Jessie Loyer’s essay on the Canadian Arts website, “Indigenous TikTok is Transforming Cultural Knowledge,” brings up an exciting account of Indigenous stories and perspectives being moved to the forefront on the social media website TikTok. Loyer’s delight at this movement is noticeable in the tone of the piece and the myriad of examples used. By “otherwise marginalized TikTok creators add[ing] their own spin to memes and contribut[ing] to a new language emerging from these digital spaces,” these actions are sort of creating an ideal space, and imagining that the world looked and acted this way in reality. The creations of…
Terese Mailhot cleverly writes about issues of the Indigenous condition, as well as the human condition.
Heart Berries by Terese Mailhot offers a raw, poignant look at Mailhot’s life through the lenses of her journey through mental illness and her identity as an Indigenous person. Mailhot is part of the Seabird Island First Nation, which is an island located in the Fraser Valley, just east of Agassiz, British Columbia. Mailhot’s voice throughout her work is unique and at times unsettling, as stated by the book’s publisher, which tends to be illustrative of her mental state. The publisher’s comments also state…
How Twist expresses her anxieties about Indigenous and Trans issues
In her poetry collection Disintegrate/Dissociate, Cree writer Arielle Twist boldly tackles the themes of life, death, change, and relationships. She expresses a lot of duality in some of her poems, with pairings like old/new, (re)birth/death, and chaos/stillness. This duality is reflected in the title of the poetry collection. Although the words ’disintegrate’ and ‘dissociate’ are not opposites, they are presented in a layout that expresses duality by being paired together and linked with a slash. There is also a duality in Arielle Twist’s identity as a trans woman, which she…
