Dakune mehodihi udenesidēł
Peter Morin
September and October, 2023
Billboard in conjunction with Re-Reading Tahltan.

This billboard is a precise acknowledgement of the work we are doing right now. Listening for what our ancestors share with us. This listening takes place across time and across space.

The sentence in the Tahltan language is precise. It states the action we are all undertaking together as we move into the future. These words, this phrase, is a spoken action that will walk with us into the next generation as we are also always becoming ancestors.

The orange colour is present here as a deep acknowledgement of power of Orange T-shirt day and is a message of love for all of our relations who are doing the work of healing from the Indian Residential Schools in Canada.

Re-Reading Tahltan is an artwork that invites the listener to encounter some of the older forms of Tahltan Knowledge through a contemporary Tahltan voice.

 Re-reading Tahltan examines the sometimes violent nature of historic documentation of Indigenous knowledge(s). Through the sound of a spoken voice, through breath, and the rereading out loud of these historic documents, the artist Peter Morin honours Indigenous Intellectual territories.

 In the spirit of remembering, Morin has lived deeply with the four books featured in this artwork. Morin first read The Tahltan Indians by GT Emmons when he was 18 years old. This book in particular has been a feature of previous artworks. The listeners of rereading Tahltan will also come to know that these books, and the authors of these books Stone, Emmons, Teit, Duncan, are all interconnected. These books have and continue to inform each other. Rereading Tahltan asks the listener to remember those original Tahltan Elders and Tahltan Knowledge leaders who informed the production of these books.

 Through the production of this artwork, Tahltan artist Peter Morin is writing a love letter to his Ancestors and to the Tahltan territory. 

Peter Morin is a grandson of Tahltan Ancestor Artists. Morin’s artistic offerings can be organized around four themes: articulating Land/Knowing, articulating Indigenous Grief/Loss, articulating Community Knowing, and understanding the Creative Agency/Power of the Indigenous body. The work takes place in galleries, in community, in collaboration, and on the land. All of the work is informed by dreams, Ancestors, Family members, sonic territories, and Performance Art as a Research Methodology. Peter is the son of Janelle Creyke (Crow Clan, Tahltan Nation) and Pierre Morin (French Canadian). Throughout his exhibition and making history, Morin has focused upon his matrilineal inheritances in homage to the matriarchal structuring of the Tahltan Nation, and prioritizes Cross-Ancestral collaborations. Morin currently holds a tenured appointment in the Faculty of Arts at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto, and is the Graduate Program Director of the Interdisciplinary Master’s in Art, Media and Design program at OCADU.