Ideas - Arctic/Amazon Art Exhibition: Secrets and Visions, Part Two

Episode Date: January 10, 2024

Indigenous artists from the Arctic and the Amazon regions came together for an art exhibition — a culmination of years of research and conversation. Despite coming from apparently disparate territories and traditions, they shared deeply on histories, present circumstances, and future worlds.

Every language is a note in the symphony of our heritage. Together they create a harmony that cannot be silenced. Discover your voice on the new APTN Languages TV channel. This is a CBC Podcast. I'm the in-between generation. There's so many where we all are standing on.

Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. October 2022. At the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto, installation crews are putting the finishing touches on an extraordinary exhibition. It's called Arctic Amazon, Networks of Global Indigeneity. It's multiple voices, multiple lived experiences, realities, histories, all kind of coming together from North to South relations, right?

When you think about North America and Latin America, like it's as if they're divided, but in reality, it just courses. It began in 2019 with a gathering of Arctic and Amazonian artists and knowledge keepers, indigenous people from these two apparently disparate regions came together and found they had a lot in common. Creating this connection with other worlds and other living forms, it is urgent and necessary in these times we are living. And until now, who is sitting on the power chairs of the world has been white, cisgender males.

So we can say that this is not working. Arctic Amazon was reborn in the fall of 2022 as an exhibition. Through the twin lenses of tundra and rainforest, it explores indigenous knowledge, tradition, history, and above all, the land. This one piece has a lot of, like, fur in it that's saturated with this really vibrant red. And what it feels like to me is like when we harvest a moose.

I feel like it's joyous because when we were kids, we'd live on rice and beans if we couldn't get a moose, you know. It was that important. And we would do it together, you know, take care of it. And it's also a very spiritual thing, too. Ideas producer Sean Foley brings us this documentary, Arctic Amazon, Secrets and Visions. And so idiot strings are the tethers that your mom makes for you

so you don't lose your mittens, which people from the north really, they know what it is immediately, usually. I'm on the exhibition floor at the Power Plant in Toronto with Sonia Kelleher Combs. She's an artist from Alaska of Inupiat and Athabascan ancestry. This installation in particular is meant to represent the 35 villages that have credible claims against the Catholic Church, credible in the way that the Catholic Church acknowledges them.

The installation title teases a cautious sort of smile out of me. It's called Idiot Strings Credible. We know that there's many other communities within our state and all across the world who have been victims of the Catholic Church in many different ways, emotional, psychological, and physical abuse, and, you know, the ills of colonization and I could go on and on. There are 40 idiot strings floating in midair, each one twisting and turning between the two mitten-like pouches they hold together. And when the installation is lit up, you see these intricately entwined shadows cast all

over the ground. It has this whole other life, like this is just one shadow. They're all individuals, but they're all connected to each other, and one loss impacts more than just that one person. So the idea is that as the shadow is cast, it's like it's a ripple effect, in a way. You see them all sort of entangled? Yeah, all sort of entangled. Yeah, they're all entangled. And it can go off the board.

It's not just about the people within this space. The pairs of mittens are made of old maps from the United States Geological Survey, maps of the communities with claims of abuse that the Catholic Church has deemed credible. But there's no thumb on any of them. They look like oblong cocoons open at the top. The sight of these shapes has raised some eyebrows.

A lot of people think it's very phallic. It's actually based on a design on our parkas. Basically, it's about lineage and a design on our parkas. Basically, it's about lineage and continuation and perseverance and things like that. I'm really interested in representing our cultures as dynamic living cultures. You know, it's not, we're building on traditions every day. That's the way I like to think about it. We still wear these garments. We still, even if they're made out of modern materials and things like that.

And also this idea of legacy and history and remembrance. And even if we've gone to boarding schools, we can still, we still are a part of this culture that, or other things, other kinds of trauma, separation, adoption. Yeah. adoption yeah and there's something so uh like tender about the the shape and the and the idiot string and it feels like there's just enough room for a little hand to go in there um even though i know it's not you know a mitten yeah like when our kids were really little they would have you'd put these yeah they're just a sock. Yeah, a little hand sock. So that was immediately what came to mind for me

when I saw these. Originally, I cut the thumb out because I felt like without that thumb, we're kind of helpless to move our... And that's kind of what it was. It was something that was bound. So it did have a symbolic kind of metaphorical meaning. But also I do this series called Secrets, which are these little smaller pouch forms and large secrets, too, without the string form on them.

