huli u’tu staluẃ / Riverbed
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Nanaimo Art Gallery 150 Commercial Street, Nanaimo, British Columbia V9R 5G6
Nanaimo Art Gallery, "huli u’tu staluẃ / Riverbed," 2021
Taking place along the Millstone River, huli u’tu staluẃ / Riverbed is a new series of artworks, walks, performances, readings, and workshops that will move upstream from July to October. Projects include performances and presentations by artists, writers, scientists, knowledge-keepers, and language advocates.
Upcoming Events:
Billy-Ray Belcourt, S F Ho, and Manuel Axel Strain at Bowen Park
September 25th / 2:00 - 4:00 PM
Bowen Park Lower Picnic Shelter (Near Wall Street Entrance)
Join us for the second-last huli u’tu staluẃ / Riverbed event featuring Billy-Ray Belcourt, S F Ho, and Manuel Axel Strain starting at 2pm in Bowen Park in Snuneymuxw territory, hosted by the Vancouver Island Regional Library and Nanaimo Art Gallery. We will be gathering at the lower picnic shelter near the Wall Street entrance. Bring your own lawn chair or picnic blanket and enjoy the performance outdoors!
Billy-Ray Belcourt will read from and talk about his latest book on grief, colonial violence, joy, love, and queerness. S F Ho will read from their recent work on the connections engendered by water. Manuel Axel Strain will enact a performance in response to the river. Each in dialogue with land and water as it relates to the body, Belcourt, Ho, and Strain will perform with the Millstone River flowing behind, serving as both support and subject. This event is presented with Vancouver Island Regional Library.
Reading with Sonnet L'Abbé
October 3rd / 2:00 - 3:00 PM
Brannen Lake Boat Launch
In this closing event at the Millstone River’s headwaters, poet and musician Sonnet L’Abbé will present their reflections on huli u’tu staluẃ / Riverbed.
Or Not Or Now: Justine Chambers, Elisa Ferrari, and Christian Vistan
October 2021
Multiple locations
Beginning in October, watch for QR codes along the Millstone River to listen and respond to Or Not Or Now, an audio score by Justine Chambers, Elisa Ferrari, and Christian Vistan. Formed through a series of conversations near and along urban waterways in Nanaimo, Delta and Vancouver on Snuneymuxw, Tsawwassen, Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh territories, Or Not Or Now plays with riverine poetics, orientations, and memories.
A river’s body requires a bed. Lying in the middle of the city, the Millstone River has its headwaters at Brannen Lake. Flowing through farms, neighbourhoods, and parks, by golf courses, penitentiary grounds, and marshes, and under roads, highways, and railroads, it enters the sea at Sxwuyum, the site of the now-displaced Snuneymuxw village. Through waterflow and sedimentation, the river has been shaping its own bed since time immemorial—wearing down soil and rock while carrying nutrients to the riverine flora and fauna that in turn provide life and stability to the riverbank. Since the 1850s, the Millstone River has also been shaped by coal mining, sawmill waste, power generation, farming, blackberries, ivy, dynamite, and construction.
In 2017 New Zealand’s Whanganui River was given the same rights and legal standing as a person. Rivers in India, Ecuador, and Colombia have also been attributed with legal rights. These shifts in legal standing not only recognise the environmental precarity of these complex living ecosystems, but also the inalienable connections between these rivers and regional Indigenous communities. While attempting to grant the Millstone River legal standing is not part of the scope of this project, we endeavour to treat the river as a living entity.
Through storytelling, bioremediation workshops, hul’q’umi’num’ classes and plant walks, film screenings, cedar weaving, collective wading, readings, and poetic responses, huli u’tu staluẃ / Riverbed invites artists, presenters, and audiences to consider the life of the river. Programs that would normally take place in the gallery are located along the Millstone’s riparian corridor, foregrounding the environmental and cultural resonance of this site.
Thank you to Adam Manson and Elder Gary Manson for providing the hul’q’umi’num’ title, huli u’tu staluẃ, which directly translates to “life by the river.”
Considering the river’s shape through time and space, huli u’tu staluẃ / Riverbed takes place in a year in which Nanaimo Art Gallery asks the question: What is progress?
Billy-Ray Belcourt, S F Ho, and Manuel Axel Strain are presented in collaboration with Vancouver Island Regional Library.