Streaming from June 20th – June 27th, 2025

This National Indigenous Peoples Day, Vtape celebrates the work of Dene and British artist Christiana Latham. Her moving image practice blends animation, found footage, and digital manipulation to pass down family stories and cultural teachings across generations.

Latham’s distinctive style remixes snippets of cartoons, internet ephemera, and archival material. Throughout her work, she weaves in family recordings and Powwow music to create layered, contemporary forms of storytelling.

“Instead of spreading a legend through the traditional storytelling methods of our Elders,” Latham writes, “I elected to employ a modern tool of communication to spread my story of choice.”

The Jingle Dress, Christiana Latham, 2010, 2:05 minutes, colour

The jingle dress originated in Whitefish Bay, ON, Canada. It is said that a Chief’s granddaughter was very ill, and the medicine woman was unable to help her. One night, the Chief had a vision. He saw a girl dancing with shells on her dress, and the sounds carried up to the Creator. The sound was pleasing to the Creator, and he then healed the man’s granddaughter. When the Chief woke from his vision, he had his wife make the dress and dance in it. His Granddaughter was healed!

Audio description: The audio used in this video is the song Jingle Dress Dance – “Watch these ladies…” by Northern Cree Singers. The audio includes drumming, calling dancers into motion. Layered with high, sharp vocals, the song honours the Jingle Dress Dance.

Christiana Latham is a multidisciplinary artist of Dene and British descent, originally from Aklavik, Northwest Territories. Her work reflects a Northern Indigenous perspective, often drawing on her Dene heritage. In 2015, she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Multimedia Arts and Design Technologies, with a minor in printmaking, from the Alberta College of Art and Design. Latham’s work has been exhibited in galleries and screened at film festivals around the world, including the selection of Jingle Dress for the 2010 imagineNATIVE festival and the Gallery of Alberta Media Arts (GAMA) at Calgary’s EPCOR Centre in 2016.

Image credit: Jingle Dress, Christiana Latham (2010)