Greg Staats, Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) (b. Ohsweken, Six Nations of the Grand River Territory) Toronto-based artist whose works combine language, mnemonics and the natural world as an ongoing process of conceptualising a Haudenosaunee restorative aesthetic that defines the multiplicity of relationships with trauma and renewal.

I address the systemic deficit of the Kanien'kehá:ka language subsequent relational worldview — through personal and community archives and an intellectual and aesthetic interpretation of the body and ceremony. Recent photographic, video and installation works combine the performative burdens of condolence, renewal and my continuously re-imagined role as observer and participant, in an effort to elevate the mind and countervail complex trauma, dissociation and loss of self. This archive, an externalization of what is carried within the body, a repository, has enabled me to move toward renewal in dialogue with the psychic space where the overwhelming is held. This installation methodology promotes the development of a personal artistic repeatable framework based on acquiring/retaining Haudenosaunee knowledge and values; conceptualizing verb based gestures.

My ongoing research of public and private within a Haudenosaunee linguistic and mnemonic continuum linked to place has informed the production of recent works based on reciprocal methodologies. For example: When at the edge of one’s condolence and within the liminal metaphysical space prior to renewal, there lies a hesitancy to move forward. While external and internal barriers must be overcome, the process must be completed with the help of others, both as witnesses and holders of the good mind. This ceremonial movement is comparable to moving from the darkness of the forest into the clearing where the light illuminates breath and one’s footing becomes clearer. The Mid-Winter (renewal) ceremony Gaihwayao:ni:, translated as “encouragement,” employs reciprocal gestures and words, repeatable to lifting up the mind after it has dropped down during condolence and/or post-trauma.

The images reflect my positionality, one that continues to be been defined from an on-reserve lived experience and relational to trauma and renewal and by an ongoing research relationships with knowledge keepers and linguists, through in depth discussions of a Haudenosaunee worldview and behaviors that can be identified and repurposed for contemporary emotional mental and environmental health, outside of the present day Art academy. The linkage to analog/digital photography to a continuum of mnemonic meaning making to support a collective memory embodied in place and state of mind. These realized works provide reflection and discussion to move my practice forward with ideas that are held within relationships as a principle organization - land environment nation community friendships family self. Within my own artistic practice, mnemonics and gestural efforts are a part of my visual language and that of a Haudenosaunee continuum of remembering. Orality is central to Haudenosaunee cyclical ceremonial life. The words are spoken/sung upon long breaths. From oral methodologies of remembering to embodied strings of wampum to pictorial documentation seen on the condolence cane, the evolution of the message of peace continues to pick up new technologies while extending the rafters of inclusion to maintain the good mind.

Recently, however I have had to employ diverse visual strategies of specific Haudenosaunee methodologies that continues to act a direct preemptive Haudenosaunee cultural behavior - to share in the warnings of a “systemic forgetting” of on-reserve lived voices, decolonized experiences and narratives.

Within the Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace the 50 Haudenosaunee titleholders original titles assigned by the Peacemaker are actual oral embodiments that reflect place, state of mind and the initial meeting and reception of the message of Peace. What is important is that the Peacemaker conducted an interview, which included; an assessment of one’s state of mind, and the things that were seen and encountered along the journey. This reciprocal gesture of naming became a living mnemonic of the responsibility to Peace. This transmission of compassion to memory reverberates in gestural efforts and is held within a reciprocal responsibility to knowledge and place.

nia:weh kowah / thanking you greatly

Greg Staats