Peterborough Ontario in Canada today which is a small City in my territory between Toronto and Ottawa I'm a writer and I'm an academic and I'm a musician and I wanted to start today by sharing well just a tiny bit about these these four pieces that I've been um working on and and I released during the pandemic um started from 2020 to 2022 because they
all in in different ways address the themes of of this series um around art activism and climate change the first is a musical project called the theory of ice it's a record of eight songs that Chronicle the freezing in the melting of a lake the dying of the okay Glacier in Iceland uh and the consequences of melting permafrost in the northern part of Canada alongside a cover of a song called I pity the country by Willie Dunn who was a migoma activist and musician active in the late 1960s and 197
0s so you can look at that album up on your your streaming services or by CDs and vinyl through through band camp there are a series of four short films that you can find on on my website and on YouTube um that correspond to to the music One by Sandra Brewster another By Carolyn Monet uh astonajuk and Amanda strong there's a fifth short film based on the epicity the country coming this year later in the year by Lisa Jackson um we also have a live show where I play the album with my bands is a no
vel um that explores National based forms of life and world making in the faith of um the deaf and destruction of of colonialism um and and climate change it's available in the US through the University of Minnesota press a short history of the blockade is a short book a sort of meditation on the wisdom of beavers within a nation of a thought and the generative world-making life affirming practices of beaver dams and blockades as a political economy pushing it back against things like oil and ga
s pipelines deforestation and climate change and then as you heard about in the introduction rehearsals for living which is published by Haymarket in the U.S is a series of letters of thinking alongside Robin Maynard and thinking through black and Indigenous land-based politics under the interlocking crises of pandemic and climate change colonialism and anti-blackness the common threads of all of these works is a refusal of racial capitalism dispossession the nation states heteropatriarchy white
supremacy all of the structures um that go into to that um and have brought us to this kind of present moment of climate apocalypse in my life I use academics and artistic practice and organizing as a sort of generative refusal of these foundations while dreaming and visioning and making otherwise um and in my case those that otherwise is is an addition of our worlds today I wanted to share with you some new work um that I haven't shared before actually from a writing project um tentatively ent
itled theory of water where I ask um the question what does it mean to listen to water and so this I'm going to share two excerpts from that project and this is the first so if we could move on to slide two that would be amazing and the title of this excerpt is listening in our present moment it starts with a quote by the writer Dion brand who I think is the most important Canadian writer probably one of the most important writers in North America right now from her epic poem called nomenclature
which was released this year and that quote is I do not have day and I do not have Moonlight I do not believe in time I do believe in water in 1991 Rebecca Belmore made a two meter wide wooden megaphone in response to the so-called okaquriosis a mohawk Uprising near Montreal to defend their sacred Pines in a burial ground from becoming an 18-hole Golf Course Belmore wanted people to address the land directly much like our ancestors had and to experience political protests as poetic action over
the next few years Bellmore traveled with the piece setting it up on reserves shorelines sacred places and sights of resistance along the way she often slept beside it in her van in the nishina bay Moon the peace was called Umi umawa Moen it's translated into English as speaking to their mother and as she traveled the piece became an instrument invoking a sort of gathering space for indigenous peoples to amplify our voices and speak directly to the land our old people bellmore's in mind had and
have an intimate relationship with the land and the water they spoke to the sun in the mornings and the moon at night as their cherished relatives they visited with the water lilies and Labrador tea before they picked them to make medicine they prayed to the ones that had passed on to the spirit world and they prayed to the Spiritual Beings that lived in their worlds they spoke with and dreamed of beavers and muskrats before they harvested them they made offerings to the Whitefish before setting
Nets and to the lakes and the rivers for safe Passage they were in constant dialogue with the living things that made up their world which is saying something because inishnabe are not known as chatty people many anishinaabe still do this while harvesting and making medicines or in ceremony for many of us the sound waves of our voices vibrations made from the instrument of the body are an affecting force in the universe it is within this context that I understand speaking to their mother at fir
