“Indigenous Kinship Systems”
Collaborators’ Q&A: Artist Theodore C. Van Alst, Jr.: Jenny Davis’s poignant reflection on the pain inflicted on our relatives, human and others, tells us that even in the face of those violent actions our kinship networks can save us, and the hands that made these marks on the home of the little school remind me of that fact in ways that few other things can. Poet Jenny Davis: Art is, at its most powerful, a chance to contextualize and re-contextualize events in ways that prioritize the relationships between the beings, times, and places and the world(s) we all live in.
Photographer Theodore C. Van Alst, Jr. is Associate Professor and Co-Chair of Native American Studies at the University of Montana. Poet Jenny L. Davis (Chickasaw) is an assistant professor at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign where she lives with her partner and spends most of her time tending her cats (and cat-sized Chihuahua), plants, and the students in her Anthropology and American Indian Studies classes.