Oki, Tansi Niiksokwa (Hello, my relative)
I hope to be able to bring you a blog soon on Identity, sharing stories from several other Indigenous individuals about their experiences in forming their identity in our post-colonial world. If you are interested in being a part of our first collaborative blog, you can send me a paragraph to be included and we will gift you with a bathbomb or medicine gift. I am not going to put a timeline on this, and if you happen to want to submit after the initial post is published, please feel free to connect as we can always do a follow-up post to the original.
Some guidelines to get you thinking about the piece are as follows, but really, we are open to hearing your story, as you want it told. We just ask that you are a self-identifying First Nations, Métis, or Inuit to be included and please include this detail in your paragraph. Here are some questions you can answer, but again not necessary if you just want to tell us a story. There is no guideline for length. Fill out our contact form here to be included:
- How would you describe your heritage?
- Has your heritage played a role in your identity formation?
- What role has Canadian society played in your identity formation as an Indigenous Youth or Individual?
- Anything else you want to share about your story as a Self-Identifying Indigenous person?
We will also now be utilizing the site for more Art posts and updates, as well as sharing some older photos – did you know that we have been dabbling in photography for about 15 years now? We started with an old wind-up film camera at about 10 years old; we have always been interested in photography, but we never did anything with our photos. This has resulted in a ton of random photos LOL; we have decided to start to share them in the form of photo journals, which we will be posting here on the site. We have been blessed to be able to travel quite a bit in 2018 and have some great shots we want to start sharing of Kanata. We also want to share some older shots to show our progression as a photographer.
Our first photo journal will be posted prior to our collaborative identity post and will be our self as the subject, with photos taken by us and others. This photo series is one of the steps I am taking to rectify the relationship to my own body and vessel as an Indigenous Woman, as there have been times when I have felt disconnected to myself and was very, very unkind to myself.
In 2019, and onward, I am beginning to take a kinder and more compassionate approach to myself to rectify this most important relationship with Self:
Indigenous Busy-ness 