By Cheryl L'Hirondelle

2007

I spend countless hours a day online and in front of a couple of computer monitors. Whether at home or on the road, I'm always connected and looking for something personal, meaningful, and transcendent from this daily repetitive interaction. To keep it real, an image of my mother and aunties adorns my desktop to further remind me that I am not alone but connected and related to real beings. Catching their gaze as they peer at me around an open browser window, I know I am safe and am cognizant of what, who, and why I am here…
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Original published as “red giveaway: linking butterflies and all my relations”, Blackflash Magazine issue 24.3

Red Giveaway.pdf

“Too much monkey business for me to be involved in…”

If chaos is a “behavior so unpredictable as to appear random owing to great sensitivity to small changes in conditions,” ii then my recent sighting of Buffalo Boy in downtown Sault Ste Marie was such a phenomenon. I witnessed this divine creature present a mock lecture to a group of northern Ontario Indigenous students and community members during a cabaret at Gallery 180. iii This was surprising since I was a pallbearer at her highly ritualized last stand in 2008! iv This reincarnation or apparition was a master class in the contradictory perfection of chaos…
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To purchase and read the full text from Adrian Stimson: The Life and Times of Buffalo Boy, edited by David Garneau, please visit: https://www.truck.ca/shop/the-life-and-times-of-buffalo-boy

By Cheryl L'Hirondelle

2014

Kayās Māna Kayās (A Long Time Ago)

Following the 1994 international Indigenous think tank at the Banff Centre for the Arts entitled Drumbeats to Drumbytes, the late Ahasiw Maskgon-Iskwew noted: “To govern ourselves means to govern our stories and our ways of telling stories. It means that the rhythm of the drumbeat, the language of smoke signals and our moccasin telegraph can be transformed to the airwaves and moderns of our times. We can determine our use of the new technologies to support, strengthen and enrich our cultural communities.”1

As a participant and contributor during that event, I would add that to be truly free and self-governing, we must also acknowledge and be aware of our pre-contact ingenuity as inventors and technologists - experts in new media and avatars of innovation…
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To download and purchase OR read the entire text for free, published in Coded Territories: Tracing Indigenous Pathways in New Media Art, edited by Steven Loft and Kerry Swanson, please visit:
https://press.ucalgary.ca/books/9781552387061/

Kayās Māna Kayās (A Long Time Ago)

It is a cold but sunny March afternoon and artist Cheryl L'Hirondelle is on the side of the TransCanada highway on the Morley Reserve between Banff and Calgary. She is placing rocks in patterns that tag the phrase “pe-miyonakwan iskonikan askiy” (“look at this leftover land”) in Cree syllabics. A trucker honks. She turns and waves. Two miles away, at the Morley School, a group of high-school students are rapping, breakdancing, mixing and broadcasting radio at ten watts - a pirate transmission according to Canadian regulations.

We are at the apex of Echoes and Transmissions, an ongoing community project initiated by curator Candice Hopkins with interdisciplinary artist Cheryl L'Hirondelle. As part of Hopkins' exhibition A Question of Place at the Walter Philips Gallery (3 April to 23 May, 2004) . L'Hirondelle and Hopkins worked with community members to stage a number of performative activities, including audio and video workshops, tagging, a pirate radio broadcast from the school and ongoing conversations about the relationship between the reserve and the Banff Centre for the Arts…
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From “Sounding the Border: Echoes and Transmissions from the Morley Reserve - a conversation," Fuse Magazine, vol. 27, #4
Fuse-Sounding the Border.pdf

For many Aboriginals in North America, the year 1992 marked a victory celebration to our continued survival in light of 500 years of colonization.By asserting, proclaiming and authorizing our complex identities, defending our lands and reclaiming lost territories - historical, personal and political - many of us re-discovered and recovered ourselves.

By the time I met Celina Ritter that same year, she was already halfway towards a Masters degree in painting at Saskatchewan Indian Federated College, having already graduated from Alberta College of Art the year before. I was settling into my role as Programming Coordinator at TRUCK. I can't remember exactly how Celina and I originally met - in those days there weren't many native artists or musicians hanging around the art forts. There were a select few that were already established in the art canon complete with reviews, solo exhibitions and commercial gallery representation - Celina's own uncle, the esteemed Alex Janvier was part of that strata…
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To purchase and read the entire text from the publication Resonant Dialogues: 25 Years of the Second Story Art Society in Calgary, please visit:

https://www.truck.ca/shop/resonant-dialogues-25-years-of-the-second-story-art-society-in-calgary

PICTURE HERE

From Critical Making, edited by Garnet Hertz, UCLA-Irvine Campus publishers, Los Angeles, CA., USA