Tentsítewahkwe

As a young girl, Jessica Shenandoah (Wolf Clan from the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation) learned about harvesting medicine and edible plants alongside her mother and grandmother. Contemporary Native Peoples 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 Tentsítewahkwe, the latest film centering Native women by Mohawk filmmaker Katsitsionni Fox, Shenandoah goes on a journey across four seasons and multiple Native territories to connect with other knowledge keepers reviving the land-based wisdom of foremothers 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.

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