we are mystery and matter in motion

This set of exercises is an invitation to dance with the unknown; with the mystery inside you, and between you and everything. 

When I was pregnant, GTDF members Vanessa and Dani invited me to read Hospicing Modernity, and then write an essay about the birth of my child, and the death of modernity.

As an introduction to the work I’m presenting here, I invite you to read or listen to “The Mask of Modernity”, written in November 2023.

The essay introduces some of the artistic work I was investigating throughout the Reactivating Exiled Capacities inquiry. It was an inspiring process filled with possibilities, which then proved itself difficult to translate into this online format with integrity—namely because the work is taught in groups, in person, and the pedagogy is layered with embodied experience. 

However, we do not have the privilege of time together to do this work in the way it was designed, and the stakes are much too high, so sharing these pathways of growth, with the intention and hopes that it may help in some way to protect life and move us towards decolonial futures, is worth the possibility of misunderstanding.

That means there is a lot of content to sift through, so please be generous and gentle with yourself as you take in what you can, and I invite you to do these exercises more than once, so you do not have to carry the burden of “getting it” all at one time. The additional framing provided is to help contextualize the teachings to our shared inquiry, and to aid the process of validating what, exactly, is happening and why it is valuable. 

The questions and seeds guiding my emergent research process:

• How can we embody the Earth’s Dream for humanity?

• What is in the Emptiness around us?

• Being in relationship with the Mystery

• Taking up space in time (Jessica Lanyadoo, Ghost of a Podcast)

• My working credo: “Nothing belongs to me: everything is a gift, and all gifts come with the responsibility to take care of them.”

• Land, and all its biological manifestations, as the source for guidance, animation, protocols, and eldership

• Any creation process can only manifest what it is already doing. how can we get as close to embodying decolonial futures, amidst the impossibility of living decolonially presently, throughout the creation process?

• Orientation, and reconciliation. How do we approach reactivating our exiled capacities? To reactivate, we need to first meet the exiled—those who live in a fugitive space and have developed invaluable skills and perspective. It is our work to consciously initiate repair, and rekindle a relationship of permission with discernment, respect, and tending to any wounding that has taken place.

• Acetylcholine is a neurotransmitter that plays a role in memory, learning, attention, arousal and involuntary muscle movement.  It’s an excitatory neurotransmitter. This means it “excites” the nerve cell and causes it to “fire off the message.”

• Ceremony builds new patterns in our brains, our bodies. Ceremony is the antithesis to colonization. Ceremony is neuro-decolonization. (Leanne Simpson, “Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies”)

I am deeply grateful for the mentorship I received throughout this inquiry from my clown teacher and Elder, David MacMurray Smith.

Protocols for the Work

Elder – a biological being or material which holds certain principles within its very nature that teaches through the natural limitations one meets by being in relationship with it and learning how to use it appropriately. Also can be an individual who takes responsibility for guiding others according to certain principles that exist in nature.

Protocols are a helpful aspect of container building for any process that intends to rewire, repattern, transform, generate, and/or regenerate.  Protocols indicate the boundaries and limitations of a living process. There is value in respecting them as the Elders who hold the life within and between, and allow the life to extend and explore (grow), without serious risk to its physiological and psychological safety. 

Protocols offer protection, so the guidance can emerge within the process to speak for/animate itself. 

They can be seen as the frameworks and agreements that hold a practice.  They provide a framework that does not change, but invites change by guiding the one who practices within them into a new shape; a new way of perceiving the world; a new way of filtering stimuli and light as it enters your Listening Body.

These protocols and exercises are offered in service to cultivating a Listening Body that is available to respond to the arising needs of the land, and operates in response to the natural law of reciprocal relations embedded within that ecology: that taking care of oneself and others is a foundational agreement to sustaining interspecies life on earth.

You are invited to relate to this work, and all the invitations that emerged within the Reactivating Exiled Capacities inquiry, as ceremonies towards neuro-decolonization.

