ORIGINS 2021-22

FESTIVAL OF FIRST NATIONS 2021-2022

Every two years from 2009 to 2019, Border Crossings presented ORIGINS as a two-week celebration of the world’s Indigenous cultures. By the time the Festival reached its tenth year, it had become a significant feature in the cultural landscape of London - partnering with major institutions like the British Museum, the British Library, Southbank, Shakespeare’s Globe, the National Maritime Museum, the ICA and Rich Mix - and, even more significantly, in the ever more potent global movement to assert the importance of Indigenous voices.

As 2021 approached, and it became clear that we would not be able to run the Festival in its usual form that year, it felt more necessary than ever that those voices should be heard. Covid-19 was not a freak aberration in an otherwise ordered world, but a clear indication of how badly the dominant culture had damaged the eco-system. Zoonotic viruses are moving from other animals to humans because of the wholesale destruction of natural habitats and spread rapidly because of globalisation: processes intimately connected to the ever more immediate threat of climate change. During the first year of the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement swept across the world: demanding a re-balancing of colonial narratives and a reassertion of justice, equity and human rights. All three are intimately connected: Covid and climate change are the direct result of the same rapacious system of global capitalism that was made possible by the colonisation of Indigenous lands and the suppression of Indigenous cultures. Today, we are living with the direct consequences of that history. The planet and its people are in deep and urgent need of healing.

In January 2021, we brought together a group of people with Indigenous ancestry who live here in Britain, to discuss how ORIGINS might respond to these compelling needs, while travel and gathering remained such a challenge. They asked us to think about what we could do in our own localities to indigenise ways of thinking and being, to bring a sense of reciprocity and gratitude into relationships between the human and the non-human. They asked us to learn from our previous ten years of exchange with Indigenous cultures and to apply that in our own lives and spaces. They asked us to work more slowly, more thoughtfully, in greater depth.

The resulting Festival has lasted until the end of 2022. It has touched people and places all across the country and (through our online programmes) far beyond. We have brought a Totem from Mexico to COP-26, installed a permanent memorial to the Aboriginal landing on Dover Beach, created gardens inspired by Indigenous practices in London and Manchester schools, offered a welcome through dance and poetry to Indigenous people visiting Birmingham for the Commonwealth Games, created a musical map of Brixton following an Indigenous Australian methodology.

This programme comes not at the start of the process as a form of publicity but at the end as a record and an assessment. It includes many links to videos and films. We hope you will continue to explore these digital traces of ORIGINS 2021-22, allowing Indigenous ideas to inform your own way of being in this rapidly changing world.

Michael Walling Artistic Director

Artistic Director Michael Walling at the welcoming ceremony for TOTEM LATAMAT

Photo: John Cobb.

19th January 2021 Online

In preparation for the different style of Festival necessitated by the Covid-19 pandemic, Border Crossings met with a group of Indigenous people living in the UK at the start of 2021, to explore the potential of a slower, longer and more localised ORIGINS.

LeAndra Nephin (Omaha):

How can we engage the younger generation? They are the future: we are the future ancestors. That's a huge responsibility, an important responsibility. So what kind of support structures and frameworks can we put in place to educate around that? Maybe you can engage with a few schools so that they can go out into the forest, find local plants, identify and establish that kind of kinship relationship with nature, with our animal relatives, with our plant relatives and even looking at decolonising the concept of time and space. My people don't celebrate New Year until the first thunders, which happens in the spring, whereas the Gregorian calendar is basically made based on January 1. Learning about ways that they can get in touch with their own history, their own ancestry, teaching a responsibility for Mother Earth.

Alexandra P. Alberda (Pueblo):

I think this idea of well-being and slowness - especially with the pandemic when people are in smaller locationswell-being is a real need. So much of that is tied to people having no access to green spaces, and this idea of always being online. Some of the actions that lead into climate change, like fast fashion - when the only thing we have is the technology that we use. Amazon made billions during the pandemic because people are buying more and more. Some of that is because people didn't have safe or normal access to things they needed, but some of it was a real want to have connections or to fill that space. So it may be climate change and well-being in the locality and slowness is a needed focus… and ways we can find Indigenous craft or Indigenous art bringing wellness strategies that we can then tie to environmental actions and the idea of well-being. How can we ‘get bored’ in a healthy way? How can we have a time where we don't have ‘the device’? What kind of Indigenous knowledge from across the world can help us? How we started this meeting, with a blessing by Kurikindi, was beautiful. At one point I opened my eyes and everyone else’s eyes were closed, looking down in just a peaceful moment. How can we bring that energy?

AND SOLIDARITY

INDIGENOUS TAIWANESE WOMEN’S ART

19 March 2021 - 31 March 2022

Online Exhibition

For the first time, ORIGINS collaborated with the Indigenous people of Taiwan, to present this online exhibition by three Indigenous women artists: Milay Mavaliw (Pinuyumayan), Eleng Luluan (Rukai) and Aluaiy Kaumakan (Paiwan). The Indigenous curator was Biung Ismahasan (Bunun, Atayal and Kanakanavu).

Although the Indigenous Nations of Taiwan are little known in Europe and America, they have much in common with Indigenous people elsewhere, for example in relation to land, language and cultural survival. Climate change has impacted powerfully on their communities: Taiwan recorded its hottest temperatures ever in 2020, and the rate of warming is twice the global average, with a commensurate rise in sea levels. Indigenous communities are experiencing serious water shortages, and when rain does come, it is in the form of extreme storms. Two of the artists in this exhibition, Eleng and Aluaiy, made work that responded to the devastation of their home communities by Typhoon Morakot in 2009: devastation on a scale that left those communities uninhabitable.

Online exhibition supported by the National Culture & Arts Foundation, Artwave and the British Council through the Connections through Culture programme. The exhibition went on to be featured in TOMORROW, TOWARDING at Taipei’s Museum of Contemporary Art, with catalogue essays by Biung Ismahasan and Michael Walling.