And it's meant to hold something that's hidden, this hidden history. Right beside Sonia Kelleher Combs' work, overlooking it really, is a vast wall painted a vibrant earthy red, and it's adorned with high-resolution images from the Amazon region. Some photos were taken in the forest and some in the city. Some depict the wonder of the wilderness, others the stark horrors of a landfill. And they're not only stunning in their own right as photographs, they're also performances. There's a particular figure, a being, a kind of shapeshifter in each of them. My name is Wira. I'm

31 years old. I live in Manaus, in Amazonia States, no Brasil. Eu sou uma pessoa indígena na diáspora. Eu sou uma pessoa transgênera, uma pessoa de dois espíritos. Eu sou bióloga e mestre em ecologia. E eu também trabalho como art a visual artist and educator. Wira, who uses they-them pronouns,

uses natural materials to transform themselves, to dress up, into a manifestation of and a bridge to the various life forms in their midst. Each manifestation of Wira is unique. What I do is basically to tell stories

about people, animals, plants and other humanities beyond the demonic ones. I like to create images not only for art purposes but also with youngsters. Imagens que refletam diferentes naturezas, né? Imagens that can reflect different natures. Duas em especial. Duas natures em particular, essas paisagens da vida diária que estão cheias de violência,

que nós frequentemente chamamos de natural, como a violência contra os trans, os indígenas e também a devastação das florestas. and indigenous people, and also the devastation of forests. Because as I understand, those forms of violence are the same. The other nature that also I'm interested in is what we more often call nature, is the nature that is over there, far away in the forest. So that's what I'm doing, telling those stories so we can reflect and think about those different natures.

The idea behind Arctic Amazon had been gestating for a long time. The idea behind Arctic Amazon had been gestating for a long time. I'm Gerald McMaster. I am Plains Cree from Red Pheasant First Nations. That's where I was born and raised. But I am a citizen of the Siksika Nation in Alberta. And I am the professor at OCAD University. I have been curating for 40 years. I first began thinking about this idea many years ago when I was working in Australia and visiting some of the indigenous

communities in the central desert. One community in particular was called Papunya. They're what they call desert painters. And what I began to notice was this highly systematic way of distribution of production in the communities. Notice the artists were not school trained. Their entrepreneurs in the cities would take canvases out to the communities on weekends or once a month and leave canvases there and pick up a fresh batch and take them back in and distribute them around the world. What I saw in that immediately reminded me of what was going on in the Canadian Arctic. And I thought, there's an exhibition here somewhere. That's where, to me, the seeds were sowed. My interest, my focus, I wanted to

shift that from Australia to the Americas, because the Americas, certainly from our point of view, in the English-speaking world of North America, Central and South America being Latin America, is such a tremendous distance from here, even though they're our neighbors. Whereas Australia and New Zealand seem much closer, linguistically for that reason, but culturally still very distant. So I think this notion of connecting the Americas was what was more appealing to me. And I thought, well, design something where we work with artists and not care about what the western art world I put that in quotation marks thinks about what what artists are doing because that's been a history of a kind of oppression in the art world if you will so I

felt maybe well let's just move the dial a little bit and start thinking not always in relation to the Western art world, but rather from the Indigenous world, right? And discover that by introducing Indigenous ways of seeing, all of a sudden, we can argue from that point of view. One of the things I've learned from Gerald is this idea of Indigenous visual knowledge. What kind of associations come up for you when I use that term? Indigenous visual knowledge. I think it's just something that's innate that you feel, and it's a part of something bigger than any of us. You can feel it.

It's just a way of seeing and knowing, even learning. You know, you're not being, no one's harping from the pulpit, like telling you, like making you memorize all this stuff you learn it through your body you know it's just a way of of learning and seeing I remember I did this one piece and it has a lot of like fur in it that's embedded into it and that's saturated with this color that's really vibrant red and it was very it's a very beautiful piece and what it reminds me of or feels like to me is like when we harvest a moose you know when we're hunting moose I feel like it's joyous because

it's so such an important when we were kids we would live on rice and beans if we couldn't get a moose you know kind it was that important and um it was always it's a family thing we would do it together you know take care of it um and it's also a very spiritual thing too so that piece always reminded me of that but other people would be like, they thought it was a pretty piece or whatever. All they could think of was like this fur embedded in this thing and it had to be gross, you know. I was like, but it's so beautiful. You know, it's just this different way of thinking and seeing. So nobody wants to know where their meat comes from. Nobody does. I'm like, at least our least our meat you know we know where it came

from and we harvested we took care of it there are some things that people do bring to to the work that i think is kind of funny like make these little things that people think are fallacies or whatever you want to call it i always think think of those shapes as both male and female, though, because there's an inside and an outside. So I just remember the first time, like especially with the Idiot Strings piece, because it's about suicide. That's what the original pieces were about.

