Past EventSymposium

Piyêsiwak Wâkôtowin / Thunderbird Kinship

Friday, April 21, 2023
8:00–9:30pm EST
In Person
Tranzac Club
Online
TQFF.ca
Available Now
90 min.

Grounded in a 2S Michif/ nêhiyaw tâpisinowin (Métis/Cree worldview), piyêsiwak wâhkôhtowin draws inspiration from 2S Cree Elder Mary Wilson’s telling of thunderbirds’ ascent into skyworld, and the gift they left behind. As a 2S creator, music acts as a resurgent practice for reclaiming ancestral languages and refusing continual acts of erasure that so many Métis relatives fought to survive. This nêhiyawêwin (Plains Cree language) song serves as a device for opening up doorways or “dream portals” to connect to trans*temporal and trans*dimensional kinships (Pyle, 2018). Specifically, the deep listening activated in the layered soundscapes, manipulated recordings of water bodies, and têwêhikan (drum) highlights vital kinships with piyêsiwak (thunderbirds). This hybrid experience links storytelling, dreams + listening while taking participants on a journey through altered realms and recentring 2S creative continuance as sites of vibrant futurity.

This event is an online workshop, hosted via Zoom. To attend, please log into your TQFF account and return to this page when the event is live. The Zoom link will be available for TQFF Website Registrants. No other registration is required.

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Presenter

âpihtawikosisâniskwêw (Métis / Nêhiyaw / Norwegian / French / British) multidisciplinary artist Moe Clark is a 2Spirit singing thunderbird. She fuses together vocal improvisation with multilingual lyricism to create meaning that is rooted in personal legacy, ancestral memory and embodied knowledge. An award-winning artist, her last solo album “Within” toured internationally and her video poem “nitahkôtan” won best Indigenous language music video at the ImagiNative film festival. Her work has appeared the world over, including the Lincoln Centre (US), UBUD Writers & Readers Festival (ID) and Origins Festival in London (UK). www.moeclark.ca

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