Artist Statement:

Sewatonhna ren - May Your Spirit be Well performance acknowledges the lives of Mohawk Institute students by symbolically offering past students what they did not receive: love, caring, tenderness, nourishment, cultural knowledge and language. It is a response to the residential school experience, an embodied way to feed the hunger of their spirits and to say: “kwè:iahre - we remember you, kwanorónhkhwa - we love you and tenkwáhsnie - we will care for you”. Audiences will be active in generating an individual response to the bricks and mortar of the Mohawk Institute and its tangible history of assimilation and cultural genocide. 

 

For more info on the artist, click here: Santee Smith