Awanigiizhik Bruce: Indigenous Futurism Can Save the World

The Rural Regenerator Fellowship brings together individual artists, makers, and culture bearers, grassroots organizers, community development workers, public sector workers and other rural change-makers who are committed to advancing the role of art, culture and creativity in rural development and community building. Recently, we asked a collective of local writers to sit down with current Rural Regenerator cohort members to share more about their work.

Awanigiizhik Bruce is a Two-Spirit Anishinaabe artist and teacher who is based on the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Reservation. Their work is multimodal, multilayered and multilingual, created within a “continuum of going from the ancient past to the future and whatever is contemporary in between.” 

Talking with them about their work and life feels like freewheeling explosions of ideas, visions, stories, temporal planes, wit, delights, despairs, and laughter. These explosions are also reflected in the deep variety of forms and disciplines in which Awanigiizhik works and studies: youth leader, Michif and Ojibway language learner and revitalist, water rights activist/protector, life-long learner of ethnopharmacology and food sovereignty. Their teaching and artistic practices focus on learning and revitalizing Indigenous art traditions and recreating them into contemporary forms. Their life vision is to explore their own multifaceted identities and support others to find their identities through Indigenous pathways. “A lot of things I work on are ethics, health, wellness, dreaming, shared leadership, and making efforts for change.” 

They were born into the old cultures’ ceremonies and traditions.  Eventually their family “walked away from that, but my dad still brought us to see elders. So we still got to learn the ‘old culture’–as we call it now…I got to meet most of my great-grandparents. We got to see a lot of elders before they passed away and got to hear about old culture. It really just impacted me on who I am today.” Hearing their elders talk about the old culture, their elders’ interpretations of modern culture and their visions of the future, is fundamental to how Awanigiizhiik sees themselves and the world. From a young age, they learned that they could be an active agent in their world–dreaming up personal and social change. As they grew older, they found their “way back” to their traditional ceremonies and practices because they were conduits of individual, communal and generational healing from the accumulated traumas Awanigiizhik and their communities had endured. 

“Ceremony lodges represent the universe … when I interact with (ceremony) I see it as a sense of community, networking and leadership. … I grew up with so much trauma that I can relate to everyone’s stories.” For Awanigiizhik, a central component to being a ceremonialist, is trying to figure out how they can help their two-spirit and gender non-conforming relatives to engage with ceremonial space that is comfortable, healing and supports feelings of belongingness. “Ceremonies are still very much binaries and colonized, because of boarding school and being acculturated by the churches.”  

From a young age they had to “literally fight with the state government over my own case.” because there was no one to adequately advocate for them. “I saw that the leadership was failing and I didn’t like the system, but being a tiny kid–there’s nothing you can do. So I learned that I really want to be the person I needed most when I was young. So I find myself in leadership and role modeling capacity and advocate … for people who are afraid to have a voice or they don’t have that skill set.”

SEVEN GENERATIONS AND REVITALIZING TRADITIONS 

They describe their work as ‘Indigenous Futurisms’ and central to this is the Anishinaabe concept of the Seven Generations. “The way I’ve been taught through ceremony … is the spectrum of seven generations. The focus is of seven generations back and seven generations forward–that’s a huge Anishnabee mindset. Are you being a good relative in regards to your ancestors and your descendents?”

Their art is an intentional rejection of the mainstream world’s views of Native Art as “this captured moment from a snapshot from the 1800s and that isn’t who we are.” In place of this static view of Native art, Awanigiizhik asks, “who are we now? … really discovering and diving into what is identity – what is our unique identity. What are things that we’ve lost through colonization that we can bring back.” Their art’s purpose is to say, “I am a living, breathing person that is connected culturally and knows history…We don’t exist in a vacuum.” They don’t have to meet the expectations and standards of those who want to buy Indigenous art. “Another thing is the whole misconception that everyone should be Lakota looking Plains Indians and I’m like there are so many tribes across this continent that aren’t Lakota peoples.” They are pushing the audience, collectors and buyers, “You don’t need no more art like this!”

Their primary mediums include ledger art, quillwork, beadworking, painting, and computer-coded LED art all of which they use to point to a unique, yet communal, engagement with traditional Native art. 

Indigenous Futurism is not only an exploration of the concept of intergenerational healing and the Seven Generations, but also of the intersection of personal identity with the plasticity of time, “an exploration of what is identity in a historic, contemporary or futuristic sense.”