st bummer installed the piece on the land outside of the gallery outside of the confines of the so-called white box and into the network of living things that contain the potentiality of indigenous peoples in this way the performance installation became a gathering site a communal meaning making project in a space that generates knowledge speaking to their mother placed bodies in relation to land and water and asked us to relate through sound and listening in a conversation with nishanaba curato
r Wanda Nana bush in 2014 Belmore said that her strategy of bringing a conceptual artwork in the form of a functional tool to the people and asking them to speak directly to the land itself as we have always done strengthened her understanding of the role of the artist the artist The Maker the Visionary has always been part of who we are Bellmore says looking back at the photographs and the videos from the first journeys of speaking to our mother I get a strong sense of how the piece brought peo
ple together at Fort William First Nation facing Thunder Bay we're facing Lake Superior near Thunder Bay Ontario and at the Wiggins Bay blockade in Northern Saskatchewan the peace is surrounded by friends and family children and Elders there are fires and visiting the sharing of food and stories and people was happening as people took turns speaking through the megaphone people were readily embracing the peeps speaking their hearts and Minds their bodies and voices becoming the peace and the mul
tiple meanings are generated searching the internet there are only a few recordings of what indigenous people said into the megaphone Looking Back Now this is a lovely part possibly because speaking to their mother was born in the 1990s where we didn't record everything all the time on our phones the thousands of conversations were private and between the speakers it was gathered at the time in the universe rehearsed unrehearsed in English in initial number one in song and prayer the things that
were said and the things that were unsaid were a demo dematic accounting of Lies a collective accounting of a present moment that the point of the piece was not just the content of the speeches or even the megaphone itself as a piece of conceptual art but that the meaning was made through the practice of speaking and listening and through traveling the land bringing people together to engage in the practice of speaking and listening to non-human forms of life on reserves in towns in cities and
at sites of indigenous land reclamation when I think of that piece now I think of the iconic photo of it on our sacred nimkiwaji under the care of Fort Williams first nation in Thunder Bay it was installed facing Lake Superior below where the Thunderbirds nest I imagine what it would have been like that day The Laughing The Joy the sense of being present I remember my own kids being frightened of their own voices as speaking to their mother Amplified them into the already scary white box gallery
of the National Gallery in Ottawa reminding us all that day of how out of place speaking to their mother is in a gallery I think of the birch bark moose cone collars our Hunters used in the fall to call in the moose that this piece enlarges and the circumstances that led balmor to be compelled to build a megaphone so that our ancestors and our relatives could hear our voices over the noise of capitalism noise which has only become louder and more totalizing since the 1990s again there is a nati
onal day frame to this that is interesting to me our ancestors spoke to their ancestors through the sound of Rushing Water it's one of the many reasons that Hydro dams interpretive centers and lift locks are so irritating to us because they close off channels of communication the sound of rusting water is a sort of portal to another world the waves of energy where human beings get altered where hearing gets altered are places where Spiritual Beings lived or where certain events happened those so
unds of water moving were also normalized so that the idea that Belmar would have to stop us remind us and amplify those sounds so we could hear them would be startling to them we can move on to the next slide while the relevance of speaking to their mother still resonates today the work gave birth to siblings in 2017 in a series called way of sound revisiting and inverting the concept of the megaphone Bellmore mid-4 sculptures varying in shape and form to amplify the sound of water and Shorelin
e the sculptures were installed in Banff Alberta at grossmore National Park in Newfoundland and then initial by territory at Pakistan and Georgian Bay instead of inviting us to speak though balmore was asking us to listen next slide wave sound is an invitation to gather at the shore to sit down and to use our bodies to hear wind Rock sand maybe even mosquitoes and the durational rhythm of waves I don't look at wave sound although I could because it is aesthetically stunning instead I become enma
tched in wave sound placing my body on the land to quiet and to listen beside nibby to listen through nibby or water to listen with nibby a being that changes form from liquid to solid to gas it travels the sky world the underground and from inside and outside of my body an ancient formation of molecules that has been the same since the beginning of this world a fugitive that erodes and escapes containment and one that we simply cannot live without quiet I listen next slide through these rehears
