Collective Spirit Podcast
First Peoples Fund presents the Collective Spirit® podcast. The Collective Spirit moves each of us to stand up and make a difference, to pass on ancestral knowledge, and simply extend a hand of generosity. The Collective Spirit podcast features Native artists and culture bearers who discuss the power of Indigenous art and culture. The Collective Spirit® podcast is produced by First Peoples Fund, whose mission is to honor and support Indigenous artists and culture bearers through grant-making initiatives, culturally rooted programming, and training & mentorship. Learn more at www.firstpeoplesfund.org
Collective Spirit Podcast
S2E18: Penny Kagigebi (Ojibwe)
2023 Cultural Capital Fellow Penny Kagigebi (Ojibwe), a Queer2-Spirit artist from the White Earth Reservation, unveils their transformative experiences with grief and the pursuit of Queer2-Spirit cultural reclamation through indigenous art forms. Through their narrative, we're listeners and companions on their journey to alignment with the Earth's vibrations, using natural materials like birch bark and porcupine quills steeped in therapeutic resonance. Penny's candor about their family's painful history with forced relocations and boarding schools offers a potent reminder of the resilience in preserving generational knowledge and identity.
When we're working with the birch bark, with porcupine quills, with other materials from shear from this land where we're from, how that helps align our cellular vibration to be in tune with the Earth's vibration and how healing that is for us.
Speaker 2:The Wombski Beneathik Indigenous House of Tujac, indodame, presents the Collective Spirit Podcast. The collective spirit moves each of us to stand up and make a difference, to pass on ancestral knowledge and simply extend a hand of generosity. The collective spirit podcast features native artists and culture bearers who discuss the power of Indigenous art and culture.
Speaker 1:Wombski, beneathik. Indigenous House of Tujac Indodame. How about beginning kag Ishikoni gunning? I am Penny Kaga Gaebe creating plans from the Widerth Reservation in Northwestern Minnesota. I am a Queer Two Spirit Ojibwe woman. My primary art form is a birch bark basket tree, which includes fill boxes and also what I refer to as a contemporary expression of traditional Ojibwe birch bark basket tree with boat work and applique beadwork on birch bark. Widerth Reservation was really targeted as the solution to the Indian problem in this region. They were just going to move all of the Native Americans in the Midwest over to Widerth and so we were super targeted by the churches and the government.
Speaker 1:My grandfather was born in southern Minnesota in 1878 and he was removed to Widerth. He and his family were all removed to Widerth before the turn of the century, so he was a first generation reservation child. And then my mother was born in 1921 and she spent from second grade to seventh grade in the boarding school here at Widerth and she was roughly from 1920 to 1934. And for those six years she wasn't allowed to go home. Her family could visit her once a month for two hours on a Sunday. Her little brother passed away and she didn't find out until two weeks after the funeral. I can only imagine how that influenced my grandfather's decisions, my mother's decisions, and I was not raised in the culture. I was raised on the reservation. I wasn't raised with language or cultural knowledge, and it was in my mid-30s. I was having a lot of health problems and I sought out cultural knowledge and ceremonial healing and that was really where my journey with ARC began. In 2008, my son passed away and for the next year my husband and I made gifts for his bundle. We had a ceremony a year after his passing to send items over to him and I got into the understanding about how making of art can help heal grief. And we're working with the birch bark, with porcupine quills and other materials from here, from this land where we're from, how that helps align our cellular vibration to be in tune with the earth's vibration and how healing that is for us. All these other struggles that I've had all my life they're just not important. When I'm working with birch bark, I have my hands on birch bark. I like birch bark so much. I have little bookmarks, so, like when I read a little bit each evening, the last thing I'm handling at night before I go to sleep is a little bit of birch bark.
Speaker 1:The first time I thought quill barks was in the late 90s and I felt like I was struck by lightning. And it wasn't the oh my gosh, that's so beautiful, it was. I got to learn how to make those. I also had to learn how to make those. Sometimes you're walking through your life and you recognize that something was like that's part of my path.