They are working with a traditional seamstress who’s slowly been teaching them the art of sewing and now Awanigiizhik has begun to make their own fashions. They transformed the design of a historic clothing article for women “for thousands and thousands of years. It was the easiest thing to make out of hide. It was basically a tube dress with straps and then it had very modified sleeves … a cape-like sleeve …. So I made that into a tunic shirt as a two-spirit thing and I made ribbon stretch jeans!” 

They also have an idea of blending Plains wear and Great Lakes wear. “Instead of just relying on the past, what can you do as a modern person to make something new? A fusion between a men’s war shirt and different women’s wear.” 

“For example, I am really pushing hard to bring back moose hair embroidered baskets. I did some deep dive digging on the internet and there are only 5 people who have worked on it – various different Natives from the northern region.” 

When some people see Awanigiizhik’s quill work, they ask, “How do you get your porcupine? Do you murder them?” 

“No! It’s sustainably used–roadkill!” And people look at them shocked and terrified. “And I’m like–it’s an animal. It gets run over.” 

And then people ask, “Well, would you shoot one?” 

“Why yes I would.”

“You monster!” 

“You know how good that meat is? They are porc/u/pine. They taste like really good pork and then a few other animals…Different elders say porcupine is one of the cleanest foods you can actually eat raw–in a pinch. I wouldn’t recommend someone doing that with a modern-day porcupine. It was definitely a cleaner environment when these elders were alive and their elders…”

SEVEN FIRES PROPHECY AND RADICAL FUTURES 

The Seven Fires Prophecy is not only foundational to the way Awanigiizhik re-envisions their relationship with traditions, but also as a way to imagine new, radical futures. It’s this prophecy that “prompted the Ojibway, before we were Ojibway, to move away from the Virginia area. We moved from there all the way to the Great Lakes, because in those prophecies they talked about a white skin race that would come and make changes. And in those prophecies they talk about how twice they were given the chance to have a sense of brotherhood or destruction.” On the first chance, they chose destruction. And now the prophecy says that there is going to come a time of the seventh fire when once again we are going to have a choice: either the pathway that leads to shared humanity–and then the eternal fire, the eighth fire of peace, harmony, and respect will ignite, or the pathway that leads to the destruction of everything. “And so far because of everyone’s passiveness in politics … We are kind of leading toward world destruction.” 

“As we get closer to 10 billion people,” Awanigiizhik continued, “we are not going to have enough food and so what is going to happen to all the wild foods? Let’s just be honest white people can’t farm. What do they do when farming–it’s warfare on the soil, on the land.” They use Agent Orange and it sterilizes the soil so badly that they then need to “add chemical concoctions” so that engineered plants can grow from it. Awanigiizhik asks why can’t national and global leaders consult “all these Indigenous practices from around the world” and pay Indigenous folks to create and collaborate new practices that enriches the soil and land rather than destroy it. “In order to save our world we need all the intellectuals at the table because clearly Eurocentric intelligence has tried and failed for centuries.” 

“We need to all be working together to make systematic changes. That is what it is going to take. There is no cure-all that is going to happen. Everything has to work in tandem.” 

When they imagine their communities’ future fifty years in the future, they want to see their “culture and the language and the traditions be brought back. What I would love to see is the catholic church moved off our rez…More natural indigenous leadership where there isn’t any influence from the church…” They also envision more housing and work stability, “Because right now there is a sixty percent homeless rate and a sixty percent unemployment rate. The average median wages here, if you’re lucky, is $20,000 per year. And then the cost of living here is exponential. It feels like you are living in a city because of the food prices. And the food here is so gross– you get this really chalky bad old fruit.”

 “I would hope that there would be a more transdisciplinary medicinal approach. A lot of harm reduction would be helped through ceremony and Indigenous modalities of healing. There wouldn’t be just one ceremony, there’d be hybrid ideas.” Their approach to their creative communal life is highly interdisciplinary and holistic because at the end of the day, “we need to all be working together to make systematic changes. That is what it is going to take. There is no cure-all that is going to happen. Everything has to work in tandem.” 

Finally they speculate about the power of a re-writing of the US Constitution, pointing out the contradiction between the Declaration of Independence saying on one hand, that “all men are created equal” and on the other hand describing Native folk as “merciless Indian savages.” 

They take a deep breath and look upward. “In the perfect scenario, we’d get our stolen land back.”