Que Rock is an Anishinaabe multidisciplinary artist and professional muralist from Nipissing First Nation. His traditional name is Manitou Neeman – Spirit Dancing. Que is currently based in Toronto.

Que recently designed and painted a wall-to-wall mural in Sunnybrook’s new Indigenous Wellness Space, with the help of assistant Sadie Marshall.

The Indigenous Wellness Space is a room within the hospital’s Bayview Campus that is now available for Indigenous patients and families for meeting and ceremony, and for Indigenous care partners who are on site to have a space to work or meet with clients. Medicine bundles, a ceremonial drum and a rattle are available as well for use within the room and around the hospital.

Here, Que talks a little bit about the mural, the meaning behind it, and why it’s important to have an Indigenous Wellness Space – and Indigenous art – in a hospital.

What goes into designing and creating a mural like the one you’ve done in the Indigenous Wellness Space?

When creating a piece, I always take into consideration the environment that I’m in. Because we’re in a hospital setting, I just automatically thought of the visual healing arts that I was raised into — my Anishinaabe culture — and that it was a perfect marriage for the environment. Our medicines are all based off of the earth elements and how we pick our medicines. I decided to do a floral pattern and include a few layers of Anishinaabe teachings and our value system, including our medicine wheel. I tried to create a visual healing experience for the viewer by using geometry patterns.

I was taught through ceremony — that is our Anishinaabe education system. So for us, it was being part of ceremonies growing up and then learning how to channel those ceremonies, learning how to communicate them, and then eventually becoming an artist. I learned about the geometry patterns that are in nature, and then how to recreate that in my paintings. This is sacred geometry, essentially, the laws of nature. And it’s showing us and teaching us the repetitive things that are constantly happening. I use these foundations of my Anishinaabe culture in my work.

How important do you think having this space — and having art within this space — is to healing?

Oh, this is huge. It’s really important to have space for Indigenous people, considering that we feel that we’re not really welcomed in a lot of places. I think when people see imagery that they can identify with, that they can recognize, that they’ve been raised with, it creates a sense of comfort and a sense of welcoming.

Can you tell us a little bit about the mural and its elements?

I love these opportunities because it challenges me to create something unique for the space. I challenge myself to recreate some of the teachings that I’ve been taught and embed the sacred geometry that’s in everything in life and in nature, while also creating a nice balance overall within the room. I want to like feel like it’s always been here.

It’s really important to me that people understand the meaning behind everything, for non-Indigenous people, and Indigenous people too, who are learning their culture. For that reason, there’s a consistency throughout the entire design.

My culture is based off of the laws of nature and so we really are paying attention to a lot of numbers, and those numbers have multiple meanings to them. You’ll see lots of groups of two, four and seven.

I repeated duality teachings, which is the balance of the polarity, the balance of all life. So there’s a consistency and patterns of two that you’ll see.

There’s also a consistency and balance of four. The four is based off of the Medicine Wheel teachings. And the Medicine Wheel is a guiding principle. It’s a tool that we use to help us understand and navigate our own natures and also the natures that are from our environments that we live in. The Medicine Wheel is a strong symbol for healing in most Indigenous communities. Although there are various types of medicine wheels, I chose to use the Anishinaabe Medicine Wheel from Ontario so that it would be accurate to this area. The Medicine Wheel starts off with the four directions: north, south, east and west. And then each direction is allocated different layers of nature. So, after you have your four directions, you have the four elements: earth, wind, water and fire. Then you have the four seasons: summer, spring, winter, fall. Then you also have the four natures of humanity. Every human has a spirit. They have emotions. They have a body. They have a mind. And the layers continue to keep growing and growing and growing. In the south, where you have the earth nation, I did it resembling a turtle based off of our creation stories with Turtle Island.

Another value incorporated into the artwork is the seven grandfather teachings. The seven grandfather teachings are layered with a value system of how you treat yourself and how you treat other people. And so I’ve included that. So you’ll see a lot of patterns that have seven in them and those are references to the seven grandfather teachings.

