In this series, Native artists and artists of color living and working in Mni Sota responded to a very open prompt asking them to respond to the question of how their artistic practice is influenced by their, and their people’s, spiritual practices and beliefs. In considering how art-making is a way of engaging with the spirit, writers conjured the words and images of indigeneity and colonization, visions and premonitions, dance, rivers, lakes, oceans, salt, shamans, callings, bodies, dreams, deaths, grief, vulnerability, genesis, destruction, and protection. Culturally-specific approaches to spirit–what animates us as human beings–and the secret lines of communication with the other-world(s), under-world(s), and after-world(s) criss cross our synapses and uphold, as an invisible architecture, our ways of creating, whether texts of words or of dance. Everything is made by the body, and the body is one home, one way station, one route of the spirit(s). A text is a body, and the word text simply means something woven. These artists generously shared their inner visions of some aspects of their relationships to their texts and how spirit cannot be separated from the living process of making art.

신 선 영 Sun Yung Shin is the award-winning author of three books of poetry, the editor/co-editor of three anthologies, and the author/co-author of two books for children. With fellow Korean immigrant poet Su Hwang, she co-directs Poetry Asylum. She is a full-time artist and cultural worker, and lives in Minneapolis with her family; more at www.sunyungshin.com.