Learn to write poems about memory and music! We will be writing tribute poems to an artist, song, or genre that we particularly admire. Themes align with BLACKLIST ME, The Chapter House’s most recent call for submissions.

Kinsale Drake (Diné) is a writer and narrator whose work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Yale Literary Magazine, TIME, New World Coming (Torrey House Press, 2021), her zine Hummingbird Heart (Abalone Mountain Press, 2022), and elsewhere. She is an Indigenous Nations Poets Fellow, and the recent winner of the Academy of American Poets/Sean T. Lannan Poetry Prize, and the Young Native Playwrights Award. She has been recognized as one of Time’s “People Changing How We See the World.” Her work is forthcoming in Poetry Online, Poets.org, The Languages of our Love (Abalone Mountain Press, 2022), and elsewhere.

Join TKP and TCH on Wednesday, June 15 at 5:30 PM PT for community crocheting/knitting night! We’ll make art, share stories and community in a healing and safe space. 

Space is limited to 10 participants. Each participant will receive a kit with all supplies needed to complete the piece + extra goodies to care for yourself. Admission and supplies are free! Please register before Friday May 27 to give us ample time to ship your kit.

Join us Thursday May 12 at 5:30 PM PDT for a Bring Your Own Project (BYOP) night! Bring a project you’re working on, hang with some community and shake off the grind of the week! 

Admission is always free! Register below.

Join The Chapter House and Seeding Sovereignty for a community art night February 11 from 5 PM to 7:30 PM PT! Our guest artist DeAnna (IG: @makwikee.co) will lead us through a painting session as we enjoy red rose tea and community!

When you register, you will receive an art supply box that includes -

- 5x7 canvas

- 12 pc acrylic paint set

- Seeding Sovereignty / Kakichihiwewin stickers

- Kakichihiwewin pin

- 2 Seeding Sovereignty patches

- The Chapter House sticker

- 2 Red Rose tea bags

- A tea light

- Juniper incense

- an N95 mask cover

🎨 TCH Community Arts Night, coming up! 🎨⁠
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Join us for a chilled out BYOP (Bring Your Own Project) arts night on September 24 at 5:30 PM PDT / 6:30 PM DST / 8:30 PM EDT. Grab your most recent project, a bite to eat, and meet us online for some conversation, creativity, and community.⁠
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Admission is always free! Register below.

Join us Saturday June 12 at 1 PM HST / 4 PM PDT / 5 PM MDT / 6 PM CDT / 7 PM EDT for a Bring Your Own Project Community Arts Night! Grab a project you're working on, make a glass of iced tea, and join The Chapter House crew for a relaxed evening of arts, crafts and fun. 🎨⁠
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Register for the Zoom session below! Admission is always free. ⁠

Reposting from @navajommdr—

Relatives, we are happy to invite you to our upcoming event to stand in solidarity with Navajo families to honor their loved ones who may be missing or have lost their lives to violence. In recognition of May 5th as the the National Day of Awareness for MMIWG, the Missing & Murdered Diné Relatives task force will hold an online synopsis forum entitled “Understanding the Trials Navajo Families Face,” and is taking place on May 5, 2021 at 4pm (MDT). MMDR seeks to increase awareness of disproportionate violence experienced in Navajo communities by reclaiming power and embracing healing.

The voices of the families are critical in the movement to recover our missing relatives and they continue to demand justice for those whose lives were taken by violence. This fierce collective of family voices continue to advocate for their loved ones. We invite folks in the community affected by the missing and murdered crisis to join our space, and if you are comfortable, you are more than welcome to share your story. This event is to elevate the advocacy of MMDR families and bring awareness to this issue affecting Diné.

To register for this event, please visit the link below. A confirmation email with the Zoom link and password will be sent to you. Ahéhee' and we will see you there!

Water is Life. A rallying cry of Indigenous Peoples, and a true, plain and simple fact. But what exactly does it mean to come from water? In her poem Atlas, where this exhibition draws its title from, Terisa Siagatonu ponders the realities of being from Sāmoa, an island in the South Pacific, very often overlooked on maps, and that is victim to colonization, tourism, and American military imperialism. For Siagatonu, water is the place she is from, in part because it threatens to overtake what little land makes up Sāmoa, but also because the ocean’s vastness is easier to see than the island. As water surrounds her homelands, how might water shape other places we are from? From the Navajo Nation to sub-Saharan Africa to California, water scarcity, the lack of running water, and drought make everyday tasks and health a challenge. On the other hand, abundance of water, like post-Hurricane Katrina or the Kiribati Islands threaten to swallow the very existence of a physical space. In both instances of too little or too much water, water structures our homes, physical and mental health, and lives.

In The Chapter House’s online exhibition, but when you come from water, we invite artists to contribute works that consider water as a material, medium, inspiration, and something to fight for. This exhibition is specifically inspired by the work of Emma Robbins, The Chapter House’s Founder and Executive Director of the Navajo Water Project. In conjunction with World Water Day, but when you come from water, explores interpretations of water in artistic form from artists from across the world.

