Although ceremony and art often intersect explicitly for me, this may not be true for others. We all have vastly different bodies that filter our experiences accordingly. We also all carry different responsibilities that alter how we respond to, and convene with, the spirit world. Sharing my personal relationship to creative practice is not to say that art is ceremony, but rather to demonstrate one way in which our art is informed by all our relations, including those that extend beyond this world. In an Anishinaabe worldview, no matter how or what an artist creates, it is undeniably shaped by all their relationships. Again, pushing against the colonial construct of spirituality, our art does not have to contain so-called spiritual content to be informed by the spirit world. Much like there is no need to label Anishinaabe culture as spiritual because it is simply our lived reality, there is no need to label Anishinaabe art as spiritual for the same reason.

  Our art is always lovingly guided by the hands of our ancestors. Our art is always pulsing with the swirling, starry sky. Our art has always been one of our central methods for accessing that holy place of the great beyond, the great return to dancing with all our relations. Our art has always allowed us to be whole.

  As I continued to paint the place before birth, I discovered an abnormal area on my cervix and had to get a biopsy. It was scary and tender. When I returned to painting some days later, I wept and was able to access a new kind of vulnerability. My womb, wounded, sat inside my mother’s in the place before birth and understood. When I painted, I laughed out loud because the painting felt like a gift from my ancestors to do this work, seamlessly interacting with my outside life and physical body. It was the furthest from loneliness I have ever felt. We can never truly be lonely as Anishinaabe people because our ancestors are always with us.

  Anishinaabe art is so full of colour. I weep at the vibrancy of our lives. I weep at the depth of our creative practice. Colour does not simply signify the visual colours we all know; colour also tethers us to the spiritual realm and the place beyond time. Anishinaabeg use colours to mark our specific relationships within the spirit realm and to communicate our positionalities with our spirit kin. To be full of colour is to be many things all at once—past, present, and future. To be full of colour is to be incomprehensible to the dull and flat settler colonial world. Our art cannot be contained within the visual, even when it comes to colour. I fall to my knees at the vibrancy of our lives.

  Settler colonialism, always an attempted removal of our bodies from the land, attempts to contain our colour and still our shifting and complex bodies into categories of control. When they flooded my homelands, the water became muddied. When they harmed my father in residential school, they tried to make him turn grey. But everything they do is always limited to the physical. They can never reach our true colour. When my homelands were flooded, the animals worked hard to restore the water’s colour, and now it shines so blue. When my father was taken, he poured rainbow colours from his tears. They can never touch the vibrancy of our lives.

  Three months after my biopsy, I was pregnant. I was painting the place before birth while Giizik sat in the place before birth, looking down at her life and consenting to it. I laughed out loud again.

  Anishinaabe creative practice is rooted in a deep and expansive relationality that mirrors our own webs of relationality. From the web of the immediate family outward to the larger community, our homelands, clans, helpers, animals, fish, insects, elements, spirits, stars, and ancestors. We are relentlessly enveloped in love, care, and guidance from all elements of creation. Our worldview recognizes that our knowledge and our art are informed by these relationships. Understanding our knowledge as expansively relational honours the collectivity of life.

  In an Anishinaabe worldview, every single person and being contributes to creative practice regardless of whether they participate in its explicit production. The people who physically create—the beadworkers, painters, carvers, birch workers, poets, and dancers—do so in conversation with the relationships around them that make them whole. Those who do not physically create—the auntie, the grandmother sitting in her chair, the moon, the muskrat, and the beating sun—still participate in the creative practice that so tenderly learns from and considers them. Our knowledge and our art are everything beyond the concept of the individual.

  Whereas other forms of communication can encapsulate our earthly experiences that are governed by linear time and space, art is one of the only forms of communication that can reach into the great beyond and allow us to share spiritual knowledge with our broader communities. Art is knowledge transmission in non-literal and non-didactic ways, making it an integral form of communication. For this reason, creative practice has always been foundational to our systems of governance, allowing us to build our world in alignment with all our relations, whether earthbound or beyond. We are a people planted firmly on the earth, yet our hearts house the stars that we come from. The ways that we govern ourselves reflect this. The intersection of Anishinaabe creative practice and governance solidifies our art as a practice of worldbuilding. Our creative practice is not oriented toward aesthetics or success but rather toward the very material marking of the world around us in conversation with all the relationships that comprise who we are. Creative practice is a responsibility to build our world.

