Return to: The Liberation of the Chinook Wind

The Liberation of the Chionook Wind, 2021
Tania Willard, Liberation of the Chinook Wind. Commissioned by the
Blackwood for The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea. Presented at the
University of Toronto Mississauga campus, 2021–2024. Programming and web
development for Liberation of the Chinook Wind, Stephen Surlin. Photo:
Toni Hafkenscheid.
Asserting Indigenous presence and claims to the water, Liberation of the Chinook Wind
conceptualizes points of overlap between Indigenous nations, settlers,
uninvited guests, and non-human beings by exploring the entangled
histories of Chinook language, Chinook Wind, and Chinook salmon. Chinook
salmon were introduced to Lake Ontario by settlers in the 1960s for
sport fishing, and to prey on other invasive species. Chinook were
preferred for sport fishing because they “fight” and “thrash” on the
line; on windsocks at the Collegeway and Outer Circle Road, Willard has
emblazoned these words alongside “water” and “claim,” to connect these
stories with ongoing Indigenous presence and claims to the water.
Chinook jargon was a hybrid of Indigenous and settler languages in the
Pacific Northwest. The Chinook Wind is also an animate being in
Secwépemc creation story, bringing forth an Indigenous concept of
interrelatedness which counteracts our human-centric worlds. In this
project, Willard evokes the wind’s agency through poems generated from
live weather data.
The poems presented on this website use source material from
these entangled histories to affirm Indigenous ways of life and sacred
responsibilities, and to gesture to ongoing land claims and land
defense, including the current water claim by the Mississaugas of the
Credit First Nation which asserts their rights to waterways that were
not surrendered in treaty.
Daily poems from this website are also displayed on a flatscreen
TV at the entrance to the Davis Meeting Place, University of Toronto
Mississauga campus.