Imagining Futures: A Conversation & Musical Performance
- Shawn Van Sluys, moderator
- Tim Lilburn, poet
- Wanda Nanibush, artist and curator
- Philip Kevin Paul, poet
- Adrian Stimson, artist
- Music by Digging Roots
Titled Imagining Futures, this conversation focused on the possibility of futures that draw from indigenous and artistic ways of knowing and shaping the world.
We think and speak in metaphors. Language first came to be through our observation of the natural world—so many of our most fundamental metaphors relate to phenomena in nature: heat rising, things falling, solids containing, liquids flowing and so on. As we became more sophisticated creatures over millennia, up to our current highly technological moment, many of our societies and cultures have lost that early connection to nature, to the land, giving rise to the dominant, oppressive, colonial and authoritative metaphors that led us to today’s entrenched social injustices.
How can the imagining of indigenous futures offer new or revised institutional, relational, and spatial forms and metaphors that centralize our relationships to the land and to each other? How do we radically resist dominant cultural constructs through our use of language and performance?