The protocols entail how we enter and exit the work.  For the time we set aside to do this work, we intend to relax our habitual patterns, to allow and see what else is possible.

Concepts to Consider

Orientation: Being able to orient yourself is a necessary skill for functional navigation of personal internal and shared external realities. The principle of acknowledging transitions from one arena of attention (frame of reference; scenario; location; event) to another is valuable for the psyche.  We are working at building capacity to be present within liminal “in between” spaces. 

The Exit exercise assists with the natural process of decompression, sifting and articulation of experiences. It also validates that there is a place “between” this and the next thing.

Beginner’s Mind: Set aside expectations, associations, or ideas about what this exercise is, what it reminds you of, or what it might mean. Approach it as an opportunity to gather and observe the facts of your experience, rather than searching for predefined answers.

Listening Body:  Shoulders dropped, arms hanging loosely, relaxed anal sphincter and jaw, tailbone untucked. Standing with hips over knees over ankles.  Relaxed breath.

Listening Body entails the agreement with all collaborators (including the self) that the conscientious focus is on fluency and facilitation of movement towards a shared intention, within which no one is harmed. 

When working solo, or with others, any historic relationship and social customs (such as efforts to make the other feel comfortable, smiling, image management) are to be dropped from focus. 

Work: in this context, refers to practices which engage with a source as inquiry towards the function to declutter, decenter, and disarm the ego.  The work is embodied in how we approach these exercises: the intention is to cultivate a quality of focus that senses with eyes of honesty, humility, humour, and hyper-self-reflexivity as we move through the invitations.

It can also be referred to as Heart Work and/or Source Work. When working with a source, we trust that we are tethered to the source as a frame of reference, and then explore wildly within that (without causing harm to oneself or anyone else) to mine information about our relationship to that source.

Impulse: Incitement or stimulus to/causing action.  Arising from some state of mind, feeling, or circumstance. Sudden or involuntary (pre-conscious) inclination or tendency to act, without premeditation or reflection.

Impulse Imperatives: The driving elements of an impulse which are seeking fulfillment; Direction, Speed, Rhythm, Shape, and Momentum in the Physical, Emotional and Psychological areas. Gesture: The ordered expression, manifestation, of an Impulse describing the Attitudes, Thoughts, Feelings, Movements of the Listening Body.

These concepts and interpretations range from loose to direct quotes from David MacMurray Smith of Fantastic Space Enterprises, shared in live pedagogy or his written companion booklet Clownage Notes.

Some of his work has been adapted to weave with the GTDF pedagogy.

Entrances and Exits

To Enter:

To mark the transition into the work, the first three exercises that follow are useful to facilitate shifting from a more pedestrian body into a decluttered, attuning Listening Body.

To Exit:

When you are approaching your exit from this work for the day, you will need to mark the transition.

As you complete the exercise, observe what is happening in your body, and what you can see, feel, hear, and touch. Tune in and resonate with what you are experiencing. Be present in this place between what you have done and where you will go next. 

Then, bend at your hips and reach your hands to your ankles. Inhale and imagine you are peeling a costume off from your ankles up your body and off your shoulders and shooting it straight up into the air, with a big exhale.  Do this three times, or as many times as you need to, until you feel like the energy from your inquiry has neutralized. Reach down again and this time imagine you are pulling earth energy of soil, dirt, and plants up through your bones, grounding your energy.

Now you are invited to record your experience to collect information that will help you to track and see your patterns. Take note of any insights, impressions, confusions, frustrations, and wonderings that you noticed in a notebook or other form of recording information that works for you. Before doing that, take a moment to get a drink of water or go to the bathroom, to mark your exit from an embodied Source Work.

