Iako'tsi:rareh Amanda Lickers

Amanda is a designer, pedagogue and multi-media artist whose work reflects the interconnected relationship of land-body sovereignty. Nurturing her creative practice through land-based pedagogy and arts-based visual storytelling, her work has been exhibited at the Seneca Iroquois National Museum in Salamanca, NY and featured in public art events in Montréal, QC such as Festival TransAmerique and Festival Phenomena. Amanda's co-directed short documentary-futurisms film titled Our Ways (2022) has screened in Toronto, ON, Ōtāku, New Zealand, Montréal, QC and London, England. A budding hide tanner, Amanda is a member of the Buckskin Babes Urban Moose Hide Tanning Collective producing fish skin leather and bone tools amongst honing other land-based skills. She has completed her first Artist Residency at Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity's inaugural Hide Tanning & Parfleche Residency in the fall of 2024.

An emerging curator, she is the 2023-2025 Indigenous Land Restitution Research-Creation Fellow at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. An Indigenous co-design consultant, Amanda has worked with museologists, curators, architects, archaeologists and designers to implement Indigenous design principles and decolonize contemporary approaches to the built environment - on stolen lands. She continues to advocate for cultural safeguarding practices which uphold Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination, looking to land-based methods and Indigenous technologies to guide the collaborative process.

As a pedagogical consultant she has worked across various levels of the education sector on a diversity of mandates. From designing and implementing Indigenized curricula with land-based, experiential learning methodologies to consulting on Strategic Planning to address institutional gaps, Amanda has worked inter-collegiately across Anglophone CEGEP and University environments. Currently a Master's student at Concordia University, Amanda’s research-creation reflects on onkwehón:we land-based futures weaving visual storytelling, Indigenous sciences, necropolitics and design sovereignty.