‘Called upon to dance’: Indigenous artist performs at Soul of Falasteen Art Night

Editor’s note: With the 2025 Falasteen Art Gala coming up on February 23 at Fredericton’s Charlotte Street Arts Centre, Incé Husain shares a lasting memory of last year’s Soul of Falasteen Art Night.

Last January, Wolastoqiyik artist Emma Hassencahl-Perley performed a jingle dress dance at the Soul of Falasteen Art Night at the Charlotte Street Art Centre in Fredericton.

The dance originates from three distinct Ojibwe communities and has been shared cross-culturally. Emma Hassencahl-Perley had been invited to perform by Laila Abuamer, co-organizer of the art night.

“I felt inspired, called upon, to dance, and it’s kind of hard to explain why, but it had been the first time that I danced in a couple of years,” says Hassencahl-Perley.

She shares the story of the jingle dress dance. It begins with the sickness of a young girl. Her uncle, or father figure, dreamt of the dance and the dress, and made the dress out of rolled tobacco upon waking. When the girl wore the dress and danced, her ailment healed.

“The dance represents healing,” says Hassencahl-Perley. “And the person who wears the dress has the responsibility to pray for the healing of a person, a community, any current issue plaguing the world.”

Hassencahl-Perley describes the art night as “really warm” and “welcoming.” She settled into the evening with Elder Alma Brooks, a Maliseet elder from Saint Mary’s First Nation. Brooks offered a prayer to the art night and spoke about the paralleled experiences of Indigenous women worldwide. She extended her prayer to mothers, grandmothers, and children of Palestine. She did a smudging, the smoke of burnt sage quietly filling the room.

“Love comes naturally in grief,” says Hassencahl-Perley. “There’s anger but there’s love as well, and that’s the healing quality of the process. There’s also a lot of talent to be shared with speeches and stories and poems.”

Hassencahl-Perley recalls feeling lost “in a trance… transported to a different place” when Arabic songs were performed at the art night. Though she doesn’t speak Arabic, she felt comforted and moved.

“Laila sang a couple of songs. She reminded me of my friend, Amanda, who will sing in our language. It brought me to such a comforting feeling, and also reminded me of being in the powwow circle when people are sharing songs, or when I’m in a space with my friends and they’re singing. She brought me into that comfort,” says Hassencahl-Perley. “When the children sang a song in Arabic, my initial reaction was that I knew it was very moving. (When they) translated a verse in English, it became very gut-wrenching – they’re singing this plea for Palestinian children to grow up and have a normal, healthy childhood. It brought me back down to reality, because the song was so nice, and then it was so real.”

She describes the paralleled experiences of Indigenous women as a shared understanding of how women hold a nation intact.

“Western powers understand that they have to eradicate women and children,” says Hassencahl-Perley. “We understand that it is to bring a nation to a halt. (Palestine) hit home in that aspect, to the violent history of Turtle Island throughout colonization.”

Hassencahl-Perley says the Israeli occupation reminds people of children’s experiences in residential schools; that there is a shared history of displacement from rightful homelands and constant gaslighting insisting otherwise; that there is a shared experience in having limited access to resources that were once abundant.

She shares that Canada rewarded the killings of Indigenous people, with Nova Scotia offering legalized bounties for their murders (see page 24). Written in 1756, a cash bounty – not rescinded to this day – reads: “a Reward of Thirty Pounds for every male Indian Prisoner above the Age of Sixteen Years brought in alive or a scalp of such Male Indian Twenty Five Pounds…Twenty five pounds for every Indian woman or child brought in alive”.

Hassencahl-Perley’s jingle dress was made from ripped shreds of the Indian Act bonded to the red of the Canadian flag. Established in 1876, the Indian Act legislated the forced assimilation of Indigenous communities.

“The Indian Act controls our lives on a daily basis in ways that mainstream society may not expect. It determines who’s an Indian, who’s not, how they access education, where they live, where they’re buried.”

The dress honours Hassencahl-Perley’s grandmother and Indigenous culture.

“With the dress, I wanted to talk about the Indian Act’s impact on culture bans – dance, language, prayer, ceremony. Those things were outlawed through the Indian Act,” says Hassencahl-Perley. “I made the dresses almost like a replica of my great grandmother’s dress because she is noted as being responsible as the person who brought culture back into my community when the church still had heavy control.”

Hassencahl-Perley’s awareness of Palestine came in October 2023 through Indigenous art communities on Instagram. Some Indigenous artists were criticizing others for being silent in the face of violence in Palestine. They were adamant that Palestine was a “land back” and “every child matters” issue, mirroring the core of Indigenous rights movements in North America.

“They were urging us to not look away, and stand with love and solidarity with Palestinian struggles for liberation because these issues affect us both historically and globally.”

She shared that Indigenous artists organized a “Turtle Island Indigenous Artists for Palestine” art raffle fundraiser to raise money for Glia International, a company 3D-printing medical supplies for Gaza, and other community-led initiatives for human rights in Palestine. They raised over $60,000 dollars, with art donations from over a hundred Indigenous artists. Hassencahl-Perley considers art to be a “language that everyone can speak a little bit of”, uniting people across worldviews and offering an intuitive window into communities’ belief systems, morals, values, and histories.

“The arts sector cannot return to the former state of censoring marginalized and racialized experiences under colonialism,” says Hassencahl-Perley of the role of artists. “In this territory, we believe that artists are the recorders of history, the truth seekers, the truth tellers. The role of the artist is supposed to be this conscious effort of love – to illuminate through creativity. And we recognize that art upholds everything in our lives – languages, laws, traditions, histories, politics. So art often becomes a visual language or identity of sociopolitical movements as well. By participating, we exercise our power and our care for others.”

Hassencahl-Perley has been sourcing and sharing information about Palestine from Palestinian journalists, like Bisan Owda and Motaz Azaiza. She says she has “learned everything from social media”, aware of the constant propaganda in mainstream Western news. Her “tidbits of information” span early histories of occupation, Palestinian symbols of resistance, and tatreez motifs.

“I can’t help but think that if this (genocide) were going on in a country with predominantly White people, then awareness of it would be so expansive. I’m not naive in that. I hope that it sheds more light on systemic racism, on any kind of barriers that have been set up throughout colonization and how deeply ingrained it is for communities,” says Hassencahl-Perley. “We didn’t have camera phones five hundred plus years ago, so we actually don’t understand the level of horror and atrocity that our ancestors faced at that time. We are understanding the levels now.”

Incé Husain is a neuroscience graduate student and journalist who writes for the NB Media Co-op and the Antler River Media Co-op. She pursues local stories independently at The Unprecedented Times. She is based in London, Ontario.

A version of this article was first published by the The Unprecedented Times on January 18, 2025.