But I remember these two women coming into a gallery in Portland and they were just laughing so hard because they knew they were idiot strings and she they just thought it was funny because it is kind of funny because that's what your mom made you wear like for your whole but then it is like serious it's like drawing you in with humor and then also like telling you this is also very serious you know there's a reason for those idiot strings and you know was that something you conveyed to them i did actually and then they were shocked and kind of a little bit embarrassed that they thought it was funny and i was like it's okay

you know i i love juxtaposing things that are very different, like making a really beautiful painting that's kind of glowing and putting hair on it. There's hair embedded within it. And people have problems with hair. I don't know what the deal is, but I use hair a lot. So people will be drawn in and then they're actually physically repulsed because there's hair on it. You know, that kind of idea. Or realizing that it's made from something like seal intestine, like people have a different relationship with those kinds of materials.

So, yeah. Do you remember the moment when you just needed to become Wira? Good question. Wira is more, in theater, people call her a character. In psychology, people call her my alter ego. In the LGBT movement, it's a drag queen. A drag queen is what I like the most, but for me, of course, it's not only a drag queen. I like to think of Wira as more than a drag queen,

more of an entity. But that has nothing to do with religion. It's an expression of my spirit, it's a way of talking to my ancestors. como uma expressão do meu espírito é uma forma de falar com meus ancestrais então, há um momento em particular, eu sinto como o Wira está comigo desde que eu nasci

então talvez foi a minha pele que transformou e ganhou essas folhas em 2016 these leaves around 2016. So it was a time where Brazil was going through a political coup. And so there was a lot of artists gathering around to defend

the Ministry of Culture, because it was taken down. So there was a gathering of artists, and it was a time where I realized the strength, the potence of art to defend those political matters, and the power of art to communicate between worlds. It was very pressing times. It was times where it was really important to show yourself, to do something.

But it was also time to show all the living things, the beauty of things. And that was the time where I needed to start thinking and discussing these different natures. Periferias são lugares onde o Estado está plantando o oposto da esperança. Quando eu digo periferia, não estou falando apenas das margens de uma cidade, mas também no meio do Amazonas. Estou falando das margens dos rios, das margens dos vizinhos. In the middle of the Amazon, I'm talking about the margins of the rivers, in the margins of the villages. I'm talking about places where people have little or none access to things like health and care.

We grow up with all this lacking and also a big crisis of self-esteem because we suffer all this erasing and deconsideration through all these years since the first years of colonization. So my narrative is similar to all these young people I work with and I'd like to tell this story and I've been through so many transformations and these are due to some special teachers and professors that I had on the on my trajectory a lot of my work is it is about community it is about place um even though it is me making this work it's and as saying that i know that there's this kind of push and pull of like i can't speak for all of my community i never could um yeah obviously it's coming directly from me, but sometimes it's not my personal experience. Sometimes it's

my relatives' experience that can't say these things, which is really difficult. It's really, really hard. It's hard for them to say it or it's hard for you to carry that in? I think both. I mean, sometimes when you're too close to it, you can't say it. Yeah. Or do it. It's important to acknowledge that there are these structures that are literally in control of the land. You know, there's this hierarchy of ownership. And even though we have rights in Alaska to the surface rights to our land, we don't have mineral rights to the land underneath there. So it becomes really complicated when you begin to think about things like the oil industry in Alaska and how our communities have been subsisting literally off of the oil industry now for almost four generations. You know, they've been up there.

off of the oil industry now for almost four generations. You know, they've been up there. It's not black and white because, you know, we depend on that industry. And so it's a slippery slope. You have to figure out a way for our people to continue to survive in a way that we hadn't in the past. So it's hard. It's really, really hard.

