This body of work is about my relationship to death and therefore rebirth, you cannot have one without the other. A big component of this is based around hunting and my family's relationship to it. From a young age I was taught about death through animals, and what it means for these animals to give us their life. During these moments I had always been taught to hold nothing but utmost respect for these creatures. This has influenced this work heavily, and ended up making it heavily relying on my family and therefore nostalgia. 

 

“For me, this story is a critical intervention into current thinking about Indigenous education, because Indigenous education is not Indigenous or education from within our intellectual practices unless it comes through the land, unless it occurs in an Indigenous context using Indigenous processes.” (Simpson, 2017)  

 

The process of making this work is important to the finished piece. It started with wanting to paint dead deer, specifically a photo my dad took at our hunting camp, and ended up with me going to my poppa's house to take swabs of the same deer from the photo, to create a specimen of them. Without this relationship I  have been given I don't think I would have had the gumption to do such a thing. 

I ended up making a performance piece because it was what made sense, after talking about how much the work related to me. I used dirt on a plinth, and planted pansies and a strawberry plant. I then laid to rest these specimens. All the while audio from a video my dad took while hunting played loudly in the back. It had dogs barking and a shotgun going off followed by him talking, which ended up soothing me while performing. I didn't realize that was in the video till the day of. 

The deer were a symbol of my desire to keep my childhood alive. The plants, strawberries, a symbol of love -ode’imin- translated to heart berry. The story of the strawberry being about how out of death something beautiful can be born. The pansies being a symbol of child-like whimsy reminding me of Alice in Wonderland. And the audio reminds me of my roots. This ended up being a type of self portrait.

The act of performance was a choice of self insertion, especially with the act of dirtying the plinth. Using dirt in my hand to rub onto the plinth was a physical act of defiance to an industry that has told me what to be, and this was me reclaiming my space, and bringing my ancestors with me. “An important element of an Indigenous worldview, which maintains an understanding of our interconnections and dependency upon the rest of Creation,”(Hall)

The main thing, death and rebirth, is shown with the dirt and plants and letting the specimen decay, like a burial. This shows how the deer may be dead but they aren't gone, they are now the dirt and flowers. This shows the same way that my childhood  may be over but it has changed and doesn't mean anything bad like I had originally been scared of. With the fact that I will one day be a flower, I am not as scared of aging. We are never gone, just recycled.