Ji zoongde’eyaang (2022) was a collaboration between Lara Kramer and her mother Ida Baptiste, artist, and retired Ojibwa language teacher (Member of Berens River First Nation, Manitoba, Treaty 5). Together they created a series of bright jingle-adorned trade blankets, one of which inspired the 2024 performance by the same name: Gorgeous Tongue. The title refers to the violent interruption of Indigenous language transmission, one of many of the many acculturating strategies deployed by the Residential Schools that Ida Baptiste attended. Whereas Baptiste was dispossessed of her language, Kramer was brought up without her mother tongue, Ojibwa; for that reason, the nonverbal and the body became rich vectors of communication for her. But the words “gorgeous tongue” also read as an invitation to reconnect with the primordial knowledge held in our guts: raw, visceral, intuitive, beautiful embodied and incorporated knowledge we—in the Global North—are taught to repress and quiet. In Gorgeous Tongue, all that originates in the mouth is brought forth at once: speech, breath, cries, moisture, taste, thirst.
Dubé, Joëlle. “Turning our ears to our soft pulsating bellies.” FTA 2024: Gorgeous Tongue (online) (05 2024).