Sarah Curtiss
Sarah Curtiss has been working for Mending the Sacred Hoop since 2009. In her work with the coalition, Sarah trains tribal and urban programs on the unique issues Native women face around domestic violence and trains programs on how to work with survivors from a holistic cultural perspective. Sarah is on the Circle Keepers/ Board of Directors for the Minnesota Indian Women’s Sexual Assault Coalition, and sits on varies committees across the state of Minnesota addressing violence against women. As a member of the Oshkii Giizhik Singers, a women’s traditional hand drum group, Sarah incorporates Ojibwe traditions and encourages Native women to use their voices in their communities in an effort to organize to end violence against Native women and children. But Sarah feels that her most fulfilling role is that of being a mother to her beautifully energetic three year old son Allan.
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Lyz Jaakola
Elizabeth "Lyz" Jaakola is a musician and educator, and an enrolled member of the Fond du Lac band of Lake Superior Ojibwe in Cloquet, MN. She teaches music education and American Indian studies at Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College.
She performs and composes in many styles and genres including traditional Anishinaabe music, jazz, blues and opera.
She has performed as close to home as Duluth, MN and as far as Rome, Italy for the Rome Opera Festival, while her Native-based compositions have also been heard on radio and television. She has arranged many Native pieces for solo and choral performance.
She is directs the Oshkii Giizhik Singers.
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Kathy McTavish
Kathy is a cellist, composer, and multimedia artist. In live performance, installation and online environments, she blends improvisational cello, data, text, abstract, layered moving images, bowed metal, wire, the after-ring of bells, reed, voice, machinery, ghost-like harmonics. Her recent work has focused on creating generative methods for building multichannel video and sound environments.
Kathy has a background in cello performance, mathematics, ecology and software development. The confluence of these disciplines informs her work as a composer and multimedia artist. She creates orchestrations of sound, light, and color. As both a musician and a mathematician, she is fascinated by multi-threaded, dynamical systems and chance-infused, emergent patterns. As a queer artist she is interested in the ways we construct personal stories / myths and the infinite, bendable between.
Erika Mock
Erika Mock is a Swiss-born award winning textile artist, boundary seeker, maker, owner of Textiles for Body and Soul.
Her installation weavings express interconnectedness. They use filaments, cords, yarns, and torn discarded clothing to explore identity, boundaries, embodiment (absence and presence), and the invisible stories still present in the cloth.
They are suspended offerings to place and person.
“I see fiber as the basic element that connects us organically and symbolically to each other and our precious planet. The patterns, cycles, emotional patina are a vital plexus of threads that tatter, fray, knit, weave a community. From plant and animal fibers to our very bodies of hair, skin, sinew, bone and heart; we are all raw material immersed in the mystery of life.”
Erika's studio is housed in Superior's Artspace, the Trade and Commerce Marketplace and she lives in a renovated caboose in the Woodlands of NW WI.
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Tina Olson (On Owa Zitgdna Wiya)
Tina has worked on issues surrounding domestic violence for over 25 years. As Director for Mending the Sacred Hoop Inc. she has organized such domestic violence trainings as Law Enforcement, Building A Coordinated Response and Creating a Process of Change for Men Who Batter. She has taken various roles in the work to end violence in the Duluth community, working as a women’s advocate and men’s group facilitator, group facilitator for women who are arrested, as well as one of the original founding mothers of Mending the Sacred Hoop’s coordinated response in Carlton and St. Louis Counties. Tina is the proud mother of four daughters who are all working in helping field careers, law, social work, nursing and a college student studying to become a teacher. She is also grandmother of nine grandchildren and lives with her partner in Duluth.
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Sheila Packa
Sheila Packa’s recent book Night Train Red Dust: Poems of the Iron Range was described by the Minneapolis Star Tribune as "part poetry and part documentary."" Her books explore migration, immigration, change and metamorphosis in northern wilderness and industrial landscapes. She grew up south of Biwabik, once the location of eleven underground iron mines, and has worked in a taconite plant. She spent several years as a mental health social worker specializing in women’s issues. She was Duluth’s Poet Laureate 2010-2012.
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Jessica Tillman
Jessica Tillman grew up in the small rural town of Barnum, MN. She moved to Duluth right after high school, attending Lake Superior College and the University of Wisconsin Superior. Jessica worked in the hospitality industry and college radio at KUWS before becoming Duluth Mayor Don Ness's administrative assistant in 2010. She currently serves as a board member of the Program for Aid to Victims of Sexual Assault (PAVSA) and facilitates the Duluth Public Arts Commission.
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