Speaker 1:15 years later I was able to go and learn how to make quill boxes with melosh and that was the first time I was able to do porcupine quill work on birch bark with the sweet grass on there. And I came to learn that all the woodland tribes in the northeastern areas, like Canada and out to the Atlantic Ocean, have been making these quill boxes forever or storage containers or medicines and dried foods. And it's beautiful symmetry of material, since the birch bark has the preservatives in the bark itself that take care of those items that are placed in there the old time emons at the ACN Museum. Sometimes there's sweet grass all along every seam and that sweet grass will repel insects, so the insects aren't getting in at your food item. And then the porcupine quill embroidery on the top of the cover is like a labeling system. So if I had dried deer meat in that container, maybe there would be a porcupine quill work designed about deer on that cover. Now that porcupine quill work, embroidery has turned into a very decorative and beautiful art form, but originally it was that labeling system.
Speaker 1:I really like utility items that can be used in everyday life. I feel like that life can be so painful, but when we have that beauty, that kind of walks through the day with us, it helps ease some of that pain of living here at this time. That was almost 10 years ago. I learned from Mel Lodge how to make those quill boxes and in the last few years I've started making these more contemporary baskets. That allows for something that I can teach in a classroom setting and have an opportunity to have more community engagement. I am tremendously grateful to First People's Sun for this opportunity, for this fellowship. I love that. They emphasize the spirit of generosity and sharing knowledge and I respect that so much. One of my early teachers he's passed away now. That was such a strong value of his. It's like everything that I teach is meant to be taken forward and used in any way that my students want to use it. I don't try to claim any trademark or copyright on making a basket or putting beads on birch bark. If they want to expand on their art form by making baskets and selling them, or if they want to go forward and teach classes, I will help them do that. I really want to see people become more involved in their culture and especially to receive the healing that's available to us through practicing these cultural art forms.
Speaker 1:The greatest challenge that I'm facing as an artist today is the access to public lands to harvest birch bark and taking good care of the birch bark trees. I do want to state that the birch bark that's peeled for the baskets, the harvesting of that birch bark, does not kill the birch tree. The tree is incredibly generous and has the ability to self-heal as long as a person is harvesting it correctly. So it comes with that counterbalance of anyone who wants to work with birch bark. They really do need to learn from an elder and spend time in the woods with an elder learning how to harvest that bark correctly.
Speaker 1:The birch forest has been on an extreme decline in the last 30 years and there's a lot of reasons for that. And without birch bark trees, ojibwe people aren't making canoes, we're not using that birch bark for those week long coverings. The birch bark gives us food and medicine. It's one of the two trees that we refer to as the trees of life the birch tree and the cedar tree and I want people to understand the value of that tree and to help take better care of it.
Speaker 1:So when it comes to teaching classes around this basket tree, that is the greatest struggle is having a sufficient amount of the appropriate kind of birch bark to teach the classes. In Minnesota alone, there's 21 different varieties of birch bark, and not all of them are appropriate for the kind of baskets that I'm pretty forward. In these classes. I want to have bark that's very forgiving and easy to work with, and I want students to have an excellent opportunity and excellent learning experience in that first time, and so it takes a very particular kind of bark to do that. Additionally, I'm laying it flat and drying the bark for about anywhere from six months to 24 months, because the color of that bark will change as it's drying, and I believe that has an extra level of beauty that comes forward.
Speaker 1:I believe my role as a queer toothed bearded artist is to allow people an opportunity to learn about cultural art forms in a way that allows people to come and be holy themselves, like they don't have to shrink and become smaller. I want people to be able to come to learning about their culture in a way that's generous and gentle and inviting, and that people don't need to change who they are to be accepted in our community. I've never been somebody who's been willing to accept just tolerance. I believe our wives are to be celebrated and if we're given an opportunity to flourish, our communities will be more vibrant and more alive and more balanced and we'll all receive healing.
Speaker 2:The Collective Spirit podcast is produced by First Peoples Fund, whose mission is to honor and support indigenous artists and culture bearers through grant making initiatives, thoroughly rooted programming and training and mentorship and more at FirstPeoplesFundorg.