Skip to content

Culture camp focuses on art for healing, resistance

Join NORDIK’s Urban Indigenous Youth for Change for a free day-long culture camp March 29
ScreenPrinting
Stock image

NEWS RELEASE
NORDIK INSTITUTE
*************************
NORDIK’s Urban Indigenous Youth for Change (UIYFC) initiative is hosting a free day-long culture camp on March 29, 2019 at Algoma University that will explore themes of Indigenous creativity, and resistance.

“This art and language camp is an opportunity for Indigenous youth to connect with others through a kind of learning that is also a source of social change and resistance,” says Krista Bissiallon, UIYFC Project Lead.
 
Since contact, Indigenous people across Canada have been using art, language, and other forms of expression as intentional and inadvertent tools of resistance. These forms of expression have always been integral to both the velocity and direction at which society experiences social change.
 
From Isaac Murdoch’s Water is Sacred image–a ubiquitous symbol that has become synonymous with water protectors and the fight to preserve that gift for future generations, to Rebecca Belmore’s Vigil, a performance piece that commemorates the lives of missing and murdered Indigenous women who have disappeared from the streets of Vancouver. These works and countless others seek to provoke conversations around history, identity, and accountability.
 
Social change and resistance can be heard not only in the incantations of determined frontline protesters, but also in smaller more intimate acts of reclamation, like offering tobacco to an elder for their guidance with a new word or an Indigenous youth softly introducing themselves in their language for the first time.
 
Whether it’s art that explores ancestry and identity, or language that’s been inherited or slowly pieced back together, these gifts have prevailed in spite of a country whose mandate was (and is) to quarantine, devalue, and eradicate Indigenous people and knowledge.
 
The event begins at 10 a.m. in the Shingwauk Anishinaabe Students' Association lounge (SH 312), with a panel discussion followed by a community question and discussion period.
 
A free lunch will be available for participants from 12 -1 p.m. before moving to the Convergence Centre (on campus), for a printmaking workshop in studio CC124 from 1 - 4 p.m. Participants are welcome to bring in any light crafts they wish to work on as well as any paper, or fabric (clothing, tote bags, etc) they would like to print on.
 
For more information about the culture camp, please contact Lisa Meschino, NORDIK’s Manager of Operations and Communications at [email protected]. To learn more about Urban Indigenous Youth for Change, please visit the website at www.ignitethechange.ca
 
NORDIK Institute is Algoma University’s community based research organization whose goal is to build Northern Ontario’s capacity to conduct research that contributes to social, economic and environmental justice in rural, Indigenous and northern communities and provides evidence for informed policy and decision making.
 
Algoma University was established in 1965, and is located on the former site of the Shingwauk Indian Residential School. Algoma University has a special mission to provide cross-cultural learning between Indigenous communities and other communities in Northern Ontario.

*************************
 
 

What's next?


If you would like to apply to become a Verified reader Verified Commenter, please fill out this form.


Discussion