  Our art, like ceremony and our bodies, is a way to dance with all our relations and then share that knowledge in order to mark our world. Our art, in its most basic sense, is expressing knowledge that is informed through expansive relationality in order to build the world in beauty and liberation, reverence and justice. The intent of our art is to splash the world with our wild and uninhibited relationality, colours strewn across landscapes that birth swirling spirits that whisper visions for a more just future. Because Anishinaabe art is oriented toward a responsibility for worldbuilding, the primary focus is not on production but rather on affecting the world itself. The value of our art is thus not limited to output but is within the processes that will carry us toward these futures, which are often not contained within the visual or material.

  Our art might exist in the form of a product—when we bead or paint—but our art might also exist in the non-material realm—when we dream or scheme, organize or govern. Our art might exist in the form of a product temporarily before passing away back into the spirit world, its message carried forward in the hearts of those who witnessed it. Anishinaabe art is simultaneously fleeting and omnipresent. It is many things all at once, spilling over, unable to be defined by product or medium, or even by time and space.

  This expansive conception of creative practice is incomprehensible to the settler colonial world of hyperproduction and individualism. In the settler colonial world, the role of the artist is limited to the act of dreaming, which is articulated through a form of production, ignoring our responsibilities to materially change the world around us in conversation with the art we are creating. Artists are encouraged to dream within the limits of the settler colonial imaginary and are rewarded when they do not challenge our oppressive conditions. Rewarding artists solely based on their production invisibilizes and devalues community-based work that puts dreams into action.

  My art is more than the paintings I create. When I create a painting, I might be dreaming up new worlds for us, but my work cannot end there. I have a deep obligation to materially change the world so that the dream can become a reality. For this reason, my personal arts practice has always been in conjunction with my contributions to community. When I visualize the love my ancestors have for my body through a painting, I am doing so in conjunction with helping Indigenous youth feel the same way about their bodies. When I marked my ankles with ink, I was doing so to mark a commitment to dancing. When I painted a future where Anishinaabeg and Palestinians were free and whole, it led me to mobilize a delegation of Palestinian organizers to visit my homelands. The dreaming and the living out of the dream, no matter how hard, cannot be separated. Artists have a responsibility not just to dream but also to do.

  If Anishinaabe art has to be defined, it is the practice of spilling over. Beyond the confines of linear time, the necessity of production, and the non-living canvas, Anishinaabe art spills over these confines with the force of whitewater over rapids. Our art, the place where our ancestors dance, an explosion of colour so vibrant it breaks the here and now. Our art, the place where Anishinaabe knowledge lives and breathes, a fleeting moment in the cosmic flow of creation. Our art, contained not just in paint and beads, but also in stardust, our own blood, the clear water of a still lake, and the voices of our ancestors. Our art, the building of our world such that we are all free and whole. Our art, the pathway to our wholeness.

  I painted the residential school that my father went to. Painstakingly, I traced the exact infrastructure that represents the utter terror and confinement of my people. Harsh and straight lines, repetitive boxes, different shades of grey and beige. It took me a long time. And then, I returned with the colour they could never touch—splattering neon pink and the turquoise of Gitchee Gumee, spilling out the ancestors and spirits they could never contain, the babies yet to be born, the futures untold. I visualized how we are always spilling over the compartmentalizations of their violence. Like a tidal wave of creation, we are everything they can never have.

  My father is one of the strongest examples I have of what Anishinaabe knowledge and creative practice looks like—embodied and agentive. He survived residential school through his artwork, and then spent his life selling his carvings and paintings on busy street corners in urban centres. At times, he traversed gallery spaces, but mostly he remained on the streets. My father never taught me how to paint; he didn’t have to. Our art is passed down intergenerationally, fed to us through the loving hands of our ancestors. Our art is passed down in spirit, not in skill and aesthetics. What my father did teach me was how to orient myself as an Anishinaabe person, and how to insist that our worldview remain firmly planted in my own body. How we orient ourselves is who we are speaking to, who we are listening to, and where our energy is directed. My father always oriented himself not toward the gallery, the inclusion, the palatable, or the career, but rather toward the stars that we come from, the low moan of creation, and the rumbling of life.

  To carve a black ash tree, we need to sleep for days in the bush. At night, we will study the constellations and line our bodies up with the stars that we come from. During the day, we will use our bare hands to move the earth around the tree that was struck by lightning. It doesn’t really matter what the carving looks like in the end. What matters is everything that wills it to be, everything that holds it in place.

  Although my father didn’t teach me how to paint, he did instill in me our Anishinaabe relationships to creative practice. He taught me that we are responsible for the relationships we are a part of, grounding me in an arts practice that always foregrounds my material contributions to community in addition to any production of visual work. The centring of art as a practice of worldbuilding and deep responsibility necessitates a critical interrogation of the settler colonial context that harms our bodies, lands, and communities. Our worldbuilding takes place within the violent and hostile context of settler colonialism that is intent on our destruction. As artists, we have a deep responsibility to resist and transcend our settler colonial conditions, and to see this responsibility as existing outside of our own lived experiences, families, and communities.

