Artist Statement

Authors

  • Angela Steritt

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.14288/bcs.no219.199177

Abstract

First Contact, acrylic painting on canvas, 5.5’ x 4.0’ (approx. 168 x 122 cm), 2014.

First Contact illuminates the reality that despite the colonial violence inflicted on Indigenous women, we have continuously risen using our culture as an antidote. The Indigenous woman’s hair is interwoven with the killer whale story on the housefront, depicting that our culture is within us and binds us to our sovereignty, land, life community, and family. Colonialism threatened to fracture our connections permanently but failed, as a result of our ancestors’, relatives’, and kin’s deep pursuit to keep our connections strong. 

Author Biography

Angela Steritt

Angela Sterritt is an award-winning investigative journalist, artist, and national bestselling author from the Wilp Wiik’aax of the Gitanmaax comunity within the Gitxsan Nation on her dad’s side and from Bell Island, Newfoundland, on her maternal side. She has traveled the world, exhibiting her paintings which mix formline designs with modern portraits, namely of Indigenous women. Sterritt worked as a television, radio, and digital journalist at CBC for more than a decade. She hosted the award-winning CBC original podcast Land Back. 

Her book Unbroken, a work that is part memoir and part investigation into the murders and disappearances of Indigenous women and girls, published by Greystone Books, became an instant national bestseller in May 2023. Unbroken was nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Awards, one of Canada’s oldest and most prestigious literary prizes. It was also nominated for the prestigious Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust award for best non-fiction book in Canada. 

In 2021, Sterritt won an Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television Award for Best Local News Reporter in Canada for her coverage of an Indigenous man and his then twelve-year-old granddaughter who were arrested while trying to open a bank account at BMO. Sterritt also won a national Radio Television Digital News Association award for the same reporting. In 2020, Sterritt was named in Vancouver Magazine’s Power 50 list of the city’s fifty most influential people.

An Indigenous woman looking towards us as her hair is interwoven with illustration of a killer whale.

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Published

2024-02-27

Issue

No. 219: Autumn 2023

Section

The Front