RESURGENCE by Milay Mavaliw

Biung Ismahasan:

At the core of this exhibition is the need for women’s togetherness: togetherness as a lived practice and togetherness as a methodology, whether that be curatorial approach or personal philosophy. Decolonising Indigenous Taiwanese contemporary art must include privileging the voices and input of Indigenous women artists. By bringing together the voices of respected Elders and three very powerful women artists, the exhibition generates togetherness through trans-Indigenous cultural exchanges across generations. It is about the transmission of knowledge between people, land and river.

Today the rights of women, the protection of Elders, and environmental concerns are critical for Indigenous Taiwanese women. There is a powerful sense of their search for new unexplored possibilities, as they strive to carve out a place for themselves, an escape or departure from the familiar and the constraints of the Covid-19 pandemic. They deliberately locate themselves in foreign or alien environments with an awareness of their difference, finding connections, experimenting with intensities. The artists in this exhibition, all of whom identify as feminists, make these journeys from the specific starting point of Native community experience, their sovereign words and concerns about environmental reciprocity.

Click on the image for a video tour of the exhibition

SENSELESS MURMURS by Eleng Luluan

25th March 2021

Online

MC Prophecy:

Any time you find Native people under attack, you will find that the land is under attack, because Native people are the stewards of the land. The recent resistance movements, for example Standing Rock, are environmental movements and they are also youth-led movements. That's why organisations like Indigenous Enterprise work with forms like hip-hop as well as more traditional music and dance - it's a way "to light the fire, to spark the flame”.

The Covid-19 pandemic gives us an opportunity to see how Indigenous culture points towards social change. "Sit down, sit still, think about what's going on in the world." It's showing that we have to put the self aside for the good of the community and of the planet. His own moniker as MC Prophecy is taken from the 7 Fires Prophecy of a choice between two paths: one wellworn and scorched, the other new and green.

"We need to change. As a species on the planet, we need to change."

Like Standing Rock, the American Indian Movement of the 1970s started as an environmental movement, with the resistance to the drilling for uranium that broke a treaty with the Lakota people over control of the land. The drilling led to radioactive water: and Standing Rock also reflects an attack on water.

These youth-led movements complement the teachings of Elders. Mutual teaching and exchange is at the heart of Native culture. Even enemies should sit down and talk together before they resort to conflict. But isolating people on reservations doesn't allow for this kind of interaction. When there is real interaction, then there should be a proper exchange between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people: "we have to think about ourselves as a species." It's fine to be inspired by other cultures: he was himself inspired by a Japanese village that has managed to reach a point where it has no waste.

"But we have a group of people who can't think that way.... Are we going to live with the Earth, or try to be masters of it?"

An online presentation of the group’s dance and ideas, with Kenneth Shirley (Founder of Indigenous Enterprise) and MC Prophecy.

13th May 2021 Online

Presented by Festival Director Michael Walling from the Garden Museum in London, the online Opening Event laid out the key Festival themes of Colonialism, Climate Change and Covid.

The event included ceremonial blessings recorded at the opening of RESURGENCE AND SOLIDARITY in Taiwan, led by Elder An’kil (Ya Lei), a performance of KATHARSIS by Yvette Nolan (Algonquin), followed by a discussion between Yvette and David Milroy (Palyku), music by Jessie Lloyd (Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander), and closing words from Amazonian knowledge-keeper Bira Yawanawá.

KATHARSIS by Yvette Nolan

A Prairie Theatre Exchange production

Featuring Tracey Nepinak

A love letter to the empty theatre

“Warriors returning from battle used to have to go through purification rituals before they could rejoin their communities. What ceremony will allow us to gather again?”

A specially commissioned short play, created for and filmed in an empty theatre, KATHARSIS was a marking of the period when our theatre was in waiting.

Director: Thomas Morgan Jones

Original Music & Sound Design: MJ Dandeneau

Lighting Design: Ksenia Broda-Milian

Stage Managers: Leslie Watson & Wayne Buss!

Associate Artist: Katie German

Ice River Films

Film Director: Sam Vint

Cameraperson/Producer: Sam Karney

Cameraperson/Producer/Editor: Andrew Weins

Yvette Nolan:

I am a theatre rat, not a filmmaker. But the opportunity to write for an actor, in a theatre, and then have that story transmitted to the world through another medium, is enough of a lifeline to keep me connected.

We have always used the theatre to work things out, together. Even though we are not in the same physical space, we can come to together in the virtual space, and watch the actor in the physical space, and perhaps begin to work out some of these recent events that have separated us from each other.

Opening Event supported by Beyond the Spectacle and the High Commission of Canada in the UK.

with David Herd.

Natalie Diaz: I’m thinking about the relationship which says “poetry matters to these politics”. Language itself is political, and sometimes political in a way that we do not have a choice. Sovereignty,

JOY HARJO

20th May 2021

Online

This series of writers’ talks and readings, supported by Beyond the Spectacle, featured leading and emerging Indigenous writers from North America. We began with Joy Harjo (Mvskoke), who was then the US Poet Laureate. She read from her work, and was in conversation with Michael Walling.

Joy Harjo: Poetry has emerged as one of the most crucial and important tools for making it through this time of deep questioning and cultural and climate shift. I remember being in circles of healers when I was young and them saying that the light of the sun would grow darker - because we would obscure it with pollution.

Stephen Graham Jones

1st June 2021 Online

Award-winning horror novelist Stephen Graham Jones (Blackfeet) read from and discussed his work with Theodore C. Van Alst, Jr.

Stephen Graham Jones: I used to just assume that all my characters were Native, but now my stuff is getting optioned more and more, I’m wondering if I need to leave more signals so that they cast it right. I want Native actors to get work and I want to see our faces on big screens and small screens. I want kids to see us, actually.