als wave sound amplifies the voices of water to cut through the noise of colonialism it works in concert with my great-grandparents praying and carrying water and with those yet to be born to become a practice together with my cochlea and auditory nerves my mind my heart wave sound transforms from instrument to belonging as water or nibby Bellmore and all of the life she has gathered work alongside me to generate meaning and Inspire new worlds next slide and so I take bellmore's invitation serio
usly after three years of pandemic Amplified fascism Freedom convoys Diane glaciers misdiagnoses police killings children alone in cages at Borders open air prisons for entire peoples all in the name of racial capitalism I'm asking myself what does it mean to as Belmore asked us listen to water what does it mean to as brand asks us to believe in water the final piece I'm going to share today is called Pinery Road and Concession 11. and it was originally written for a gathering to celebrate Dion
Brand's 20th anniversary of the book that's pictured here mopped to the door of no return and you should all look up that Gathering online because it's just this fantastic collection of of artists and writers and thinkers responding in a very very generous way to to the 20th anniversary of that book Pinery Road and Concession 11 is a name of one of the chapters in that book and it's a place where 25 years ago Dion's car broke down that place is my territory and so I went there and I installed a
surveillance camera for 24 hours to record the activity at this corner and then I wrote a piece to go over that video and you can you can find that at the conference website along with all the other amazing offerings foreign Shades of Gray and I'm dressed in seven shades of sky the basket is in the back seat Loosely wrapped in an opaque plastic garbage bag waiting for its ride home it's different than the other baskets I've seen in my life it carries a darker color it's also bigger with fancier
detailing I think it's made of black ash Papa Gigan that we can barely find around here nowadays the old ones used to harvest a tree canoe it back to the reserve and then pound the log until the annual rings would separate into splints the splints were woven together into baskets I imagine the fancier ones were sold to white folks and the mediocre ones were kept around our tents and shacks and cabins to keep our belongings next slide this basket is a body made out of the years of Baba gigan's li
fe each of those annual rings records growth and weather each one of those orbits a document of light heat water and nourishment I think of who might have harvested the tree and paddled it back to the community I think of who might have done the pounding to make the splints I think of the women who wove those years into something else I think of the woman that paddled her canoe on Shimon Lake going from Cottage to Cottage selling and trading her hours for clothes and food for her family we leave
the city driving through Farmland speckled with conservative and people's parties of Canada election signs when we turn onto the reserve and across the border every telephone pole is wrapped in red cloth I tell the basket this is because one of their young women was recently murdered by her white boyfriend the one that loved catching frogs we passed wooden cutouts at children dressed in pure love with the words quote every child matters unquote that we're allowed to be serious and sad now withi
n reason the one that ran away from school and into the bush followed Jim Collins and Madden around the one that didn't bring lunch to the bush instead eating seagulls and loon eggs water snakes and frogs porcupine and squirrels muskrats and turtles I wonder if Papa Gigan makik is looking out the window for the relatives they will be hard to find much of the black ash was cleared by colonizers for farming and settlement and the remaining are under the threat of the emerald ash borer an invasive
Beetle who came to North America inside packaging and wooden crates we stop at the old man's house beside the dump but he isn't home I use this Outhouse and I'm Overjoyed when I find the empty peanut butter jar with half a roll of toilet paper inside back on the road we pass a lonely orange election sign as we pull into the cultural center the curator meets us and through face masks I taught retell the story of the 80 or so years traveled from an anishinaabe woman in a canoe on the shoreline to
a white lady's Cottage on Shimon Lake to a house in my birthplace to my parents house and then my sister's house in Toronto to my house in Peterborough and now here in a quiet voice the curator says welcome home we'll sew the basket to the elders we'll show it to the advisory Circle they might be able to tell who it belongs to by the signature in the style make which for bringing this home I stopped for cheap gas a paper map Bad Coffee there are no paper mats it's September the 2nd September dur
ing the pandemic and we've now been charged with the task of living with the virus a code for the arithmetic that allows some of us to live without carrying the burden of those that succumb a calculation of who we will sacrifice to line the pockets of those with the money there's heavy grief in the air there is a turn in the light as the first cool air marks the time of year when they stole the kids where they still take the kids to remake them into people with pockets lined with money summer mi
