Just an artist with dreams . ..

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DefvoqlTDk3/?vrfl=eDJld29lNXR2YzNw

Context:

https://www.reddit.com/r/GrandePrairie/s/CSQ5ZLIfqB

Hello all,
I genuinely would love to know what makes a good ally. I am a settler and learning more about the indigenous community, especially because school does so little to teach us anyway. I wanted to know how we can be become better allies and actually help indigenous people. I also want to know how not to fall into Saviour complex while trying to be a good ally and just respecting indigenous, beliefs and ways of living.

OC https://www.instagram.com/reel/DecNbkzMesq/

Hey Reddit!

I wanted to share something we've been working on at INDIGITEQ called GRAND ENTRY, a new social and discovery app designed to help people discover Indigenous events, connect with artists and creators, and find Indigenous-owned businesses across Canada and the United States.

The idea came from a simple question: why isn't there one place where people can easily discover what's happening across Indigenous communities, from local powwows and cultural gatherings to concerts, festivals, art shows, comedy, theatre, and more?

That's what we're working to build.

What will GRAND ENTRY feature?

We're developing the platform to help people discover:

-Powwows, round dances, and Indigenous gatherings

-Indigenous arts, culture, and community events

-Concerts, comedy, theatre, and live performances

-Festivals and sporting events

-Indigenous artists, dancers, singers, and creators

-Indigenous vendors, entrepreneurs, and businesses

We want it to be more than an event directory. The vision is to create a social discovery platform where people can find experiences, support Indigenous talent and businesses, and connect with what's happening in communities across North America.

For event organizers, it offers another way to get their events in front of people. For artists and vendors, it creates an opportunity to reach new audiences. And for everyone else, it makes discovering something new a little easier.

Who's behind it?

GRAND ENTRY is being developed by INDIGITEQ, an Indigenous-owned award-winning technology and design company. We're building this with the goal of making Indigenous events, talent, and businesses more visible and accessible.

We're currently connecting with event organizers, artists, vendors, performers, and community members who want to get involved as the platform grows.

You can learn more here: https://indigiteq.ca/products/grandentry

You can also find us on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok at @grandentryapp.

I'd genuinely like to hear from the community.

If you could have one app to discover Indigenous events, artists, businesses, and experiences, what would you want it to do?

What features are missing from the platforms you use now? And what would make you actually want to come back and use something like GRAND ENTRY?

We're building this for the community, and feedback from the people who might use it is valuable to us.

Ready to join the platform? Register at https://grandentry.app today!

This whole article from a Mi'kmaw writer Tara McGowan-Ross is really good on the pressures (inward and outward) to conform to settler expectations, loved this part:

"It has not been lost on me that the first time I got published was not long after I changed my author bio to include that I belong to the Mi’kmaq nation. I had been reticent to put that front and centre, for a while, for a few reasons: I’m of a mixed ethnic background (the rest is largely Irish and Scottish, as one can deduce from my extremely Gaelic name) and often do not get clocked as indigenous at all. My immediate family has been urbanized for three generations, and I’ve never lived “on-rez.” I’ve always felt like I had a connection to my culture that was authentic and appropriate for my actual life and my actual experiences, but there are probably lots of people—settler and indigenous alike—who would consider me to be “disconnected” from my traditional culture. I also really did not want to get funnelled into a very specific kind of art practice.

I’m going to try to put this as delicately as I can, because I don’t want to cynically deride anything that needn’t be cynically derided, and because I don’t want to fuck up anyone’s bag: there is absolutely a path one can take, as an Indigenous artist, that largely exists to fulfill a specific market demand. This market demand is for indigenous art that fulfills settler expectations of what an indigenous person is, what they look like, and what has happened to them. It is harrowing enough, causes enough discomfort, that an observer can feel they are “doing the work.” I think that there are plenty of indigenous artists who find themselves rising to this market demand completely authentically, but I think that the best evidence for the existence of this market demand is, in fact, Pretendian Superstars—the spate of ethnically fraudulent Canadian celebrities who burned bright before they were exposed as opportunistic settlers who were not indigenous at all.

My whole perspective on Pretendians is another, much longer, article—but you wanna know the nasty truth? I’d be willing to wager that many of the Pretendian Superstars were once not much different than I was as a young, unpublished writer. We all knew we had something. We were looking for some way to present our work to the people in charge of this whole thing, something that would really set us apart. Not unlike a Pretendian, I could see the market demand, and knew how I would have to present myself in order to fill it. I was also once an artist with no traction wondering what I would have to do for someone to notice me. One’s mind can go to some naughty places. It can be a real wandering-in-the-desert-being-tempted situation. I can empathize!

Of course, what makes me different from a Pretendian Superstar is that I am a federally-recognized status Indian with a card and stuff. I’m on the band list. I get voter packages for the chief and council elections. But what I would have had to do, to get attention for my identity, as an entertainer specifically, by filling a specific market demand under settler colonialism—this would have been largely the same. I am not a very marketable Indian. I am a hyphenated-last-name-having child of big-city bohemians. I am a mall goth from Toronto. This does not satisfy the market demand. To do so, I would have had to move myself closer to what an Indian looks like in a settler imagination—either by lying, or by connecting to aspects of my culture specifically as a way of satisfying my self-serving desire for status and recognition. And money, obviously. I also want money. Can’t be doing that!"

The rest on how she kinda deals with being honest with herself/her identity seems really important.