What else will people see in this work?

You will also see some of the medicines. We have four sacred medicines. Tobacco is our most popular medicine that we use when we’re doing a lot of our ceremonies. It’s pretty much part of every ceremony. There’s an old saying “Tobacco first.” And that’s what I was trying to show here. I depicted the tobacco that actually I grow. I’ve been given seeds that have been in my family for more than 2,000 years. It’s a special tobacco; it doesn’t really grow often. It’s really old and very unique because this tobacco flowers. It has a very nice beautiful yellow flower that comes out of it. Most tobacco plants don’t do that.

You will also see Spider Woman. She wove the first human being and then we were lowered down from the Big Dipper, from our umbilical cords to Turtle Island.

You will see a butterfly, representing the story of the first grass dancer Rocky Boy, who could not walk until he was at a gathering and heard the beat of the drum. A butterfly landed upon his forehead and helped him dance.

You will see a heart, representing the care that went into creating us.

What do you hope staff, patients or visitors take away from experiencing your art in this space?

I would love for people to feel really safe and really comfortable. Welcomed. This style of art is a visual healing art. It’s very layered; it has a different effect on the viewer, depending on what they see. My goal is to create a healing experience, or at least something that resonates within the DNA, where they’re feeling really good overall after being in the space.

The post Meet Que Rock: the Anishinaabe artist behind Sunnybrook’s new Indigenous Wellness Space mural appeared first on Your Health Matters.

“I wasn’t really raised with any of the culture or traditions. I had to discover that for myself later on,” says Sophie, a University of Toronto medical student and a participant of SPARK (the Sunnybrook Program to Access Research Knowledge for Black and Indigenous Medical Students).

“My mother’s grandmother was a residential school survivor and suppressed that side of her completely to protect herself,” she says, explaining the disconnect from her Indigenous background growing up.

But now as an adult and aspiring geriatrician, Sophie has been reconnecting with her roots by exploring Indigenous practices and building relationships with other Indigenous people.

“I’m at a point where I’m very proud and sure of who I am in my identity,” says Sophie. “But it’s taken a lot to come to this point, and there are still lots of challenges that I face.”

One of the challenges she has been dealing with is the emotional heaviness of the residential school graves that continue to be uncovered throughout the country.

To cope, Sophie has leaned on the relationships she’s built while reconnecting with her heritage. One of the people she’s turned to is her roommate, who happens to be the only other Indigenous person in her medical school class.

“Feeling like you have a safe place to talk can really be motivating,” says Sophie.

And while she’s grateful she has her roommate, Sophie says it’s jarring that there’s such low Indigenous representation in her class, and in medicine in general. Connected to that issue is the fact that Indigenous people are more likely to experience poor health-outcomes than non-Indigenous people.

To help address these tough realities, Sophie’s focus has been learning as much as she can—in school, from her Indigenous mentors, and through social interactions with other Indigenous individuals—so that she can inform her medical career and better support her community.

“I have a very large interest in Indigenous health, and I plan to do lots of outreach and really form my future practice around that,” she says. “I know that I can make an impact.”

The post Reconnecting with her roots and advancing Indigenous health: Meet medical student Sophie Weiss appeared first on Your Health Matters.

What was your path to becoming an artist?

Being an artist isn’t a choice. You are born like that, and I’ve felt that calling since I was a kid. I was already doing amazing artwork at an early age and it was something I loved. It kept me occupied, and in a way kept me from seeing how horrible the world was for Indigenous people in this country. I remember being very industrious with my artwork and have won numerous awards through the years. My parents were very encouraging and if I asked for art supplies, they did their best to get them for me.

How did you come to create this beautiful artwork for Sunnybrook?

Sunnybrook’s Indigenous Advisory Council approached me. My work is on social media and I do a lot of public speaking about the history of Indigenous culture and the history of our land. There are lots of institutions that are aiming to connect with Indigenous people and educate their employees.

