The Art of Change: Decolonization and Gendered Indigenous Environmental Artivism in Works by Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and Ann-Helén Laestadius

Abstract

Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and Ann-Helén Laestadius define themselves neither as environmentalists nor activists, although their artworks critically reflect on and actively engage with the complex issues of Indigenous environmental justice and the gendered struggle against multiple forms of colonial and extractive violence. Using confrontational aesthetic strategies and building on human-place relations, they create transition discourses and counter the neoliberalism of Eurowestern politico-economic elites in post-democratic societies. They employ Indigenous worldviews and relational ontologies as creative forms of “imagining otherwise” for living well with Earth. This article proposes to apply the cross-genre category of artivist works to Tailfeathers’s experimental adult short film Bloodland and Laestadius’s young adult novels Tio över ett [Ten past one] and Inte längre min [No longer mine], and argues for understanding these works as artivism.