RESILIENT ROOTS
SATURDAY, AUG 15 | 7PM
YouTube/Facebook Live

The Resilient Roots Project makes a triumphant return to Vines Art Festival. Led by Senaqwila Wyss (Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Ethnobotanist), and Heather Lamoureux (Artistic Director of Vines Festival) featuring the voices, art and work of some of the emerging voices in Indigenous arts, activism and community. Consistently highlighting queer, trans and Two Spirit voices, Resilient Roots unabashedly prioritizes voices often silenced in the Indigenous contemporary art scene. Refusing to shy away from uncomfortable conversations, this event is sure to show you the nuances and beauty of these necessary voices.

with Closed Captioning

BO DYP
Bo Dip is a non-binary drag artist from the Musgamagw Dzawada’enuxw nation. Bo has developed their work as a medium for exploring their culture and their intersectional position in body politics. Kwanxwalaogwa, one who possesses thunder.
Their practice is their healing process because they present raw dialogue –sharing the experience of living in Bo’s body. A mixed-race body, with indigenous and white-settler ancestry. A female body, assigned at birth. A non-binary and queer body. A sexual body. A body that has been beaten, grabbed, assaulted, and raped. A body with addictive tendencies. A body with arthritis. With depression, dysphoria, and ideation of body death. A body that has danced. And a body that possesses thunder.

BRANDI BIRD

EDZI’U
Edzi’u is a 2S Tahltan and inland Tlingit sound artist, songwriter, composer. They were born in the Yukon and raised in Whitehorse, YT, spending a large part of that time in their traditional territory of Dease Lake, BC. They received a Degree in Music Composition at Vancouver Community College in 2019. Edzi’u has been performing nationally for the better part of ten years, in festivals, galleries and living rooms. Their roles in performance life have ranged from solo performer, to choir soprano, actor, and concert coordinator. Currently their art practice centers on weaving electronic soundscapes with audio manipulation, while drawing on classical songwriting elements. Their sound installations have been shown in Tkaronto’s film festival imagineNATIVE 2018 as well as 2019, while debuting internationally in 2019 at the Document Film Festival in Glasgow, Scotland.

KUNG JAADEE
Kung Jaadee (Roberta Kennedy) is a Haida singer, storyteller, and drummer. She has performed for hundreds of audiences across Canada and parts of the United States for nearly twenty years at festivals, schools, museums, aboriginal celebrations, and conferences.
She is originally from Haida Gwaii (formerly known as the Queen Charlotte Islands, B.C.) and has most recently lived in Yellowknife, NWT and Winnipeg, Manitoba, where she served as Storyteller-in-Residence at the University of Manitoba Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture. She has worked as a primary school teacher and now performs stories and songs full time.
Kung Jaadee loves dancing, singing, drumming, laughing, eating and she is a true Raven causing mischief wherever she goes in this world. Her stories tell of a time when the animals taught us how to be true haada laas (good people). They were our sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers. We understood them because they already knew the secrets of life.
She prefers to be known by her true Haida name, Kung Jaadee, Woman in the Moon, the personal crest she wears on her button blanket. She was formerly called Kwii-Ge-Ii-Wans, or Big Loved Cloud, her maternal grandmother’s name, but she has now passed that name on to her daughter.

LORELEI WILLIAMS – Butterflies in Spirit: Dance, Healing, & MMIWG
Butterflies in Spirit: Dance, Healing, & MMIWG builds on the years of community healing work Lorelei Williams has done with her dance group, Butterflies in Spirit. Founded in 2012, Butterflies in Spirit is a dance group consisting of family members of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls (MMIWG). With a mission to raise awareness of violence against Aboriginal women and girls, Butterflies in Spirit has performed at numerous gatherings and events throughout Canada, the US, Mexico and has traveled as far as Bogota, Colombia to perform at an International Women’s World Peace event. On stage, members of the group wear shirts depicting images of their missing and murdered loved ones.

MECHELLE PIERRE 

SUNKOSI MAYA MARIA / SUNA – what comes from inside me; where I come from
This piece is a prayer for the feeling of goodness that comes from all the players involved knowing what their responsibility is and being in the simplicity of that action, to bring something of integrity into being. This is my version of a creation story, a shared story between my two Indigenous ancestries, expressed through the feminine principle that is woven into the very nature of Mother Earth. It’s a prayer to All My Relations.

ZOFIA ROSE MUSIEJ
Zofia Rose Musiej is a Polish and Carrier First Nation, singer/songwriter, poet and interdisciplinary performer. She resides in Vancouver (on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples) where she can be found busking in East Van. She is a slave to the muse, a graduate of The Writer’s Studio at SFU (2019), and her poetry has been published in Prism, RoomMagazine, and Salt Chuck City Review. Zofia has performed music and poetry at Indigenous Brilliance and the Talking Stick Festival.