This piece I’m working on is about how post-contact Indigenous narratives are constantly interrupted by colonialism. It’s a simple idea: I painted a picture that represents Aboriginal Women’s spiritual being in a traditional, everyday life setting. I then plan to paste archival writings from White men who deemed themselves some kind of authority on the ‘savages’ over the story I’ve told with my painting. This stuff still hurts. It cuts to think these people thought we had no word for ‘love’, and were thus incapable of loving. That is dehumanising. This dehumanisation made it easier for them to dispossess us; to subjugate us; to rape and kill us. I’ve rearranged the words five or six times now, and still haven’t pasted them, because while this is a representation of how our stories and histories have been constantly interrupted and changed in order to present a fabrication of who we were and are as a people, it still hurts. It still hurts to read these words, even though this man is long dead. It hurts because I know the damage that’s been done by the misrepresentation and dehumanisation of Indigenous people that fostered colonial violence against us. It hurts because the views that stem from this still exist today.