
ASKO is a teaching lodge that you enter into with hesitation and humility. It is an immersive experience in which, if you bring an open heart and an open mind, you will learn to listen in a different register and come out of the lodge with a different perspective than you entered. ASKO is a coming together –a meeting of emotional and intellectual knowledge, a meeting of the heartbeat and the sound of thought travelling through space. It is a place that teaches us how to listen to the energies and forces that continually create nêhiyawak worlds in spite of and despite the noise of colonialism.
It is a storied meeting place of the drum and the rattle.
Marek Tyler is nêhiyaw and Scottish/Irish, and while his name is on the project, ASKO is a gathering place of many collaborators and advisors. In some ways, Tyler is an oskâpêwis, listening deeply to the creative forces of his relatives. He follows the guidance of his câpân (great-great-grandfather), his mom, artist, educator and Knowledge Keeper, Linda Young of Onion Lake Cree Nation, his uncle Dale Awasis and advisor Diana Steinhauer. ASKO’s community doesn’t end here, though. ASKO includes the kinetics of pow-wow dancers following the heartbeat of the big drum and embraces the choreography of prairie chickens telling the stories of the grasslands. It is the voice of the wind and the songs of the bright blue sky.
Taking this all inside, Tyler responds with ASKO, a creative offering in the form of a soundscape echoing nêhiyaw life and ways of living. ASKO foregrounds these energies, inviting the listener into a rich gathering of the nêhiyaw creative practice across time and space, generations, and forms of life.