Mother, Teacher, Destroyer – 2011.
Four channel video, mixed-media sculpture. Duration: Loop. (wood, deer antler, deer hide, boar bladder, found materials).
Installation view and Video Still, Close Encounters: The Next 500 Years, Winnipeg, CA.



Mother, Teacher, Destroyer presents four women from surviving Indigenous nations that have hacked foreign (colonizer) artifacts and technologies to create culturally sensible implements for the purposes of survivance and resistance. Although the design of the instruments in Mother, Teacher, Destroyer may appear crude or absurd, they are highly functional and articulate representations of prayer and cultural self-determination; tools of Indigenous women’s will to sustain Indigenous ways of being. With their instruments the women have forged a new form of tribal music from the shards of an apocalyptic history, and in the process they have saved and reclaimed the essence of their cultural and spiritual identities. Mother, Teacher, Destroyer functions as both a shrine and memorial to the spirit of these cultural heroes, and a means of honoring the future forms of Indigenous resistance.