Hand-carved wood. Poplar wood, natural dyes, beads, shells, acrylic resin, tin foil, aluminum, water-based lacquer, paint.

“We Are Medicine” is composed around the theme of “community” and the relationships and stories that form connection and support the essence of belonging and autonomy from an Indigenous lens. The goal is to provide a nurturing composition of provocative stimulation that provokes awareness and sparks our interest of connection, spirit and how as relatives we all have unique voices, stories and experiences that can lift each other up as we rise together.

This composition incorporates Indigenous medicine and dyes from the southeastern united states as well as a few from the Pacific Northwest. These include but are not limited to nicotiana rustica, cedar, sage, sweetgrass, hand-boiled yellow root, blood root, butternut, walnut, pecan, chestnut, mosses, lichen, obsidian and natural ochre pigments. Other mediums include acrylic resin, beads, tin foil, aluminum, water-based lacquer and paint.

It is a love story about kinship and healing. It is a visual and sensory-driven approach to incorporating unique perspectives of what it means to be sacred, stand in our power, heal and to maintain well-being. It is brought up by my deep reverence for Long Person, the ancestral kindred spirit to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, the natural world and waterways because a bond so deep and unbreakable can fearlessly address uncomfortable truths and build awareness. Through our natural environment and water ways we are rooted in our hearts, minds and spirit.

States of superposition and superimposition suggest that everything, everywhere all at once, is simply a dance of resonance and timeless connection of the universe. Symbiotic relationships full of love and honor, flow and grace, balance and harmony celebrate our breath of life by actively engaging in a timeless energetic dance of sacred exchange between ancestral land and spirit inspires questions such as, “What is real?” and aids in visualizing intersectionality in existing world views and cosmological visions “in the now” and a deeper sense of connection through visual storytelling because we are medicine and because our stories are medicine.

It is necessary to combat mainstream ideologies, colonial mindsets and persisting rhetoric which generate cycles of oppression and violence for a more sustainable future. Eugene is composed of a vast network of ancestral knowledge, power and landscape. What does that mean? Eugene as a city is not an object of abstract thought but made of “real” energy that connects us timelessly to space and place. A beautiful emergence is taking place from individual to global as we swap stories and build bridges.

“As with language, art objects contain the code of tribal identity. They remind us of what it means to be Cherokee. They speak in the Cherokee natural tongue of how their makers are related to a tribal family and how that family is anchored in community. Objects are also guardians that pass down the fire of knowledge to future generations so they may think about and see the world in the way of their forebears. They honor the past and anticipate the future. Yet it is equally important to remember that the human qualities required to advance the community are gifts of the divine.” – Rennard Strickland.

For artist and artwork inquiry, contact the artist at [email protected]