About the Sovereign Collectif

---

Jacqueline M. St. Pierre — who sometimes steps onto the stage as Stella Vandal — works at the crossroads where land, story, and rebellion braid themselves into something that feels half incantation, half investigative report. Her writing moves like wind across Manitoulin’s tallgrass: incisive, but sharp enough to slice through pretense. She threads ecology with politics, Indigenous sovereignty with settler accountability, grief with grit. Every sentence seems suspicious of easy answers and always looking for the heartbeat under the headline.

Her art carries the same restless pulse. Canvases, flat beadwork, natural pigments, raw silk, and found organic objects — she gathers materials like someone collecting evidence of a living world that still remembers our promises, even when we forget. Her beadwork carries the lineage of her ancestress grandmothers, all skilled needle workers, and her canvases and compositions reclaim space from the male gaze. Her installations sit lightly on the land but carry weight: reminders of resilience, agency, and the stubborn hope that care and reciprocity can still be learned.

And then there’s Stella Vandal — her comedic, sermonizing, trickster-as-educator persona who saunters into rooms to talk about Relationship Anarchy with the swagger of someone who knows love can’t be fenced in by colonial bureaucracy. Stella turns theory into a campfire story, a stand-up set, a subversive little prayer. She dismantles the romance-industrial complex with a wink, critiques hierarchy with a belly laugh, and calls people back to community care, mutual aid, and decolonial love without ever sounding like she’s preaching. It’s pedagogy incognito as mischief, rebellion clad in  joy.

Together, Jacqueline and Stella form a single through-line — artist, journalist, advocate, trickster — using story, beadwork, canvas, and satire to carve out space for more honest relationships: with land, with one another, and with the complicated selves we’re still becoming.

Dakota Lanktree carries Manitoulin Island in her bones—the long light, the limestone, the slow-breathing certainty of the North. She grew up amid those ancient waters before drifting south, finally rooting herself in Hamilton, a city with its own raw pulse and furnace-heart.

For seven years she helmed a small commercial and corporate video production company, learning the quiet alchemy of story: how light bends around truth, how an edit can reveal the spine of a moment. But the corporate world could never contain her restlessness. So she turned her lens toward the human condition, toward the people whose stories rarely get the dignity of a close-up.

Documentary became her terrain—wide, unruly, and real. Dakota stepped into it with the steadiness of someone who has always known the land teaches you to listen before you speak. Her work has earned her two Hamilton Independent Media Awards, including Best Environmental Journalist and Best Social Justice and Human Rights Journalist for Harperman: A Dissident Serenade.

Today, she continues to chase the stories humming beneath the noise, drawn to the places where justice, land, and lived experience braid together. In every frame, you can feel it: the island kid who learned early that truth, like water, is meant to move.

Ukumbwa Bio: 

Ukumbwa Sauti, M.Ed. is a Consultant, Educator, Facilitator and Program Developer on issues of Anti-Racism, Anti-Patriarchy, Men's Work, Consent and Culture. He has worked with religious organizations, cultural groups and regional organizations and has taught in higher education for 16 years engaging issues of Race, Gender, Environmental issues, Media and Culture. Ukumbwa has been a member and supportive of numerous local ,national and international organizations and movements advocating for Pan-Africanism, Anti-Racism, Relationship, Sexual and Intimacy safety and education and Men's Development. Ukumbwa has presented across New England, USAmerica, California, Toronto and Barbados. He has worked as Social Media Director for Voice Male Magazine and an organizer for the Greater Boston Men's Network and is currently the moderator for the Men's Work Initiative.

Ukumbwa is an initiated Elder in the Dagara tradition from Burkina Faso. He does work as an educator of Dagara and African culture, numerology, readings, ritual work and spiritual counseling.

“ While  so many people, at least in the United States Settler Colony (we can talk about what I mean by that) don't actually think race and oppression are important and salient issues to address, so many of us are very clear that it is work that must be done, that must be validated and engaged and made more common and normalized.

More often than not, it seems that a lot of people recoil from and avoid frank and authentic (therefore, most probably more effective) conversations about race, racism, patriarchy and oppression. It is often said that that response is natural, given the difficult and uncomfortable nature of these kinds of conversations. Many times these conversations get undercut by people afraid of allowing strong emotions to be aired during the conversation. To many people, it is inevitable that strong emotions will arise - fear, shame, anger, embarrassment, self-loathing, indignation.

And if we are going to be serious about dealing with systemic oppression and ultimately toward dismantling racist and patriarchal systems and structures, we must be ready to deal honestly, directly and consistently to have profound, insightful and revelatory conversation toward actively and forthrightly creating the necessary changes in our communities, medical and health industries, the policing and justice systems along with housing, education, business and media and communications systems.

We must be motivated, committed and willing to be vulnerable, in our full integrity and to hold and move through difficulty, discomfort and heavy emotional embodiments. Doing the work effectively and substantively requires this principled commitment. 

This is the nature of the work.”