Click here to watch the recording

Matthew James Weigel & Liz Howard

3rd June 2021 Online

First Nations Canadian poets Matthew James Weigel (Dënësųłinë & Métis) and Liz Howard (mixed settlerAnishinaabekwe) read and discussed their work with Prof. Peter Jaeger (Roehampton University).

Matthew James Weigel: There’s a very strong connection to the place where I literally am right now. It’s about the land, and that’s the bedrock. Moving in that fortunate space, being here and being able to do the work that I do.

Kyle Whyte: There was nothing “normal” about the situation prior to the pandemic. We say that governments moved quickly, but African Americans and Native Americans experienced severe harms due to Covid, and the causes of that vulnerability still haven’t been addressed.

Click here to watch the recording

ETCHED IN BONE

ETCHED IN BONE

17th June 2021

ETCHED IN BONE tells an extraordinary story of theft and repatriation. When the Smithsonian Institution agrees to repatriate stolen human bones from northern Australia, the Aboriginal elder Jacob Nayinggul creates a ceremony that restores his ancestors’ spirits to their homeland. Linking into contemporary debates about decolonizing museum collections and repatriating cultural artefacts and human remains, the post-screening discussion will consider recent efforts in the US and the UK. The screening was followed by a live Q&A with the filmmakers, Martin Thomas and Béatrice Bijon, alongside museum curator Stephen Welsh, and chaired by Menzies Screenings curator, Stephen Morgan.

Co-presented with the Menzies Australia Institute at Kings London.

ANIMISM ON FILM

24th June 2021

This was an evening of short films and discussion around Indigenous spiritual ideas, chaired by Prof. Graham Harvey, the author of ANIMISM: RESPECTING THE LIVING WORLD. The event included two films exploring animism by Alisi Telengut (Mongolian) - THE FOURFOLD (2020) and TEARS OF INGE (2013) - and a new film about a Mayan ceremony for the equinoxAJAW Q’IJ (2021), directed by Chiara Faggionato and Juan Jose Chiriz Cuat (Maya).

Alisi Telengut: THE FOURFOLD is an animated film using paint and plants, based on animistic beliefs from Mongolia and Siberia. It’s narrated by my grandmother, who told me about all these rituals. Many rituals were suppressed in the Soviet time, but they are coming back now.

Presented in partnership with the Open University.

UNDERMINED: TALES FROM THE KIMBERLEY

21st October 2021

A vital documentary about the ongoing fight to save the vast Kimberley region of north-west Australia from an unprecedented land grab. UNDERMINED investigates the politics of an area now branded “the future economic powerhouse of Australia,” and what this means for First People and their unique cultural landscapes.

The screening was followed by a Q&A with director Nicholas Wrathall.

Presented by the Menzies Australia Institute in association with Flourishing Diversity, Invisible Dust and ORIGINS.

VAI

6th August 2021

New Zealand 2019 / Directors: Becs Arahanga, Amberley Jo Aumua, Matasila Freshwater, Dianna Fuemana, Miria George, Ofa Guttenbeil, Marina McCartney, Nicole Whippy

Co-presented with Aya Films.

Eight connecting moments of seemingly different lives thread together Vai’s journey of empowerment through culture over her lifetime. Beautifully shot over seven Pacific countries, and played by a different Indigenous actress in each place, Vai links together a story of family, culture, and at times, isolation. A delicate exploration into the meaning of growth, adaptation, and most notably, a connection to water and home.

Michael Walling: VAI is made up of nine ten-minute vignettes, portraying a woman called Vai (meaning “water”) at different stages of her life. They aren’t actually the same woman - she could be many ages in the same era, and moves around the islands of the Pacific - but they are like the same woman, with other people in her family always having the same name, even if their personalities are very different. Vai, water, flows between Polynesian people and binds them together across the vast Ocean. And, like this story of common cultures and continuous regeneration, the very process of film-making suggests a community-

WHERE WE BELONG

14 June - 11 July 2021

Online

Written and performed by Madeline Sayet (Mohegan)

Directed by Mei Ann Teo

First presented at Rich Mix and Shakespeare’s Globe as part of ORIGINS 2019, Madeline Sayet’s solo performance was re-worked for online presentation.

Reshaping the World: A Mohegan Reaction to Madeline Sayet’s WHERE WE BELONG

Finding Native representation in art and media when I was growing up was difficult. Finding anything good or specific? Nearly impossible. Imagine my joy at a piece of theatre written by a Mohegan about Mohegan that uses Mohegan language, teachings, history, and cultural motifs—by another Maddy, no less!

I see WHERE WE BELONG as primarily about balance and translation bound up together. As Sayet moves around the stage, traversing the shifting boundaries demarcated by lights and a winding trail of piled dirt with one small island of dirt in a bend, she embodies that delicate act that I, and I assume many other Indigenous people, go through in trying to find some place to stand that feels hospitable to us, that will accept the whole of us without demanding translation.

That dirt design, which alternately represents artificially imposed borders and bodies of water, resembles the Mohegan trail of life design. In one scene, this earthen river is illuminated with another variation on the trail of life that we view from above.

Translation, and language itself, is the other topic that sticks with me from this piece. First, I appreciate it for what it asks of the non-Native viewer. Sayet challenges them to examine their assumptions and the conventions they take

for granted. By foregrounding translation, both of language and of worldviews, throughout the piece, she emphasises the fact that those views which we often take to be natural or neutral are not in fact so, but owe that status to a long and violent history of colonisation. The viewer must ask themselves what it means that her story is being presented in the language of her coloniser. While Sayet tells us her story, some of its truth remains unspoken so long as it cannot be said —and heard—in Mohegan.

