A 40-foot-tall woman walks through a canyon of buildings in Moira Villiard’s video collage Madweyaashkaa: Waves Can Be Heard, this year’s Illuminate the Lock installation at the Upper St. Anthony Falls Lock and Dam, presented February 18 – 20.
The recorded voice of Dakota/Ojibwe First Nation Elder Millie Richard speaks of the isolation in an urban space during a pandemic and gives advice for a remedy: connecting with Mother Earth, Father Sky, Grandmother Moon, and Grandfather Sun. We see some of those figures projected across the lock: a moon with a kind, weathered, woman’s face, a grandfatherly sun wearing a baseball cap. There’s a flute playing soothing music in the background. Richard says, “We’re in a setting which is sacred water flowing right beside this urban concrete jungle that we live in. It can give hope to reconnect with the lifeblood of our Mother Earth.”
The projections, music, and narration center around the resilience of Indigenous women, Villiard said in an interview last week. The project is an extension of the Bring Her Home: Sacred Womxn of Resistance exhibition sponsored by All My Relations Art, a program of the Native American Community Development Institute. Bring Her Home, in its third year, spotlights the epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women. Two years ago, Villiard was the digital designer for the exhibit and last year the assistant curator. Her experience with murals and other public art made her the perfect artist to tap, said Angela Two Waters, director of the All My Relations program, when the group that puts on Northern Lights events invited All My Relations to collaborate with the lock illumination.
Villiard, a Fond du Lac Band of Ojibwe direct descendant, found inspiration for the images in several ways. The central figure of the moon came from her own experiences working at a domestic violence shelter, where she was introduced to the Anishinaabe full moon ceremony, a ceremony that she said is dedicated to women folks, and is about reconnecting with the moon as a grandmother figure, “You get a reminder through this ceremony – and through a lot of aspects of [Anishinaabe] culture – that our relatives aren’t just human, you know, our relatives are in the plant life and in animals, and in the sky.”
At the shelter, she said she was exposed to women who were trying to reconnect with their heritage, who had gone through lots of difficult experiences. Women, Villiard said, whom one might think of as being “missing” in different ways. “Beyond just … being physically missing, they were missing from culture and missing from their families or just feeling some sort of disconnection.”
Before creating the visuals, Villiard did what she always does when creating public art: she consulted with the community. She asked Richard to speak about women feeling disconnection or women in an urban setting looking for ways to reconnect with culture or nature. “I felt like it was important to incorporate a Dakota person in the project because we were also on Dakota Territory,” Villiard said.
She also asked on her Facebook feed what sacred resistance of women meant to her friends and followers, and what images the concept conjures. She said she used some of those in the art. In addition to the celestial imagery, other animations included waves and fish, a swimming loon (on her first visit to the site, there was one swimming in the locks). A hand offering tobacco was there “to remind folks about gratitude,” she said, and at one point in the 11-minute animation, a woman in a jingle dress appears. There are several origin stories about the dress and the Ojibwe jingle dance tradition, all of which go back about a century, and they all involve a man whose daughter or granddaughter fell very ill, and in his dreams, he learned about the powers of the Jingle dress and dancing to make her well.
“It was kind of complicated … in trying to balance this project as … a public project, but also with a lot of indigenous symbolism and teachings in it. I don’t know what non-native audiences necessarily are going to get out of it, I’m not 100% sure. But at the same time, I think just those overarching themes of, you know, reciprocity and being grateful and connecting with nature, those things are really universal.”
This year’s Illuminate the Lock installation was a partnership of All My Relations Arts, which is a program of Native American Community Development Institute (NACDI); Northern Lights.mn, Mississippi Park Connection and the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area and was supported through a grant from St. Anthony Falls Heritage Board.
More about Villiard and her art can be found on her web site, artbymoira.com.
Below: Madweyaashkaa: Waves Can Be Heard – The lock at St. Anthony Falls was the backdrop last weekend for Duluth artist Moira Villiard’s Madweyaashkaa: Waves Can Be Heard. The animation, words and music reflected on the resilience of indigenous women and the healing power of nature, even in an urban environment. “It can give hope to reconnect with the lifeblood of our Mother Earth,” said Dakota/Ojibwe Elder Millie Richard in the recorded narration. Indigenous imagery was featured in Moira Villiard’s animation for this year’s Illuminate the Lock production. The narration talked about the “sacred water, flowing right beside this urban concrete jungle” and spoke of the healing that can come from opening to Grandmother Moon and others of our “relations” in nature. The outstretched hand offers tobacco, a gesture of gratitude and respect. (Photos by Karen Kraco)