Rethinking Archive (2025)
A collaborative project with Serene Weasel Traveller

Project description

I worked as a digital arts director and videographer on a collaborative research project with Serene Weasel Traveller that focused on rethinking archival materials. Drawing on Weasel Traveller’s auto-ethnographic graduate research in Indigenous methodologies with traditional Blackfoot quillwork, Atonaan (the Blackfoot word for quillwork), this collaborative digital arts project was presented at the Crowlodge Park (June 2-3, 2025, Piikani Nation) and at the Dr. Margaret Perkins Hess Gallery at the University of Lethbridge (October 2025 - Jan 2026). Conducted collaboratively with Serene Weasel Traveller, this project was a way to reconceptualize settler-colonial approaches to archival materials through the use of Blackfoot methodologies and digital materials. My work in this project comprised documenting two performances that took place at waters of the Piikani nation and at Áísínai'pi (Writing-on-Stone provincial park) that were part of Weasel Traveller’s graduate research, and I worked to conceptualize alternatives to archival data such as immersive 3D virtual environments and multi-channel video. It was supported by the Niitsitapi Pod (housed at the University of Lethbridge) of the Abundant Intelligences project.

Ksisstsikomaki (Thunderwoman)

Serene Weasel Traveller

Serene Weasel Traveller is from the Piikani Nation of the Blackfoot Confederacy and she resides in Lethbridge, Alberta, where she has successfully completed her university studies and has received her Bachelor of Fine Arts – Indigenous Art Studio Degree, and her Master of Fine Arts from Iniskim University. As a graduate of a Fashion Design and Merchandising program from the Lethbridge College, Serene is a designer of traditional and contemporary native regalia using beadwork, quillwork, textile garment construction, and jewelry. In her art practice, Serene works with beading, digital media, installation, site specific projects, found objects that are combined with traditional Indigenous art processes. Balancing her two-world realities, Blackfoot culture, where she was raised within traditional societies and protocols, and western worldviews where she conforms to the requirements of another value system. Serene integrates the opposing realities in a continuous search for balance.

  • Crowlodge Park, Piikani Nation. June 2, 2025

  • Crowlodge Park, Piikani Nation. June 2, 2025

  • Serene Weasel Traveller, Crowlodge Park, Piikani Nation. June 3, 2025.

  • Atonan (part of group exhibit). Dr. Margaret Perkins Hess Gallery. Iniskim/University of Lethbridge. Oct 2025 - Jan 2026

  • Atonan (part of group exhibit). Dr. Margaret Perkins Hess Gallery. Iniskim/University of Lethbridge. Oct 2025 - Jan 2026

  • Serene Weasel Traveller and Nayan Velaskar. Dr. Margaret Perkins Hess Gallery. October 17th, 2025

  • Serene Weasel Traveller (Process Exhbition, part of Hess Gallery Outreach). Dr. Margaret Perkins Hess Gallery. October 17th, 2025

  • Serene Weasel Traveller (Process Exhbition, part of Hess Gallery Outreach). Dr. Margaret Perkins Hess Gallery. October 17th, 2025

I co-videographed, directed and edited the performances.

Monique Weasel Traveller was a co-videographer.

The warrior song was sung by Traven Weasel Traveller.

The first performance took place at the waters of the Piikani Nation, April 2025.

The second performance was documented at Áísínai'pi (Writing-on-Stone provincial park), May 2025.

Virtual Remediations

This project attempted to foreground mediated ways of documenting Blackfoot objects—in this case, alternate ways to document quillwork shirts housed at Pitt Rivers Museum. Our objective was to propose virtual environments to document the intent behind an offering: representing Weasel Traveller’s autoethnographic (and our collective) understanding of how something that is produced from the land, must be returned back to it. Alongside Weasel Traveller and Kaiya Healy (Niitsitapi Pod Researcher), we organized multiple photogrammetry workshops to produce 3D digital objects of Weasel Traveller’s quillwork-on-paper offerings and fullbody scans of Weasel Traveller in her own hand-crafted ribbon dresses.

  • 3D Photoscan of the (brother) offerring left at Áísínai'pi (Writing-on-Stone)

  • 3D Photoscan of the (sister) offerring disintegrated in the waters of Piikani Nation

  • Shirt with (brother) insignia held by Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, UK.

  • Shirt with (sister) insignia held by Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, UK.

I made the virtual environments using Unity Game Engine and Blender.

Kaiya Healy provided significant visual effects assistance by producing the disintegration effects.

Interactive 3D virtual environment documenting Weasel Traveller’s performance at Áísínai'pi (Writing-on-Stone).

Interactive 3D virtual environment documenting Weasel Traveller’s performance at Piikani Nation

  • 3D virtual environment documenting performance at Áísínai'pi (Writing-on-Stone)

  • 3D virtual environment documenting performance at Áísínai'pi (Writing-on-Stone)

  • 3D virtual environment documenting performance at Piikani Nation

  • 3D virtual environment documenting performance at Piikani Nation

  • 3D virtual environment documenting performance at Piikani Nation

  • Interactive 3D virtual environment documenting performance presented at Crowlodge Park, Piikani Nation