On Wholeness

A brilliant exploration of the body as a site of settler colonial impact, centring embodied wholeness as the pathway to our collective liberation.

This fierce and enlightening book explores a new way of understanding settler colonialism through the intimate lens of how it impacts the body. We start in the place before birth, before time, and before form, swirling like smoke with our ancestors in the great beyond. But we are born into bodies that are contorted, eroded, and shaped by the settler colonial environment. In lyrical and vulnerable prose, Anishinaabeg visual artist Quill Christie-Peters shares her experiences of colonial disembodiment through gendered violence and her father’s legacy as a survivor of residential school.

Despite colonial violence, the Anishinaabeg perspective sees the body extending to encompass ancestors, homelands, spirit relations, and animal kin. Dancing with the wild smoke swirling within, Quill explores the themes of childbirth, parenting, creative practice, pleasure, and expansive responsibility to chart a pathway to wholeness. An integral part of Indigenous resurgence and resistance, wholeness is also the pathway to liberation for all people.