"To fill the silence, sing softly” by Tanaya Winder
Artist statement: When envisioning an Indigenous future, I see us as happy, healthy, and thriving. We acknowledge our past soul wounds and continue to heal and grow from them. For this project, I took some of my more well-known poems that address the epidemic of murdered and missing Indigenous women. I did the erasure poem technique on these poems and blacked out all the parts that reference us being taken, murdered, or stolen. I then took the words that were left to create a new poem “To fill the silence, sing softly.” In the future, in the end – love wins. We are able to “sew new memories into old scars,” and our mouths hold all of our stories and songs, our fire. We carry our stories and we keep breathing.
Poems by Tanaya Winder