Miꞌkmaꞌki

Welcome to a special series of Art Pays Me interviews with the winners of the 2025 Creative Nova Scotia Awards.

Presented annually by Arts Nova Scotia and the Creative Nova Scotia Leadership Council, these awards celebrate artistic excellence across Mi'kma'ki.

Award categories are as follows: Creative Community Impact, Prix Grand Prix, Established Artist, Emerging Artist, Black Artist, Indigenous Artist, and finally, the Portia White Prize that is given to a person who has made outstanding and significant contributions to Nova Scotia's creative community over a sustained career, much like the incredible woman that the award is named after.

The winner will also choose a protege, an emerging artist or cultural organization that will also receive funding.

In terms of a, a two-way street, you have to think of it even in the context of, you know, how have, um, from the point of early settlers all through the 18th, 19th, and now 20, 21st century, you know, who has benefited from things like resources and resource extraction.

And what you have, I suppose, in Mi'kma'ki, in academia we call this, like, a treaty denial period.

Um, and for me, it, it's almost broken up into three different segments.

You have every moment in time prior to the creation of the Indian Act, and that was created in 1876.

And so I think it's really crucial that in order for people to understand why reconciliation is even needed, we have to understand where we come from, right? And there's a long history here, over 300 years between Mi'kmaq and non-Indigenous settlers.

And so, you know, thinking about reconciliation, thinking about how Ebegwit and the wider Mi'kma'ki territory, which encompasses Atlantic Canada, is unceded territory.

The Mi'kmaq had never ceded any of this territory.

They never surrendered it.

I've worked with many historians, have consumed a lot of content in terms of Mi'kmaq history.

I think when you go back, you have to view...

Mi'kma'ki, this Atlantic region, Ebegwet, Prince Edward Island, all of this as the entry point to what became Canada.

And so colonization happened here first.

Because like I said, oral storytelling has been around since humans started communicating.

And in Mi'kma'ki, we have all those old stories are retold and retold and retold and retold.

And that's a culture that's built on storytelling.

So much of our culture today is not built on it.

And I really get I get pleased because like the berry pickers is now in 27 languages, I think around the world.

And the birthing tree is at 11 right now.

So the world is learning that we're still here, that we're resilient and the Mi'kmaq are still here and we're still practicing our traditions and we're still alive and well and living in this land called Mi'kma'ki.

So yeah, I really love the idea that people are learning about the Mi'kmaq and hopefully things will like, ooh, I wonder in Google and learn all the good stuff.

Welcome to United in Dance, a Dance Nova Scotia podcast.

we would like to acknowledge that this podcast was recorded in Mi'kma'ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi'kmaq people, which is covered by the Treaties of Peace and Friendship, which Mi'kmaq and Wailaskakwe people first signed with the British Crown in 1725.

Each episode Dance Nova Scotia brings you interesting and sometimes little-known facts about dance.

This episode we are proud to highlight the powerful positive effect of dance for those living with dementia.

My name is Tiffany Morris.

I am a horror writer, well, broadly speculative fiction writer and poetry from Chibuktuk, Mi'kma'ki.

I am Mi'kmaq myself, so that's First Nations people here.

um in atlantic canada also known as um i have recently released a sapphic cannibal novella called carnalis um that is a

Right.

And why, you may ask, why is it called Bijinawaska, and what does that actually mean? Well, For more than a millennia, members of our Mi'kmaq community here in Mi'kma'ki have been using this river as a means of transportation, as a source for food, as a place to recreate and enjoy and connect with Mother Nature, et cetera, for playing.

Right.

For us, when the park was being created 10 years ago, the town went out to the public to ask, what should this park be called? And more than 50 submissions were received.

But the one that really resonated was the one that honored this river's original name from our Mi'kmaq community.

And so the town felt at the time that this was the most appropriate way to acknowledge this special place, our place here in this area of Mi'kma'ki, etc.

And so that name was adopted.

And people do have...