ght have held space for running and laughing and shrieking around but there is no space for that in the fall there is no space for the sons of children after I leave the reserve instead of going back to the city I head in the opposite direction past Miss waziri which used to be called River in 1993 some of the elders are curved like First Nation led by Gladys Taylor launched a complaint to the Ontario Geographic's name board to have the name of the River changed back to its original name misqua
zibi meaning Red River I think this will be the only time today I see my language next is nogi's Creek it is littered with ice cream stores and paddle board rental shops campers and cottage none of these people will know that Chief nogi was the chief of curve like First Nation from 1830 to 1848. he was exiled from the reserve to this place by the Indian agent and the missionaries there was no real hardship for him gnocchi's Creek was a beautiful place where he and his family could live the good
life away from the surveillance of Indian agents and God I squint to see The Good Life as I turn onto the burnt River Road I inhabit a familiar sense of dread can I have the next slide please thank you oh yes this is Michi sagic land and I'm grateful I'm in a car that is working well with doors and locks and a cell phone I passed re-election signs I passed the sign for the Somerville track land that was purchased by the county of Victoria in 1928 the land was cleared for agricultural use by sett
lers but then abandoned when it wasn't fertile enough red white and Scott's Pines were planted the plantation is managed by the ministry of Natural Resources the trees are planted Coast together in rows like corn they are the wrong species for this place they form a forest that doesn't have any parents or language because there is only one kind of tree and they are all exactly the same age they were oh they were only children and they grew up as best they could I sit in its wits anishinaabe carr
ied travel Roots around in their heads passed down and in an East-West orientation rather than enough north south orientation focused on creeks and streams and rivers and lakes and portages these Maps were stories upon stories of each time they had traveled the route of each time their parents and grandparents had traveled those same rivers and lakes they were stories of Storms and hard times of meetups and good luck the bends and riffles mnemonic devices from Memories the smell and sounds remin
ders each Journey another ring to travel one had to float paddle themselves with rivers and lakes doing the carrying every destination was Temporary Home was always Temporary Home was always shared home always a shared practice homelessness always a shared practice meaning the Earth the land a book a letter a document a paper when the colonizers came they were always lost because they refused to live within the network of the living they needed a book a letter a document a compass a paper a poli
cy a law an accounting so they could build fences and put up signs that say no trespassing and private property I am getting close to why I came dread is filling up my stomach with sharpness my dread of course is not in the same register as Dion Brandt's when she writes quote this place fills me with a sense of dread but also a sense of mystery unquote our histories and diasporas are different what brought her to this place and now me decades later are both different and entwined my dread is co-
mingled with shame I should feel comfortable here I should feel connected and like I belong I should be stronger than my fear of these landowners I should insert myself because I don't see myself I should know the name of burnt River in my language I should want to live here in a cabin and write books and do ceremony and top maple trees I should and I don't sometimes the land defeats you just the sum of it I'm old enough to know that coming here and retracing will not likely lead to finding what
ever it is I'm looking for I'm old enough to know that when I reach Pinery Road and Concession 11 there won't be much of anything I am old enough to know that I won't find home but we all might feel a little less alone make watch and um Tanya thank you so much Leanne Cook's Jam that was an amazing offering thank you for that I wanted to start us out with this um this discussion with reading a poem from a project that you know that's actually up in your home territories and so I'm going to read t
hat poem and then I'm going to tell others a bit about that project to lead into our maybe our first uh foray into some discussion I'm so pleased to be here with all of you and with Leanne uh quickly I'm Tanya Willard I'm from the sukama nation as introduced and I'm joining you from my home territories in sofa mahulu and I have a poem I'm going to read called habitat violations and it was generated by the wind on October 11th in 2022. spiritual ties to provide extremely valuable abandoned curren
tly free errors and omissions nature is better while using ancestors can continue environmental that can inform flood Plains concentrations of wetlands are worth measure concentrations of our vision modern day intimate restoration relationship its ability ownership of water flows of ecological Services millions of dollars Capital plan heavily industrialized it is The Giver of Life sub-watershed scales climate change sacrificing and one of the reasons I chose to show this poem was I think it was