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Invitation 1: Entering a Listening Body

The Setup

You will need:

• A speaker or wireless headphones to listen to the recorded audio guidance
• A timer

Space:

• Minimum of 20 feet of open space with even ground free of objects you could trip over or stumble into while walking with eyes closed

Time:

• Allow 15 minutes for the three warm up exercises

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Invitation 2: Follow the Impulse (Brick Toss)

The Setup

You will need:

• A notebook and pen for reflections, with a printout of the questions OR computer/phone to read them from
• An object similar to a foam brick (a small pillow, a thick bundle of socks, a tightly folded sweater, a shoe, etc.). For simplicity, we will refer to it as the “brick”
• A sash or cloth to cover your eyes (optional), for walking with your eyes closed
• A speaker or wireless headphones to listen to the recorded audio guidance

Space:

• Minimum of 20 feet of open space with even ground free of objects you could trip over or stumble into while walking with eyes closed.

Time:

• Allow 10 minutes for the exercise and an additional 15 minutes for reading and reflections

The basic design of this exercise is:

1. Read the Introduction to the exercise
2. Listen and follow the 6 minute audio guidance
3. Read and respond to questions for reflection in your notebook
4. Read the Closing Thoughts

You are welcome to follow the design as it’s laid out, or take it at a more gradual layered pace by doing a first run through with only the audio instructions for guidance, and skipping the Introduction and Reflections (for now). Then, in a second (or third or fourth) run through of the exercise, you can integrate the questions for reflection after each walk, and the Introduction and Closing Thoughts.  Or, you can integrate the written content immediately, reading and responding in full or part to whichever questions you feel drawn to reflect on at the time. The choice is yours, with the invitation that you do go through all the written and embodiment invitations of this exercise at some point. It can be repeated as many times as you wish to, as it is a framework for an ongoing revelatory process which continues to teach in the doing of it.

Introduction

This exercise invites you to engage with it as a process for embodied inquiry, with a Beginner’s Mind and a Listening Body.

This exercise invites you to explore key capacities that can deepen your awareness of how you move through uncertainty and how you relate to intention, control, and surrender. It is a practice of noticing—of bringing your attention to the impulses and patterns that emerge when navigating the unknown.  It is also a practice of allowing your body to think aloud, and lead. This involves permitting the initiation, response, and follow through of impulses to move through you. 

This is not an exercise in achieving a specific outcome, but in observing the layers of your experience — and how you respond to feedback that arises in relationship to intentions made external. It’s a practice in listening, accepting, allowing movement, trusting before thought, and dancing with intention.

It invites you into a process of attuning your guts (radars) and your heart (vital compass) towards the calls to action that being devoted to dreaming decolonial futures into a shared reality will ask of you, by first acknowledging and metabolizing (decluttering) the well-practiced defences which block your path.

This is not a walk of achievement, but one of attunement. Notice what arises in your body and mind as you engage with the unknown.

The exiled capacities that you are invited to engage with:

• Allowing the body to think aloud by permitting the allowance and follow through of impulses, while ensuring no one is harmed by their embodiment
• Trust of bodily instincts (visceral response-ability before choice)
• Proprioception and extrasensory perception
• Courage to act in response to what is needed within a larger ecology
• Being in relationship with the mystery; seeking and trusting guidance from the mystery without certainty of outcome
• Following an intention with an open Listening Body as a receiver; trusting your intentions, and your body’s inherent intelligence as a guiding system in relationship to the mystery
• To walk with the hypothesis that nothing never happens.

You are invited to validate where you are right now by noticing, tracking and accepting what you observe, with honesty and non-attachment. This is only your starting point. To move toward something else, it is necessary to first be present—right where you are, in your body, at this moment.

Research Questions for Reflection

How do you feel toward the brick—both about it and in relation to it?

How did you feel when you reached for the brick, whether or not you touched it?

What is the intention of this exercise?

Can you discern any other layers of intention that slipped in?

How did you move toward the brick? What qualities (e.g., fast, hesitant, calm) did you notice in your body’s movements?

What part of your body led you?

Can you discern how you adjusted when the brick wasn’t immediately within reach?

Consider that the space between you and the brick is the tightrope in the SMDR Compass.^[1] How did the balance between you, the unknown, and the brick feel?

What did you hear or feel as you engaged with the reverberations between the tightrope and the brick?

How does the tension between the known (the brick) and the unknown (whether you will reach the brick) mirror your relationship with uncertainty?

Did any feelings of failure or success arise, and how did you respond to them?

What are your mental blocks when meeting the unknown?

What insights did the walk reveal to you?

What else in your life can you apply these insights to?

How willing are you to take a risk and follow an impulse, when you don’t know if you’re going to succeed or fail?

Closing Thoughts

This exercise is an invitation to consider the value of engaging with a practice of orienting and anchoring yourself in relation to our collective goal to actualize decolonial futures; relating to it not as an exalted goal but rather a living entity, a story song dancing in constellation to other story songs. It may exist as principles of relationship, and may involve qualities we cannot comprehend or describe. It exists before thought, and our bodies may have the instincts to recognize it before our mind comprehends it.

Being engaged in embodied inquiry is an ongoing process towards an intention within the emergent unknown. It represents something we move towards with dedication, without the expectation of certainty, attainment, or arrival. The inquiry guides us, and while remaining ungraspable as a final destination, it reveals the qualities of its existence as the path towards it is walked.

Within the context of GTDF Collective’s work and our collective engagement with the Reactivating Exiled Capacities inquiry, the brick is decolonial futures and the tightrope is the embodied process of reactivating exiled capacities. We do not know when, how, or if it is even possible to fulfill that dream, but it is our responsibility to take the next most responsible steps within reach towards it, so we are able to recognize and affirm its life-giving webs when it emerges.

One thing we can hypothesize is that how we take each step towards this future is what really matters and what brings the dream closer.  It is not only what we do, but how we do it, that grounds the dream of decolonial futures into our bodies, and into us as the land.  

How we dance towards the what can become an act of fulfillment with each step.

Perhaps it is this quality of listening—of tending while listening—that enables us to open wide enough to receive impulses from the land: information that can guide us towards tending the emergent needs of our ecology. By being open and listening with discernment, we become transmitters that can act and follow through on the next most responsible task within our reach.

The tightrope is our path, individually and collectively, and while we can take breaks to sit on the bank of the abyss (and it will sometimes be necessary to), the work being asked of us now is that we never turn our back to it.  Each next small task within reach is our path, and each step is an invitation to anchor in compassion, understanding, and orientation of stewardship towards decolonial futures.

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Invitation 3: Making Fishskin Leather

The Setup

You will need:

Part One:

• Raw fishskin
• 50-90 Red Rose or black tea bags
• 1 L mason jar
• Boiled and cooled water
• Teaspoon of salt

Part Two:

• Dried fishskin with tea tannins soaked in olive oil
• Dish soap
• Bowl
• Paper towels or cloth
• Pumice stone or sandpaper

Space:

• Kitchen counter or table surface you can easily wipe clean

Time:

• The whole process takes about a week

• On the first and last days of the process allow 1-2 hours for continuous scraping / softening / clean up

• On the days in between you will just need to boil water to make tea and let it sit until it cools (overnight) then transfer the fishskin into the cooled tea (in the morning)

View fishskin instructions as a PDF

Introduction

I come from mixed Indigenous and Settler ancestries with family who still live off the land in Turtle Island and Nepal, to a certain degree.  On my father’s side, my Great-Great-Great Grandma Rosalie Janvier would have tanned hides as a lifeway—I know this because the skill was transmitted to her eldest daughter, my Great-Great-Auntie Flora, who was renowned for tanning 30 moose hides in one summer (which is an incredible feat). Her sister, my Great-Great Grandma Blanche, did not tan hides or do any cultural crafts from the stories I’ve heard, and refused to speak her mother tongue (Dënesųłinë́, an Athabaskan language spoken in Northern Saskatchewan) until she was on her death bed and was too exhausted to hide anymore.  So the skill was not transmitted to me from my own grandmother, though I have held my Great-Great Auntie Flora’s bone scraper and a metal scraper she fashioned out of a broken spring from an ATV.  Her tools work better and fit better in my hand than any modern tools I’ve come across—it is clear she was intimately twined with her craft.

On my mother’s side, my Great-Great Grandfather followed deer through the northern mountains of Nepal for survival.  My mum, Kamala Tamang-Yonzon, is a Bönpo in the ancient healing tradition of Bon practiced by our clan, the Tamang people.   Bönpos are in a symbiotic relationship with hide tanners, who make their sacred objects: drums made from goat and deer skin, hair-on deer and tiger mats, instruments made from deer bone, and porcupine quills for their regalia.

I remember learning about Indigenous lifeways in Winnipeg, Manitoba in grade 3 from a textbook, and being so enchanted with the pictures I saw—buckskin clothing, canoes, living on the water. I loved it deeply and longed for it immediately.  Soon after I learned about residential schools. It taught me that our lifeways were a thing of the past, and that a deep shattering has taken its place.  It wasn’t for another 20 years almost that I would learn my grandmother had gone to a residential school when she was a teenager, because she never talked about it.  My dad worked up north in remote communities as a nurse practitioner, and would bring us back story books and carvings and moccasins—that was our connection at the time, and it was one filled with beauty and art, but removal.

In 2014 my dear friend Shauna Mikomi Tsuyuki shared with me about the “primitive skills” community, and I was amazed that there were people practicing skills like making buckskin by hand. I had no idea at the time. So in the beginning, I felt like my only access to this world I craved to be a part of was through European people I could find who were teaching. I was briefly introduced to tanning a possum skin in 2014 by Lynx Vilden, a British wilderness survival skills teacher.  In 2017 I dove with more dedication into learning how to make buckskin from deer with my first hide tanning mentor, Mara Cur, on the unceded traditional territory of the Snuneymuxw, Snaw-naw-as, and Stzuminus people.  She is of Scottish and Hungarian descent. I continued learning the fundamentals of hide tanning using European methods on sheep, deer and fish through three seasons during an immersion led by her on Kwantlen First Nation territories in 2019. It was through Mara’s mentorship that I felt equipped to begin teaching on my own in July 2021 on xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh + səlilwətaɬ (MST) Territories.

During that immersion I got to learn fishskin leather making from Janey Chang, who is a first generation Chinese Canadian woman living on Sḵwx̱wú7mesh + səlilwətaɬ Territory at the foot of the mountains and close to the ocean.  I later learned more about tanning fish from Amber Sandy, who is Anishinaabe and a member of Neyaashiinigmiing, Chippewas of Nawash First Nation.

From Shauna Mikomi’s teachings I learned more about sheep and working with buffalo hides. She is a Yonsei (fourth generation) Japanese-Ukrainian settler who resides on Ktunaxa and Secwepemc territory in the East Kootenays. She continues to mentor me, and inspires me endlessly.  It was with her and the buffalo that I began to experience the transformative nature of being on Hide Time.

All of my teachers are incredible people who I am so grateful to have received knowledge from and shared space with.

In 2021 my cousins Jeremiah and Lyndon, their daughters, my sister, and I began learning to tan moose hides with my Uncle Brian MacDonald, who takes care of his grandmother’s (mentioned above) tools.  He says he never learned to tan hides from her, but he has lived off the land his whole life—so when we tanned a moose and buffalo hide together, a lot of innate knowing and old memories of watching his grandmother work rose to the surface.

One time my Grandma Kathie was watching while my sister Jamuna was doing the final touches of softening a smoked deer buckskin. She had never been interested in helping before, but this day was beautiful and she reached out for the buckskin and brought it to her cheek, sitting in the sun.  She smelled it.  After a few moments she told my sister that a memory came to her of being in the kitchen with my Great-Great Auntie Flora, who was Grandma Flora to my grandma (she had looked after my grandma when she was a baby and had raised my Great Grandma Mabel). My grandma and her cousin Sadie were both strapped into cradle boards, while her Grandma Flora cooked.

I believe that land, language and craft are intertwined with our DNA. Reclaiming these skills is reclaiming our worldview, our place here on earth, our birthright to be here—as long as we tend to everything around us in this world we’ve been gifted. 

Hide tanning is so significant for me because it is the first way I’ve found to feel empowered and alive in my Indigeneity, instead of heartbroken at what has been lost.  It helps me to coexist with grief and loss; to stay open for what comes after.  It is a way for me to feel so much closer to my kin—to embody the same movements and senses they lived through.

The process of hide tanning often involves holding an animal skin taut in a wooden frame, while we work at loosening its fibres and breaking down its fascial layers.  The frame helps to make our efforts to relax the fibres more effective. There is a mutual relationship of listening. The hide tanner must listen to the animal skin in order to do their work well—how hard to scrape, how long, what adjustments to make in regards to tools, where to place the hide in relationship to the weather and climate, and many more considerations. All of these choices are in response to the history of the animal who lived in this skin.

In return, the animal skin listens to the hide tanner—with each scrape, they are changed, allowing themselves to be transformed into another life form entirely, with each step that makes them a durable, withstanding textile.

This process is inherently reciprocal. While the hide tanner enacts a ritual that tends the liminal space of death and resurrection for the skin of the animal, the skin transforms into a buckskin, leather, or fur textile which can then tend the people by providing warmth, protection, and holding.

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Protocols

Acknowledge the political historic relationships of your people, their relationships with the local Host Nations where you live or have lived, and any role that they may have played to either preserve and uplift, or interrupt the lifeways of the Host Nations.

• do you have a mess to clean up, or a torn relationship to repair?
• do you have relationships and ways of being and skills to reclaim?

Consider how you can gift back the teachings (without virtue signalling or transactional exchange) and be in service to Rematriation of Indigenous lifeways.

• Do not relate what you learn here to making money

• Gift the leather or something you make with the leather

• Respect your role in the cycles of death and rebirth of the animal and the land by returning any guts, membranes, fur, and scales to the land or the water

• Approach the animal skin with reverence—it is your Elder

• Practice listening with curiosity, patience, and dedication

Research Questions for Reflection

Before

Research the local Indigenous communities’ relationship with fish.

How has the infrastructure of the town or city you live in altered the local community’s capacity to be in relationship with fish?

Research what uses the host Nations had for fish, and its role in the community.

You are invited to hold one of your own patterns of thinking / behaviours / habits (a passenger within you) in mind that you are challenged by, and perhaps wish to transform. Allow your work to soften, stretch and relax your mind into a new shape. Dedicate the transformation to the spirit of Rematriation.

Instructions: Making Fishskin Leather with Black Tea Tannins

Day One: Scraping

Materials:

• raw fishskin
• 50-90 Red Rose or black tea bags
• 1 litre mason jar
• boiled and cooled water
• teaspoon of salt

To pull the skin off of a fish, it is easiest when the fish / filet is half-frozen or nearly defrosted. Make a small slit where you are going to start pulling (pull away from the head), use a paper towel to grip the edge of the skin, and just pull towards the tail.

1. First you want to scrape the flesh (pink), membranes (grey) and fat (sparkly white) off the inside of the fish skin. Use a spoon or butter knife or small uloo, and press harder than you think—fish skins are quite strong. Scrape towards the tail, and scrape until the skin is as smooth and white as you can get it.
2. Dunk the skin in cold water to clean it off, then flip it over to scrape the scale side. This time, scrape away from the tail. Use less pressure on this side in order to keep the scale pockets intact.
3. Dunk it in water again and rub your finger along the skin away from the tail to feel if there are any scales still stuck in the skin, and pull them out with your fingers or keep scraping.
4. Wash the skin in soapy water.
5. Store the fishskin in cold water with a little bit of salt until you are ready to put it in your cold tea bath.

