“While an almost eerie constant wind blows, underscoring the confluence and friction of settler society while ceremony is stood back up again and happening just across the river.” “This video installation is entirely a way to transmute knowledge while simultaneously forcing an interruption and juxtaposes a city coming to life in the morning as we hear sirens and trains and geese and ravens,” he says. McNeil- Seymour offers salmon bones wrapped up in a cedar bundle, and lays them on the frozen shoreline by the rushing river in order to call the salmon back, and in turn, bring Two-Spirits home. Indigenous performers including: Danger, Raymonde Lisa Bourque-Bearskin, Aunty Colleen Seymore, Skullhemp and Stkmastik and special guest Miss Quanah (Style) Napoleon, begin the ceremony by singing a Secwepemc honour song to the river. I fight to save what I love which is the water and the salmon because we are salmon people, but also in that fight I am reclaiming accepted spaces for Two-Spirit people.”Įdited by Never Apart’s Veronique Mystique, two screens project aerial video winter footage of Tk’emlups (Kamloops, BC). “Water is medicine and medicine is water. Murdoch’s iconic water protect prints feature a silhouette of an Indigenous figure with a bright red beating heart, and text that reads : Water is Sacred No Pipelines! While these prints contrast the exhibition’s more subtle textile pieces, Murdoch’s and Christi Belcourt’s work boldly frames the show’s central poetic focus. “The colonial technology’s of homophobia and transphobia are Canadian colonial cultural projects deeply embedded in all communities of the nation state of Canada.” “In thinking about the issue of skirt shaming and other erasures of Two-Spirit people from having historically existed excludes us as young persons from feelings of belonging –The Indian Residential School system must be named as having cemented homophobia and transphobia always and loudly,” says McNeil-Seymour. Images from Two-Spirit Man/Two-Spirit Woman Call Home the Salmon w/Help | Image credit: Shannon Webb-Campbell Traditionally, long skirts are worn during ceremony, yet can be quite controversial should a person deviate from the gender binary and wear one the wrong way. In the exhibition Two-Spirit Man/Two-Spirit Woman Call Home the Salmon w/Help, two mannequins are dressed in cedar wrapped shawls, and each wear a Sundance skirt belonging to Metis/Saulteaux/Polish Two-Spirit artists Danger, whose long black skirt features an embroidered uterus (designed and sewn by Erin Marie Konsmo and Dayna’s mother), and McNeil-Seymour’s skirt is a brilliant cobalt blue with light blue ribbon layered over salmon shapes cut from navy blue ribbon. I don’t want to wait another seven generations for things to get better or the next federal or even an INAC band election and hope – maybe this time.” I have to use my gifts to clear as much of a pathway as I can for the young ones,” says McNeil-Seymour.
“I’m interested in sewing seeds for two-spirit persons coming up behind us or those not yet here. Two-Spirit Man/Two-Spirit Woman Call Home the Salmon w/Help is a calling, an act of resilience and space-making for Two-Spirit youth in particular, as a means of to move necessary conversations forward. Indigenous art explores transformational ancestral connection between the body, water, land and spirit. Even in light of the fact that the hands of those we thought would protect us and keep us safe were the cause of violence – or idle while it happened.”Īrt is a call to action, a means to hold space and presence. “It’s a doorway through which we tell our beautifully diverse stories of triumphant loving and being and sur-thriving trauma with the lands and water and peoples that we serve and protect.
“Two-Spirit is about storytelling,” says Jeffrey McNeil-Seymour, of Secwepemc and 4th generation English settler descent. Featuring work by Jeffrey McNeil-Seymour and Dayna Danger, Christi Belcourt, and Isaac Murdoch, the exhibition ran at Never Apart, an urban queer art gallery in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal, until September 22, 2019. Two-Spirit Man/Two-Spirit Woman Call Home the Salmon w/Help, a collaborative installation, honours the power of art, action, and ceremony. Art by Christi Belcourt and Isaac Murdoch | Image credit: Shannon Webb-Campbell
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