maybe the first time that I noticed that climate change had been included in the poem structure uh and this work this uh series of poems is an artwork called The Liberation of the Chinook wind and it asserts indigenous presence and claims to water um quoting specifically from the mississaugas of the new credit River claim to water um liberation of the Chinook wind conceptualizes points of overlap between indigenous Nations settlers uninvited guests and non-human beings by exploring the entangled
histories of Chinook language Chinook wind and Chinook salmon and the Chinook wind is an animate being in sequama creation story and in this project I wanted to evoke the wins agency through poems that are generated through live weather data and so that was the weather on October 11 2022 that um generated that poem from a series of other documents um you refer in your work uh to co-authorship um co-authorship of water snow other beings uh in sharing the wind poem I wanted to get at something ab
out the innate beingness of elements and non-human relations people use terms like personification and animate belief that are used with a very anthropological frame but I don't think they really reach the core of a kind of philosophy of deep relationality and I wanted to talk with you a bit about when you approach this type of writing that you're attributing as a collaboration how do you start recognizing and acknowledging that collaboration and what does that mean to you in your practice thank
you for that for that poem and and sharing that peace and that question [Music] I guess I think for me I start within Anish nav I thought and um we we make the world through this this series of of intimate and cascading um relationships so I sort of think of the world as a network of relationships and when I approach my life like that um and engage I think a lot of in lots of of different kinds of land-based practice you notice the living elements around you whether that's um for right now for
me it's it's ice and and snow um and I see sort of the Bush and our word for bushes no booming as a as a gathering space of plants Nations and animal nations of air and soil and insects and two-legged and birds all figuring out how to live in a networked sort of reality together with the purpose of bringing forth more life so I think it's not just that my art or my my academic practice is a collaboration with these beings in the natural world I feel like I'm made up of of my relationships with t
hese um these non-human beings and I'm constantly in conversation and I'm constantly um in relationship with them so I think it's sort of an acknowledgment of of that um that way of thinking yeah it's such a beautiful way to think of ourselves um against a kind of individualism and that we are these ecologies and I see that in your kind of in your collaborative work and land-based work and I'm thinking about that word as that word ecology as as directly a method that we might use also in writing
and creative action uh you mentioned you talked about Rebecca belmore's work and the use of creative action as as uh political you know proposal um and I wonder if you might talk about the uh the ways in which the political motivations the desire to make change uh inform the focus of some of your work I wanted to start that my talk today with with that speaking to their mother piece because it was directly related to the Oka crisis and for I know that um that we're both in Canada and the Oka cr
isis is fairly well known here certainly among people our age but if you if you're if it's not familiar to you it's it's good to look that up because it was this um this large mobilization by Mohawk people near the city of Montreal in the summer of 1991. um to protect uh their sacred a sacred area that contained a burial ground and resulted in a large mobilization of police and then 400 soldiers from the Canadian Armed Forces and of course we've seen Echoes of this with um the anti-pipeline prot
ests in in South Dakota um and you know the the organizing that we're seeing in in Hawaii around Mauna Kea so there's lots and lots of of Echoes of this but um Rebecca's and I I guess would have been Rebecca's a bit older than me but I was an undergrad I was in my first year of University when this happened and so this um and then along with um the Rodney King um riots in the U.S the next year were these political um I would say some of the greatest kind of political education of my life and to
see Rebecca take that um that experience that we were living through and watching and and participating in Dion brand actually was also uh participating as an ally and supporting the Mohawks during that that crisis and then um and making this megaphone and touring it across and then having another kind of echo of it in wave sound but this time um kind of inverting it and instead of speaking we're listening and that was interesting to me because of of this 25 years that have passed and here we ar
e um now we're old and we have all of the same issues all of the predictions that our elders were making about climate change and about what happens when you treat our relatives as resources and you hoard masses of greed have come true we're in this situation where we're feeling the impacts of of climate change on a on a weekly if not daily basis and um it made me stop and sort of and sort of think so I think for me um there are lots of different sites of of knowledge generation there's a lot of
