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Voices: Indigenous Women on the Front Lines Speak is many, many things involving many, many people.

Voices is the creation of a hand made, hand bound book and series of posters featuring interviews and illustrated portraits of Indigenous Women and Queer/Two-Spirit Land Defenders.

Voices is the process of traveling so called british columbia to front lines in support of Indigenous Land Defenders protecting their traditional and unceded territories. It is the strengthening of existing relationships and the growing of new ones.  It is participating in resistance to the stranglehold of colonialism that threatens to destroy all of us.

Voices is an act of honouring the Indigenous Land Defenders who raise their children on the land, living their lives unwavering in the way of industrial expansion.  Voices honours those who blaze the trails of what contemporary anti-capitalist and anti-colonial resistance can look like while teaching new/old ways of being in relationship to the land and each other.

Voices is Ulluisc, it is the Unist’ot’en Yintah, it is Meagan of the Lekwungen, it is Chipati Mountain and Ahausaht, it is Lax U’u’la.

Voices is possible through the willingness of Indigenous Women and Queer/Two-Spirit Land Defenders to share of themselves, it is possible through the love and support of our friends and chosen families who feed us, care for our hearts, offer their cars, accompany us to the front lines, provide materials and supplies, funds, grant editing, connections and advice.  We are the multitude of the hands who hold us up.

Voices is an artistic collaboration and labour of love by beyon wren moor and Wulfgang Zapf.

In the fall of 2016 beyon and Wulfgang will travel to Halifax for a residency with Radstorm where they will hand make the book and posters.

The books and posters will be available for purchase in the Winter of 2016.  A large run of Zines will be an accessible accompaniment to the hand made book.  We will be touring Turtle Island to share our work after the Winter launch, we’d love to visit you.

All proceeds made from the books, posters and zines will go directly to the Land Defenders featured in this project.

** a note on the title.  We made the decision to say only Women in the title and to not include the words two spirit and/or queer.  One honest reason for this is it keeps the title shorter.  We also mean to use Women in an expansive sense to include non-binary gender people as well.  We have been engaged with the language we choose, and recognize that the english language is always lacking when describing and naming queerness and cultures outside of white settler culture.  For us we felt we lost more by trying to get too specific with colonial words and boundaries then we gained.  People’s own languages have important, powerful and beautiful words to describe gender and that many of these have been lost through the violence of colonialism. We wish we were able to use these words.  We did not want to participate in further erasing those words by using colonial replacements as if the ‘queerness’ of Indigenous people can be properly addressed with a colonial word like queer or that the diversity of indigenous gender can be captured by an important yet often generalizing word like Two-Spirit.  We recognize also that this decision acts to invisibilize queer/two-spirit indigenous people and that we end up using these words in order to say what we mean while lacking other words anyway.  Deer ones, we are in process.