  My father taught me how to care for our spirit kin through our art. My father taught me how to care for our bodies using our art. My father taught me how to care for other people and communities using our art. As such, I have always directed my energy toward understanding and charting settler colonialism as part of my responsibility as an artist who wishes to transcend these realities. But it is hard to wade through the settler colonial matrix as an artist. Anishinaabe art itself is embedded within the Western art world, and must contend with the logics and power dynamics of colonialism.

  Settler colonialism, as a force of compartmentalization, seeks to separate art from life, disrupting the complex and beautiful threads of creative practice that flow across the universe. In the settler colonial world, art becomes strictly an aesthetic product oriented toward success within the capitalist conditions it exists within. From the Western perspective, art becomes practices like painting and drawing, music and dance, but only insofar as we are directly contributing to some iteration of a product of these practices. Art becomes a box, separated from the expansive relationality of the universe that birthed it. The purpose of this compartmentalization has multiple dimensions.

  First and foremost, it is part of the larger compartmentalization of the human being from the web of creation they exist within that lays the groundwork for the primary unit of settler colonialism: the individual. The establishment of vapid individualism supports capitalism while preventing people from accessing their internal knowledge, feeling a sense of belonging and purpose, and forging relationships of mutual dependency that can reduce state reliance. When we remove art from its relationality and process, we demand that the artist create from outside their web of creation, following the logics of the individualism that is the heart of settler colonialism.

  The Western art world, following in the footsteps of the settler colonial infrastructure that birthed it, operates according to hierarchy. The units of this hierarchy are the constructs of skill and clout, which function as the measure of value in the settler colonial art world. In this context, skill is a construct in which value is applied to measure creativity rather arbitrarily. The Western art world is divided into experts and amateurs, skilled artists and beginners, those who “just have it” and those who don’t. Here, I use the term skill to denote something different from mastery, which I think of as a more functional term that places value on learning the practical aspects of a craft. Skill, however, has a shifting meaning beyond mastery of a craft, often assigning value to art that is palatable and profitable, highly subjective and governed by colonial logics. The construction of clout emerges with the idea of an expert or visionary that is supported by the Western art world’s ability to control the systems of value surrounding art. There is now a social hierarchy supported by material power. If you can control who is considered an expert, who is an artist, and what is considered good art, then you can generate an industry of control that will support the colonial project. Of course, there are many ruptures to these systems. Many artists have existed, and continue to exist, on the margins of this world, creating work that is so powerful that it exceeds these conditions, but these are still the conditions it must transcend.

  In the settler colonial world, you can climb the imposed hierarchy to be considered an artist or expert by creating work that is deemed valuable within this system. Capitalism wills it to be so. What will be considered valuable art will be decided by the constructs of skill and clout, which are always ultimately oriented toward the settler colony. Creative practice is taken away from process and becomes the product. The immateriality inherent to creative practice—the relationship-building and the worldbuilding—is not only erased but is also devalued and even punished within the settler colonial context. There is no value ascribed to work that does not yield a product in the settler colonial world.

  Settler colonialism works hard to ensure that its art industry follows its logics of compartmentalization, hierarchy, and control. Through the compartmentalization of artist from their web of creation, and product from expansive process, the artist becomes an individual who will create products that then determine their worth within the system of capitalism. Artists are rewarded for their complicity within the structures of settler colonialism, receiving fame and monetary gain for visionary thinking that challenges mainstream perspectives enough to move people without threatening the material conditions of settler colonialism. Artists who choose to operate on the margins will largely not experience these rewards, and will have to find ways to support themselves and define their own sense of artistic value.

  Settler colonialism does not want art to bind people to their web of relationships because this enables people to resist and dismantle the oppression they face. Settler colonialism does not want art to make people whole, reminding them of their homelands and the loving embrace of their ancestors through their own bodies. Settler colonialism most certainly does not want art to bring the individual back to the collective, where they are reunited with deep purpose and communal responsibility that lives outside the settler colony.

  Anishinaabe relationships to creative practice stand in stark contrast to the Western approaches to art that dominate our lived reality. Anishinaabe creative practice both spills over and demolishes the structural violence of settler colonialism—it is both attentive to the destruction of settler colonialism and oriented toward all our relations that exist in the still night sky and deep in the red earth. Anishinaabe art is the practice of spilling over—undefinable, elusive, agentive, and fleeting. Our art is ungovernable, sovereign; like the rushing river of creation, it is unstoppable. It is all the fragmented moments that bring our hand to the paintbrush—the way the moon hung in the sky that night, what our ancestors whispered in the stillness of the morning light, our helpers and the trembling land beneath our feet.