Honouring Doodlers Everywhere!

At the Honouring Indigenous Women event, something stopped me in my tracks as I was walking into the Rotundra. Someone, perhaps one of the girls that was taking care of registration, sketched this on a scrap piece of paper. I call it a doodle only because it was obviously freehand, off the cuff and on a scrap piece of paper. Something inspired this artist to draw this at that moment. Really, it's a beautiful piece of art and this person has real talent. Perhaps it was their way of honouring indigenous women through the arts. I think it is beautiful and it made me smile when I saw it. I wonder if anyone else noticed it.

Honouring Indigenous Women in the Arts

I am so glad I made the time in an otherwise busy and chaotic life to go to this event. Dolores told me she was receiving an award at the "Honouring Indigenous Women" show because of her work at home with her language and drumming. I am so happy she invited me to go because I'm not sure I would have made the time otherwise. It was a great way to relax and celebrate the many talents of indigenous women. I displayed some of the art at the show above and in case you can't read the "Bear Woman" piece it says "Legendary Medicine Woman. could tranform into a Bear. became lovers with a Bear Mate. Birthed and Raised Many Children. She gives us Courage. to Shape Shift as we need. to Love who we Choose. and to Defend our Young."
There were several pieces of beautiful art displayed at this event but the main event was the best part of this show. One of Fyre Jean's (First Nations Studies professor) First Nations classes put on a play about the paradox of traditional and contemporary ideologies of women on their moon time (on their period). Whoa! Right! Did I just say that? Yep! We have been conditioned by social constructs to believe that being on our moon time or women on their moon time is gross, something to hide, something to be ashamed of. Traditionally, First Nations revered women on their moon time to have a lot of power, a power that was so powerful it would disrupt the natural powers of spiritual ceremonies. Women on their moon time were not allowed to attend sweats, attend a potlatch (for the first year) and prepare food or attend other sacred ceremonies. Women would gather together on their moon time to bead together, share stories and celebrate their womanhood. The play they did was amazing, there was a girl who wondered a lot, named Wonderwoman! Wonderwoman was trying to make sense of the traditional and contemporary ideologies about women on their moon time and so the play went on to tell the story of what I briefly and incompletely described above. There is much more to it than I have described here, but I would not be able to tell the story.
Thanks for reading...

Aesthetics of Events

The aesthetic appeal of an event can make or break an event. A large part of planning and logistics of any event is how the space will look. The theme must be omnipresent at the event so that people know what the event is about and that they are in the right place! It also sets the mood for an event. Could you imagine if there were no ribbons, no balloons, no poster, no leaves? The mood would have been quite different; stale and bland maybe. The mood set by design and aesthetics will set the tone for the whole event.Given the little resources and time we had to create the mood for this event, I was happy with the results.

Celebration of Art

Celebrating student's work is so important as it gives them a sense of pride in their work which transfers into confidence. Confident students allows for successful learning to occur because they have a positive outlook on learning. Although only a few students showed up to the art fair from my class, for those three students it was an amazing experience. They felt so proud that their work was being displayed for everyone to see. Parents were so proud and will no doubt praise their children for such great works of art! It was a great experience for me as well, it showed me that these events go a long way for students and are so important to build student's confidence in themselves as learners.
The top picture is myself and one of my students, a daughter of a colleague in our program. I will not mention names but I have permission to post this picture on my blog.

Headstone Potlach Ceremony

Drumming, singing, dancing, beautiful art that represents each clan in the background. 

Art is a way of life here, not something you just do.

Ski Pass Mask

It was about a week before my friend Rosco's birthday and I told him to "sit down and stay still, I'm making a plaster mask of your face." So he did, he let me put Vaseline on his face and put a plaster cast on his face, trusting friend! I didn't tell him why I was doing this. He had a shoelace in his room with about 20 different seasons passes from all the different mountains around the world that he had either worked at or had a pass to. I took it, got all of them copied in colour and cut them out. I pasted all the copies of his seasons passes on the plaster mask as well as a few magazine picture of snowboarding scenes. This was his birthday present. He LOVED it! It's kind of weird looking but it's really cool.
Plaster is a great tool for art, although quite messy! I think to use plaster successfully in the classroom it would be for intermediate grades only! 

