Gathering: Tanya Lukin Linklater

Wolastoq and Quebecois dancer, choreographer, and curator Ivanie Aubin-Malo invests herself in projects that reflect on ecology and human ethics regarding our environment. She also has danced fancy shawl, a powwow style, since 2015. Her artistic research hopes to shed light on the beauty of the Wolastoqey language and its relation to the land and the body. Through the collective MAQAHATINE, based in Tio’tia:ke/Montreal, Aubin-Malo contributes to connecting Indigenous movement-based artists by organizing a dozen workshops each year for and by this vast community. Based in L’islet (QC) since 2021, she fosters the idea of a Wolastoqey Cultural Center where culture can be celebrated and revitalized in the area while getting to know others.

Johannah Bird is a Saulteaux/Anishinaabe of Peguis First Nation and a PhD candidate in English at McMaster University. Currently, she is finishing her dissertation, which traces how Nêhiyawak (Cree) and Anishinaabeg (Ojibwe) expressed their related theories of knowledge in language influenced by and connected to the environment of the Canadian prairies in the late nineteenth century. Bird’s creative and research interests include archives, affect, life writing, and poetry.

Camille Georgeson-Usher is a Coast Salish/Sahtu Dene/Scottish scholar, curator, and writer from Galiano Island, British Columbia, and is assistant professor of modern and contemporary Indigenous art at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Through her research, she is interested in the ways that peoples move together through space, how public art becomes a site for gathering, and intimacies with everyday life from an Indigenous perspective. She uses her practice as a long-distance runner as a discipline that connects thoughts, ideas, understanding, and feelings with her physical body and experiences and as a process for accessing alternative forms of sensing place.
 

Brennan Govender (Moose Cree First Nation) is the drum keeper, lead singer and cofounder of High Ridge Singers (started in 2008). Based in North Bay, Ontario, Brennan sings competitively at powwows with High Ridge. They have been invited as host drum at many powwows in Ontario, Quebec, and elsewhere. Brennan is also a round dance singer, participates in ceremony, and is well-known and asked to serve in the cultural role of stickman at round dances in Ontario. 

Tanya Lukin Linklater has recently participated in the Aichi Triennale, Japan; Gwangju Biennale, South Korea; New Museum Triennial, New York; and Toronto Biennial of Art. Her work has also been shown at the Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; among other institutions. She is represented by Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver. Her first collection of poetry was Slow Scrape (published by The Centre for Expanded Poetics and Anteism Books in 2020 and by Talonbooks in 2022). A catalogue, Tanya Lukin Linklater: My mind is with the weather—copublished by the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; Oakville Galleries; and the Southern Alberta Art Gallery Maansiksikaitsitapiitsinikssin—was released in spring 2024. Lukin Linklater’s Alutiiq/Sugpiaq homelands are in southwestern Alaska where much of her family continues to live. She is a tribally enrolled member of the Native Villages of Afognak and Port Lions in the Kodiak archipelago. 
 

Paige Restoule is a councillor for Dokis First Nation, chairperson of the Dokis First Nation Cultural Committee (organizing the Dokis First Nation powwow annually), and a cultural consultant who is often asked to facilitate workshops with children, youth, and women. She sings for community gatherings with High Ridge Singers and has been a women’s powwow dancer for decades. She is known for her practices of regalia making, dancing, and beading. Her work to protect the water led her to serve as a Water Protector at Standing Rock, North Dakota, as a community delegate from Dokis First Nation. She graduated from Trent University with a BAH psychology and minor in Indigenous studies. She is dedicated to Anishinaabe teachings, youth, and the community and participates in ceremony. 

Rosy Simas is a transdisciplinary and dance artist. She lives and works in Mni Sota Makoce (Minneapolis, Minnesota). Simas is an enrolled member of the Seneca Nation. Her knowledge of her Haudenosaunee family and lineage is the underpinning of her relationship to culture and history—stored in her body and expressed through her work—of moving people, images, and objects that she makes for stage and installation. Simas’s work weaves personal and collective identity themes with family, sovereignty, equality, and healing. Simas creates dance work with a team of Native and BIPOC artists, driven by movement vocabularies developed through deep listening.
 
Simas is a Doris Duke Artist, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation (NACF) Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, McKnight Foundation Fellow, Dance/USA Fellow, United States Artists Fellow, a Joyce Awardee, and NACF SHIFT Awardee. She has received multiple awards from the New England Foundation for the Arts, the MAP Fund, and the National Performance Network. She is the Artistic Director of Rosy Simas Danse and is currently an artist in residence at the Walker Art Center.