Kwe’! Teluisi Apuksikn (Lynx),
Hello! My name is Amanda Amour-Lynx and I am a queer, Two Spirit, Mi’kmaq First Nations interdisciplinary artist and social worker living in Tkaronto, Ontario, on Dish with One Spoon treaty territory. I come from mixed ancestry and I was born and grew up in Tiotia:ke (Montreal). Interested in the intersections between art and activism, I focus on Indigenous story work and socially engaged approaches to explore healing trauma and unearthing collective truths. Spirituality, connection, and community are at the root of wellness. I’m interested in an embodied practice that fuses physical and emotional healing through hybridizing interpersonal, land-based epistemologies and western therapeutic models of counselling and wellness. I am passionate about how expressive arts facilitation can engage youth and provide them with tools to mobilize and develop kinship, helping them to model stronger, healthier relationships that address issues such as intergenerational trauma. I received a BFA from OCAD University in Drawing and Painting, minoring in Indigenous Visual Culture.
I’m interested in how cosmology and ethnobotany can be incorporated into the wellness paradigm. Resurgent practices are important to me; including cultural acts of making, ceremony, language revitalization, plant knowledge, cultural transmission, land-based wellness initiatives, bushcraft, two-eyed seeing, shapeshifting, and how western ideologies offer us tools to form dialogue and pedagogy to recover and enliven the old ways.
I want to imagine a future where intergenerational healing can occur and where traditional ways are honoured and informed through the lens of Indigiqueer futurism and youth truth-telling.