Utility Art

Utility Art: Art doesn't not just have to be for please, it can also be for utility. I made this jewelry holder from shells, driftwood and a stone from the beaches of the west coast of Haida Gwaii. When I was roaming the beaches I started collecting and shells, I looked at the abalone and thought it would be cool to hang earings from the holes in the abalone shell. From there my jewelery holder took shape and I started collecting for this purpose. I used wood glue to glue the wood to the rock and shells to the wood. Wood glue works for EVERYTHING I have come to realize.
I love art that I can use because I appreciate it on a daily basis, not just when I pause for a moment to look at it. I often put my earings on in the morning and look at this piece and I remember where all the parts of it came from, it's nostalgic in a sense.
I think utility art can be a great thing for our students, because they can appreciate it every time they use it. It's not just something that gets put on the fridge or shelf for a couple of month and then in the garbage when the next great piece of artwork comes home and replaces it.

Chicken Bus Tales

Vivien, Linda, Kim, Catherine

Everything happens for a reason. I hiked up to Raven Lake today. We started to get up in the snow and were about 20 minutes away from the cabin (our final destination) and we ran into these two lovely ladies. They informed us that there were very fresh (within the last 20 minutes) grizzly tracks just ahead. They had made the decision to turn around and leave the grizzly alone, after all it is HIS territory, not ours. We asked our new friends if they wanted to team up and finish the last part of the hike, because with 4 of us, the grizz would likely leave us alone. As we were romping along, we saw more and more tracks and they got fresher and fresher. We ended up following his tracks and Vivien (a 71 year old amazing outdoors woman) said, "I think we should leave this grizzly alone and head back). We decided to listen to our elder as she seemed very wise to her environment, and this definitely wasn't her first time in bear country!

I am so happy that we ran into these amazing ladies. They are very wise and wonderful women. Vivien, as it turns out, is an author. She has written several books and she writes for a guide book company. She has traveled the world and her own backyard, she is a mountaineer of sorts and she had so much wisdom to impart. I probably asked her 100 questions on the hike down. Vivien has taken incredible photos of her journey's and she has a website. Her website is: www.chickenbustales.com (you should check it out!) that chronicles her adventures and showcases her incredible photography and books she's written. I do believe we met these ladies for a reason, not only to save us from a potential grizzly encounter (as they are looking for their big protein at this time of year) but I also feel like they shared their years of knowledge and wisdom about the outdoors with us.


Vivien is inspired by nature, her art is motivated by the natural beauty in our world; the mountains, streams, trees, rivers, bears, squirrels, birds. I think we should bring our students outside and see if they are inspired by the natural beauty that surrounds us. There is so much adventure outside, we must show our students that there is a world beyond video games and structured sports and clubs. Being in the wild allows your imagination to run wild!

Two Boys

Both Boys.
One White.
One Black.
The difference, however, is not colour.
Here stands a boy;
A brother just like every other.
TV is but who he is a follower.
A big phat sweatshirt whose name is Echo.
Then jeans that are much too big for this fellow.
His shoes are new with no dirt in view.
His baseball cap sideways,
With a tag from his crew.
All of his attire is what he desires.
But only he, and the people on TV,
Care that his socks are Nike.
Standing there beside him is his friend.
This boy in a very different trend.
This, also, seen on TV.
But different from his buddy, homey G.
A boy who thinks he is like no other,
Rebellion is what he has discovered.
However, his ripped t-shirt,
From the time of Siskel and Ebert,
Is also a fancy of many.
On his feet are high tops and no socks.
The difference these mates create,
Is nothing but different family traits.
Why is style so important?
For boys to express their emotion?
When who you are is what you say.
What you wear is simply
Foreplay for the eye of a potential soul mate.

-Catherine Eagles

This poem I wrote, oh geeze, probably almost 10 years ago now! Whoa I'm old! Anyways, I was working at a hot dog stand at the Butchart Gardens in Victoria, I was bored and noticed these two boys and a poem sprang out of nowhere. I had never written any poetry, but this came to me as I was observing these gentlemen. I wrote another poem that day, but I can't find it. That was the extent of my poetry writing to this day!
I think this tells me that anyone can be a poet! This poem I'm sure does not follow any kind of poetry rules but to me it is poetry. I think to engage ALL students in poetry, there must be some freedom. I don't believe there are borders to what poetry can be. Release poetry from its cage! haha.

