"EARTH (Okâwîmâw Askiy - ᐅᑳᐧᒫᐊᐧᐢᑭᕀ)” is a 12-hour event that follows on the heels of 2020’s You, 2021’s And, 2022’s I, 2023’s Are and 2024’s Water. It is the sixth in a series of twelve annual events taking place on December 12 from 12 noon to 12 midnight. NAISA Radio will be broadcasting the audio livestream from the USask Galleries in Saskatoon.

Each year the event moves through each word of the 12-word phrase, You And I Are Water Earth Fire Air Of Life And Death, to activate the word of the year in myriad ways.

This year's edition is curated by jake moore and Christof Migone. Featured artists include Christina Battle, Joshua Bonnetta, Tanya Doody, Michaela Grill / Karl Lemieux, Jessica Karuhanga, Masha Kouznetsova, Cassie Packham, Danielle Petti, Laura St Pierre, Aurora Wolfe, Worried Earth, and many more.

The word ‘earth’ when preceded by a direct article becomes planetary, the Earth. This proximity shifts our understanding of ‘the substance of the land surface; soil’ into ‘the world’. It moves from ground under your feet and soil you can hold in your hand, to expanse you walk on and territory you live within. This perceptual transformation makes clear the potency of spatial relationality in language and worldmaking and opens the parallel in this year’s title and prompt, Earth (Okâwîmâw Askiy - ᐅᑳᐧᒫᐊᐧᐢᑭᕀ).

The planet Earth is the only one in this solar system whose English name is not taken from Greek or Roman mythology. The word Earth comes from Old English and simply means ground. Ground-, grounded, defined as the solid surface of the earth, a limited or defined extent of the earth's surface; land, land of a specified kind, an area of knowledge or subject of discussion or thought, factors forming a basis for action or the justification for a belief, a prepared surface, solid particles that form a residue; sediment. While the planets that exist light years away are assigned narratives already in existence, it is Earth’s spatial and relational proximity to us, that invites beings to story it directly with experiences born of connections between living and place. Humans continue to re-story the world as Earth’s topography informs us while we simultaneously inform, deform and re-form.

One story goes that when Earth was a young planet, a large chunk of rock smashed into it, displacing a portion of Earth's interior. The resulting chunks clumped together and formed our Moon. Unlike other discrete moons in this solar system, Earth and Moon were once one. Moon is made of Earth, and Earth, like its human inhabitants, is mostly made up of water. These critical correspondences and seeming oppositions of liquids that produce the appearance of solids make clear the intra-relations at play, the co-constitutive nature of things, and how our wounded planet maintains balance through its spatial tether to its long-lost entrails.

Another story, not our own to tell, but its repetition here is required to indicate the inadequacy of univocality when coming to know a complexity. We have listened to this story many times, so we choose to retell it here as we have the one above, as listeners, as receivers, with unique positionalities to inform its reception. This story tells of how Ota Aski, as we know it now, comes into being. Sky Woman, who lived in solitude in the heavens, comes through a hole in the sky to rest on a gigantic turtle’s back. Earth at this time was an entirely watery surface. Sky Woman asked the beings living there; plants, two legged, four legged, winged ones, and swimming ones, to bring up some soil from below the waters. Only the small muskrat succeeds in her travel below the waters to deliver soil to the edge of the turtle’s shell. In doing so, muskrat is passes. Sky Woman surrounds the turtle’s shell with the soil to create a place for generation. She revives the tiny muskrat and asserts her role as a giver of life. Earth is our mother, Moon is our grandmother. Still of one another, entwined.

How do we definitively describe something still coming into being? How do we definitively describe something that is brought into being by multitudes, and regardless of consensus of origin, fully exists?

These co-constitutions, interreliance, and fluidity of meaning reflect how Earth is primarily made up of water—its seeming material opposite—and the ground itself is made up of a series of relations. Western science describes it as the only planet in this solar system to support life as ‘we’ know it (knowing Western understanding of life is limited). In this cosmology, Earth is an ocean planet reliant on its moon to keep it from wobbling uncontrollability. There is an intimacy implied and required in making our world a whole constructed of millions of parts, distributed and connected, reliant on their ongoing transmission and reception. Electronic communications require grounding to flow uninterrupted and make clear our species’ reliance on Earth to both imagine and articulate connections and the potential to be whole, if wounded, through them. Amplifying Earth as a series of relations becomes our grounding premise.

Samuel Beckett concludes one of his Fizzles with these words “ruinstrewn land, little panic steps.” As both unsettled settlers of Argentinian/Austrian and Scottish/Dutch heritage, the paths we take are teeming with these little panic steps, but they are steps nonetheless.

We are coming towards you from this ground here. Here, kisiskâciwan, the traditional territories of the Nehiyawak, Maškékowak, Nîhithaw, Lakota, Nakoda, Dakota, Saulteaux (Anihšināpē), Dene, and the ancestral lands of the Métis, specifically Treaty 6 on the Canadian Prairies.