Please join Inspired Word Café and Dr. Astrida Neimanis and Michael V. Smith (Co-Directors of the Biodiversities of Gender project) for a writing workshop facilitated by visiting author Joshua Whitehead. 

Biodiversities of Gender investigates the intersections of gender, climate crisis, and place, with a particular grounding here on Syilx lands, in Kelowna, BC. Fostering a sense of abundance, BOG encourages creative process as an opening to more dynamic considerations around gender and climate equity. Overall, BOG will meaningfully contribute to a safer local community where new gender, climate and anticolonial cultural abundance can flourish through research-creation.

Register here! Please come with a pen/pencil and paper. This event is free to attend.

Stones and Slipstreams: in this workshop, Whitehead is interested in exploring the epistemologies of stones. Within Anishinaabeg and nêhiyawak worldviews, stones are animate beings: from the miniscule pebble to grandfather rocks in our ceremonies to the mountains that sleep beside us through to the titans we call planets. Take, for example, manitou asinîy, or Creator's Stone, a 145kg iron meteorite that fell in the Iron Creek area bordering what is now known as Alberta and Saskatchewan. A meteorite used for ceremonial purposes, which also goes by the name awâsis kôhtakocihk kîsikohk (the child who fell from the sky) and was stolen from the land in 1866 and is, for now, housed in the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton. Here, Whitehead will ask: how does the stone act as a slipstream? What do stones tell us of Indigenous and/or queer futurities through their histories? And how might stones function as creative sites rich for writing and storytelling?

Joshua Whitehead is an Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit storyteller and academic from Peguis First Nation on Treaty 1 territory in Manitoba. He is an Associate Professor of Indigenous Studies and English at the University of Calgary on Treaty 7 territory. He is the author of full-metal indigiqueer, Jonny Appleseed, and the editor of Love after the End: an Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction. His book of non-fiction, Making Love with the Land released in Spring 2022. Follow him on Twitter or Instagram at: @JWhitehead204.

Joshua prefers to write about Indigeneity, and more specifically, 2SQ (Two-Spirit, queer Indigeneity). His poetic style is usually lyrical, experimental, and intertextual, he likes to use repetition and anaphora to help structure his poems, along with a multitude of voices to help his speakers sing. 

Location: ORL Downtown Library (Classroom 1 Upstairs)

Date: March 7th, 2025

Time: 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm

Cost: FREE