ARTIST PROJECT

Terraform | Ooleepeeka Eegeesiak

Nov 07, 2022
by Ooleepeeka Eegeesiak

My writing for this project, titled Terraform, infuse science fiction and ecology to share connections between worlds and memories, envision an alternate reality on a livable planet and emphasize the importance of our dreams and futurisms as Inuit.

meteorology

prairie life is a certain type of existence
if you know here you know hypothermia in the desert
hail, squashes in the garden plot
pelted this time of year
new with the snowshoe hare

sila carried over the rockies
exhaling our breath
the grasslands emerge with hurricane force
chinook arches over
the low icy hum of river
incubates for a thousand years and comes out ancient rested and ready

I’m a stranger here
starting to recognize these seasons
fertile flower fruit
we rely on

the thunderstorm of my dreams is real and here
supercell activation
wash the dust off
turn the volume up on the river
baked sandstone cutbanks
are weathering
like us

As an Inuk/qallunaaq living in the south, there is a sense of alienation from culture, language and land. Despite the distance in space, there are values and worldviews I have been gifted. My relationships with my siblings are central to these works. As adoptees, our family was composed in a unique way that shows the potential of extending kinship into other realms, including beyond the human.

nonlocality

pleistocene dreams holoscene nightmares
ice age reincarnation
starlink defacement above, glacier carvings below

sinking into the centre of the planet
couleecore, softcore
buried in rocks and particles
orbits and energy and space and garden beds
a solarpunk quantum entanglement
on ground so unlikely

permafrost, shorelines, valleys
and water and desire and hereness
geomagnetic reversal at the poles
shapeshifting is commonplace in our world building

microclimates and microorganisms scaled up to make a landscape
it’s a collaboration
oriented towards the imaginary
migration routes are coded into generations
adaptation /algorithm
but these patterns change

In my life, the concept of home has always been unsettling. While I may be displaced, there is belonging in being an earthling. We live in a time of climate apocalypse and extinction alongside the false promises of space travel, geoengineering, and some green technology. When flourishing isn’t found in colonizing Mars you just need to phone home.

we perish to become everything

sent to a languageless planet
bringing every word I know
the stories of this place aren’t mind
and the ache of the circumpolar somehow still lives in me
while at the feet of the cypress hills

earth walker, earth, walking
becoming animated
glare on the screen of this stream
as the moon transforms with future fruit
this rock flips over again
it’s called a season or a lifetime depending on your part

a body making berries
flesh rotting at different rates
to decompose at the same time
where the land so easily eats us
and returns our memories
reconstituted
but this time a little bit different
I hope

the sweet and sour end of our days are gobbled up
as they should be
dutifully dying
a seed in the gut in a stomach of soil

–
Ooleepeeka Eegeesiak was born in Iqaluit and is currently living in Treaty 7 Niitsitapi lands, Lethbridge, Alberta. She is a writer, curator, wannabe gardener, and prairie lover.

This series was made possible with the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts.