Connect What is your favorite type of art to create?

I create art that tells stories, that digs deep inside to decolonize through ancestral memory, and that honors the original peoples of these lands and supports their struggles to defend the Earth, and art that uplifts social change and the people, especially women, who lead revolutions, rebellions, and the fight to preserve Indigenous culture and language. This includes murals, large scale paintings, ink work, sculpture, printmaking, t-shirt design, and charcoal drawing.

Where do you find inspiration?

I find inspiration in my own journey to heal from the violence of intergenerational abuse cycles and trauma, and to learn how to decolonize through reconnection to my ancestors and precolonial understandings of how we belong to the Earth. I also find inspiration in my chosen community, the people who surround me in my daily life-- matriarchs fighting to save their lands from extraction and exploitation, Native people preserving language and culture, Black women, queer people, immigrant families.

What would you do with $25,000?

I would build out a studio at home to enable myself and my Native partner to create and to earn a living through our work, and the rest of the funds would go to sustaining our three kids, my partner's elderly father, and ourselves to enable us to build out our community work, to share art with others and build their skills to document their own community stories and to find healing outside of a carceral system and mentality.