Sheldon Pierre Louis is a member of Okanagan Nation and began painting at an early age. He started selling his work when he was 11 and was trained to do murals at age 18. He comes from a family full of artists.

Artist's Statements

A lot of my work is based around environmental impact, advocating for clean water, but also heavily influenced by our traditional gathering: picking berries, digging roots, and being out on the land. In my family we’re often out on the land, practicing a lot of our traditional ceremonies. Certainly a lot of the imagery that comes through in my artwork is Sylix not just the traditional lifestyle, but how we live it in today’s context.

We Are Medicine

UNDRIP Article 25

Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain and strengthen their distinctive spiritual relationship with their traditionally owned or otherwise occupied and used lands, territories, waters and coastal seas, and other resources and to uphold their responsibilities to future generations in this regard.

UNDRIP Article 13

1. Indigenous peoples have the right to revitalize, use, develop and transmit to future generations their histories, languages, oral traditions, philosophies, writing systems, and literature, and to designate and retain their own names for communities, places and persons.

UNDRIP Article 23

Indigenous peoples have the right to determine and develop priorities and strategies for exercising their right to development. In particular, indigenous peoples have the right to be actively involved in developing and determining health, housing and other economic and social programmes affecting them and, as far as possible, to administer such programmes through their own institutions.

UNDRIP Article 12

1. Indigenous peoples have the right to manifest, practise, develop and teach their spiritual and religious traditions, customs and ceremonies; the right to maintain, protect, and have access in privacy to their religious and cultural sites; the right to the use and control of their ceremonial objects; and the right to the repatriation of their human remains.

2. States shall seek to enable the access and/or repatriation of ceremonial objects and human remains in their possession through fair, trans- parent and effective mechanisms developed in conjunction with indigenous peoples concerned.