Gathering: Native Food Sovereignty

To mark the closing of Gathering at Amplify’s Generator Space on Friday, October 18th from 7:00pm - 8:00pm, artists Mi’oux Stabler and Lydia Cheshewalla will sit down for a conversation, moderated by Casey Welsch, about Native food sovereignty and Native-led efforts to reclaim local food systems. Together, they’ll explore the role food sovereignty plays in confronting generations of colonial dispossession and revitalizing community health, economic autonomy, and cultural traditions.

Free and open to all. Please RSVP to help us plan.

Gathering, a collaborative exhibition organized by Valerie St. Pierre Smith, considers the act of gathering–gathering kin, gathering medicine, gathering songs–as an embodied practice that uplifts indigenous lifeways and ancestral healing practices. Exhibition artists and organizers assert food and plant medicine pathways in the immersive, indigenized environment of the exhibition space to question the disconnects and detachments of an increasingly commodified contemporary health and wellness industry.

Generator Space is wheelchair accessible and located on a fairly busy street with a decent amount of traffic. Please use crosswalks for safety. Unmetered street parking is available on Vinton Street, 18th Street, and neighborhood streets to the north and west of the space.

Alternate Currents programming is presented with support from the Nebraska Arts Council and the Nebraska Cultural Endowment.

About the Panelists:

Lydia Cheshewalla is an Osage ephemeral artist from Oklahoma, living and working in motion throughout the Great Plains ecoregion. Through the creation of site-specific land art and ephemeral installations grounded in Indigenous land stewardship practices and kinship pedagogies, Lydia engages in multivocal conversations about place and relationship. By working within a framework of change and collaborating with beyond-human kin, she rejects Capitalist reliance on scarcity, immortality, preciousness, and waste production in the creation of value and remains responsive (responsible) to the realities of shifting ecologies in an age of climate crisis. Her work has been shown at Generator Space, the Union for Contemporary Art (Omaha, NE), Comfort Station, Harold Washington Library, the Center for Native Futures, and EXPO Chicago (Chicago, IL) among others. She was awarded a 2020 Tallgrass Artist Residency, participated in the 2022/23 Chicago Art Department Think Tank:On Mending, and is a 2024 Spring Tanda Fellow through Chuquimarca Projects in Chicago. She has been filling the bucket with water to see if it leaks.

Mi’oux Stabler is a member of the Umoⁿhoⁿ Nation whose tribal lands are located in northeast Nebraska along the banks of the Missouri River. She is a proud mother, artist, land tender, and a dedicated cultural advocate. For the past decade, her endeavors have been geared towards the revitalization of traditional languages and land stewardship practices. She has traveled extensively, but currently focuses her work in the ancestral homelands of the Umoⁿhoⁿ people.

About the Moderator:

Casey Welsch is a working class writer, cook, journalist, and organizer. Born and raised on a dryland Nebraska farm, he now lives and works in central Omaha. As a multimedia journalist in southeast Nebraska, Casey started a community news service at KZUM radio in Lincoln, was a founding member of the Dandelion Network mutual aid group, and was a regular contributor to Hear Nebraska and Perfect Pour magazine. These days he is focusing on his other life's work as a cook, working at Methodist Hospital, feeding the sick and those who care for them.

About Amplfiy:

Amplify provides resources for artists, organizers, and cultural workers to incubate liberatory ideas move our community forward.

Host or Publisher Amplify Arts