#denesuline

[folkfashion]

Dënesųłı̨ne (Chipewyan) mother and daughter, Danita & Dani Bilozaze, Canada, by Karen McKinnon

[indigenouscontemporaryart]

Catherine Blackburn | Tell Me the Truth. 2017

“Catherine Blackburn’s, Believe in Something, and Truth Basket pay tribute to her kinship relationships, and the land that has sustained the Denesuline people for centuries. Bound through the love that stitching suggests, these sculptural works become acts of reclamation in their refusal to be classified or minimized by the oppressive history of colonization, by instead celebrating the contemporary resurgence of Indigenous presence and identity.” La biennale d’art contemporain autochtone / The Contemporary Native Art Biennialbaca.ca

[iphigeniacomplex]

We Drowned the Land of England in the Waters of the Denendeh by Matthew James Weigel

It was clearly understood, there was no ownership of land, so clearly does the land, in fact, own me.

My water from the river and my nitrogen, a buffalo protein. I am a fleshbound manuscript of what this place might say. Hear in it how family made the treaties, live them, love the land, this place this creek this river.

Make a sediment of me, make mud, make silt and send it on its way: Saskatchewan Athabasca Slave Mackenzie to the sea.

If you could take the dirt of England and rejuvenate the ground, if you could manage, as was always done, as people and the beavers manage, take the soil of England, cast it in the lakes across the north, and ball it up in handfuls, homes, and dams, and hold the land of England to account for Canada,  for the bishopry, for the Company, and record it in the manuscript of the north-west.

Then write these things that we are saying down, write them on two sheets, one for you and one for me to keep.

Hold these things we learn and teach them on, tell the story written in the mud, recorded in the river, and copied days downstream.

Then I would hope you carry safe your copy,  and when you reach the sea, find England, compare it with this copy we have made, and stir the ocean with it.

[ayearinlanguage]

A Year in Language, Day 225: Denesuline/Chipewyan Denesuline is an indigenous Canadian language of the Athabaskan family, one of the America's largest native families. It is spoken by over 11,000 people (a little under half the ethnic population) in central Canada, and has official status in the Northwest Territories. The terms Chipewyan is the standard English term for the ethnolinguistic group, and comes from the name of the people in an unrelated Algonquian language (Plains Cree). Most speakers of North Athabaskan languages refer to themselves as Dene, which, in typical style, just means "people". It should not be conflated with "Chippewa" which is another term for Ojibwe. Denesuline includes the cross-linguistically uncommon sound known as the "interdental fricative", which English also has and writes "th". Most consonants in the language can be aspirated or ejective. The language briefly adopted the syllabic writing system used by many indigenous languages of Canada, but currently uses Latin script. There is some controversy of the use of the letter "ʔ", used for the glottal stop, in official documents.

[sagepaul]

caribou antlers in floral design