Opens March 22 on World Water Day.

Bring a project you’re working on, grab a cup of tea, and hang out with The Chapter House crew on March 19 at 5 PM PDT!

This Friday, March 12, at 4PM EST, Emma Robbins and Swagato Chakravorty will sit in a conversation hosted to Public Humanities at Yale. You can join the call directly from our website by clicked the link below.

Sharing from Eventbrite:

Join us for this live, online discussion with author Yolanda Bonnell (Ojibwe/South Asian) to discuss her play bug.

About this Event

Join us for this live, online discussion with author Yolanda Bonnell (Ojibwe/South Asian) in conversation with researcher and theatre-worker Jill Carter (Anishinaabe/Ashkenazi) to discuss our January Indigenous Book Club selection bug. The event will be broadcast on Facebook Live. Register to receive reminders and the link.

Our Stories: Indigenous Book Club series is a partnership between the National Arts Centre’s Indigenous Theatre and the Ottawa Public Library.

A separate book and author event will be announced each month.

About the play bug

The Girl traces her life from surviving the foster care system to her struggles with addictions. She fights, hoping to break the cycle in order to give her daughter a different life than the one she had. The Mother sits in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, recounting memories of the daughter that was taken from her, and the struggles of living on the streets in Northern Ontario. They are both followed by Manidoons, a physical manifestation of the trauma and addictions that crawl across generations.

bug is a solo performance and artistic ceremony that highlights the ongoing effects of colonialism and intergenerational trauma experienced by Indigenous women, as well as a testimony to the women’s resilience and strength.

About the author

Yolanda Bonnell (She/Her) is a Queer 2-Spirit Ojibwe/South Asian performer, playwright and poet from Fort William First Nation in Thunder Bay, Ontario (Superior Robinson Treaty Territory). She is now based in Tkarón:to. Yolanda’s Dora-nominated solo show bug had its world premiere at the Luminato Festival in 2018, followed by a national tour and a remount at Theatre Passe Muraille in February 2020. She was also a part of Factory Theatre’s The Foundry, a creation program for new career writers, where her play Scanner continues to be developed towards production.

Sharing from EventBrite:

Join us for our first Virtual Art-Talk! Learn more about how Kinngait textile printing impacted contemporary Inuit fashion design.

About this Art-Talk

For our first Virtual Art-Talk, Textile Museum of Canada Curator Alexandria Holm will speak about contemporary Inuit fashion designers featured in her exhibition Printed Textiles from Kinngait Studios. These include Martha Kyak of InukChic, Nooks Lindell of Hinaani Design, and Tarralik Duffy of Ugly Fish. The exhibition explores a little-known story of a group of Inuit artists and printmakers who produced a collection of graphic textiles in Kinngait, Nunavut, during the 1950's and 60's -- a traumatic period during which colonial efforts disrupted traditional language and relationships to the Land. Alexandria will trace the evolution and impact of the Kinngait textile printing initiative on Inuit graphic arts and entrepreneurialism to become a story about Inuit cultural survival and celebration in the 21st century.

About Alexandria Holm

Alexandria Holm is a Toronto based art historian and the Curatorial Project Coordinator of Printed Textiles from Kinngait Studios, an exhibition at the Textile Museum of Canada.

Alexandria received her MA in Art History and diploma in Curatorial Studies in Visual Culture from York University, and her BA in Art History from McGill University. She has nine years of broad experience in both public and private art businesses, including museums, commercial art galleries and artist-run centers in Toronto, ON, Hamilton, ON and Montréal, QC.

Finger weaving is a traditional art form used to create versatile woven pieces for voyaging / travelling and wear by First Nations communities and peoples in Canada.

Please join The Chapter House for an intro to Métis (Michif) finger weaving with S.A. Lawrence-Welch! Learn to make a basic pattern along with a little history and some really excellent joke telling! Whether you’re a beginner, an expert, or just curious about a new art form, this session will be welcoming and inclusive to all.

Come share (virtual) space, community and culture with us!

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For the session you will need:
- 3 skeins or balls of yarn, different colours 🧶

- Yarn.com

- Deal Genius

- Etsy (sometimes more expensive, but lots of variety!)

- A wooden dowel, chopstick or pencil⁠ ✏️ 🥢

- Tape⁠

- Scissors✂️

Sharing from the Art Institute of Chicago:

As part of the Art Institute’s King Day celebrations, join Rebirth Poetry Ensemble and the performance duo In the Spirit featuring Zahra Baker and Emily Hooper Lansana. Youth poets from the Rebirth Poetry Ensemble have been performing at the annual King Day festival for several years, and this year they’ve created spoken-word pieces in response to the exhibition Bisa Butler: Portraits. In the Spirit, too, is returning to perform for King Day, bringing to life Butler’s quilts and the legacy of Dr. King, through original stories, woven together with rhythm and song.

This virtual event will be hosted on Zoom. Find Zoom tutorials and resources here. If you have any questions about virtual programming, please reach out to museum-programs@artic.edu.

