resurge/alight/burrow Action 1: resurge

resurge/alight/burrow

Action 1: resurge

From its very first dream stages, and throughout its birth into this world, this camp chose its identity as a space of action. I think of this now, as the lodges rest uncovered, traveling through the slowed time of winter, edges softened by a blanket of snow. Even muted by ice, the action I envisioned is present. To give my unfolding of the piece’s title some room to breathe, I’ll create separate posts exploring how each concept is enacted. Today I’m focusing on resurge.

As I’ve previously described, resurge is an allusion to reclamation of lost spaces, knowledge, and opportunities to thrive. As it presents in the camp, it functions to place tangible Indigenous creation spaces in visions of the future. Outside of the camp context, resurge is the most intersectional of the title’s three visible elements (there’s also an invisible fourth element which I’m taking time to navigate internally). resurge shines through lodge structures reclaiming land on museum grounds.

Its presence is tangible in the use of these lodges for teaching workshops: Each new hand threading a bead is a ripple across a growing pond of cultural knowledge. Each new mouth speaking a traditional constellation name is a wave in expanding oceans.

resurge shows up in jewelry, both as armor in a transforming world,

and as an imagining of adornment in a transformed after.

It is green and mossy. It celebrates sharp edges and a keeping of softness. It imagines toppled pillars adorned with flowers.

resurge is measured, patient, and subversive. It requires a strategic warrior energy, an inching forward to take what is reclaimable and expand into invaded spaces. It is often redirective of attention, slipping capsules of landback into sweet-tasting offerings. It is stickers on telephone poles and the crumbling of infrastructure. It is spirit beads, t-shirts, and wheat paste signs.

It is ceremony on stolen land. A diligent blooming.

And though each action is modular, at this point in time only resurge is standalone-capable. Neither alight nor burrow are yet able to subsist separately from resurge, for the risk of bypassing the healing integral to its concept. With each piece I put into the world, I imagine a future in which this hurdle has been leapt: a world which we no longer have to strategize a return into.

For now, I’ve landed on resurge and its deep well of action. It is portable and shapeshifting, expanding into the space of an installation and compressing into the space of a single bead. It is rich and alchemical, transmuting the light and sound of alight into holograms from an Indigenous future, atoms bonding with burrow to birth ceremonial wigwams and teaching spaces.

It rang out as I settled into the softness of the camp with my laptop for a coffee-fueled sci-fi writing session. It echoes there now, through poles planted in snow. A promise of spring. A thawing, a crumbling, a blooming. Space to regrow.