Zena Hagerty moves through the creative world like a comet—bright, unclassifiable, and trailed by a long history of artistic upheaval. A renowned singer–songwriter and multi-media impresario, she is best known today as the host of My Heart Remembers, a podcast that lives in that uncanny territory beyond culture, where the nominal collides with the phenomenal. Each episode is an invitation to slip past the surface of things: a warm cup of tea served with a soul cookie, as she dives into the esoteric, the origins of creativity, and the luminous threads that bind humanity. For Zena, the question has never been what is art? but what is the artist’s job?—and she answers it plainly: to spark the creative spirit in others.

Her life’s work is inseparable from Sublimatus, the ever-evolving artistic force she co-founded with Walter G. Peter. Part experiment, part ecosystem, part myth, Sublimatus has taken shape as a band, a gallery, a performance engine, a radio show, an events space—refusing definition, because definition is too small. Its influence has rippled through southern Ontario and far beyond, seeding scenes, inspiring movements, and igniting imaginations.

Across decades, Sublimatus carved out a constellation of creative spaces:
• New York Bagel Café on Locke Street (1987–89)
• Synagogue Studio—affectionately known as the ZenaGog—at Cannon and Bay (1989–93)
• Sublimatus Studio on Vine Street (1993–95)
• Sublimatus Dundas Studio at 100 King Street East (1993–97)
• Sublimatus Gallery on James North (2003–06)

These weren’t just rooms; they were laboratories where sound, image, and performance bent their own rules. One of their legendary ventures, the 1994 Reconnaissance improv series in the Dundas studio, became a kind of birthplace. What started as a ten-week experiment bloomed into a creative surge that helped launch an improv-driven electronic music scene in Hamilton—drawing in artists like Rich Oddie and Christina Sealey (later Orphx), members of Legion of Green Men, David Foster (Huren), Johnny Dark, and a parade of wild-hearted collaborators whose influence would go international.

Zena’s artistry, whether sung, spoken, curated, or conjured into space, continues to operate on that threshold where wonder meets craft. My Heart Remembers, produced by Dakota Lanktree and anchored by the Sublimatus theme of the same name, is simply her latest portal—another invitation to step deeper into the mystery she’s spent a lifetime tending.Her work traces the fault lines where systems bruise the psyche. She teaches people how to feel their way back to themselves, to activism that won’t devour them, to DEIA approaches rooted in humanity rather than performance metrics. Known for her sharp, clear-eyed work on decolonizing feminism, Stephens blends rigor with softness—never afraid to question the frameworks we inherit, and always willing to imagine something braver.

Online, she keeps the conversations alive on Instagram and Substack, where she writes about liberation with the precision of a scholar and the warmth of someone who has walked the fire herself. Through her online healing community, newsletter, retreats, and workshops, she offers spaces where people can breathe, learn, unravel, and rebuild. Her voice also weaves into wider dialogues, including podcast conversations such as her appearance with Zawn Villines on Liberating Motherhood.

In every medium, Stephens’ compass points toward the same horizon: a world where liberation is not an abstract dream, but a daily practice—felt in the body, held in community, and lived without apology.

Desireé B. Stephens moves through the world like someone intent on prying open locked doors—not with force, but with a steady, tender insistence that healing is possible when we stop pretending we’re whole. A trauma-informed decolonization educator and counselor, she is the founder of Make Shi(f)t Happen, a B-Corp built on the unglamorous, radical belief that equity and liberation start with truth-telling and “whole self-healing,” not corporate checklists or hollow gestures.

Her work traces the fault lines where systems bruise the psyche. She teaches people how to feel their way back to themselves, to activism that won’t devour them, to DEIA approaches rooted in humanity rather than performance metrics. Known for her sharp, clear-eyed work on decolonizing feminism, Stephens blends rigor with softness—never afraid to question the frameworks we inherit, and always willing to imagine something braver.

Online, she keeps the conversations alive on Instagram and Substack, where she writes about liberation with the precision of a scholar and the warmth of someone who has walked the fire herself. Through her online healing community, newsletter, retreats, and workshops, she offers spaces where people can breathe, learn, unravel, and rebuild. Her voice also weaves into wider dialogues, including podcast conversations such as her appearance with Zawn Villines on Liberating Motherhood.

In every medium, Stephens’ compass points toward the same horizon: a world where liberation is not an abstract dream, but a daily practice—felt in the body, held in community, and lived without apology.

Wayward Girls Studio was founded by Jason Helm. Having a choice between continuing education at the Ontario Academy of Art (now OCAD) or entering Funeral Service Education, he took the pragmatic path and ending up apprenticing his Funeral Directing License at a former home for unwed mothers in Scarborough, ON. Leaving his chosen profession and exploring opportunities and experiences across the country, South America, Europe and Eastern Africa a corporate position landed him in central Ontario. There he started putting the pieces of the original cooperative studio into place. Relationships with knowledgeable locals expanded his knowledge of wild foraging, introduced him to fur trapping and whole system ecology while working with locally sourced materials made into finished form. An autodidact, Jason expanded his passions and their applications in garment making, leather craft, practical accessories and old world workmanship. Jason now shares his knowledge and skills with the desire to help others learn skills of interest, share ideas and access to creativity through partnerships, sharing processes publicly and offering workshops.