These places where we've been westernized, a lot of ills are there, you know. It's interesting. You can kind of tell the way that the church came in. That's one of our colonizers, and it's something I've been thinking about for a long time. But they divided our state up by denomination and you can tell which denomination was where by suicide rates and things like that you know the sicker but the villages that have more kind of

social problems alcoholism a lot of mental illness things like that a lot of them you know those are catholic villages i was raised catholic you know um there's all sorts of different kind of or where different industries where the language is strong is where there were less contact right things like that although certain elements may have been erased by like let's say the moravian church wouldn't let them dance but they can still speak their language so it's interesting what each denomination decided to focus on yeah language in itself is just such a massive yeah i don't speak my language it's amazing there's so many people here that speak their language. And yeah, both of my parents went to boarding school.

So they met in Sitka, all the way from Barrow to Sitka, all the way from Nulato to Sitka. For those not familiar with the geography of Alaska, Barrow, now known as Utkyavik, to Sitka is nearly 2,000 kilometers as the crow flies. Nulato to Sitka is about 1,500. Either way, it's an incredibly long way from home. They went to Mount Edgecombe. So one of the boarding schools there. But yeah, and my mom understands, but we never spoke it. She's Athabascan, and my father, he speaks it, but they didn't communicate with each other in a language, so just in English. And there was another school that my mom went to.

It was called Pius Mission School in Skagway that burnt down, but they're doing interviews right now with survivors of that place, including one of my uncles is probably going to do an interview there. But we know that, you know, there's the same problems for sure. Yeah. Children missing. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. It's the same, like even with the sanitarium, I think that it would, I think that's what they called the sanitarium. Like they would send people with tuberculosis. My mom's mom died of tuberculosis in the sanitarium and then she was adopted by her aunt and uncle and raised in their family. And then her two brothers were kind of in an orphanage for a

while, the older brothers until they were adopted into another part of the family. And the two sisters were shipped off to family in Missouri. And my mom finally met one of her sisters 46 years later. Yeah. I can't imagine. What was that meeting like for her? I don't know. I don't know. I wasn't there. That feels like such an immense topic and I know that you... I'm slippery as well.

I'm sorry. I apologize. It's emotional. you know when we think of the border wall between mexico and the united states really we think of the border wall between Mexico and the United States, really, and how those borders really did this exact same thing for all Indigenous communities of the Americas. You just think of all the countries that, what, there are nine countries that border the Amazon. So each one of those is a geopolitical boundary, and it cross-cuts all Indigenous territories. So our cousins are always on the other side of the border, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I, you know, think of my brothers and sisters in the Amazon, you know,

and just what they're living through now. And it's just, you know, I think even in my lifetime, I think we were going through that when I was young, and they're going through it now. And it's really, it's disastrous. And I think having contemporary artists address these and think about them and not always addressing the political issues, they're just telling who they are. Gerald McMaster, lead curator of the exhibition Arctic Amazon, Networks of Global Indigeneity,

which was held at the Power Plant Gallery in Toronto. The exhibition also traveled to the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across Turtle Island on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Nala Ayed. Every language is a note. In the symphony of our heritage. Together, they create a harmony that cannot be silenced. Discover your voice on the new APTN Languages TV channel. Essential reading for everyone. Health for All is the instant number one national bestseller by Jane Philpott, former federal minister of health and Ontario lead on primary care. With over 6 million Canadians lacking basic health care,

Philpott offers a prescription for a healthier society focusing on hope, belonging, and purpose. Available in hardcover and audiobook. Narrated by Jane Philpott. From Alaska to Brazil, Indigenous artists occupy a present moment between traditions and histories on the one hand and future worlds on the other. We continue with Sean Foley's documentary Arctic Amazon Secrets and Visions. Eu cheguei à biologia e à ecologia por causa do amor que eu sempre tive desde que eu era criança para as coisas vivas. Então, os seis anos estudando ciências foram realmente importantes para mim porque eu aprendi sobre as formas e metodologias

das ciências ocidentais e eu aprendi como estudar e entender mais sobre a vida. about the forms and methodologies of Western sciences, and I learned how to study and understand more about life. I wrote articles, I worked in international research. Basically, I was moving towards keeping the forest alive, standing up. But I felt, and I still feel that this is something that lacks, not only for me, but to the whole society, a better articulation between science and the general population. Scientific knowledge is still produced by a really small group inside really small spaces that have really high walls. So I realized that it would need a lot more than scientific articles and numbers

to bring people's love for the forest. That's why I became a tree, to remind first of all myself, but then our people, and eventually everyone else as well, that we are also plants. Seeing Wira in this form of drag, it's a melding of the human and the natural and the spiritual that I haven't seen before. This new image unseats me from my Western position of separateness.

