In Kinship Archives & Performance Fellowship

What possibilities emerge when we look at social repair and environmental care as public, creative acts? In Kinship's Archives & Performance Fellowship is a year-long opportunity with stipends for four Fellows that follows the tradition of Wabanaki Guiding, connecting Native and non-Native people to place through experience, language, and story. Fellows will experiment with research and performance approaches to understand stories and histories of the Penobscot River and watershed. They will collaborate to create new work, inspired by their learning, that addresses ecological recovery and social justice. Fellowship activities will be led by Penobscot Nation partners and will center indigenous knowledge and experience.

The broad goal of this project is to activate the potential for richly layered research, cross-discipline dialogue, and creative process to shift public understanding of our shared environments and histories. It is driven by a desire to understand how the (hi)story of the Penobscot River is preserved and told and, at the same time, to work against linear, progress-based narratives of the river that represent the past as something static that is disconnected from the present and future.

In Kinship is an ongoing, transdisciplinary project investigating environmental stewardship of the Penobscot River. The Penobscot River is in recovery, like many rivers in North America, from two centuries of industrial abuse. Penobscot Indian Nation, indigenous to the watershed, is at the forefront of these recovery efforts. In Kinship is not designed to address a single facet of environmental harm for this river. Rather, it is an arts-based effort to help increase the resiliency of the system and everyone who is a part of it, to tell its many stories, invest in recovery, and shift the consciousness of its communities toward justness. Fellowship activities are led by Penobscot Nation partners and center indigenous knowledge and experience.

The project's core questions include:
How can we approach the history of the Penobscot River as alive, inseparable from its present and future?
How can artists, activists, community members, and scholars engaged in ecological issues better learn from and support one another?
How can we honor non-human voices and narratives that are important to the river?
How does a river heal itself?
What stories does this watershed want to tell?

In Kinship is driven by a desire to understand how the (hi)story of the Penobscot River is preserved and told and, at the same time, to work against linear, progress-based narratives of the river that represent the past as something static that is disconnected from the present and future.

Website:
http://openwaters.org/fellowship

Instagram:
@openwatersmaine