On Wholeness: Anishinaabe Pathways to Embodiment and Collective Liberation

A brilliant exploration embodied wholeness as a pathway to our collective liberation

Through reflections on childbirth, parenting, creative practice, and expansive responsibility, Anishinaabe visual artist Quill Christie-Peters explores how reconnecting with the body can be an act of resistance and healing. She shows that wholeness--despite pain and displacement--is not just possible but essential for liberation, not only for Indigenous people but for all of us.

In poetic and raw storytelling, Quill shares her own experiences of gendered violence and her father's survival of residential school, revealing how colonialism disconnects us from ourselves. Yet, through an Anishinaabe lens, the body is more than just flesh--it extends to ancestors, homelands, spirit relations, and animal kin.

This fierce and enlightening book reimagines the way we understand settler colonialism--through the body itself. On Wholeness takes us on a journey that begins before birth, in a realm where ancestors and spirits swirl like smoke in the great beyond.

QUILL CHRISTIE-PETERS is an Anishinaabe educator and self-taught visual artist from Lac des Mille Lacs First Nation located in Treaty 3 territory. She is the creator and director of the Indigenous Youth Residency Program, an artist residency for Indigenous youth that engages land-based creative practices through Anishinaabe artistic methodologies. She holds a master's degree in Indigenous governance on Anishinaabe art-making as a process of falling in love. She has spoken at Stanford University, the University of Toronto, and California College of the Arts, and her written work can be found in GUTS magazine and Canadian Art. She is also a mother, beadwork artist, and traditional tattoo practitioner following the protocols of her community. All of her work can be found at @raunchykwe.