I find myself trying to recall those fleeting moments in nature when I might have felt integrated with my surroundings. The whole Western way of thinking is based on binary divisions. Art is something separated from life. That's the base of it. And then you have nature and culture, subject and object, all these binary divisions. Brazilian anthropologist Nina Vincent is a co-curator of the exhibition. She's also acting as an interpreter in my conversation with Wira. When you start learning about other cultures,

you see that those divisions just come off. And you're going to start to see a whole aesthetic complex that is not just about art, it's about their whole life, it's a world that has to be built and rebuilt every day. It's not this idea of nature as something that just exists and is created and then it's done. You know, when you don't think like that, you have a world that has to be built and rebuilt based on relations that you have to work on those relations every day. The shamans, they're like diplomats, you know, because they have to build those relationships between worlds with the spirits, specific spirits that they have to negotiate life to try to maintain the world's balance.

Noor Aleh is associate curator at the power plant. She worked with Gerald and Nina to bring the exhibition to life. Your centric ways of thinking and being are very hierarchical, right? The knowledge seems to be a very privileged kind of position, you know, and there's one authority voice, and sometimes the artists are excluded from that, you know, because museums have done these kinds of things in the past, right? When we think about ethnographic museums, the objects are dislocated from their cultures, their communities, right? And then there is a voice that interprets this,

but doesn't integrate the voice of the community. There is no consultation. So when you work in this very contemporary context, it's important to have a relationship based on trust and friendship, right? And among the three of you, you really were able to develop that? Absolutely. The way that we worked? Yeah.

Gerald and Nina, feel free to speak about that. I lost my power. Yeah. But it was a beautiful way of working. It was beautiful. It was all you know, it was beautiful. It was all part of the orchestra of this, you know, it's multiple voices, multiple lived experiences, realities, histories, all kind of coming together from North to South relations, right? And that's what's important. There was no hemispheric divide that Gerald kind of mentioned.

When you think about North America, you know, and Latin America, there's this kind of mentioned when you think about North America you know and Latin America there's this kind of like divisionary concept like it's as if they're divided but in reality it just courses. Forest is often referred to like in school books or even common sense on on the streets as natural resource. Natural as something distant, separated from us. Resource as something for consumption. This is ideas that show how we are not connected to the forest. Those are an old set of ideas. You can find those ideas on the Christian Bible and whatnot. So you have passages on the Bible that talk about plants and animals

and how you should use them. And in many other references, you have this idea of serving from the nature. If you go see in indigenous societies, you're going to find animals, like a bird, for instance. It can be a relative. It's some part of us. It can be a part of the family.

Creating this connection with other worlds and other living forms, it is urgent and necessary in these times we are living. So it's not only an anthropocentric society, but it's also a society of

men. So now if we look at the worlds, at the planet, either we look from inside or the outside, we have crisis spread all over it. Environmental, political, cultural, social, spiritual crisis, all kinds of crisis. And until now, who is sitting on the power chairs of the world has been white, cisgender males.

So we can say that this is not working. já vimos que não deu certo. something and gathering. I mean, I think that is something that fuels the work that I make. So I think when I learned how to do things like sew and bead, and I didn't want to do those, but I did, I learned them, you know, and it was later in life that I was like, I realized how important those things were, and how they influenced, you know, came below and kind of infiltrated the work that I make. You know, I was trained in a Western ideal of art. I went to college, you know, I went to graduate school and all of that. But all these other things kept on creeping back in and can actually effectively participate of this planet making. have a lot of interesting and important stories to tell, but that their own stories have been told until now by all those same people.

Women, LGBT people, indigenous people, black people, we all have to be able to participate more in this world. But more than only other humanities, we also need to listen to the stories of other species, other living things that can contribute, inspire, and collaborate a lot to this world. Some of the things, the making that you had within you from growing up would keep creeping back in i think is the term you used but and then you you felt you needed to keep

that separate do you remember when that you were just were like okay all right it was in graduate school i went to school at arizona state university was there for three years, and I came home every summer. I almost quit. I called my husband. I was like, I can't do this anymore. This is just, they said, you are doing this. You have to do this. You know, he just talked me off the ledge.