gender knowledge generation coming from organizing there's lots of knowledge generation coming from art and creative practice and artistic practice there's knowledge generation coming from the academy there's knowledge generation coming from community and we need sort of all of this in our study as indigenous people and in our world making because we actually don't have to build the world Anew we have to figure out how to live within it um and within this network that's continually bringing for
th more life yeah and I think it's important to remind people here that all that um criminalizing of people who are doing that work is continuing today that many people in my home communities are facing criminal sentences for their stand against pipelines that go throughout Indian Country um and uh you know and certainly we've seen the kinds of racial violence continue uh in America and so those things are so present um but within your work there's also this entirely different world view that in
some ways comes from anishnabe Moen in some ways comes from your your beautiful poetic way of working but I'm thinking about the ways in indigenous languages as well as sometimes in English that we are refer to land after different parts of the body like the mouse or the head of a river for example which is actually quite similar in my language anyway so what makes Gene uh and you've given a lot of this um theory of thinking through mapping in your work in your work mapping as indeterminate map
ping as a story or a song um regarding the cycles of the moon on a turtle's back layers of time and tree rings in these kinds of deep geological relations uh and this linguistic determination of like seeing something as animate or inanimate is pretty different between indigenous languages and English and you mention in your in your presentation the basket as a body as animate in some way associated with the tree from which its components were harvested and you take us on this journey with that b
asket thinking through uh even its Harvest and maybe what offering or prayers were given and in what ways do you use language or I see you using language in your writing and it's really this deep resistance and reciprocity but also uh in my perspective it shares so much love and joy and I wondered if you wanted to talk about um your use of language in in your and your practice I'll just remind people too that next we'll take some questions from the audience yeah so take those questions into the
Q a function and we'll get to as many as we can so I mean when I think of my ancestors they got up every morning and they made things they made their their political systems they made their clothing their transportation their food networks their spirituality they were constantly making they were constantly reenacting and aligning themselves with our origin stories and that's reflected in our language through um the fact that most of our language is verbs there's a lot of motion there's a lot of
kinetics there's a lot of collaboration with different forms of life in making things and so the basket to me um was something that I was essentially repatriating it had come to my family because they knew we were an ishnabe it come it had come to us from a white family they knew that it came from shimong Lake and I was interested in it because we don't have very many black ash trees because of climate change and when I was speaking to Elders about how that basket was made the pounding of those
rings made me think of mapping in quite a different way because the maps that we know that are on our phone I was gonna say in our glove compartments of our cars but that would really be dating me the maps that we have that are on our phones are sort of a record of dispossession their record of racial capitalism they're a record of of land as property and um anishinaabe people and the land itself has these records and embodiment of things like weather recorded on the rings of a tree and then ani
shinaabe women you know harvested that tree pounded the tree into the Rings and then wove this belonging um so a lot of times when I'm looking around my house I'm seeing kind of you know baskets from Ikea um things that that hold my belongings that are products that I've bought that are Commodities that are property and when I think of this map I think of it as a hub of a whole bunch of different relationships it's a code almost when you start to break down of all of these different practices it
's a map of all these different practices and it feels like a belonging to me it feels like something that I'm related to and that was something um that became really precious to me and was really intimate to me and it represents what climate change is taking from me so it's not just the weather it's this deep um sense of attachment and belonging and love and knowledge practices that for Generations have built particular kinds of Worlds and so when I think of Art and climate change and activism
these are the kinds of things I'm thinking of I'm thinking of the Sugar Bush has been so important in my work and it is so kind of threatened right now um at this present moment thank you I often think I work in basketry in different ways and I often think of our ancestors maybe didn't have USB sticks but they had baskets that contain a lot of knowledge we're going to move into some time to take questions from the audience so people who want to use the Q a function we're not going to be able to