Sayet speaks about tripping over our own tongues and dreaming of a day when we don’t encounter that difficulty. I often come to a point in writing or speaking where there is something that I want to say but I simply cannot, because I do not have access to the language that would enable me to do so. I am slowly learning Mohegan, but sometimes I become so angry that there wasn’t a community of living speakers to pour the language and the worldview it contains into me from birth. The removal of our language deprived us not only of the words themselves, but of the relationships encoded in that language and our ability to maintain those relationships with one another and the land.

In discussing language loss and reclamation, Sayet reminds us that it is these relational languages that we need to repair the relationship of all humanity with the earth. The diminishment of Indigenous languages is an incalculable loss not only to those communities like mine, whose language has been sleeping for a long time making it all that much harder to rouse, but for those who landed on our shores lacking the sense of reciprocity one needs to have in order to survive with the land. There is no existence separate from the land, and our languages are able to express that in a way that the languages of our colonisers simply do not.

Perhaps the most exhausting translation is that between the worldview of the coloniser and the Indigenous worldview. I hear the beginning of Sayet’s journey as a fan and performer of Shakespeare to an academic who studies Shakespeare as an attempt to render herself legible to the dominant colonial power structure. Having done a great deal of this myself (though not with Shakespeare), her sense of desperation to make them understand feels like my own, and I imagine I am not alone in that. It comes to feel at times like, although we have learned their language and we are speaking to them in it, we are still speaking some other language with which they either choose not to or simply cannot understand. And, robbed of our own language, too, we are left speechless.

But Sayet is not speechless. In one of my favourite lines of the show, she says, “I realise the power that comes with showing people a different way of seeing the world.” Whatever limitations there may be in translation, wherever we may still feel out of balance, WHERE WE BELONG presents, in a voice fully and unapologetically Mohegan, a story with the power to reshape how audiences see the world.

Madeline Hutchins

THE SLOW VIOLENCE OF NATURAL HISTORY

22nd September 2021

Online

Rosalyn LaPier (Blackfeet and Métis) is an award winning Indigenous writer, ethnobotanist and environmental activist with a BA in physics and PhD in environmental history. She works within Indigenous communities to revitalise Indigenous & traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), to address environmental justice & the climate crisis, and to strengthen public policy for Indigenous languages.

Her talk, presented by Manchester Museum in association with ORIGINS, shared the story of how American science and natural history was “not viewed as violence at all,” but impacted the Blackfeet and other Indigenous peoples. It began with the military and scientific expedition of the Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery and it proceeded throughout the century. American science was built on a “violence of delayed destruction... dispersed across time and space,” without the consent or permission Indigenous communities. And its legacy fills museum and university collections today.

LEPAGE AU SOLEIL

8th July 2021

Online

In 2018, the celebrated Canadian director Robert Lepage collaborated with the Théâtre du Soleil to produce KANATA: a work that imagined the meeting of Europeans with First Nations people of Canada over a period of two centuries. In an open letter published by Québec newspaper Le Devoir, a group of Indigenous actors, writers, activists and artists protested against the production's lack of Indigenous performers and authors, saying that they were fed up with “hearing other people tell our stories." The resulting debate led to the cancellation of all planned North American performances, although a version of the play was presented at the Cartoucherie in Paris, under the title KANATA, ÉPISODE 1: LA CONTROVERSE.

In July 2021, ORIGINS brought together Innu writer Maya Cousineau Mollen, one of the signatories to the letter of protest, with Soleil actors Vincent Mangado and Dominique Jambert, who played leading roles in KANATA, to reflect on the controversy surrounding the show. Attendees were encouraged to watch an online screening of the film LEPAGE AU SOLEIL before joining. The online talk, presented in collaboration with the CRE-ACTORS project, was attended by people across a wide range of countries both in Europe and the Americas, and explored relationships between Indigenous peoples and European cultures, and the working out of colonial legacies.

Click here for an edited transcript of the conversation pp.50-55.

Rosalyn LaPier

TOTEM LATAMAT

Needa

1 October - 20 November 2021

In Chumatlán, Veracruz, México, a 4.5m high totem was carved from a single tree during a ceremony to thank it for giving its life. The head of a man and the wings of an eagle were sculpted into the cedar wood, the chiselled lines imprinting a message that would stretch 9,000km from Veracruz to London.

Commissioned by ORIGINS and carved by Indigenous Totonac artist Jun Tiburcio, TOTEM LATAMAT is a messenger sent by the Totonac people. "Latamat" means "life" in Tutunakú, and the totem is expressive of Totonac spiritual ideas as they relate to the environment. It emphasises how deeply our existence is interwoven with nature, calls attention to the damage being done to the seas, the land and the air, and insists that we cannot ignore this destruction any longer.

TOTEM LATAMAT travelled to the UK by ship and toured important cultural hubs, drawing powerful links between Indigenous experience and local heritage. The totem finally arrived in Glasgow for the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP-26). Following COP-26 it was ceremonially returned to the Earth in Dumfries, emphasising the cyclical and transient nature of life and art.

TOTEM LATAMAT at the Rollright Stones, Oxfordshire

Photo: John Cobb

TOTEM LATAMAT was co-presented by Centro de las Artes Indígenas with the support of The Open University and the Embassy of Mexico. Supported by Arts Council England as part of ORIGINS 2021-22.

Chiswick House 1st-5th October

Milton Keynes: Station Square 5th-11th October

Enfield Town: Fountain Square 11th-14th October

Warwick Arts Centre 14th-18th October

Rollright Stones 18th-21st October

Manchester Museum 21st-24th October

Hexham Abbey 24th-27th October

Glasgow: The Hidden Gardens 27th October - 14th November

Dumfries: The Crichton From 15th November

TOTEM LATAMAT: CARVING A MESSAGE FOR CLIMATE

Click on the image to watch the film

From tree to totem: message and messenger of the multi-species community we call Life

I followed the journey of TOTEM LATAMAT from afar, since the very beginning of its 5,500 mile voyage from Mexico to Scotland. And I was honoured to have the opportunity to participate to the panel at the Crichton in Dumfries, though virtually. Now that the TOTEM LATAMAT has been laid back on the soil and started its new journey of decaying, of transforming, I wish to share some still ongoing reflections as a non-Indigenous woman, native of Italy, and as a researcher of ancient Mesopotamian cosmologies and contemporary Alpine and Indigenous American botanical narratives.