And there's this thing called a 15-hour review. You take 15 hours, 15 credit hours. So it's a year actually that you're on kind of a probationary status. Then you do an oral defense with the whole department pretty much. And I was like so nervous and my aunt and uncle were in town and we went, my roommate and I, to have lunch. And on our way home, we got into a car wreck. And the next day was my 15-hour review. We got checked out. I had a Miss America bruise across my chest and two black eyes and broke my sunglasses.

And I still have scars on my knees, but I was alive. And it was such a pivotal moment. It was like it gave me all the perspective in the world. I was like, these people don't have any power over me. I know who I am. And after that, I did what I needed to do. And there was no separation. After that first year, I brought back all these natural materials that came from my home.

And I hung them in the studio for a while. At first, I just would emulate those. Like I have a walrus stomach and I would make a synthetic walrus stomach and then I would show them together or juxtapose them. And then they began to combine. Before I went to graduate school, I thought, you know, I was never going to go back and live in Alaska. Yeah. So it clarified, it was like, I needed to be back there because that's where everything is, not just my family, the community, but the land. Yeah. Cada animal ou planta tem sua própria história de vida e eles são absolutamente muito inspiradores para o mundo. A pachubinha é uma árvore que anda.

Por exemplo, a pachubinha. Pachubinha is a walking tree. This tree just breaks any colonial imaginary about trees because she walks about 20 meters per year going to find what she precisa. Então, a dança vai ser extasiada para olhar para este trigo. A ciência vai ser tirada. Nós, em nossas vidas diárias, que somos tão inertes,

tão parados, tão still, devemos olhar para este trigo, ir atrás do que ele precisa. E nós temos muito o que aprender. E nós temos muito a aprender. E essa é só uma história de uma floresta inteira. E essa floresta está no jardim. E essa é a floresta, mas também está no jardim,

no lago, lá fora. Mas não vai começar a falar se não pararmos e nos prestarmos atenção. in the garden, in the lawn, right there outside. But it's not going to just start speaking if we don't stop and pay attention. They don't desire or want or need to be our teachers. We have to be the good students, the good learners. That's what Wira does, is try to mediate to help this process to happen, this connection to happen. Telling these stories with the body, because apparently people are not willing to listen to these stories on their own.

I don't want to hear these stories on my own. On their own. things have to be, you can't do by yourself. And it's really important to have somebody with you to do those things. Like processing walrus stomach or seal intestine, things like that, you know, twining those idiot strings is not a one person job. Stitching those little tiny, small red, white and blue secrets. You know, My mom has helped me with those, and other friends have. We sit, it's like a sewing circle. And something amazing happens when you bring people together, and we could solve all the world's problems in that little tiny group. And in the context of the work that's made,

and the things that it's invested with, whether it's the contact of many hands, whether it's the material that you've gathered from the land, this becomes a carrier of meaning on so many different levels. Absolutely. It is about our relationship to each other and to the land, walking softly on the land and treating each other with respect and honoring those gifts that have been given to you. What else could I say?

I want to say something about healing. Well, I wonder maybe if I ask about the pouches, if there are these containers, what do you, what would you say is inside there? It's everybody's secrets. It's all the stuff that's hidden. That's really hard to talk about that we've tucked away and sometimes put a mask on and pretend it's not there. You know, we go out in the world and everything's okay, but you know, there's things that we need to let go of so that we can move on. Until we open up those wounds and clean them out, they're not going to heal all the way. Just as you'd find on a little pair of mittens, the idiot strings join the pairs of small pouches,

matching sets, except for one thing, a spray of red threads pouring from one pouch in each pair. And in the idiot strings piece, you have that one side. Yeah, with the thread. With the thread. Yeah. Which indicates there's a healing process going on. Yeah, with the thread. With the thread. Yeah. Which indicates there's a healing process going on. Yeah, absolutely.

You know, stitching and mending, it's like repair. And that's kind of what I'm getting at. But also it's like flowing out at the same time, allowing it to leave, to go. We're all soft you know so it we can we can get hurt easily but at the same time if it's fragile we can break it open and and let it go you know if it's if we're at the right space the right place yeah the other side is fully repaired it's there's no you know there's no scar and maybe it's before and maybe it's after i'm not sure but um hopefully both you know because the two are connected right yeah it's our history and our future

gerald you wrote for so long we've been marginalized, but I would argue it is because our starting point has always been within the framework defined by the Western art world. My concluding question is this, what would result if our starting point were within the philosophical or intellectual traditions of Indigenous communities.

