Towards Braiding is an on-going collaborative process between Elwood Jimmy and Vanessa Andreotti hosted and funded by the Musagetes Arts Foundation. This collaboration involves several modes of relational engagement with Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists, scholars, and communities, including visits, gatherings and consultations, addressing the “compass questions” below.
- Towards Braiding (download the book)
- Towards Braiding handout 1: For organizations starting the journey [of engagement with Indigenous peoples, knowledges, communities)
- Towards Braiding handout 2: Mis-steps on the path to braiding: opening conversations about inappropriate and appropriative engagements
Compass questions:
- What are the conditions that make possible ethical and rigorous engagement across communities in historical dissonance that can help us move together towards improved relationships and yet-unimaginable wiser futures, as we face unprecedented global challenges?
- What are the guidelines and practices for ethical and respectful engagement with Indigenous senses and sensibilities (being, knowing, relationships, trauma, place, space and time) that can help us to work together in holding space for the possibility of “braiding” work?
- How do we learn together to enliven these guidelines with (self-)compassion, generosity, humility, flexibility and rigour, and without turning our back to (or burning out with) the complexities, paradoxes, difficulties and pain of this process of healing?
- What kind of socially engaged and community anchored Indigenous-led arts-based program can support this process in the long term?
- What are the expectations in terms of responsibilities of the organization to the place/land and her traditional ancestral custodians from the perspective of the local Indigenous communities?
Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures 