EMERGENCE--> DRUM MAKING

EMERGENCE__ "Change Happens one Warrior at a Time. Our people must reconstitute the mentoring and learning–teaching relationships that foster real and meaningful human development and community solidarity. The movement toward decolonization and regeneration will emanate from transformations achieved by direct-guided experience in small, personal, groups and one-on-one mentoring towards a new path." (Alfred and Corntasel 614)__ The drums represent elements and the spirit of reconnection to ancestral homeland and regeneration of ancestral memories by using color and design relationships that collaborate with sacred Indigenous materials. The drums exist in the exhibition as art objects, but as a display reflect the group collaboration, community, as well as the individual who represents their unique tribal diversity. This collaborative experience and exhibition aims to expand both the viewer and the artist’s notion of Indigeneity and American Indian. __ The drums simultaneously hold their own futures outside of the gallery space. The instrument represents the heartbeat for the people, embracing the symbolic strength of the circle. They are created as prayer, in their emergence and existence to become a bridge home, a bridge inviting our ancestors to cross and join with us, walking forward. Their future is returning to ceremony, returning to homelands, bringing new voices and visions with them, through the artists and their families future generations. The artist’s participation and making activate these drums in non-linear temporalities, through remembering and making, an object can become an art practice, a tool. This is the first utterance in remembering how to communicate in re-indigenized and decolonizing languages. This exhibit allows the viewers and the artists to witness a beginning, and to remind us that the drums are a life and they will carry their own memory of a people, so they stand and witness these remberances alongside all of us.