In Session 3, youth co-researchers Black Spruce (Indigenous & queer co-researcher, age 32) and Melanin Monroe (Black co-researcher, age 28)were invited into a visual intervention practice (Tkaronto CIRCLE Lab, 2023) grounded in this imaginative act. Using digital photographs they had taken, each was given a blank canvas, their printed image, and a selection of paints and mixed media materials. The invitation was to alter the photograph, to transform it in response to the prompt: What does collective grieving mean for Black and Indigenous futures? Through paint, layering, cutting, and collage, they intervened in the image, adding new textures, obscuring parts, amplifying others, shifting the photograph into something that carried both grief and possibility. The evening unfolded in two rounds of reflection. In the first, they were asked to describe their altered image: What do you see? What’s happening now? How does it respond to the prompt? Why did you make the changes you did? In the second round, a check-out invited them to reflect on what stood out most in their conversations about the image and grief. 

In response to the prompt in this activity, Black Spruce chose an image he referred to as a brutal structure. It was a photograph of two parallel, concrete forms that dominate the frame. They sit heavy at the center of the image, but their lines stretch outward, cascading beyond the photograph’s edge. In the foreground, metal lines crisscross the frame, evoking the sharpness of a barbed fence. This imposed boundary interrupts the landscape, marking a threshold between where one stands and what lies just beyond. The ground is sparse, a patchwork of yellowed grass struggling through snow and ice. Behind the overpasses, a thick, dark green forest rises and above it all, a wide-open sky, brilliant blue and full of clouds, hovers. As Black Spruce described his photograph to both myself and Melanin Monroe during the session, he paused and said quietly, “I feel like it would've been more beautiful if it looked the way it did.”

He explained. “I added a teepee ’cause it’s along the river, probably what would’ve been there a couple hundred years ago.” His intervention focused on the bottom center of the photograph, where the frozen ground met the base of the concrete forms. He used yellow acrylic paint creating a layered effect that introduced new texture and color into the scene. The paint was applied with broad, soft strokes, and its pale tone stood out against the darker, colder palette of the original image. Over this, he used a black fine liner to draw thin, precise lines that moved across the photograph. His intervention extended beyond the photograph’s edges, continuing onto the blank canvas underneath, where similar materials were used to carry the image outward. The photograph was centered on a square canvas that featured a circular design, divided into four colored quadrants: white, yellow, black, and red, each occupying a quarter of the circle. The circle dominated the space, leaving only narrow green sections visible at the top and bottom edges of the canvas. Beneath the canvas, on a separate white piece of paper, he painted the words: otos-kwunee, using the same muted yellow acrylic paint, or one closely resembling it.

With his intervention, Black Spruce theorized the tension between settler infrastructure and Indigenous continuity, layering his image with a speculative intervention. The addition of the teepee was not just artistic; it was a deliberate act that layered past and present onto the same ground. Rather than simply documenting what is, he used creative practice to conjure what could have been, what might still be possible before enclosure, before concrete.

This act of reimagining recalls a form of world-making (Maynard & Simpson, 2022), and what Muñoz (2009) calls queer futurity. Muñoz (2009) argues that queer futurity is an imaginative and aspirational orientation toward what is not yet here, a refusal to accept the here and now as all there is. It is a reaching toward a different world, one not yet realized but urgently needed. Similarly, Indigenous feminist scholars (Kimmermer, 2013; Simpson, 2017) describe world-making as a process of relational imagining, of bringing forth ways of being rooted in reciprocity and land-based futurities. It is through these lenses that Black Spruce’s image gains deeper significance. In describing the photograph and through the physical act of adding a teepee to the scene, he enacted an intervention that reimagines both place and time. Rather than merely documenting what is, Black Spruce used his medium to conjure what could have been, or what still might be. This is world-making work: to re-situate Indigenous presence where it has been erased, and to insist on the persistence of memory and land-based possibility even within the built environment. His image becomes an act of refusal and hope, an articulation of queer and Indigenous futurity that imagines otherwise.

His intervention did not stop with the photograph. He placed the altered image on a canvas where he had painted the medicine wheel. The colors, he explained, were part of something he had only recently begun incorporating more intentionally into his work. Melanin Monroe, curious and attentive, asked, “What’s the background medicine wheel and what the four colors are?” Noting their recurrence across sessions, she added, “He’s had these colors on a bunch of the different stuff that we’ve done.” Black Spruce nodded: “Yeah, that’s something I recently started implementing more of ... I like the way it looks and because,” He paused, then continued, “There’s this whole guide. North is white, East is yellow, red is South, and black is West ... sacred teachings.” In naming these directions and their teachings, Black Spruce situated his work within a cosmological framework, invoking meaning that exceeds what is immediately seen. In the final session of the Good Grief program, when submitting creative work for inclusion in the Good Grief Commons, he shared new pieces that deepened this visual language. Each featured the four sacred colors of the medicine wheel – white, yellow, red, and black – rendered with intention. His contributions across sessions form a visual and conceptual throughline: a theorizing of grief and futurity that calls on Indigenous cosmologies to contest settler temporality, and to imagine futures shaped by sacred direction.

This symbolic layering of color, direction, and teaching, offered a visual grammar for grief. But Black Spruce’s practice did not end with image-making; it also extended into language and voice, where grief surfaced in quieter ways. “I was gonna add a question: Have you taken the time to learn the Indigenous name of where you live? Calgary is otos-kwunee, the Métis word.” He reflected that language is something he has started looking more into and that “it’s a part of connecting with my identity.” Black Spruce imagined the land differently: alive with ancestral presence, resonant with teachings, refusing erasure. When asked, What do you want others to know about what grief teaches you?, he responded with quiet vulnerability: “My ideas about grief, especially as I go through life and think about my own identity, sometimes I get really bothered that I can't speak my language. I haven’t, I shouldn’t, my voice shouldn’t sound like this. I get caught up in that.” Here, grief was not only for the land itself, but for the names, sounds, and teachings that had been severed from it. His reflection and thinking mirrored what numerous youth in the study explicitly link: that disconnection from land is deeply entangled with the loss of language.

Kimmerer, R. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants. Milkweed Editions.
Maynard, R., & Simpson, L. B. (2022). Rehearsals for living. Haymarket Books.
Muñoz, J. E. (2009). Cruising utopia: The then and there of queer futurity. NYU Press.
Simpson, L. B. (2017). As we have always done: Indigenous freedom through radical resistance. University of Minnesota Press.
Tkaronto CIRCLE Lab. (2023). Intervening on Images [Land Education Dreambook].