Mitch Miyagawa, Community Artist and Founder

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I live in traditional Snuneymuxw/ Coast Salish territory, on Gabriola Island, on 5 acres of forest and wetland. My family has been here 7 years, moving here from Whitehorse, where my life partner Angela grew up and my two sons, Tomio (16) and Sam (14) were born.

My family lines come from islands, the Japanese and the British Isles. The ancestral spirituality of my Nikkei identity is in Shinto, the indigenous folk belief of Japan. In Shinto beliefs, the world is alive with kami, nature-god-energies of the sun, the ocean, the forests and the animals.

What are the root causes for the current calamities we face? I think the root is rootlessness: disconnection from our bodies, from each other, from our histories, and from nature. It’s time to grow some new roots, plant some new seeds. I know that spreading seeds is my purpose.

My current mentor is Gary Kekoa Dillon, an artist and ceremonialist on Gabriola. My advisor is David Spiritwolf Bodaly, traditional weaver and knowledge seeker/keeper, from Snuneynuxw. I previously mentored with Penny Wassman, NVC Trainer in Cowichan Bay, BC.

In the community, I’m a Board Member with the Poetry Gabriola Society, and a Trustee at the Gabriola Commons.

“Practice time” for me currently means plenty of play time, exploring dance, painting, and music.  I’m outside as much as I can. I spend a lot of my time tending to my relations, with the land, the plants and animals, with the spirits, with my family, and with beloved friends.
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‍Artist Bio and Intentions
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I have worked as a creator and producer in community arts for 20 years. I'm a multi-disciplinary artist who has also done professional and award-winning work in theatre, documentary, and essay. My artistic highlights include Plum Tree, a widely-produced play about Japanese-Candian internment, and A Sorry State (2012), an award-winning documentary about government apologies for state-sanctioned racism (also a cover essay in Walrus Magazine in 2012).

Alongside my artistic career, I am a group facilitator, trained at the Center for Nonviolent Communication and the Justice Institute of BC, with an emphasis on transformative process.

I identify myself as a community arts practitioner. My purpose is to bring individuals together in transformative experiences that open them to a felt-sense of interconnectedness. Through this, I am supporting and leading a community-level movement to weave nature and culture back together.

My most recent large-scale project was the direction and production of 3 annual community arts events with the Gabriola Arts Council, from 2017 to 2019. I created the new multidisciplinary community event, Cultivate Music + Theatre + Art Festival in 2018.

In its second year, Cultivate ran three stages at the Gabriola Commons, with 2-day lineup, 700 tickets sold, on a magical festival grounds and a great community vibe.

"Gabriola's Cultivate Festival is spirit in action, revealing the colour-splashed, wildly creative, wonder-filled, interconnected, joyous, playful, peaceful community and world we generate when we gather together.” ~ JW, Cultivate participant

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My current artistic project is to experiment with:
- Small-scale hybrid events, formats and technologies that are adaptable to challenging physical restrictions
- More collaborative, equitable, and land/season-based models and approaches for production and organization.
- An artistic process that incorporates relationship with land and my Shinto cultural heritage.
- An artistic identity – Maji Events – that serves as an organizational container.
- highly collaborative artistic partnerships with other community artists
- inter-generational approaches – seeking wisdom from older people, serving and listening to younger people.