How do I define community? I come from a strong nation that has a lot to do with community and how we vibe together. Community is very essential to our mental health—to have people around you, it helps you grow and helps you feel comfort and that you’re not alone.
I come from a long line of healers and medicine people. I want to help people; it’s just a part of who I am. In my community, I started HEAL, Helping Every Artist Live. It helps youth heal through the arts because that’s how I healed. Doing spoken word and art helped me to process the trauma that I have and the historical trauma my people have experienced. I created this organization to empower youth to tell their stories through art and to also incorporate all aspects of who we are—our mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical natures. I was always told that we are like a vehicle; we need all four tires to move forward and drive, so we need all four of those aspects in our life to be able to feel good and move forward in a good way.
My personal journey informs everything that I do. It is part of my own personal agreement to life and how I perceive the world and myself. I needed to learn the lessons of my past in order to be where I am today—the hard lessons and the good lessons. It was a beautiful, but hard way of life that I had to endure in order to have this knowledge and this understanding of myself. It is this self-awareness and self-acceptance that flows forth in my work.
When I write, it has nothing to do with how I think, I just write from a higher place. It’s like I’m a vessel. I channel it, and then it comes. I have to write it down quickly or I won’t remember it. It’s funny because when people put me on the spot to write, I can’t do it for some reason. But when I’m just going about my life, it just comes to me. In those moments I have to go to my notes in my phone and just write. The poems I share are the ones that came spontaneously.
As an Indigenous person, the language I use in my work is super, super important. It’s a part of who we are, how we pray, how we live, how we communicate. For my community, the Tsuut'ina, we are on crunch time because we are losing all our fluent speakers and there are no young fluent speakers. That’s why I want to incorporate it, because it’s so fragile to us. Blackfoots have their language and their young people are fluent, and Crees have their language, but Tsuut'ina, specifically, we don’t have that. And if we don’t have our language, we are not considered a treaty nation or a tribe. So that’s why we’re fighting so hard to keep our language. That’s why it’s so important.
We are all treaty people, but not in the way most people think. In our language, to create a treaty means to create relation, but a lot of people misinterpret it as an agreement to land. That’s not what our people think of it as. We understand it as meaning that we have a relation together and live together. Everywhere there’s a city, or anywhere really, it’s on treaty land. That’s why we say that we are all treaty people. It’s sad, but most of the first treaties were forced. We missed out on the chance to learn from each other. We missed out on that chance to create community.
As I grow as an artist, my art changes and my definition of what it means to create changes. As an artist, I think everything is art. Being a mother—that is an art in itself. I am always saying that my biggest masterpiece is my daughter because I created her out of myself, literally out of my flesh and blood and bones. But even the way you think, how you create your reality, your daily life and how your intentions—that's also art. Art can heal us. It can inspire us. And it can connect us. We are all artists and we are all community.