In its triumph of colours and beings, TOTEM LATAMAT is not just a totem nor an artwork, but it embodies the very essence of Life as an ever-transforming multi-species community. In such a community, humans are inhabitants of the Earth together with the other-than-human inhabitants, be they animals, plants, stones, rivers, mountains and seas. The Totem consists of a snake, the face of Death, a human person, and a basket of hummingbirds, with an eagle pervading the whole composition. The Totem is a travelling message, and the hummingbirds are its messengers. TOTEM LATAMAT calls for fighting climate change and ecological crises by celebrating the living relationships between humans and non-humans, places and communities, between words and actions. The hummingbirds and the eagle carry messages of relationality, that are the seeds of change. In order to change, TOTEM LATAMAT – which means ‘life’ in the Totonac language – reminds us of death as the regenerating and transforming force of Life. With its smiling skull, the Totem tells us that the essence of life is transformation, and that death is not its opposite, but part of it.

The life of the Totem started with the death of a living tree. The Totem was carved by the artist Jun Tiburcio from a cedar tree growing on the East coast of Mexico. The cedar’s felling was accompanied by gratitude, ceremony and prayer for the life that is taken, in a way that starkly contrasts with the massive forest destruction executed daily worldwide. The mainstream approach in felling trees rather seems to follow another story. In the epic of Gilgamesh, the legendary king of Uruk ventured to kill the guardian of the sacred Cedar Forest in order to obtain timber for his palace. Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu are depicted felling the living cedars and destroying the sacred forest. An organism full of life is turned into a waste land. Their actions are impious at the eyes of the gods of the cuneiform cultures, and the myth narrates of the punishment of the king (i.e. his best friend’s death) and his following quest for immortality. Isn’t it surprising to find such narrative in an ancient text written on a clay tablet

from Iraq? The roots of the dominant worldview of Anthropocene seem to sink deeply in the humanity’s past. At the same time, this myth is an ever-green warning that the world is sacred and must be respected. Also, it tells us that not all stories and worldviews should continue.

The radically different story of the Totem expresses the vital importance of celebrating life in all its faces, and that life itself is movement and change, with death as another transformation. TOTEM LATAMAT has undergone two intertwined journeys. One from Mexico to Scotland. The other is from living tree to Totem to decaying tree. The ceremony at the Crichton, where the Totem is now laid to rest, marked the honouring of when life is returned to the earth. A Totem embodying the multi-species community of life was returned to the earth, where the features of Totem and tree interpenetrate until they dissolve. The tree is itself symbol of Life: the vegetal life keeps making the world by transforming itself. By fusing themselves in the world, plants embody and express a cosmology that is meshwork, cyclicity and inter-dependence. The Totemtree recalls us to embrace the spiral of transformation that is Life, with its endless capacity of regeneration and imagination. Joining the desire of the Anishinaabe scholar, educator and activist Melissa Nelson, TOTEM LATAMAT is a call to each of us “to serve as a hospice worker to encourage the death of colonial, fragmented worldviews and practices that support separation, and act as a midwife for a new/old consciousness of justice and harmony”.

After the unsurprising failure of COP-26 in steps for de-escalating the interconnected crises facing Earth’s life, we should acknowledge that these challenging times are our last best chance to come together. As TOTEM LATAMAT forcefully reminds us, we are all swimming in these stormy waters together: we, humans, are together with all the other-than-humans inhabitants of our home, the Earth. We should re-turn and re-discover, restore and re-story and spread the messages of the hummingbirds. And we should become messengers ourselves. We have the best last chance to weave new paths and stories, that draw from old relational ways of being and of knowing the world. TOTEM LATAMAT reveals us that the time is ripe for bringing together Indigenous and non-Indigenous, relational and eco-centric worldviews, which radically challenge the dominant worldview of the Anthropocene, with its centuries-long and enduring process of Colonisation and Modernisation. These are practical, local, embodied, rooted and non-dualistic philosophies and spiritualities of endangered and marginalised worldviews, that understand humans as part of the environment, and embrace and enhance care for the well-being of humans and the other-than-humans.

In these unsettled and painful times of human and environmental sickness and solitude, with the hidden dangers of a comfortable-looking digital and hyper-connected world, TOTEM LATAMAT calls for a reciprocal healing: a cure through care. Care for the humans and the nonhuman inhabitants of our beautiful world, of the lands we are rooted in. Such a cure will only take place if we will all walk along the path of cooperation and reciprocity, join forces, celebrate diversities, and nurture what Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer calls a “polyculture of ideas”. A polyculture of ideas, knowledges, practices, stories that stands against the progressing monocultures in all levels of life. A healing and regenerating polyculture of relational and locally grounded stories, ceremonies and practices that express practical wisdom and intimate relationships with the land.

In this journey, art has a crucial role. Art emerges from and dialogues with the the Earth, from the grounded meshwork of existence. By charting and chanting the emotional routes of connections between humans and the non-human inhabitants of the world, art brings us back into communication and intimate relation with our human nature and the broader-thanhuman community pulsing with life, into the reciprocal inter-breathing of the world. Old and new stories, performances, ceremonies, artworks are all celebrations of reciprocity and respect among the different persons that dwell in and make the world. They are pivotal forces that can transform our relationship with the living world, and mend the cut that separated us from the rest of the multi-species community we call nature, while re-enchanting and re-empowering the more-than-human living world.

