Kinship Rising: Unapologetic, resurgent, connected, sovereign bodies. 

Kinship Rising is an Indigenous-led project focused on healing from colonial gender-based violence by restoring our sacred teachings of gender wellbeing. Kinship Rising promotes gender resurgence through art, land-water relations, and reconnection with all our relations.  

Shape Shifting Settler Violence Through Art and Land Retellings

Body sovereignty is land sovereignty

Kinship Rising is an Indigenous-led project based in British Columbia. Kinship Rising works with communities and organizations to conduct art- and land-based workshops with Indigenous youth of all genders, including 2spirit and LGBTTQQ youth, using an intergenerational framework.

The vision of Kinship Rising is to support young people’s dignity, healing and strengths in relation to historical sexualized and gender-based violence. We are focused on blanketing and honouring those who have experienced sexualized and gender-based violence. Centering our own teachings and perspectives, we seek to retrace our circles of relation with our lands and with our bodies.

Kinship Rising: Dignity, Consent, Sovereignty

Research on sexualized violence in our communities tends to focus on the impact of risk and trauma, and on the legal, social and psychological costs of interventions. Our project uses art and land-based materials and teachings as a form of restorying and rebodying colonial violence. Activities have included circles with Elders, walks on the land, art and collage-making, tanning hides, working with wool, stone, hide and cedar, digital storytelling, painting, image collages, mask-making, spoken word and traditional felt and beading work.

Kinship Rising: Body sovereignty, land sovereignty

Kinship Rising workshops use land-based medicines and materials to honour the link between our land and body sovereignty. Our artwork, created during Kinship Rising workshops, shows how participants expressed their experiences and discussions around topics such as self love, dignity, sovereignty, sexual health, inter-generational trauma, consent, decolonization, land-based healing, teachings from Elders, lateral violence, the colonial roots of violence, responses to racism, hetero- and 2spirit phobia, and how to recenter our own sacred teachings regarding gender wellness and wellbeing.

We have had the great honour and privilege of hosting workshops with numerous youth, communities and organizations across BC.

We raise our hands in deep gratitude and acknowledgment for all of those who have experienced gender and sexualized violence, to those we have lost to violence, to those who have shared and walked with us in this project, and who resist, protect, survive, love and imagine other ways of being with each other and with all our relations.