AT HEART OF THIS WORK
To regenerate endangered ancestral consciousness that communes with the diverse intelligence of the living world. To heal cultural orphanhood from generational colonization through restoring belonging to the web of all our relatives. And to remember that our greatest intergenerational wealth is relational wisdom.
HOW
art activism. empowered storytelling.
relationship weaving. circle work.
social justice. environmental advocacy. indigenous leadership + lifeways. people of color + under-heard voices. conflict resolution. transformative justice. community organizing. creative placemaking. restorative imagination. influencing culture into reconnection.
THE NATURE OF THIS WORK
Exploring relationship to Indigeneity; becoming people of place.
The hearth fire of my work supports our connection with land, opening to the highly relational intelligence that is Earth and our contemporary homecoming to this way of being.
Centering collaboration and reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, my work kindles substance from the art of relationship crafting as a way to understand, heal, and grow together.
My offerings support the examination, evolution, and deepening of personal and collective identity that is interconnected with the natural world, guided by the shared sacred knowledge of Indigenous Wisdomkeepers.
Midwifing the recollection and embodied practices of our own ancestral Indigeneity & folkways, as non-native, into contemporary times that empowers decolonization and a revival of earth-based values in the emergence of revitalizing cultural awareness.
In honor of the sacred lineages that have protected wisdom cultures in the face of so much harm from colonization, genocide, and assimilation, I portrait Indigenous Wisdomkeepers. I work directly with the elders, to listen deeply and build relationship. Accompanied with recording their wisdom stories and experiences in an audio format, the large scale portrait becomes a shared belonging: together, we strategize how the visual and audio art can best serve the initiatives of their people and Indigenous reclamation efforts via exhibition, fundraising modality, public engagement, etc.
"At the Pace of Mule is a cultural illumination journey, walking overland of the eastern sierra high desert by mule. The 350 mile trek is an immersion into primal experiences of a slower and more interconnected life way, centering the pace of relationship. It engages with postcolonial influences upon land, people, culture, and, ultimately, consciousness. The project is a deep inquiry into ways of life that nurture access to relational wisdom and Indigenous intelligence, while revealing contemporary cultural ways that conversely limit or obscure these paths of remembrance needed during these times..."
At the Pace of Mule
I work with tribal communities and other environmental + social allies to develop various public arts projects to engage local + visiting communities with significant narratives.
We strategize ways to influence the culture of the community into more decolonized remembrance + way of being.
I work with Indigenous Wisdomkeepers and Elders to honorably paint their portraits, record their wisdom stories, and strategize with them and their allies how best for the art to serve their initiatives.
WILDERNESS COMMUNION GUIDE aided by VISUAL ART
I bring folks into wild spaces and guide them into second awareness, receptivity and communion within themselves and Mother Earth. We utilize art modalities as a mapping and visual aid to the experience.
I work with tribal allies and communities to co-develop engaging ways to bring significant conversations into the community.
Melle North is a cultural illumination artist whose work centers the remembrance of earth’s living wisdom. Her work explores relational consciousness and both its endangerment in colonized culture, as well as ways of regeneration that guide us in returning to our belonging within the intelligence of the natural world.
Living in the wilderness for eight years, Melle studies culture and listens for the medicine of these times, tracking for root disconnections and then creating inclusive ways to bring awareness and healing. She lives, thinks, and creates at the threshold where ancestral wisdom meets the relatives of our futures, and where human meets ecosystem, occupying the responsibility of the living fulcrum between these relationships.
WAY OF HEARTH
WAY OF WATER
+The place where we remember the circle of all our relations and our sacred responsibility of communion.
+Where we remember the warmth of fire within our hearts, and the power of the shared heart.
+Where we remember and hear storytelling in all relatives; the way of council.
WAY OF DREAM WEAVING
spins like a wheel in each moment and in grander moments; mapping an ecosystem of cultural change-making
+Where we remember both the steadfast commitment of our sacred covenant to life, and the ever-changing rhythm that carries it forth in its many forms: patient trickle, surging fortitude, still reflection, sinking wellspring, steady flow, rising evaporation, raining nourishment.
+Where we develop the skillful means to know which form of water is being called forth in the work; always a way forward or through.
+Where we regard and trust the river of memory; where we've come and where we're headed in sacred cycle.
+The way of resilience and healing.
+Where we remember the power of our sacred imagination, accessing the mapping of true creative remedy to dream into the world our hearts know is possible.
+Where we remember the practice of being receptive to our ancestors and future generations, Mother Earth and cosmologies.
+Where we remember to deeply listen and court the visions that come to guide us.
+Where we remember that each of us carries an important key to our collective dreaming & becoming
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WAY OF RITE OF PASSAGE
+Where we remember the sacred power in acknowledging transformation.
+The place where we let die and honor former ways of being, to rebirth into a next maturity in our journey.
+Where we remember in ourselves, our community, our global family, that of identities and lifeways need proper burial, to allow for sacred becoming.
+The place of ceremony, witnessing, honoring, forgiveness, renewal, and support in accountability.
SOME WORDS ON
PROPHECY OF OUR TIMES &
INDIGENOUS WISDOMKEEPERS
The Greatest Story is happening now, and we, are living it into being.
As we walk through the entryway of this prophesized era and simultaneously, the doorway of our own day, we come to an opening of pure unknown, and yet far more potent with potentiality than the mystery of our imagination can yet behold. This is the threshold of our overturning times, the very times that we are made for...