Digging Deeper: Offerings at Ishpadinaa

Metcalf Intern, Dainty Smith, has written about her experience of Offerings at Ishpadinaa:

After weeks of conceptualizing, imagining, meetings, artist talks, re-visioning and returning back to centre of what Offerings at Ishpadinaa is and can be. We arrived at the studio tentative and hopeful of what each of us can make of this work. 

With care and respect, how can we make offerings? As artists and dancers, as Black, mixed-race Indigenous, Filipino, South Asian persons, what can we offer to those who came before us? To those who will come after us? And to those who are here with us now? As we live, work, create and dream on this land? We are deep in exploration, dance and movement and creation work and we are building the artwork on two foundational principles: 

The Nova Dance Namaskaram words: heart, sound, circle, reach, mother earth, forgiveness, ancestors, humanity. And: cleansing, resistance, heart, reclaiming, joy. These principles have been our guiding light as we create our dance and movement. And when questions arise, it’s been a relief to find that our foundations can be both a container and an anchor for us and for the work. This is important as much of this process is triggering and heart wrenching, to stand on the ground at Ishpadina, to gaze upon the house that sits on the land means to see for what it is; a monument to colonialism and Eurocentric dominance. 

But to walk to the grounds and look around, means also seeing growth, beauty and resistance. 

Ishpadinaa is an Anishnaabe word, “it’s a high place’’ is one of the translations and in plain terms, that’s exactly what it is, in terms of location and where it’s situated. But, it’s also a place that calls people in, to come, to sit, to discover. It is a beautiful ghost story that says yes, there is still joy and love here.