How do you see Water as a living being?
Skitpeq by Emma Hassencahl-Perley
The PMA invites you to experience the 2022 Workshop, which features a mural skitpeq (“on the surface of water”) by Wolastoqew visual artist, Emma Hassencahl-Perley. Skitpeq is a love letter to the water, salmon, people, and all living things sustained by the Wolastoq and Tobique rivers that surround Hassencahl-Perley’s homeland. The Tobique First Nation is a Wolastoqiyik community in New Brunswick, Canada, and is part of the Wabanaki Confederacy.
Wolastoqiyik means “people of the beautiful river” in the Wolastoqiyik language. Wolastoqiyik are also known as “Maliseet,” the English version of the Mi’kmaq word. Unceded Wolastoqiyik territory covers parts of lower Quebec, along the Wolastoq River in New Brunswick and across the colonial border into Northern Maine. Unceded means that First Nations people did not legally sign their ancestral lands over to the governments of Canada or the United States.
The 2022 Workshop’s theme of water was selected to complement the themes at play in the North Atlantic Triennial, which features other Mi’kmaq artists Jordan Bennett and Meagan Musseau, Penobscot artist Jason Brown aka Firefly, and a handful of Sámi artists from the Nordic region. This interactive installation invites participants to explore their personal relationship to water as they learn about the Wolastoqiyik relationship to water. Hassencahl-Perley’s skitpeq includes composer Jeremy Dutcher’s contemporary rendition of the culturally traditional Oqiton song, which is about travelling down the river in a canoe.
Workshop Wall Text Translations
Translations for texts featured in the Workshop are available in Arabic, French, and Spanish.
Rich Text Format (English)
Workshop wall text is available for download as Rich Text Format in English. Rich Text Format is compatible with most word processing programs.
Song playing in the Workshop
Audioguide
“Understanding and respecting water as a living entity, and ancestral being, teaches us interconnectedness and about our revered relationship with the feminine spirit, symbolic of our mother. As unborn children in our mother’s womb, we are nested within the water, therefore, our position to water starts at the beginning of our lives. We must act in relation and in obligation to water.”
How do you see Water as a living being? How would that change the way you treat the Water in your life?
When you close your eyes and think of Water, who is the Water that you imagine? What other living beings come to mind when you think of Water?
What waterways are close to you? How will you protect these waterways?
Skitpeq (“on the surface of water”) is Emma Hassencahl-Perley’s love letter to the water, salmon, people, and all living things sustained by the Wolastoq and Tobique rivers.
Take a postcard and consider these questions. Write or draw your own love letter to Water and/or the living things sustained by a waterway that is special to you. You can hang this postcard to share with the PMA community and/or take one home.
About the Artist
Emma Hassencahl-Perley is a Wolastoqew visual artist, instructor, emerging curator, writer, and art historian from Neqotkuk (Tobique First Nation), New Brunswick. Hassencahl-Perley approaches this work from an individual relationship to water that is rooted in the Wolastoqiyik nation’s collective identity inspired by Indigenous feminist ontologies of water.
Installation materials are supported in part by Lila Hunt Davies, the Margaret Coleman Brown Fund, and the Roy A. Hunt Foundation.