Amerikin Carnival
A ritual hOMEcoming in
Three MOVEMENTS
Amerikin
Carnival
A ritual HOMEcoming in
Three MOVEMENTS
“Carnival is an art, an act of defiance, a cultural tradition that grows stronger every time we answer the call and force our bodies to move. Carnival carries on the tradition of slaves who rejected such a title because they knew the power of their physical and spiritual being; who seized their freedom in fields through movement, unafraid. Carnival celebrates our joys, our pains, together.” —Kristin Braswell
Amerikin Carnival is a multidisciplinary storytelling migration that aims to connect people to the Great Lakes waters; celebrate Great Lakes people, cultures, and histories; and imagine livable futures of reciprocity. Through performances, prayer walks & paddles, workshops, and story circles taking place across the western Great Lakes in summer 2026, Amerikin Carnival draws people together from segregated communities to consider what it means to be American in this 250th Anniversary.
Dates & Locations
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Sunday, May 17 – Smelt Parade
2:30-3:15pm | Artmaking for Americas Wake at the Lift Bridge
3:15-3:30pm | America’s Last Act – A Clown Show at the Lift Bridge
3:30-4:30pm | Funeral March & Resistance Singing along the Lakewalk
4:30-5pm | America’s Last Act – A Clown Show at Gichi-ode' Akiing Park
Saturday & Sunday, June 13 & 14 – Livable Futures Prayer Walk
Details to come…
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Details to come…
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A Note About the Name “America”:
America is named after Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian explorer who first proposed that the lands discovered in 1492 were part of a new continent, rather than Asia. In 1507, German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller mapped these new lands, using the feminized version of Vespucci's first name to label the continent of South America. The name “America” formally refers to all countries of the Americas, yet in the United States, “America” is commonly used to refer to the U.S., thus “America” is used here to reflect many Americans’ U.S.-centric view of self.
Wake
[What binds us blinds us.]
America is in a death spiral. This last attempt at greatness that we are witnessing in full-throttle imperial fantasy reveals the American dream and promises of prosperity to be paper thin—a mere mask for the horrors that have always lied within. With death occurring all around us—and with the death of America being essential to the recovery of life on earth—how we grieve the loss of lives under American empire as we honor the gifts America has given us says everything about who we might become after America is gone. Let us give wake to legacies of complicity strewn throughout American history as we awaken other imaginative possibilities for co-creating dignity, safety, and belonging.
Enter Sacred Clowns, Street Preachers, Song Leaders, Bioremediation Sculptors, and Remembrance Shrine Makers.
Walk
[What breaks us remakes us.]
As much as we’d like to break away from the systems that exploit and entrap us, we can’t…not alone anyway. Our lives have come to depend on machines, monetary systems, and media that everyday poison us and the earth. The haunting of historical harms hides in our nervous systems. We have glimpses of life on the other side of generational impoverishment and disempowerment, of widespread healing from dis-ease and despair, yet it feels nearly impossible to get there. Let us walk the walk of transformation from isolation and addiction to recovery and reciprocity. Only together can we traverse the long, perilous path back toward right relationship, where all life is protected and respected. Every step becomes a prayer for collective healing and awakening of spiritual strength.
Enter Walkers, Paddlers, Performers, Poets.
Weave
[What mends us blends us.]
Those of us left out of the American dream have the most knowledge about economies of ecological care and mutual aid, regenerative foods and medicines, cohabitation and crisis transformation. We can rebuild our basis of belonging, not by what and how much we own/take but by what and how much we give/release. Let us weave together our ancient cultural practices and create new rhythms for Indigenous realities.
Enter Healers, Storytellers, Makers, Menders.
The United States poses the greatest threat to the survival of life on Earth.
Like the automobile, hamburger, firearm, and fireworks, industrial empire was not born in America but perfected here. In its 250 years of existence as a nation, the United States has not been expanding its territory for only 3 years (in those years of 1854-1857, the federal government was intensifying its forced marches and military confinement of Native tribes onto reservations). In our endless war, theft of resources, and subjugation of peoples, the United States has caused more collapse of communities and ecosystems than any other society in human history. In our militarism, materialism, and manifest destiny (the "triple evils" identified by Martin Luther King, Jr.) lie the seeds of our total destruction.
Yet America is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions.
