[Living rurally] gives me access to healing because it gives me access to land. And when I say land I’m talking about the physical earth— the rocks, the mountains, the water, the air, the trees…that’s really what undergirds my pilgrimage to rural settings. The land is instrumental to resolving a lot of my racial trauma.

That would be a dream. But you know that is not an easy thing. I would love nothing more than to be in an all black community and to have us all come out of these stupid holes that we’ve all been thrown into one way or another… There are no black people [where I live] but I wanted to get out of a system. I had been corporate all my life, at the top of the game, had all the money I needed. But I wanted to get out. I didn’t want to be owned by white people. Now, I’m homesteading. I built my own well, dug my own septic field, laid the foundations for my own house….I’m in a world by myself. I would love it to be black…. [And though it’s not] I’m not going to ever forget my Black Heritage.

I grew up surrounded by whiteness and it was my objective in life to be palatable to whiteness. To get as close to whiteness as possible… [My advice would be…] Be you. As you are, you are excellent…. Not just enough, but excellent. You will never be close to whiteness. It is a futile aspiration that’ll result in heartache. Be your authentic self… Your black body is so beautiful and is so unique and needs to be celebrated. I think if I could have processed and understood those words for the truth that they are at a younger age I would have spared myself a lot of heartache and a lot of trauma.

I grew up with mostly [my mom] and my brother and myself. That was the extent of our coloured community. When I was really young it didn’t really bother me because I didn’t really understand…. We never faced aggressively overt discrimination. It was more the little things. …Like when I would go to a friends house for dinner and [their parent] wouldn’t know what to cook for ‘someone like me’ or silly things that get placed upon you because people don’t really now what your culture is…. but I really didn’t either….. [I often felt] I was not a good enough black person because I didn’t fit the stereotypes… Now my main focus as an artist is to advocate for others and for myself [the fact that] nobody can tell you what it means to be black.

I feel more connected spiritually. Though I haven’t ever lived within a black community, I feel like my passion for wanting to collect and to learn all of the wild herbs, mushrooms, and plants that are around me…[are part of] how my ancestry has been channeled through me…I have had a funky intuition about these things my whole life.

Well, we were one of the first black families to come to Saskatchewan. Oh it was just fun. When I started school we went to this one room schoolhouse. It was called Oskaloosa Afton - the name of the town my grandfather came from in Iowa. They built the school on his property, but it was a municipal school. Both black and white kids went there. … Our parents taught us that if somebody called you a name it’s because they are feeling bad about themselves. Just forget about them and go on your way… I never internalized anything about being black as negative. I know some people do, but I never did. …I just had fun living on the farm.