Tashina Emery

Tashina Lee Emery is a one-woman operation fashioning elegant jewelry featuring natural materials, inspired by the beautiful environment of the Great Lakes region. Empowering sovereignty, healing, teachings, or a direction in a matter of importance through modern Anishinaabe wearables. Tashina’s artwork blends traditional and modern elements in order to assert sovereignty. Her heart remains stolen by the Michigan's Upper Peninsula woods, and she belongs to the Ojibwe Keweenaw Bay Indian Community. She creates contemporary aesthetics on her home reservation influenced by her roots, the natural world, and a fascination of post-colonization. Tashina's originals are unmistakably her own, purposefully raw, lasting and hold an overwhelming presence of history and spirit.

Her most recent journey has come from her privileges in education and confidence in art. I have entered the world of Tribal Politics and Native American Public Health. Being born Native means you are automatically born into politics. Tashina’s most success and challenges in her life so far has come from the work in her Tribal Clinic. What keeps her continuing in the work of prevention is getting to assist in the healing journey of her family, community and Indian Country.

What are some of the challenges and/or rewards of this program?

Of course, writing for Professor Hentyle's Issues in Arts Politics was the most intense class I’ve ever taken, but I’m so thankful for the rigor and push. I feel like  However, challenges came in the form of growth. I grew so much and learned how to fight. I was able to witness Angela Davis speak!! I mean come on, I had so much agency to fight. I was able to get into Poetics of Violence with Fred Moten, I was unfolding and unraveling. I still can’t believe I was able to sit in rooms with real-life heroes.

What drew you to the MA in Arts Politics? 

First, it was being in New York City. I wanted a purposeful reason to live and work in New York. I was looking into Masters's programs and NYU Tisch was always in the back of my mind since my undergrad studio practice. The timing made sense, as I was transitioning in careers. I was needing a spark again to fuel new work. I applied to three programs (one was more studio-based and the other business-focused) and as I got closer to the decision I knew I needed the M.A. in Arts Politics because it blended the social work, education, Indian Country advocacy, and art I am doing. I was able to intertwine all my passions, an entanglement of "suffering". Passion comes from the word to suffer. I tirelessly hustled and through exhaustion built a practice for the writing and art I am doing now.

How did your experience in the program shape your work?

I always like to reflect on a more subtle memory, when a colleague from my cohort and I both decided to take a writing course together outside of Tisch second semester to explore more of the broader NYU school’s offering (which I highly suggest, I even utilized the entrepreneurial lab many times, if you can attend the women's founder lectures, do!). We were in critique and I have never really participated in a writing workshop before and I never explored writing beyond academic research or papers. This was the first time I was writing for myself. I am a confident, extroverted person in my art but writing is different. I remember shaking, barely able to read aloud. There so much intensity when I shared my words. But the feedback, one comment in particular from my cohort member and now life long friend stuck with me to this day. She told the room my stories had a “Beloved-by-the-great-Toni-Morrison-quality” and “my work is without walls.” I didn’t read books then and hadn’t known the incredible works of Toni Morrison yet, I didn’t have exposure to Authors or even Artists of Color on my very rural reservation. But I understood walls, we were at height of Trump’s scary walls, shattering walls and glass ceilings, and other silo metaphors for concealing, hiding and excluding and I was without walls. Both compliments are why I am in my current MFA in Creative Writing working in Fiction. That course was also the first time I was ever published!

https://confluence.gallatin.nyu.edu/sections/creative-nonfiction/firefighters-never-hesitate

https://www.tashinaemery.com/

Read Tashina's Humans of APP feature