Anna Perdibon

TOTEM LATAMAT - CARVING A MESSAGE FOR CLIMATE premiered online on 21st January 2022, introduced by our Patron Peter Sellars. The Embassy; at the FAMA Festival in Mexico City; at the University of California, Berkeley; and in Jun Tiburcio’s Totonac community.

PACIFIC ARTS FESTIVAL

9th-30th October 2021 St Martin in the Fields

Showcasing both heritage and contemporary arts, including a wide variety of visual art that has never been on show before, this exhibition took visitors on a journey across the Pacific region, highlighting the impact climate change is having on small island nations, including Fiji, Vanuatu, Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea, and how Pacific communities are fighting back. Income from artwork sales directly assisted Pacific Islanders who had been so badly affected by the Covid pandemic. Artists showing in the exhibition included Nicolai Michoutouchkine, Irami Buli, John Danger and Robert Kua.

Curated by Sulu Daunivalu (Director, Museum of Pacific & Oceanic Art, Latvia)

Produced by Pacific Island Artists Connection (Katrina Talei Igglesden & Vanessa Eden) in association with ORIGINS.

HONOUR SONG

From 27th October 2021

Online

HONOUR SONG was a a four-part series of films about climate change in Indigenous territories, made possible by a partnership between the sākihiwē festival, the High Commission of Canada in the United Kingdom, Border Crossings’ ORIGINS Festival, and the Embassy of Canada to Colombia.

Click on the images to watch the videos

The North Sound (Blackfoot)

A short music film about climate change in Saskatchewan from the perspectives of Forrest Eaglespeaker (The North Sound), singer/actor/Elder Joseph Naytowhow, and filmmaker/Elder Maria Campbell by filmmaker Matt Braden Smith.

Burnstick (Plains Cree)

A short music film about climate change in Manitoba from the perspectives of Indigenous folk music duo Burnstick and Elders Jocelyne Pambrun and Dr. Winston Wuttunee by BNB Studios.

Fawn Wood (Plains Cree / Salish)

A short music film about climate change in Alberta from the perspectives of Fawn Wood and Elders Charles and Mary Wood by filmmaker Natalie Wood.

Leela Gilday (Dene)

A short music film about climate change in Denendeh (Northwest Territories, Canada) by Dene filmmaker Morgan Tsetta from the perspectives of JUNO Award winner Leela Gilday, Sahtugot’ine Elder Cindy Gilday, and Shuta'ot'ine Elder Paul Andrew.

AMAZON VISIONS

6th November 2021

17th February 2022

Warwick Arts Centre The British Museum

As the programming partner for Indigenous work, ORIGINS collaborated with the CHANGE Festival to present José Navarro (Quechua) in his environmentally conscious puppet show AMAZON VISIONS. The piece was also presented at the British Museum to accompany the Peru exhibition, and at the five schools participating in BOTANY BAY. An exquisite cast of hand-made puppets tell the story of the Peruvian Amazon, its extraordinary importance and its devastating destruction. This is a tale of the region’s intricate links to the global ecosystem and to the Indigenous people who care for it.

Photos: Benedict Johnson

ORIGINS AND MUSEUMS

THE BRISTOL MUSEUM WINTER LECTURE: THE ORIGINS FESTIVAL AND INDIGENOUS INTERVENTIONS

IN MUSEUMS

9th December 2021

Bristol Museum & Art Gallery

Indigenous Australia: British Museum 2015

Relationships between museums and Indigenous people have become increasingly complex in recent years, with questions of ownership, appropriation, decolonisation and repatriation coming to the fore. ORIGINS has been

Tanya Tagaq: National Maritime Museum 2017 Photos: John Cobb

The British Museum 17th -18th February 2022

To complement the British Museum’s exhibition PERU: A JOURNEY IN TIME, ORIGINS presented a series of activities and events. José Navarro (Quechua) again performed AMAZON VISIONS for young audiences, while embroiderer Bella Lane ran workshops on ancestral Paracaas embroidery to teach visitors its history and techniques, so they could contribute to the installation for the evening show!

We screened WIÑAYPACHA (ETERNITY), the first feature film shot entirely in the Indigenous Aymara language, shown as a tribute to its young director Óscar Catacora, who had sadly died shortly before.

The evening event CELEBRATING PERU was packed, in spite of coinciding with a hurricane! Quechua shaman Kurikundi opened the evening by performing a blessing on the performers, audience and museum objects. Baroque music from Peru was performed by Rafael Montero in Indigenous languages Aymara and Quechua, accompanied by Roberto Gutierrez and Johnny Rodriguez; while Sumaq Ayllu / Sagrada Familia (Raymi Willka, Kanti Quena & Phaxsi Coca) performed Andean music. José Navarro returned alongside José a Fernandez to perform a Ritual Scissor Dance.

Photos © The British Museum

Photography by Benedict Johnson

25th-26th June 2022

City Centre Gardens, Birmingham and subsequently online

Border Crossings’ ORIGINS Festival, ɅVɅ DANCE

COMPANY & b.solomon//ELECTRIC MOOSE

Presented as part of Birmingham International Dance Festival 2022, produced by FABRIC. Commissioned as part of the Birmingham 2022 Festival, generously supported by Arts Council England, BIDF, the Canada Council for the Arts and the High Commission of Canada in the United Kingdom

As Birmingham prepared to host the Commonwealth Games, REMEMBRANCES asked how best to welcome Indigenous people as visitors to the city, the country and the land. In the time of #BlackLivesMatter, and in the face of colonial injustices, how can we offer a genuine space of welcome to First Nations people from Commonwealth countries?

The piece was in two parts:

1. WE WHO HOPE TO WELCOME

Choreographed by Avatâra Ayuso. Dancers: Eva Escrich González, Amy Hollinshead, Georgia Rose Thompson. Music by Dave Carey. Texts by Michael Walling & Matthew James Weigel.

