Starry Nights Story

I painted Starry Nights at a time, I didn’t yet know the stories of my Solomon ancestors—Voyageurs whose lives paddled through the shifting currents of French and British empire, with the enduring strength of the Anishinabeg and complex intertribal kinship networks around the Great Lakes. Their world was one of constant rupture and relationship, cross cultural exchange, enforced assimilation, displacement and eventual erasure of ancestral knowledge and stories.

In Anishinabeg cosmology, there is a sacred path called Manidoo-miikana—the Spirit Trail. It spirals through the great cycles of life, winding through the earthly realms, the sky world, the star world, and into the vast spiritual dimensions. Truth carried in story, ceremony, and the land itself: layered, alive, and deeply relational. The eternal trail—a mirror of the Spirit Trail above and within.

When I look at the painting now, I see how the night sky holds more than light—it holds remembrance, guidance and deep knowing. Ancestral knowledge that lives on, not written in books but dreams, behaviours and intuition guiding us subconsciously. Even after generations of rupture, the Spirit Trail is still there—spiralling through the body. Sometimes we feel the ancestors stir when we are quiet enough to hear them in the stillness, sensation, and vision. It is a form of seeing and knowing that culturally we have been conditioned not to trust anymore.

Dreams, spiritual encounters, synchronicities—has long been honoured across cultures as sacred. But oppressive systems erase what they cannot control, separating spirit from matter, soul from body, the seen from the unseen. 

But there are patterns everywhere, if we choose to see them: in the spiralled shell, the plant that offers clues to its medicine, the shift in seasons, your inner knowing. To live with vision is not to escape reality—it is to expand it. It is to remember that time, spirit, and consciousness are not illusions, but companions on the trail.