Welcome back to an exciting new year. We hope everyone had a terrific holiday break and are looking forward to the year ahead. This year saw a slight departure from our usual completely-based arts projects to tackle a pretty big and complex cross-sectoral project called Niriqatiginnga. As a locally and regionally-focused community economic development project, Niriqatiginnga works to support and increase the participation of northern Indigenous communities and businesses in Manitoba and northern food sector opportunities.
In addition to incubating creative entrepreneurship through food sector skills development, this exciting new Winnipeg project is planning and designing for future food production, an online marketplace and social entrepreneurship programming. A lot of the mixed-methological, arts and participatory approaches were piloted and tested over the last few years on projects like Our People Our Climate, one of our first projects we ever worked with as a collective. Niriqatiginnga also incorporates arts and entrepreneurship research from our @1860 Winnipeg Arts Incubator project (funded by the Canada Council for the Arts Digital Greenhouse) in 2021-2022 and the Manitoba Arts Council Indigenous 360 Program in 2023.
And a huge, enormous congratulations go out to the Niriqatiginnga team! Niriqatiginnga was approved for funding in December and members of the project will be presenting at the 2024 Arctic Congress in Bodø, Norway this June. We want to say that every single member of our team is thrilled and incredibly proud of this major accomplishment. Like all projects we work with, Niriqatiginnga really does come from ‘the ground up’ and started with pretty much nothing but what was learned on past projects and a few really cool ideas. We see a great journey ahead!
As Niriqatiginnga gears up, our @1860 Winnipeg Arts team are starting to prepare for their next project: Winter City Stories. The primary activities of our next arts project will revolve around cultivating the skills and abilities necessary to create, curate and translate oral stories and histories from those who have experienced the transition from northern to urban environments. The project will feature a strong emphasis on hands-on experiential learning, participatory learning, and cross-cultural knowledge-sharing activities. Participating emerging artists will have the opportunity to acquire valuable arts-sector skills while deepening their sense of cultural awareness, identity and belonging.
We’ll also be linking some of this training with Niriqatiginnga and their Towards a Framework for Northern Food Systems Innovation project! That project also has oral history and storytelling training that will be a big component of the program. We’ll be looking at storytelling for the past, present and future. The “Past” will delve into the cultural and trading history of northern Indigenous communities. In the “Present,” they will explore the increasingly inequitable realities of northern food supply chains and investigate the extent of purchase power parity. In the “Future” subproject, Niriqatiginnga will be positioned to sustain a healthy business, community and data-driven ecosystem for Indigenous agri-food-related cultural entrepreneurship through traditional trade and new technologies. The @1860 Winnipeg Arts team will collaborate with the researchers, youth and Elders and creative entrepreneurs on the oral history, exhibition, curation and storytelling training, so we are super excited to see what this fusion of arts and science will achieve.
We are really pumped to explore new approaches to storytelling and oral history that can combine with work some of the awesome researchers from the US Defense Resiliency Platform and Permafrost Pathways Project are going to be working over the next year. We’re already planning to catch up with them in Norway later this year. There’s going to be a lot of knowledge exchange and we are so excited. And the technologies our artists are starting to explore are really, really cool!
Highlights from 2023
We started 2023 on a project funded by the Manitoba Arts Council, and ended the year with news that the Niriqatiginnga project has been approved for funding from the Sustainable Canadian Agriculture Partnership – Indigenous Food Systems program with Manitoba Agriculture. We’ll have more news and details over the coming weeks, but this is a tremendous accomplishment.
We are really thankful to everyone who’s helped get the Niriqatiginnga program up and running. From the @1860 Winnipeg Arts team, we are super thankful to Tony Eetak, Lucy Eetak, Ethan Caners, Jamie Bell, Maeva Gauthier, Dr. Olaf Kuhlke, PhD from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and Dorothy Tootoo, O.Nu. from the Arctic Buying Company. We are also immensely thankful to Inuk Elder Nellie Kusugak, O.Nu for gifting us the wonderful name Niriqatiginnga, which means come eat with me in Inuktitut.
From the new Niriqatiginnga team, we thank Tony Eetak, Lucy Eetak, Tara Tootoo Fotheringham in Winnipeg; Ashe Underwood, Anastasia Broman, Ellis Anderson, Hachelle Carson, Connor Johnson, Lesley McGater, Alvaro Serrano and Kami Norland from the Creative Entrepreneurship program at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design along with Dr. Wenqing Zhang, PhD at the Labovitz School of Business and Economics at the University of Minnesota Duluth.
We also thank the businesses, entrepreneurs, organizations and politicians we consulted and engaged with over the last year, like the Hon. Dan Vandal, Hon. Senator Dennis Patterson, Mike Barrett, Emmanuella Lambropoulos, Cliff Caners, Maeva Gauthier, Katrin Schmid, Constance Menzies, Wendy Carnegie, Mervin Traverse, Robin Young, and Bryan Fotheringham. We also remember those we have lost this year, the late Wendy Brabant and the late John Muryunik Alikut for their contributions to supporting and contributing to our project.
Everyone support over the last two years has resulted in more than $180,000 of arts-based and participatory learning opportunities. We believe these achievements are solid examples of what it means to meaningfully and authentically contribute to economic reconciliation through the arts. We thank everyone who made this last year exceptional and we are so incredibly over the moon excited for the adventures to come.
Welcome to 2024.
Upcoming Conferences and Events:
This February we will be attending the 2024 Direct Farm Marketing conference in Winnipeg. Also in Winnipeg from February 26-29 is the Northern Perspectives Trade Show and Conference, which is also hosting the Kivalliq Energy Forum. In June, our team members will be joining several of our collaborators to present at the 2024 Arctic Congress in Bodø, Norway.
Upcoming Deadlines:
Artists in Communities – Share (Manitoba Arts Council): January 30, 2024