Sharing from Yale University Art Gallery —

What would the world look like if, as humans, we thought of ourselves as companion species? Can acts of creative collaboration help heal broken bonds with the environment and with each other? Cannupa Hanska Luger (Manda, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota) and Marie Watt (Seneca), M.F.A. 1996, invite the public to consider such questions while contributing to the physical manifestation of a large-scale sculptural installation.

In conjunction with the Gallery’s exhibition Place, Nations, Generations, Beings: 200 Years of Indigenous North American Art and in preparation for the collaborative project Each/Other at the Denver Art Museum, artists Cannupa Hanska Luger and Marie Watt host a virtual sewing circle. Gathering together on Zoom, the artists will lead us in a shared practice of making a monumental artwork and reflecting on the Gallery’s exhibition, in which artwork by both Luger and Watt are featured.

No sewing experience is necessary and all ages are encouraged to participate. Participants are invited to bring their own materials: a bandana or a piece of fabric roughly 22 inches square, needle, and thread; embroidery hoop is optional. Email yuagprograms@yale.edu with any questions or if you are in need of materials. More information will follow registration.

Closed captions will be available in English. Generously sponsored by the Martin A. Ryerson Lectureship Fund.

Though space is limited at the virtual sewing circle, all are welcome to embroider a message onto a bandana or piece of fabric, which artists Luger and Watt will incorporate into a forthcoming large-scale sculpture for the Each/Other exhibition at the Denver Art Museum (https://www.denverartmuseum.org/exhibitions/each-other). 

Instructions:
1. Acquire a bandana or a piece of repurposed fabric roughly 22 inches square.
2. Fold bandana/fabric corner to corner to create a triangle.
3. Embroider/stitch text, imagery, or any other visual sentiment onto a corner portion of the fabric.
4. Embroidered fabric should be mailed to the artists at this address by January 25, 2021:
Camp Colton
c/o Each/Other
30088 S Camp Colton Drive
Colton, OR 97017

Learn more about Cannupa Hanska Luger at https://www.cannupahanska.com and Marie Watt at https://www.mariewattstudio.com. Find information about the exhibition Place, Nations, Generations, Beings at https://artgallery.yale.edu/exhibitions/place-nations-generations-beings.

Registration is required and space is limited. To register, visit https://bit.ly/37Bfoge.

Reposted from Empowering Pacific Islander Communities (EPIC):

Centering Tongan Fonua: Indigenous Feminisms and Protecting the Sacred

Speaker: Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu

Tuesday, December 8th @11am

The Pacific Islands nation, Tonga, currently holds the global record of the highest conversion rates into the U.S-based Mormon Church in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Following the Tongan and Indigenous cultural practices of oral traditions and storytelling, this presentation centers my own Tongan female body, my fonua, as a Tongan Feminist archive to tell stories or to participate in what First Nations scholar Leanne Simpson terms as the “narrative imagination” to examine the twentieth-century spatiality of the “Tongan Mormon Family.” Considering what Ohlone/ Costanoan-Esselen writer Deborah Miranda terms as the “genealogy of violence,” I examine the desires of U.S. setter colonialism, U.S. empire, and the histories of the U.S. military occupation of Tonga during WWII and their “white terror,” a racialized violence aimed to produce colonial systems of family, gender, and sexualities against the bodies of Tongan women and girls. Correspondingly, the scope of “white terror,” I will argue, is inextricably tied to the expropriation of the Tongan natural world—the fonua (land) to the Moana (ocean)—spatialities and Tongan cosmologies that are delineated as Feminine and located at the core of what we define as the Sacred.

This presentation concludes with a turn to Tongan migrations navigated by the Mormon Church to the U.S., and to Huichin, the occupied and unceded Lisjan, Ohlone land also known as the East Bay, California. This land currently hosts one of the largest Tongan communities in the U.S. outside of Hawaiʻi. I examine the local campaign here in Huichin, led by Lisjan Ohlone leader Corrina Gould to rematriate the land and to protect the West Berkeley Shellmound. I argue that as Tongan “arrivants” on occupied Lisjan Ohone land—our embodiment of the Tongan methodology of tauhi va (cultivating genealogies of relationalities)—asks us to stand with the Indigenous and original stewards of the land in their work to rematriate and to protect the Sacred in order to “find our way back home” to our own respective fonua.

Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu is a Tongan/Pacific Islander scholar and storyteller. She received her doctorate from the Comparative Ethnic Studies Department at UC Berkeley in 2019 and is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley. She is working on two book manuscripts; The Mana of the Tongan Everyday: Tongan Grief and Mourning, Patriarchal Violence, and Remembering Va and a collection of creative non-fiction titled, Looking For Hine Nui Te Po: Searching for Our Mother. Her research and storytelling examines the normalization of violence against women in Tongan families and communities.

Event details:

https://berkeley.zoom.us/j/98268415530

Meeting ID: 982 6841 5530

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Find your local number: https://berkeley.zoom.us/u/aeDRRFuzOU

For event accommodation requests, contact gilliane@berkeley.edu