Hope in Shadows

The quote in the first photo reads: "Life is not a dagger stained with the blood of hatred. It is a branch filled with the blossoms of love and compassion. Life itself is restless for peace in the world. Let its noble dream materialize." The word "hope" is a common theme in the worlds of the oppressed. Hope is often the thing that keeps people going when their life is in peril. Hope is sometimes the only thing people have.

Hope in Shadows is a great initiative born from the community of the Downtown Eastside (DTES). I know that many of you didn't grow up in the lower mainland and perhaps have never been to the DTES. It is a place of paradox, it is full of love and hope but also poverty and despair. It is a community and home for those without a home, for those that have been rejected from all other communities and homes. For some it is a place they go because they are lost. The stigma attached to the DTES is that of hopelessness, drug-addicts, prostitutes and filth. I've heard several times, "I just don't understand why those people can't just get it together, it's their own fault they are like that." That isn't true at all. Most of the people that live in the community of the DTES have experienced complex trauma in their lives and/or suffer from a severe mental or physical disease. They haven't had the luxury of having support, health care or a family to take care of them. The easiest and most available way for people to deal with their pain is through drugs. It is a vicious cycle that is extremely hard to break. That said, there is a strong community in the DTES where they support each other and it is a place full of HOPE. I could talk about this for hours, so I will end it there.

The Hope in Shadows project is amazing. It provides people of the DTES an opportunity to celebrate their community and an avenue to rehabilitate themselves through meaningful employment by selling the calendars.

I thought it would be a great idea to pair students up, give them a disposable camera and get them to take pictures of their school community or their home community. I would then, collect the cameras, get the pictures printed or in digital format, choose the "winners" - the top 12 photos and get the students to design a calendar with these photos. You can fill in the blanks of how this would happen. There would have to be strict expectations and guidelines, that's for sure!

Paradox

Artivism: today we were talking about artivism and what that means. Willow spoke to the fact that art is often a medium through which people heal themselves because it allows them to express themselves without having to articulate it into words. I use art as a medium to release anger, frustration, guilt, and even rage. Most people who know me know that I'm not an angry or ragey person, but I have a complex and deep understanding of the inequalities in our world both local and global, both human and environmental, and this often results in a lot of frustration. If I try to express myself using words, often I can not articulate myself well enough or my words fall on deaf ears. I use collage as a method to formulate my thoughts and express what I see. I have made lots of collages that I call counter-culture collages. This one is the most PC of them all which is why I chose this to post!

This one is called, "Paradox" and as you can imagine all the images are paradoxical. I feel that often the best way to get across a message is through stark contrast and illuminate paradoxes, that is what I was trying to achieve with this. This is the first time I've ever posted this anywhere on the internet and I rarely show anyone my collages, only people I really trust. I'm not sure why I don't share them, I think it's because they are for me, they aren't for anyone else because it's my way of venting and releasing.

Ocean -- Vast. Deep. In Peril.

I showed y'all this full page add that I found in The Citizen that was produced by Enbridge but I wanted to share it blog style as well. It is an interesting tactic use by large corporations to use marketing gimmicks such as this to appeal to the ignorant. I don't mean ignorant in a rude way, I mean it in it's literal sense (to people that just don't know). For anyone that doesn't understand the complexities of the potential negative effects of the Enbridge pipeline, they would not know the hypocrisy of this ad. This ad precisely describes the beauty of the ocean that this pipeline would potentially destroy and odds are that it will one day. This could be one of those pieces that could be used to teach students to look and think critically about what media portrays. These ads must be effective because a full-page spread in a newspaper is not cheap!
Emma found a counter-poem to this one and sent it to me:

The Ocean --
Vast. Dying.
We thought it was limitless.Deceiving
The life that dwells there is not on vacation,
Has no other home.
No gateway to swim to greener waters.
Is an ocean without life an ocean
Always?

Wisdom

As teachers we should strive to be this wise. Strive to instill wisdom into our students, not merely teach to the curriculum. We are their elders after all.

the dot

This is another great book by the same author as "ish," Peter H. Reynolds. Same sort of idea as "ish" but just a different story...it speaks to those students who may not think they are artists or creative.