Jamie John
Jamie John is a two-spirit Anishinaabe and Korean-American multi-disciplinary artist living and working on their ancestral homeland of so-called Michigan. They are a dually enrolled tribal citizen of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians and the United States of America. With very little connection to their Korean heritage and being raised alongside their adopted Nahuatl descendant family, much of early life was full of cultural richness and contrasts.
Weaving personal and historical narratives together with collective memory and cultural loss allows the work to speak on what it means to be Indigenous, to honor our histories, and to how our history is a pathway into the future. Jamie’s cultural and familial background gives a profound sense of kinship and belonging as well as what it means to connect to the land, to ceremony, language, and to others. The responsibilities they have to their community, kin, and culture is a mindset that extends throughout their body of work. For CYCLE II, COUSIN supported Jamie’s creative practice.