Megan Samms
Saturday September 9, 1 – 5pm: Drop-In Indigo Social
Megan Samms is an L’nu and Nlaka’pamux multidisciplinary artist based in her home community of Katalisk, Ktaqmkuk (Codroy Valley, NL), one of her two traditional territories. She is also a regenerative, community-based farmer there.
In thinking through the theme of this year’s Biennale, Host, Samms kept hearing the words of Beau Dick (1955-2017), a Kwakwaka’wakw artist, activist and hereditary chief. Samms recalls Dick leading a Copper-breaking ceremony on the steps of the Parliament building in Victoria, BC, in 2013, calling for government accountability to Indigenous communities. As part of his message, he stated “we want to remind you that you are still our guests and we are still your hosts.”
Samms’s piece for the Biennale responds in part to the narrative of the “discovery” of North America that took place along the Peninsula’s shores , one of the places of First Contact. The piece is a gentle reminder of who the original Hosts of this place are: the land, water, and importantly, the human and non-human kin, who have called this place home for millennia. Made from linen, wool, beads, and natural dyes, the flag is hung vertically, as the traditional Mi’kmaq flag is. The text is bordered with delicate and repeated Mi’kmaq motifs representing the land and sea. Displayed outdoors for the duration of the Biennale, the flag will be affected by the wind and weather, by environment and circumstance, as all relationships are. While flags are typically used to make a declaration, or to claim dominion or ownership, Samms’s flag makes a statement in a conversational way, inviting viewers in to reflect. As Samms says, “I think we can all use a reminder of how best, how tenderly, how kindly to treat our place(s) and each other.”
ABOUT THE ARTIST
I want you to know that I care deeply and I work from a place of love. I hope to generate more, and more, and more here in my homeplace—I work and make to cultivate an ancestral and place focused practice.
Katalisk, Ktaqmkuk, is one of my traditional territories where much of my kin network is too; I am also connected to Kumcheen, or Lytton in so-called British Columbia. I am an internationally Indigenous person of Mi’kmaq and Nlaka’pamux descent; I come from the Samms, Noseworthys, Halls, Gagnons, Cennames, Watkinsons, and from Spintlum.
When I’m working, in our gardens or studio, I think and make moves intergenerationally. I believe that by thinking and working that way, more and more life, love and care, work and effort will be generated. I hope that my practice(s) serve then, now, and yet-to-be relations. I explore decolonial values, perspective, care, and love by examining story-in-place, living-in-place, specificity, and resultant relationships by making work to generate and continue more story and living. I’m interested in complexity, multiplicity and fragmentation, what it is to consider and heal, the interwoven and complex interrelationships that arise from this.
I tend to work with a diversity of media including fibre and handweaving, natural dyes, paint, and words in my creative practice. Though growing food and tending to bees is a creative work too.
—Megan Samms