Messages on Doors: Kwakwaka'wakw
Messages on Doors: Kwakwaka'wakw
Produced by The Fox Queen.
A live blending of storytelling, personal experience, and performance art.
Join us in person this Feb 13, 2025 for the public feast and artistic responses to the Messages on Doors online workshop in honour of The Big Ideas.
Messages on Doors is a community engagement workshop, live art presentation and feast where members of the public received a gift packaged to connect and create hand-made works of art through a free artist directed creative process.
In the spirit of reconciliation, Indigenous and non-Indigenous community participants work together to create messages shared as a live celebration performance on the traditional and ancestral lands of the Kwakwaka'wakw peoples.
The Big Ideas
We are responsible to take action against the Historical and Present day dark messages of hate towards Indigenous peoples.
In these times of Reconciliation, we need to connect more.
Values: Love. Truth. Listening. Survival. Joy.
Artistic Lead — Tsatassaya White
Tsatassaya White, B.A. is a curator, event planner and community mobilizer. She is a member of the Snuneymuxw First Nation (Coast Salish) and also of Earthquake House of the Hamilton family of Hupacasath (Nuu-chah-nulth Nations). She carries cultural knowledge, roots her work in traditional protocols and has a vast network of community connections. Recently, Tsatassaya curated “Qwuyulush utl’ Swyalana” a day of Indigenous dance at InFrinGinG Dance Festival (July 2019) at Maffeo Sutton Park, produced and directed “huulth-huultha 2020” a dance film in response to the pandemic, and curated the inaugural Sum̓sháthut (Sun) Festival, an on-line Indigenous cultural festival, and co-produced with Nanaimo’s Crimson Coast Dance Society.
Artistic Lead — The Fox Queen
Progressive Theatre Collective, The Fox Queen (FQ) was formed during the early days of Covid 19, due to a strong desire to connect, inquire, dismantle, (re)align artistic practices, and forge new decolonized ways of theatre making and creation. The Fox Queen is creative collaborators Tamara McCarthy and Dave Mott. These two white artists of settler descent have over 40 years of combined theatre creation, direction, performance, physical training, devising, leadership, independent producing, mentorship, presentation and teaching in the arts sector. The Fox Queen ethos rests solidly inside the founding shared values of Humour, Love, Communication, Listening, Respect, Healing, Song, and Collaboration. Tamara and Dave are focused on Community, Responsibility, Survival, Anti-Racist Practice and the Present Moment. Our values lead and define us. FQ exists in the present moment, self reflecting and focusing on the heartbeats around us; we are flexible, continually responding to the evolving needs of the people on our teams and the communities with whom we engage.
Associate Producer - Minah Lee
Minah is a multidisciplinary artist and arts producer based in traditional and ancestral Snuneymuxw and Snaw-naw-as territories. She was born and raised in South Korea and first moved to unceded Coast Salish territories on the mainland in 2007. Minah initially joined Messages on Doors as a core artist, one of the founding duo of an art collective Art Action Earwig for the MOD: Quw’utsun in 2023. Meanwhile she was also excited to take the role of an assistant producer for the project, deepening her relationship with broader communities on Vancouver Island. She feels very grateful to be able to learn more about the history, creativity, and spirituality of the communities she has been meeting and collaborating with.
MOD: Kwakwaka'wakw Core Artists
The Community Members
Jason Greenwood, Kerri Reid, Melissa Steginus
The Team
Technical Direction, Catering and Produced by The Fox Queen
Associate Producer: Minah Lee
Special Thanks to Robin Folvik and the Port Hardy Museum for their support of this project.
Event Details
Public Celebration and Feast - February 13, 2025
The Alert Bay Lodge
549 Fir Street, Alert Bay, V0N 1A0
Complimentary food and soft drinks will be served starting at 5:00pm until resources run out.
To book a FREE Ticket - please follow this link
EVENT TIMELINE
Protocol Welcome & Prayer
Dinner
Core Artist Presentations
This is a free event. Donations gladly accepted.
Do you have barriers to access Messages on Doors?
Please contact us to discuss with The Fox Queen if our team are able to meet them.
Alert Bay Lodge, 549 Fir Street, Alert Bay
Messages on Doors Image was created
by Eliot White-Hill Kwulasultun.
Artist’s Statement:
Its a simple Salish design in a heart.
The crescent and trigon come together with the shape of the heart to
form a the lower half of a face, kind of like the smiling comedy mask.
