A winner of the 2026 Rewilding Arts Prize, this collection of eight 2D wall works, beaded maps on canvas, and buffalo teeth explores buffalo repatriation as an act of cultural resurgence and renewed kinship. Carved wooden panels—worked with pencil crayon, ink, pigment, and charcoal—are encased in beeswax and resin, holding maps, dreams, and pathways of buffalo past and present. Found buffalo teeth on steel plinths evoke extraction, reverence, and return, reframing decimation through a lens of repair. The work also honours the enduring bond between buffalo and the land. Beaded maps mark repatriation sites alongside the birthplaces of my ancestors, reflecting ties to buffalo kin and Red River Métis homelands.
Appearing first in this series, we-buffalo is the anchor work which visualizes the movement of historic buffalo populations on both sides of the medicine line. Hand-carved into wood panel and layered with beeswax, pencil crayon, and charcoal, the surface becomes a living map of relations. Green-tinted wax references halite and mineral licks, wayfinding markers that guided migration and signal connections between land, the buffalo, and Indigenous nations. The wax gestures to smoke, clouds, and ceremony—land and spirit converging to guide return. Bodies of water and carved hoof-mark patterns reflect how buffalo shape the land as they graze, wallow, and move. This work honours buffalo not as symbols of loss, but as living relatives whose presence affirms our responsibilities to kin. In this way, buffalo repatriation becomes a form of community care, reciprocal and enduring.
we-buffalo, 2025, 36 X 36 in., charcoal, pencil crayon, bees wax, and resin with carved interventions on wood panel
This work has been made possible through the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the BC Arts Council, and the Leung Foundation