ask all of your questions um but we'll start out with uh with some here um Leanne so these are coming from the audience uh many thank yous and many accolades here firstly but one question is um one person was intrigued by the way you talked about sometimes the land defeats you and they were wondering if you could speak more about the relationship you have to ancestral homelands and how that's impacted by historical and ongoing forms of colonization um which you have done but in this particular p
hrase on sometimes the land defeats you if you could expand on that so the footnote for that is that that line comes from a line in the chapter um Pinery wrote in concession 11 by Dion Brandt sometimes the land just defeats you and so I'm using it here in this poem as an echo and it's hitting in a different register and what's defeating me isn't necessarily the land it's the dispossession of the land and this this moment so here is Dion brand a black writer um her car is broken down in this midd
le of nowhere in this rural part of of Ontario 25 years ago and then here's me in my territory in my homeland in the space and I'm supposed to feel the most connected and alive and safe at this same corner feeling something that's different than Dion was writing about but something that is related and so I think that I struggle in my territory um because it's so close to the city of Toronto because it has been so urbanized there's so much Farmland there's so little Bush I struggled to maintain c
onnection to it um and I have to work very very hard to um find that beauty and find that knowledge and find I guess that inspiration find that generative energy I find that that's very very meaningful work but sometimes I sit in its width sometimes the land defeats defeats me Thank You Leon and you're touching on another question that's coming up in the Q a uh that I'll maybe pose as this uh idea of Home an idea of home as sometimes rooted in our territories sometimes not that uh the uh the bas
ics of belonging and there's lots of questions here and and stories about the you know unaffordability of uh of housing of homes of the nature of how to relate to home uh whether that be in a kind of geographic sense people are all also talking about the ways in which rivers are flowing East-West yet we have this other spatial um geographies that we live by so mapping at home are really present for a lot of people in the Q a and maybe you can talk a bit more about that sense of belonging through
through something more than a paper map yeah so um Christy Belcourt has a beautiful painting of a map of an old anishinaabe map and it's called facing west and so if people Google that you'll be able to see the map it looks it looks like a spine and it's a map because anishinaabe people had orientations of our Maps were East-West it's a map from Thunder Bay going west towards Winnipeg through the Lakes um through traveling on water through having this sort of different perspective and so I thin
k one of the themes in a lot of my work is around belonging and around home and around um how do you live in the city and feel connected how do you feel connected and be an ishnabe when you can't afford to buy land that's Waterfront when you can't afford to buy land that's um that's in your territory when you can't afford to live in your territory when you're you're forced to to live in a city for so you can feed your family um and and sort of looks at and celebrates I think all of the beautiful
ways that indigenous people um live our ethics and our stories and our life ways anyway in spite of and despite of dispossession and colonialism and violence and celebrates that and kind of grows that because I think that that's some it's it's in many ways some kind of miracle that I'm here and that you're here and that our ancestors were able to get us here with um the the gifts and the skills that we have um in spite of of four centuries of of the State trying to prevent that from happening y
eah absolutely and I think gratitude and respect for those struggles before and what continues today are so um so critical for us for everyone really at this point I'm going to share a comment here and then we'll lead into some of the final questions that we have time for so if anybody else has a question please use the Q a uh but beautiful comment I'm also noticing people young people in the chat who are really active in combating climate change and different kinds of community integrated ways
and so I want to recognize them in the Q a I'm not going to get to all the questions but recognize that uh that that passion young people have for changing our world and World building is so important but here's a lovely uh comment from coming from Qualicum uh at Qualicum in BC uh just yesterday I was out walking along the little Qualicum River and a large fallen tree was in the water and on the land and I held my ear on the tree and you could hear and feel the water beautiful big question of th
at I love the way that in nupemeng you also leave space for reflection we're so used to filling space um in maybe in writing and in speech and I just think that the way that you masterfully direct us to spend time uh to listen and to fill a space with not only our own words but with thoughts and gratitude is is so important in the discussion I think that um I've learned a lot um from from black feminists around space and around listening I'm thinking of of Ruth Wilson Gilmore and her her idea th