For Remembrance Day, Sunnybrook engaged Indigenous artist Philip Cote to create artwork that honours the service & sacrifice of Indigenous Veterans.

Learn more about Philip, and the meaning behind his piece: https://t.co/ITHQtZ9wYt #CanadaRemembers pic.twitter.com/AXWyKi2JLc

— Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre (@Sunnybrook) November 10, 2021

Can you explain some of the symbolism in the artwork you created for Remembrance Day?

Even though it may look pretty and simple, it’s very complicated when it comes down to explaining all of the symbols.

The interior part of the buffalo comes from the Woodland, or x-ray, style of painting. Indigenous Canadian artist Norval Morrisseau is the most famous individual noted for this style of work and rightfully so because his art is so amazing. Even if you are not Indigenous, you can see something in it and it’s attractive. Morrisseau said that attraction is about the spirit, and he wanted to use that spirit to heal the viewer.

The idea of the spirit runs much deeper than our physical world, and this is so important in Indigenous culture. So all the black lines around my painting represent the beginning of the universe. When we talk about the beginning of the universe, the Anishinaabe people, we are talking about a great black void. There was a spirit in that black void that sent out signals into the universe and waited for a response, but no response happened. So the spirit called the signals back and asked them to create light in the universe as they returned. In that moment, the stars and planets, including one that could hold life, were born. And that’s where our humanity began, represented by the black lines seen throughout my painting.

The buffalo represents our ancestors and another nation, not just an animal. Part of the Indigenous philosophy is that human beings are not on a pyramid at the top. That’s the western view of the world. The Indigenous view is that we are all in a circle and connected together on the same level. That means the buffalo is just as important as humans.

The buffalo also represents the west. Our medicine wheel is divided into four colours, where the buffalo sits in the west, the turtle in the east, the eagle in the south and the bear in the north. The east is where the sun rises, so that represents the beginning of life. The sun sets in the west, so that’s where our ancestors are.

The poppy is a significant flower in terms of remembrance, something I’ve practiced since I was a kid. Remembrance Day was always important to me and it became more so as I got older. I realized we are talking not just about the warriors but also about our ancestors, who are so important in Indigenous culture and ceremony. I’m alive because of them, and I strive to follow their teachings and practices. The poppies I drew represent all the good deeds of our ancestors. They fought for our safety, peace and justice. For me, the poppies signify life, not death.

The magnificent crimson colours of the poppies are also significant as they remind me of a sacred fire. When we do a Remembrance Day ceremony, we have a sacred fire and invite people to put tobacco down and say a few words for those ancestors, the ones that fought in all the wars. We make an offering and say thanks for their deeds. That’s something that’s passed down to our children.

Canadian history is marked by many difficult truths in relation to the treatment of Indigenous peoples. How would you like to see Canadians reflect and move forward?

It’s a difficult question. The first thing I think of is 215, the number of young people found buried at a former residential school site in Kamloops, BC. Canadians need to think about the history of this country. Their freedom came at the cost of our people, and it’s important that our story start to be told.

You can hear the truth and it’s not about guilt, it’s about breaking down systemic racism. The Indigenous narrative is yet to be told. It seeps out slowly because of stories like the residential school children, and now they have found many thousands of them. That story was long thought to be mythology by most Canadians, and breaking down that kind of mythology will be important to the transformation of this country.

When I think about my people, I think with my heart and how that’s connected to my family and community.  Every day, we are shown that we only have a certain amount of time on this earth, so practicing “heart thinking” focuses on what we want to leave to the generations yet to come. Canadians opening up to this will be important in showing Indigenous people that they are now included in Canadian society.

As I grew up, I learned that my paintings being shared across the city were the reflection that young people needed to see. A new history is evolving because people want to see where this artwork is coming from and from which culture. My paintings and the stories they tell are my legacy and I hope that generations from now, my descendants and everyone can learn from them. It’s about understanding why Indigenous people are important in this world.

*This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post Meet Philip Cote: The Indigenous artist behind Sunnybrook’s Remembrance Day art appeared first on Your Health Matters.