Honoring the Ancestors and Creator

Abstract

Abstract Contemporary feminist scholars problematize the difficulties of creating meaningful political alliances between Indigenous and diasporic communities in settler states such as Canada and the United States. This essay uses a relational framework to trace how two feminist artists, one Indigenous and one diasporic, creatively resist the ongoing and uneven conditions of settler colonial capitalism. The essay examines artwork by Tannis Nielsen, a midcareer Indigenous artist with Métis, Anishnawbe, and Danish ancestry, and Rosa Sungjoo Park, an emerging diasporic Korean artist with landed status in Canada. Taken together, the artists’ works offer fruitful opportunities to think through difficult questions about power, history, and representation on Turtle Island. Both Nielsen and Park engage “pedagogies of the Sacred” to honor ancestral traditions and spiritual practices while disrupting binary narratives of tradition vs. modernity. I contend that their creative use of digital media draws on lived experience, embodied knowledge, and spirituality to refuse colonialism’s hyper-individualism and imagine alternative worlds.