Rights are being revoked. Pathways to prosperity are bottoming out. Poisons pump through every body. Media is manic. Leaders are losing. Terror tugs our heartstrings with panic and paranoia. Addiction of every kind is out of control. Institutions are freezing. Ethical professionals are being eliminated. Wars waste resources beyond imagination. AI endangers reality. Environmental protections are pulverized. Members of nearly every group are being persecuted. Abuse is absolute. The power of the people to move the needle of progress is being policed to the fullest. Wild weather whips through the grid faster than we can gather. Corporations control every facet of our lives. The promise of heaven has turned into a hellscape so insidious we’ve barely noticed it creeping in.
In short, our unmetabolized histories of exclusion and extraction have fully come home to roost.
The Great Lakes are home to stories that foretold these conditions.
Around 1,500 years ago, while the Anishinaabe were living peacefully along the Northeast coast of North America, seven prophets came to the people and left them with predictions of the future, now called the Seven Fires Prophecy. The prophets instructed the people to rise up and migrate inland or they would be destroyed. They told of the coming of the light skinned race and said, “Beware if the light skinned race comes wearing the face of death. The face of brotherhood and the face of death look very much alike. If they come carrying a weapon, if they come in suffering, they could fool you. You shall know that the face they wear is one of death if the rivers run with poison and fish become unfit to eat.” These prophecies prompted the Anishinaabe to begin their generations-long Great Migration to the “land where food grows on water” (manoomin, wild rice, is found throughout the Great Lakes bioregion). It is here that the Anishinaabe Three Fires Confederacy (Ottawa, Potawatomi, and Ojibwe) created a vast, powerful homeland (Anishinaabewaki) and experienced the fulfillment of all the prophecies.
The Great Lakes are what made America “great.”
The Great Lakes have been the birthplace of cultural flourishing for generations. For time immemorial, the Great Lakes waterways provided travel routes and a meeting ground for tribal (and eventually European) nations to come together. During American slavery, the Great Lakes provided crucial routes on the Underground Railroad to Canada. The Great Lakes continuous waterways from the American heartland to the Atlanta Ocean helped industries like agriculture, electrical transmission, iron mining, steel manufacturing, oil pipelining, and automobile manufacturing rapidly expand across the continent, usher in industrial production at mass scale, and establish global trade. The Great Lakes became a destination for African Americans during the Great Migration as auto plants in Southeast Michigan built America’s middle class, became the “Arsenal of Democracy” for weapons production during WWII, and paved the way for U.S. global supremacy. And throughout the 20th century, the Great Lakes helped transform the labor movement with the Flint Sit-Down Strike, shaped civil rights with the Niagara Movement, saw the birth of the modern environmental movement, and made significant strides in the Indigenous rights movement.
The Great Lakes hold 95% of the U.S.’s surface freshwater (a nonrenewable gift of the glaciers); as such, they are known as “the heart” of Turtle Island (North America) by the Anishinaabe. What we do in the Great Lakes ripples out across the continent.
Carnival means “farewell to flesh.”
Originating in the 17th and 18th centuries in Brazil, Tobago, and Trinidad, Carnival (the world’s largest party) blended European pre-Lenten masquerade balls with African rituals, music, and dance. Enslaved people created Carnival celebrations as a form of defiance, mocking the elites and celebrating their resilience. Over centuries, Carnival has developed into a vibrant expression of freedom; a place where old hierarchies are flipped on their head, ancestors are danced with, and ancient cultures spill into the streets. Carnival celebrations around the world provide a counter to the brutal history of the American circus. And in a time when divisions are hardening and many of us are forgetting how we got here, Carnival helps us reclaim our mother cultures from erasure and shake loose rigid identities.
We are in a time of spiritual reckoning.
The last prophet of the Anishinaabe said, “In the time of the Seventh Fire, the light skinned race will be given a choice between two roads. If they choose the right road, then the Seventh Fire will light the Eighth and final Fire, an eternal fire of peace, love, brotherhood and sisterhood. If the light skinned race makes the wrong choice of the roads, then the destruction which they brought with them in coming to this country will come back and cause much suffering and death to all Earth’s people.” Anishinaabe people believe we are in the time of the Seventh Fire, a time when we might still be able to deliver our society from the scorched Earth path if we can retrace our steps to find what was lost, rekindle old ways, and midwife a rebirth of many nations that are guided by respect for all living things. If we can say farewell to militarism, materialism, and manifest destiny, we might still be able to walk the green Earth path.
Amerikin Carnival calls us into reconnection with our stories, histories, legacies, and great spiritual mysteries.
Page Art Credits:
Kin Carnival Collages by Thomlin Swan