Constellations Online Listening Party

This piece is dedicated to Maria Hinton, the Oneida speaker heard at the end of the piece, and to Ima “Akoh” Johnson, Mohawk-Cayuga faithkeeper and language teacher. This piece is also dedicated to the land and its defenders everywhere.

“This piece is a prayer and poem which speaks directly to the ancestors and the future generations through language. A prayer and a promise.

It’s goal is to send a message to generations passed and generations to come in the Oneida language, which is endangered by settler-colonial violence. The piece features two voices, the English voice which is static and unmoving, and the Oneida voice, which moves in a counter-clockwise motion, representative of traditional Haudenosaunee dance practices. When Sky Woman, our great-grandmother, danced on the great turtle’s back, she did so in a counter-clockwise motion, and so the Haudenosaunee people do so to honour her.

Haudenosaunee people understand our responsibility to the land that gave birth to us, and so this piece is an address to not only the generations that have long since returned to the land, but those who are set to inherit this land. Across Turtle Island, Indigenous people are fighting to protect their ways and the land, and this poem is a message, a promise, to the next seven generations that we will not stop fighting on behalf of the land and the water and the non-human beings.” – John Hill

Pointing At Canopus is a meditation on the nature of home, not in the brick-and-mortar sense, but the broader idea: a place of rest. Children of immigrants often separately compartmentalize these ideas. Home is a place we live but heritage is a space we occupy. There is a daily pivot between the cadences of interaction with our family and those of our friends or co-workers. Inevitably the lines blur, and as individuals we find ourselves on different points along a gradient.

Coming to Iran reversed this pivot for me. The language of my home life suddenly spilled out in the streets, flooded my conversations, my day to day. For the first time I was utilizing Farsi beyond the comfort of my family home— I became a Farsi speaker.

At the same time, English became a place of thoughtful saudade. I would be lulled to sleep by audiobooks. The meter and ornamentation of the language felt familiar but distant like a kind of reverb— I became an English listener.

Pointing At Canopus explores the waxing and waning of home and heritage. I hope to evoke in listeners a sense of transit. A feeling neither here nor there. The idea that home is the pivot, not the point. Sounds of moving vehicles. Extra-lingual umms & ahhs while a speaker connects sentences. ‘Here’ is a space, but ‘there’ is a mythology, a fable. We orbit our fables like atoms around a nucleus. Wherever we go, there we are again.

Pointing At Canopus was composed by Arif Mirbaghi and edited by Michelle Macklem and Jess Shane. It was made with the voices of over a dozen friends. Special thanks to Michael Eckert for his pedal steel improvisation and Parva Karkhaneh for her patient guidance.

This piece was produced by Sophia Steinert-Evoy with original boops by William Smith and help and trust from her anonymous friend, and editorial support from Jess Shane and Michelle Macklem.

“Energy usage and sound are two omnipresent components of our daily life. We’re constantly trying to weigh our own wants and complicities against individual sacrifices and the perceived “difference” our actions can make. In this piece I wanted to capture an interpersonal interaction about climate and personal responsibility, so I spoke with a friend who works in the oil and gas industry. I found he has many of the same moral quandaries as those of us who consider ourselves to be less directly implicated in the production of fossil fuels, which brought up questions of personal responsibility. I captured sounds of latent energy usage in my daily life: the stove, the laundry machine, a lawnmower, my car, the garage door, the shower to highlight how integrated energy usage and thus destruction is. – Sophia Steinert-Evoy