Carl Gawboy, Ramona Kitto Stately, and Jeffrey Tibbetts.
This interdisciplinary production includes animation shorts, large-scale projection, sound art, and digital story art. Our team of five Indigenous elders and knowledge holders included Carl Gawboy, Ramona Kitto-Stately, Travis Novitsky, Jeffrey Tibbetts, and Annette S. Lee. Five short films had a total run time of 20 minutes. The venues were the Mille Lac Indian Museum in central Minnesota on the Mille Lacs Ojibwe Reservation and the INSAP XIII conference in Corfu, Greece. Both premiered in May 2024. This work was also presented at the IAU-CAP conference as Keynote by Annette S. Lee in June 2024, Toulouse, France.
Premiere of “Spirits Dancing-a Night Sky Experience” at Mille Lacs Museum, Minnesota, U.S., May 2024
Specifications: Intermedia installation, large-scale projection, digital story, animation, time-lapse, soundscape visualization, interdisciplinary collaboration, ensemble, Indigenous knowledge-led content & production
Premieres & Venues: Mille Lac Museum (land-based of Mille Lac Band of Ojibwe), central Minnesota, U.S.; Ionian University-Corfu, Greece; La Cité de l’espace-Toulouse, France.
A. Lee, Keynote Presentation, IAU-CAP, Toulouse, France, June 2024; photo by Pierre Carton
Spirits Dancing, A Night Sky Experience … shares astronomical, cultural, and personal knowledge of the night sky, focusing on the Aurora and the Milky Way from an Ojibwe and D(L)akota perspective. The large-scale audio and visual production parallels the new book, ‘Spirits Dancing: The Night Sky, Indigenous Knowledge, and Living Connections to the Cosmos’, by Annette S. Lee and Travis Novitsky (release date Nov. 2024). Jiibayag niimi’idiway (Ojibwe-Spirits Dancing, Northern Lights).
