invocation for ceremonied art

Here we are, we humans, filled by the strange intersection of two distinct ways of being in the world: the first, "kincentric"* way sees all life, from the smallest particle to the largest galaxy, as family, or kin, alive and capable of communication with us. The second, "humancentric" way does not.

These two inclinations fluctuate in the human spirit, expressing in infinite different cultural forms. Today, the humancentric dominates our planet, devouring the living world as 'resources,' trusting human cleverness to navigate indefinitely into the future. What the humancentric point of view has done to the world cannot be undone; the obligation to all life as family that so many of us feel in our hearts -- despite millennia of violent suppression -- cannot be erased.

How do we hold the tender, cutting edges of these contradictions?

"Art" is a word made by humancentrics to contain the contradictions in this world. Art is a corral given to the ache to know all life as family, to celebrate the furor of love and the exquisite, rageful, generative energy of separation. Art, itself, is defined by its separateness from systems of governance. So art, in its separateness from humancentric governance, can accommodate contradiction, the existing of two – or, many – opposites. Art, an organelle inside the cell of humancentric culture, carries the fire of interconnection that has not yet been extinguished. 

Art is a seed bank that stores the memory of what humans use to talk with all life as family: visions, imagination, listening. In the tiny pockets where traditional kincentricity still breathes, or is, even, coming back into strength, art is invoked as a bridge, a way to ferry love and survival back and forth between the two worldviews. Where kincentricity is all but gone, art is the place to remember. To remember conversations with all life as normal, as crucial. To remember the ever-presence of the singing voice that streams out from trees, rocks, stars, ancestors, cars, cell phones, drones, dogs, tables, mountains, rivers and each other, wordlessly telling stories, giving instructions, receiving and responding to our longings. Art undoes the disbelieving crush of mental supremacy by flowing into the body's song, commanded by feelings: touching, moving, pounded by sound, opened by light.

   

This, too, is what ceremony can do. Ceremony draws in and concentrates what matters most. In humancentricity, this is people: their triumphs, their lifecycles, their gods. In kincentricity, what matters most is relationship with all life as family. Here, ceremony distills time into dialogue, bringing the living, listening, breathing selves into the slipstream of the unending conversation between all life as kin. In kincentricity, ceremony turns up the volume of what already exists, fine-tunes the antennas, quiets the static. Life is ceremony even without ceremony, and ceremony makes that clear.

Does this kind of ceremony – the one that affirms life as family – ride disguised as art into humancentric seas? Can I, can you, can we ceremony art, making art ceremonied?* Can this "ceremonied art" blast messages to all life out through the membranes of its confinement? Can ceremonied art serve as a still lake, whose smooth surface registers vibrations from all corners of the universe? What must be done to bring this calm, to become ready to receive? To listen and to repair the continual severing between humans, and between humans and all life? Can ceremony do this?

Those of us who have recoiled in horror from our own violence towards all life, and those of us who have been smashed down and nearly annihilated again and again for knowing all life as family: can art-as-ceremony bring us together? Can ceremonied art cast a powerful eye into human broken places and invoke help beyond the self, careless of contradiction, muffling the peevish requirements of empiricism? 

Join me, fellow artists: join ourselves in ceremony. Let us hide together under art's mantle, generating ceremonies that sidestep what seems possible, or doesn't, to affirm all life as family. Let us wait and see what pours over us, and into us.

Release these seeds into that old soil that still builds our bones.

~ Tilke Elkins, January 2025                                                      

*ceremonied / to ceremony are a terms coined by artist Tilke Elkins in July, 2024.

** kincentric/kincentricity are terms coined by O’odham, Chicano, Anglo elder & educator, Dennis Martinez in 1995. See Native Perspectives on Sustainability: Dennis Martinez (O'odham, Chicano/Anglo), 2008. The term “kinvcentricity” has since been engaged by many, including Enrique Salmon, and by Darcia Narvarez and Wahinkape Topa, in their important book, Restoring the Kinship Worldview.

"The idea of 'saving the planet' with any knowledge, as understood in the context of the dominant Western worldview, will connote the idea that we humans are in control of the Earth. However, such an idea is foreign to [the Indigenous worldview]...To be honest we, humankind alone cannot make such a claim. We will have to call on the help of our relatives. We must pay attention and look to the plants, the animals, the wind, the water, the Earth, and our most distant relative, the sun, to stop imminent Earth catastrophe. It is precisely this help, from these, our other-than-human relatives, that Indigenous thinkers are not embarrassed to call on." 

~ Daniel Wildcat, from Red Alert! Saving the Planet With Indigenous Knowledge

 

"While on Country, we are always in ceremony, deep ceremony, no separation."

~ Melisa Ladkin, Co-Founder of Country As Teacher

"Ceremony is life itself."

~ gkisedtanamoogk, from Anoqcou: Ceremony Is Life Itself

"Indigenous communication was inseparable from the spiritual sense of interconnectedness to all things visible and invisible. There was a kind of telepathic interplay with other-than-human sentience that seemed to be mutually understood. This telepathy also worked between humans and co-existed with verb-based languages that stemmed directly from the sacred places in which Indigenous tribes lived. "

~ Four Arrows, from Indigenous Sustainable Wisdom: First Nation Know-How for Global Flourishing