The arts project that was the inception to The Melawmen Collective started as a indigenous youth art project. A friend of Morgan’s kept saying he needed to connect her to a curator in the area, who then expressed that she was working with an artist on themes of space, territory, boundaries and narrative, specifically to Indigenous peoples, with a focus on Indigenous Youth. This is how she met artist Jayce Salloum who asked her to co-facilitate an arts project that would explore storytelling, identity, collaborative painting and the Indigenous contemporary culture.
“It really was the foundation of our work as The Melawmen Collective. The collective was created because we were coming close to the ending of these workshops, and the youth kept asking, ‘what is going to happen after these end?’ We didn’t know what to say… we knew it was needed and the work needed to carry on, so we decided after that, to found what we called: The Melawmen Collective. ‘Melawmen’ in Secwepemcstin (secwepemc language) means ‘medicine’. We thought of our collective as ‘gathering’ medicine, to heal, to continue to share, and we have been doing so since then.”