at we have to change everything um and I think that can be overwhelming but it can also be such a beautiful sight of of generative imaginings otherwise and um I think that I love sort of that I love leaving space so that we can take this sort of intimate Networks and then follow them and follow the threads in an international and planetary sense because I think that International sort of solidarity piece becomes really really important when we're starting to think about something that's planetar
y like climate change and I think that um I think that that work of the kamaki river Collective um and and those black feminists sort of knew that um you know in the 70s and the 80s and uh that's something that I think I've thought a lot about um through rehearsals for a living and um it's something that I think that that space gives us time to build relationships with other anti-colonial movements and and other communities outside of our own experience which I think is a I think it's going to p
rove to be to be key in all of this work yeah and I'm speaking to that there's some offers of access to black ash in the Q a from someone who's south of curb Lake and maybe that's the kind of networks we need to imagine and enact uh that you're proposing uh here uh I will share one other we have time for one last question and so I'm going to share that um this uh this question is asking you to speak to the difference if any in me in the meaning of listening to water and belief in water between d
ifferent states of water liquid in rivers lakes the sea clouds puddles versus maybe water as those different states solid as ice snow hail stones gas in terms of steam so to speak to a little bit more in terms of thinking through those States and if there are differences or subtleties in how we listen and enact an exchange with water in those different forms so that's a great question and of course I do not know the answer to that to that question and I think um I wanted to kind of position the
Dion brand quote about believing in water alongside the Rebecca Belmore quote and practice of listening to water for this very reason for that for that reason um because I wanted to ask that question you know what's the difference is there a difference what does it mean what do you learn when you listen to water because water is this planetary cycle that has been present since the beginning of this world that we're all utterly dependent upon that the life of the planet is dependent upon it's thi
s beautiful complex cycle and Network and then there's all this transformation that happens with water um from States but I'm a solid to a gas to a liquid then there's water that's inside me there's water that's connecting me through breath which I thought a lot about during the height of the covid-19 pandemic when we were all infecting each other um then there's the the sort of our first environment um water there's that water and then there's all the kind of relationships that that tie into to
that so water became something that that was um I spent a lot of time in my the early parts of my career thinking about land and I'm now thinking a lot about water and what I can learn from water and what I hear from water the songs of water the trans the transformative nature of water the intimate parts of water how I can I can follow sort of water from my territory um Downs through the Great Lakes outs through the St Lawrence River to the Atlantic Ocean I know nothing about the ocean it's dow
n into the Caribbean it's this connector and so I don't know what the answer is but I am interested in collaborating and thinking through with a whole bunch of different kinds of people and being and paying attention to to those cycles and those transformations as sort of a practice of living and as a study thank you so much Leanne I think you're leaving with us with a prompt um this prompt to to look further to listen uh to this space uh in the prompt looking at Rebecca belmore's work and Dion
Brands writing and to think through what the possibilities are for ourselves and recognizing those subtleties so I really want to thank you for your sharing today for all that you've offered and I'd like to bring back um Susanna with us uh who's here to offer closing remarks thank you cook stem well thank you what's such a splendid hour I'm so appreciative to to both of you and I want to thank Leanne for her insightful and moving presentation and both Leanne and and Tanya for your wonderful conv
ersation and indeed to our audience for uh your terrific uh questions uh we hope that uh uh everyone on June on Zoom that you'll join us next week uh Tuesday January uh 24th at 4 P.M eastern time for the second program in this series on Art activism and climate change which is co-sponsored by the Mahindra Humanity Center and the uh Harvard Radcliffe Institute next week's program with Will feature Angelique kidjo in conversation with Vijay ire today's program has been recorded and it will be post
ed on the Radcliffe website in about a week there's so much to take in from this hour I'm sure we will all want to watch it again for information about upcoming Radcliffe programs and to see videos of past events please visit the website radcliff.harvard.edu and for further information about programs at the Mahindra Humanity Center we also encourage you to go to our website at mahindrahumanities.fas.harvard.edu so thank you once again to Leanne and Tanya that was terrific and I also want to than
k all of you who are on Zoom for joining us today and please everyone Take Good Care thank you
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