What reflections do you have on that question? Well, if we had always beenate, reclaim all that has been erased and taken away. And if we just shift that perspective and think about the communities from where we come from as we as we go to universities we really learn hard you know in those spaces but similarly we have when we go back to our communities think of it as a university because our teachers our professors our knowledge keepers are there you know that's that's why they're there. Let's learn from them and really, really study hard. I think artists are really capitalizing on that and thinking about that really deeply.

And I think that that's good. And I think the exhibition really draws that out. We're talking a lot about the reclaiming, right? The indigenizing and there's a lot of work to do you know from institutions museums governmental bodies to you know impart this knowledge and also support their indigenous communities at all levels possible and being very humble as well the west needs to be humble and adaptable and it has a lot of unlearning to do. Yeah. One thing that always comes to my mind when I listen to Gerald and everyone talking about this reclaiming and all these re-words is that in the Amazonian region, there's still a lot of people living there

that are not on the reprocess. They are still living the way they always lived. And this is so rare if you take the whole planet. And this is so precious. And they are like so menaced. There are so many threats. And this is such an urgent thing to protect them. Not everything is about gaining space in the Western system. So there has to be these two

possibilities, changing the Western system, indigenizing this, but also the possibility of living apart from that. And this is precious and rich, is the possibility of multiple worlds. Wira was at the Arctic Amazon Symposium in Toronto in 2019. Their presentation was a newsflash from Brazil. It was also an exhortation. Brazil is repeating dictatorship. Once again denying reality. Once again attacking art, freedom of being, freedom of speech. Once again the better model is the one that misinforms, that confuses people, that harms people. It's a blind patriotism.

It's a part of Brazil that puts God above everything. And unfortunately, this God is not the mythological figure, but rather Bolsonaro, the president. He was elected in 2019. Bolsonaro sought re-election in 2022 and lost. He undermined the electoral process. His supporters stormed government buildings in a coup attempt. He declared his intention to run for president again in 2024, but was barred by the courts from seeking election in any capacity until 2030.

He has no idea of the size of the Amazon. He has no idea of the size of the Amazon. He has no idea of the size of the Arctic. He has no idea of the size of the interactions, the impact that these groups together can make. In Brazil, people are anxious. They have anguish within them. We all feel this way. And this entire scenario favors despair.

Despair is not something good. It neutralizes us. It stops us from moving. And we don't have this option right now. We must continue feeling. If you don't feel, if your spirit is not living, then you are supporting violence. We must guide those feelings using other forces and other spirits. Em 2019, quando eu estava aqui para o simpósio do Amazonas do Ártico, eu nunca vi formas indígenas de vida que eram tão radicalmente diferentes do que eu sabia antes. E eu acho que para as pessoas do Ártico que foram parte do simpósio, foi a mesma coisa. As diferenças são bonitas, tal qual são as semelhanças. Arctic people that were part of the symposium, it was the same. Differences are beautiful, but just as much as similarities.

So then we started to see those similarities. Então começamos a ver essas similares. Não apenas as similares das forças coloniais que afetaram nossas histórias, a violência que afetou nossos territórios, mas também toda a... I was very moved and I get emotional remembering about the similarities because I realized that the faith on our resistance was just the same. It was the same. We met in this hug, the space of a hug,

because we were both people that had a vast knowledge of millennia of living in our territory and all that comes with it. I think that differences have the power to bring us closer and they are the way to survive in this world. Because this world is gone, it's done. But to build new worlds that allow indigenous people to survive, to live, worlds that are possible have to be built through difference. It's the only way possible. I know that. On Ideas, you've been listening to Arctic Amazon Secrets and Visions, produced by Sean Foley.

Featuring the artists Sonia Keleher-Combs and Wida Sodoma. Curators Gerald McMaster, Nina Vincent and Noor Ali. Special thanks to Beverly Cheng at the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery. Arctic Amazon Networks of Global Indigeneity is available in book form, published by Goose Lane Editions. Reading by Nahid Mustafa. Reading by Nahid Mustafa. Technical production, Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Senior producer, Lisa Godfrey. Our executive producer is Greg Kelly.

And I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.