Please join Inspired Word Café and Dr. Astrida Neimanis and Michael V. Smith (Co-Directors of the Biodiversities of Gender project) for an online writing workshop facilitated by author Joshua Whitehead.
Biodiversities of Gender investigates the intersections of gender, climate crisis, and place, with a particular grounding here on Syilx lands, in Kelowna, BC. Fostering a sense of abundance, BOG encourages creative process as an opening to more dynamic considerations around gender and climate equity. Overall, BOG will meaningfully contribute to a safer local community where new gender, climate and anticolonial cultural abundance can flourish through research-creation.
Registration is required. Register by clicking here! Please come with a pen/pencil and paper. This online event is free to attend.
Stones and Slipstreams: In this workshop, Whitehead is interested in exploring the epistemologies of stones. Within Anishinaabeg and nêhiyawak worldviews, stones are animate beings: from the miniscule pebble to grandfather rocks in our ceremonies to the mountains that sleep beside us through to the titans we call planets. Take, for example, manitou asinîy, or Creator's Stone, a 145kg iron meteorite that fell in the Iron Creek area bordering what is now known as Alberta and Saskatchewan. A meteorite used for ceremonial purposes, which also goes by the name awâsis kôhtakocihk kîsikohk (the child who fell from the sky) and was stolen from the land in 1866 and is, for now, housed in the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton. Here, Whitehead will ask: how does the stone act as a slipstream? What do stones tell us of Indigenous and/or queer futurities through their histories? And how might stones function as creative sites rich for writing and storytelling?
Joshua Whitehead is a Two-Spirit, Oji-Cree member of Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1). He is the author of full-metal indigiqueer, Jonny Appleseed, Making Love with the Land, and Indigiqueerness: a Conversation About Storytelling. He is also the editor of Love after the End: an Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction. Currently, Whitehead is an Assistant Professor at the University of Calgary where he is housed in the departments of English and International Indigenous Studies.
Joshua prefers to write about Indigeneity, and more specifically, 2SQ (Two-Spirit, queer Indigeneity). His poetic style is usually lyrical, experimental, and intertextual, he likes to use repetition and anaphora to help structure his poems, along with a multitude of voices to help his speakers sing.
This event takes place in the Engineering, Management, and Education (EME) building foyer (ground level) at UBC Okanagan Campus. All-gender, accessible washrooms are available.
Our programming is made possible by the City of Kelowna, the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at UBC Okanagan, and the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art. The Biodiversities of Gender project in partnership with Dr. Astrida Neimanis and Michael V. Smith. Funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
We respectfully acknowledge that we live and work in the unceded, ancestral territory of the Syilx people. It is a privilege to be able to put on events as uninvited guests on their land.
Photo provided by Joshua Whitehead.