a dreaming of healing Alzheimer’s 2022
Peter Morin

A dreaming of healing Alzheimer’s takes place on Wet’suwet’en territory. 

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For this project, I had four dreams that I wanted to explore. It’s important to know that our family lives with a genetic disposition that leads to generational Alzheimer’s. Our mom, and several of her brothers, and her mother, and her grandmother, have lived with this genetic passenger. I’ve been working through shifting language around Alzheimer’s for myself. I’ve started thinking/practicing the idea ‘travels with the passenger Alzheimer’s’. I’m also tired of saying that word. I asked my cousin Edonamah what I could say in didenek’eh. Edonamah told me something Aunty Jenny said: K’ā’a medzē’ iht’inh. This I love more than words.

 

What you see here on this page is a series of performance actions that build towards the final artwork called – A Dreaming of Healing Alzheimer’s. In some of the videos, you see my destroying and burning some of my earliest artwork. These three wood panel pieces were completed in 1999 while I was in art/school. You can see that they are made by a younger person. You can see the unfinished ideas. These artworks are documentation of my thinking at the time. Mostly importantly, they are now positioned as memories. The hammer breaks these memories apart, and the fire remakes these memories into something else.

 

The final art/work is built-up from the ashes of those memories.  I want to also acknowledge that chance to dream. I am a part of a dreaming culture. Thank you to France and Breanna for making/shaping this space. and Thank you to your team – Gerry Ambers, Steven Davies – for all of your beautiful care and support as the dreams started to come into this reality. I want to acknowledge Veronica Wachter, who is Gitxsan, for carving the Ancestor finger prints and the frog who taught me a dream song. I also want to acknowledge Angelo Cavagnaro, who is Nisga’a, for carving the back of my neck rattle. This artwork wouldn’t have happened without your contributions to my dreaming.

 

Dream 1: 

 

my mom has lived with Alzheimer’s for the past ten years. my first dream is that she gets healed from this disease.

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Dream 2: 

 

In the dream, I’m running a ceremony to heal the Alzheimer’s that lives inside of our uncle. In the dream I reach into our uncle’s neck and pull out the Alzheimer’s. 

 

Dream 3: 

 

In the dream, I’m running a ceremony to heal the Alzheimer’s that lives inside of our mom. In the ceremony, I’m hold our Ancestor’s finger prints. In the ceremony, I hold out our Ancestor’s finger prints for her to hold. 

 

Dream 4:

 

In the dream, the frog teaches me a song that heals Alzheimer’s.

 

Written by Peter Morin  

 

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