2. RED FLAG

Choreographed by b.solomon//ELECTRIC MOOSE. Dancers: Marianna Medellin Canales, b.solomon. Click here for our online programme

Photos: Avatâra Ayuso

From 9th July 2022

On July 9th 2022, ORIGINS commemorated the raising of the Aboriginal flag on Dover Beach with the unveiling of a plaque commissioned from Wiradjuri-British artist Jasmine Coe.

On 2nd November 1976, two Aboriginal men landed on Dover beach, and planted the Aboriginal flag, symbolically claiming the land for Indigenous Australians "by virtue of possession". One of them was the famous activist Paul Coe. In 2022, commissioned by ORIGINS, Paul’s daughter Jasmine designed the plaque, installed permanently on Dover beach as a memorial to these events.

Our short film, featuring Paul and Jasmine Coe, explains the background to the landing, and its relationship to the wider context of Aboriginal activism.

Click on the image to watch the film

From 17th August 2022

Click here to download the podcast

This podcast is an audio guide for a walking tour of Central London sites associated with Indigenous visitors to London since 1497. The tour begins at Covent Garden tube station, and ends on Westminster Bridge, lasting around two hours.

The audio guide is narrated by Kahu Burrows (Māori: Ngāti Maru) and Nathan Woodworth (Native AmericanKaruk).

The tour was prepared by Prof. David Stirrup from the BEYOND THE SPECTACLE project, and based on Prof. Coll Thrush’s book INDIGENOUS LONDON: NATIVE TRAVELLERS AT THE HEART OF EMPIRE. We are grateful to both authors. Supported by the High Commission of Canada as part of ORIGINS.

The photo shows Warriors of AniKituhwa recreating the Abbey Road EP cover, 2019. Members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, the Warriors came to London in 2019 to walk in the Lord Mayor's New Years Day Parade and to retrace the footsteps of their ancestors who came to London in 1762 to reinforce treaty relationships with the British.

Image credit: Beyond the Spectacle and the AHRC

imagineNATIVE DIGITAL PROGRAMME

WE ARE STILL HERE

23rd-30th October 2022 Online

In an exciting new partnership, ORIGINS worked with Toronto's imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival to bring their digital programme to our audiences. imagineNATIVE is the world’s largest presenter of Indigenous screen content, and has been a pioneer in the online presentation of Indigenous film. The 2022 programme included dramas, documentaries, experimental films and shorts programmes, many of which explored key ORIGINS themes: resistance to colonialism, environmental justice and cross-cultural exchanges.

Feature film highlights included: POWERFUL CHIEF by Henry Vallejo (Aymara), a Quechua and Spanish language film that follows Elisban, who arrives in a new city homeless and without money, as he survives in a city that sharpens his loneliness at every step; THE DROVER’S WIFE - THE LEGEND OF MOLLY JOHNSON by Leah Purcell (Goa-GungarriWakka Wakka Murri), a searing reimagining of Leah Purcell’s play and Henry Lawson’s classic short story, in which a mother is pushed to her limit to protect the ones she loves; and WE ARE STILL, HERE, a unique Indigenous film that interweaves eight powerful tales, from eight directors from Aotearoa, to tell a sweeping story of hope and survival.

Feature documentary highlights included: BRING HER HOME by Leya Hale (Dakota/Diné), a true crime doc that follows three Indigenous women – an artist, an activist, and a politician – as they fight to vindicate and honour their missing and murdered relatives who have fallen victims to a growing epidemic across Indian country; and KAATOHKITOPII: THE HORSE HE NEVER RODE by Trevor Solway (Blackfoot), a POV documentary narrated by the director about his grandfather Sonny Solway, a life-long rancher and ‘Indian Cowboy’.

1st October 2021-31st December 2022

A major participation and learning project, supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, BOTANY BAY explored the significance of plants and their migration histories in relation to Colonialism, Climate Change and Covid. Before the European invasions of Indigenous lands, evolution had followed divergent paths, with species of plants developing in very different ways from continent to continent. The colonial period replaced this with convergence, and with a commercial approach which is in part responsible for the ecological emergency we now face. By looking into the Indigenous heritage of the plants we grow and eat, we can begin to develop a more respectful relationship with the natural world.

BOTANY BAY involved five schools in London and Manchester, each of which created a new garden on Indigenous principles. These gardens contain installations especially commissioned from Indigenous artists, and were opened with ceremonies inspired by Indigenous practices.

Click here for the BOTANY BAY project booklet

Jessica Luong (Quechua) at Cavendish Primary School

Photo: John Cobb

Frederick Worrell with his artworks at Oswald Road School, Manchester

Photo: John Cobb

Winter

Beth Kidd visits Oxford to explore winter gardens, and Rosalyn LaPier points out the colonial nature of botany.

Introduction to the BOTANY BAY project

Tim Hudson outlines the historical background, and Melinda Schwakhofer (Mvskoke) looks into Yaupon Holly.

Summer

Genner Llanes Ortiz (Maya) looks into Indigenous relationships with maize, and Nisha Dassyne responds to the unprecedented summer of 2022.

Spring

Nathan Woodworth (Karuk) visits the American Museum in Bath to explore how his culture relates to Spring.

Autumn

As the project ends, the schools celebrate its success in their gardens, facilitated by Gordon McLellan.

With thanks to National Lottery players!

Click on the images to watch the BOTANY BAY films

From October 2022 Start at Brixton tube station

Download Aswarm XR for the SONGSTREETS app: 1. For iPhone 2. Google Play for Android

During October 2022, Indigenous Australian musician Jessie Lloyd undertook a residency in Brixton, working with the community to discover songs and stories from the 75 years that have passed since the Windrush brought the first post-war migrants to London from the Caribbean. Applying the methodology she evolved to work with Indigenous Elders in her MISSION SONGS project, and collaborating with Brixton-born artist Tony Cealy, Jessie explored the commonalities of experience between Indigenous Australians and Black Britons, using music to commemorate local heritage, within global histories of racism and emerging processes of reconciliation. Jessie’s grandfather Albie Geia was a leader in the 1957 Palm Island Strike, which like the events in Brixton in 1981, were labelled ‘riots’, leading to Albie’s imprisonment.

