Tentsítewahkwe

As a young girl, Jessica Shenandoah (Wolf Clan from the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation) learned about harvesting medicine and food plants alongside her mother and grandmother. Contemporary Native People are often separated many generations from their traditional knowledge due to the effects of colonial realities such as boarding school, forced religion, and land theft.

In the latest Native women-centered film by Mohawk filmmaker Katsitsionni Fox (Ohero:kon - Under the Husk, Without a Whisper - Konnon:kwe), Shenandoah goes on a journey across four seasons and multiple Native territories to connect with other knowledge keepers reviving the land-based knowledge of their ancestral grandmothers in order to return to time-honored practices of pottery making, mat weaving, hide tanning, medicine making, food gathering, and more. Jessica embodies the Mohawk concept of Tentsítewahkwe as she picks up knowledge of the old ways, these slow methods of creating and connecting in reciprocity with the Earth.

This film is at once a thank you to the Native women who imbued their descendents with blood memory of these practices and a promise to future generations of Native people that these practices will stay alive for generations to come.