Making the Tea Bath

Day 1: 5 teabags + 1 teaspoon salt
Day 2: 10 teabags
Day 3: 15 teabags
Day 4-6: 20 teabags

1. Boil enough hot water to fill your jar ¾ of the way full. Add 5 teabags and 1 teaspoon of salt and let the water cool.
2. Once the water is cold, put your fishskin in (this solution is strong enough for up to 2 fish skins), tighten the lid, and shake it. Shake it at least 3 times a day, or every time you walk by it.
3. In the evening, make a new teabath with more teabags in it, and let it cool overnight. It will be ready to use in the morning.
4. Dump the used teabath and toss the used teabags in the compost, and add your fishskin to the new teabath. You can leave the new teabags in the jar because they might still have some tannins soaking out of them, or toss them for more room.
5. Repeat for 4 days, and on the 4th or 5th day cut a small piece off an edge of the skin to see if the fish has been tanned all the way through. If there is a white line in the middle, do one more day of teabath with 20 bags.
6. If it is tanned all the way through, you can take it out of the teabath, rinse it under running water for a minute to wash the tannins out, and let it dry.

Day Six: Softening

Materials:

• dried fish skin with tea tannins soaked in
• olive oil
• dish soap
• bowl
• paper towels or cloth
• pumice stone

1. Rehydrate your fishskin, which now should be a lot thicker and feel like dry leather, by soaking it in a warm bath of water with soap in it.
2. Roll the fishskin up in a paper towel or cloth to press as much water out of it as you can.
3. Pour a few tablespoons of oil into a bowl, and drip your fishskin into the oil to slather it all over both sides, then wipe excess drips back into the bowl.
4. Massage the oil into the fishskin with your fingers, pulling in all directions.
5. Once the oil has been massaged in well (at least 5 minutes), you can lay it down on a table or hang it to dry for a while. If there is a lot of moisture still in the skin, you can leave it for intervals of 15 -30 minutes, and just keep picking it up to stretch it out a bit every once in a while.
6. When the skin feels like it is starting to dry, you will know because it will stretch out and hold its shape more than it did when it had a lot of moisture in it. Once it is drying, you don’t want to leave it sitting for very long. Continue to massage and pull at it in every direction.
7. The last 10% of moisture is the most important to keep massaging the skin until it is totally dry. You can dip it in more oil or spray water on it if it is starting to dry out too fast or getting hard. Rub the membrane side (opposite the scales) with a pumice stone or on the edges of benches, chairs, skateboards, rocks, etc. to help break the fibres and soften it.

Don’t rub the scales side with tools because it will break the pattern of scale pockets, which is what makes fishskins so beautiful! You will know the leather is totally dry when you put it to your cheek and it is not cool to the touch anymore.

Research Questions for Reflection

During (included in the video instructions)

Consider this fish as a relative and ancestor.

Consider that this fish lived a life, and now you are tending its death.

How are you tending it?

What thoughts, feelings, memories and images arise within you and drift into the space around you as you work?

With what quality of intention and attention are you tending this fish skin?

What is your relationship with time right now? How did you engage with time to arrive at this moment of tending a fish skin? What was required of you to get to this moment? Who helped you arrive at this moment? What relationships did you need to engage in order to be here with this fish?

Consider that the spirit that animated the fish whose skin you are tending is gone, but its skin still holds the memory of its life, and it holds teachings for us about life. This fish is now your Elder. What are you learning from this fish? How is it communicating with you? What is communicating with you?

After

Research your own family’s and lineage’s relationship with fish, as far back as you can track.

How has it altered the fish’s relationship with their ecology?

Consider your ancestors’ role in altering the lifeways of the host nations where you live. If they did not live where you currently live, consider the role they played in their migrations. Consider the role your ethnic kin played, and that humans have played. Consider the impact of your lifeways currently on the fish’s lifeways.

Research ecological restoration initiatives that are being carried out in your community and the layers that are involved—who is leading? What is the role of the host nations in the initiative?

What is the next most responsible action you can take towards restoring the lifeways of the Indigenous host nations with their fish kin and ancestor? What actions toward Rematriation and the Land Back Movement can you take?

How can you apply the same care and dedication to hospicing this fish’s form to being with the people, stories, and forms that are dying or have died in your life?

Return the fish scales and membranes and guts to the forest or waters so they can cycle back into the land in a good way.

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Endnotes

^[1] “The SMDR compass is…a set of orienting directions that invite people to deepen their capacities to move with deeper emotional serenity/sobriety, relational maturity, intellectual discernment, and intergenerational responsibility.” See https://decolonialfutures.net/notes-on-the-smdr-compass/

Photo Credits

Opening frame

1. Graphic collage by Artist using own photograph of buckskin submerged in water and a creative commons image of milky way galaxy, 2025
2. Photo taken by Artist of friend’s baby while teaching sheepskin workshop on xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh + səlilwətaɬ (MST) Territories, 2024
3. Photo of Artist adding punk wood to a buffalo hide smoking fire on Secwepemc Territories taken by Shauna Mikomi Tsuyuki in 2020
4. Photo taken by Artist of clown artist Eddy van Wyk during SLAB film performance for Vines Art Festival on MST Territories in 2020
5. Photo taken by Artist on Ktunaxa Territories in 2022
6. Photo taken by Artist on MST Territories in 2022
7. Photo taken by Lashen Orendorff on Sinixt/Ktunaxa Territories in 2022

Invitation 1

1. Photo taken by Artist on MST Territories in 2023

Invitation 2

1. Photo taken by Artist on MST Territories in 2022
2. Photo taken by Artist on MST Territories in 2022
3. Photo taken by Artist on MST Territories in 2022
4. Photo taken by Artist on MST Territories in 2022
5. Photo taken by Artist during installation of artwork for Vines Art Festival: Resilient Roots on MST Territories in 2020

Invitation 3

1. Photo taken by Artist on MST Territories in 2024
2. Photo of Artist’s family including Great-Great-Great Grandma Rosalie Janvier, Great-Great Auntie Flora Seright and Great-Great Grandma Blanche MacDonald, from Artist’s family collection
3. Photo of Great-Great Auntie Flora Seright’s hide tanning tools, taken by cousin Jeremiah MacDonald in Buffalo Narrows, SK in 2021
4. Photo taken by Artist on Sinixt Territories in 2025
5. Photo taken by Artist on Sinixt Territories in 2025
6. Photo of (back from left to right) jaz whitford, Sacha Ouellet, Julia Rayanne, Jamuna Galay-Tamang, Stephanie Wood, (in front) Miki Wolf and Artist on MST Territories in 2021
7. Photo taken by Artist of Shauna Mikomi Tsuyuki on Secwépemc Territories in 2020
8. Photo of Uncle Brian MacDonald scraping a moose hide, taken by cousin Jeremiah MacDonald in Buffalo Narrows, SK in 2021
9. Photo of Great-Great Grandma Flora Seright and Grandma Kathie Galay from Artist’s family collection
10. Photo taken by Artist of sister Jamuna Galay-Tamang, Uncle Brian MacDonald and cousin Jeremiah MacDonald in Buffalo Narrows, SK in 2021
11. Photo taken by Soloman Chiniquay of Karmella Cen Benedito de Barros during hide camp on MST Territories in 2021
12. Photo taken by Artist of buckskin pouch crafted by sister Jamuna Galay-Tamang on MST Territories in 2022
13. Photo taken by Artist of Culturally Relevant Urban Wellness Program Elder April Bennett during youth hide tanning workshop on xʷməθkʷəy̓əm Territories in 2022
14. Photo taken by Artist on MST Territories in 2024
15. Photo taken by Artist on MST Territories in 2024
16. Graphic collage by Artist using own photograph of framed buckskins and creative commons image of galaxy, 2025