ORIGINS commissioned Brixton-based sound artist, Thor McIntyre-Burnie, and his public arts company Aswarm, to respond to Jessie's residency; creating a site-specific, immersive experience that weaves the songs through the streets of Brixton and uncovers their extraordinary stories. The result is this immersive, interactive audio-walk.

Click here for a podcast about the project

Guitar in hand, androgynous Aboriginal Orpheus, she emerges from an Underworld. Brixton shrieks and chatters round her still, unsmiling head. Down under Australia’s red heart birthed her Blue of the Torres Strait bore her forebears over reef and wave. Red and blue the sign sings “Underground”.

Beneath these streets the secret, sacred rivers run. Effra, Neckinger, Peck.

You know your Songlines, Jessie LloydMusic and memory carried your ancestors to sacred sites and welcome waterholes.

What echoes will you hear here in our Brixton Songstreets?

Shard & City skyline from Brixton Hill by stevekeiretsu via Flickr

Festivals are not the culmination of a project: they are the beginning of a process. I have always thought that festivals plant many different seeds, each growing a tree, ultimately creating forests of communion through art and tradition.

As a director and producer of many festivals, I know that we can make a contribution to social change, cultural improvement and better living. We establish long-term relationships with the communities we interact with, and are responsible for much more than simply the duration of the festival. Through festivals, cultures have been saved, cities dignified, forests defended and recovered, all while different cultures have embraced, whole regions have been fortified and art and traditions have been emancipated. Festivals have forged temporary spaces of peace and social justice with an holistic approach, providing a common ground for all. We act to create an entire scenario so that people can come and live in an harmonious bubble for a given period of time.

Then came Covid-19, and it changed our entire DNA. How could we create and run festivals without the public? We had to invent new and innovative ways to accomplish our mission, to think more deeply about what we wanted to say and how we could say it.

ORIGINS came up with a magnificent idea: expand the time and space of the festival. Instead of having multiple activities in one space at a certain time, special activities would be held throughout the year.

I must confess that when Michael Walling called me and told me his idea, I thought it was insane: that he would be working like a madman without rest, that audiences could get distracted, that financing would be more difficult. However, once he had finished explaining, I realised that it was a brilliant way of keeping the message of ORIGINS while actually broadening its audience.

It is no coincidence that this prodigious elucidation came from the ORIGINS Festival, which specialises in Indigenous arts. Time runs lighter in Indigenous cultures. They think of the preservation of Mother Earth and the safeguarding of their heritage, accepting natural cycles and having the patience necessary to accomplish such a great mission. ORIGINS understood this message and devised a magnificent programme with a wide range of artistic, traditional and spiritual experiences held across diverse areas of the UK and online.

The Indigenous message is to love and respect Mother Earth, to understand that we are a part of the cosmos and not its owners, to acknowledge community and family systems, to get closer to the deities and to realise that we are all connected. This Indigenous philosophy is the crucial piece of the puzzle that is missing in global reasoning and ORIGINS is the window for this ideology in the United Kingdom.

Profound Indigenous messages from all over the world have been presented throughout the past two years to a multitude of attentive ears and people of consciousness, reflecting the most important issues for our survival as a species. These messages came in the most innovative ways. A sacred Totem travelled through England and Scotland to COP-26, while performances, exhibitions, films, dance, music, theatre, happenings, lectures, publications and all kinds of arts were presented. All shared the most important vision of the 21st Century: to love and preserve Mother Earth, to view humanity as a whole, to seek social justice for Indigenous people, to realise that we are all connected and to take action for a better planet.

Thank you ORIGINS for making this world better.

Salomón Bazbaz Lapidus

Founder of Mexican educational and cultural institutions such as the Centre for Indigenous Arts, the NEMI Foundation and the Central Association for Cultural Intelligence, Salomón Bazbaz Lapidus focuses his efforts on the protection of traditional Indigenous cultures through the creation of festivals of international scope, including the Cumbre Tajín, the SurReal Festival, the Augustin Lara International Festival, the Route of Fire and Tajin Lives. Salomón seeks the preservation and dissemination of Indigenous identity, with a particular focus on the Totonac and Mayan cultures, basing his work on promoting social, cultural and touristic development. He coordinated the bid for the Ritual Ceremony of the Voladores to be listed as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO (2009). Salomón attended ORIGINS 2015 with the Voladores, and worked with the 2021-22 Festival on the commissioning of TOTEM LATAMAT.

Credits

Festival Director & Artistic Director of Border Crossings: Michael Walling

Associate Director (Community, Participation & Learning): Lucy Dunkerley

Heritage Project Manager: Marine Begault

Production Manager: Ed Borgnis

Marketing Manager: Emma Townsend

Press and PR: Chloé Nelkin Consulting

Web Design: Future Design (UK) Ltd

External Evaluator (Botany Bay): Carolyn Defrin

Patron of Border Crossings: Peter Sellars

Board of Trustees: Anthony Brooks, Katharina Guderian, Prakash Kurup, Catriona Sinclair, Jatinder Verma MBE (Chair)

Registered Charity No. 1048836. Company Limited by Guarantee

Registered in England No. 3015984. VAT No. 690 7714 09.

OriginsFestival @BorderCrossings #OriginsFestival

@border_crossings

With special thanks to:

The Elders of First Nations who have permitted these stories to be told

All the many artists and participants involved in the Festival

The Staff of our venues and other partners

The many commissioners and funders involved, credited throughout this programme in relation to specific ORIGINS projects

Border Crossings is certified as a Carbon Neutral Business by @carbonneutralbritain