Our Story

Sexy storytelling, performances, and anonymous audience confessions. Sex, (almost) everybody does it and (almost) nobody talks about it — except at Tipi Confessions.

Tipi Confessions is a live storytelling show on sex, sexuality, and gender, featuring performance and anonymous audience confessions. We highlight Indigenous, decolonial, political, humourous, creative, feminist, queer, and/or educational perspectives. Our shows have showcased spoken word, personal narrative, erotica fiction, burlesque, live musicians, and short theatre performances.

Tipi Confessions is produced by three Indigenous women: University of Alberta professors Kim TallBear (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate) and Tracy Bear (Nehiyaw’iskwew from Montreal Lake Cree Nation), and Native Studies PhD student Kirsten Lindquist (Cree-Métis). We are an offshoot of the popular Austin, Texas show, BedPost Confessions, founded in 2010.

Tipi Confessions is not only sexy. Our audiences are reminded that sex is always political. The Tipi Confessions enterprise also serves as a “research-creation laboratory” at the University of Alberta, Faculty of Native Studies. This is a space of creative experimentation and action research, both informed by and furthering existing research and teaching in decolonial and critical sexualities.

History of our parent show, BedPost Confessions, Austin, TX

When sex bloggers Julie Gillis and Sadie Smythe met sex podcaster Mia Martina in the fall of 2010, they envisioned a new kind of show for the Live Music Capital of the World: one that explores sex and sexuality through lenses of humor and vulnerability (without sparing any racy details). That show is BedPost Confessions, which merges entertainment, ethics, and education.

The title was fitting, since it was the confessions—written and submitted at each show by anonymous audience members, then read by the producers—that stole the show and the audience’s heart. If the confessions are the heart of each show, then the featured performers are the soul. At both BedPost and Tipi Confessions, we hear from the hilarious, heart-wrenching, and titillating souls of standup comedians, musicians, magicians, memoirists, academics, sex educators, storytellers, and dancers.

“decolonizing sexuality, and sex positivity and healing more broadly, is key to curbing violence in our society in both Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities”.

Kim TallBear

Producers

Kim TallBear
Kim TallBearProducer
Kim TallBear is Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience & Environment, Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta. Building on lessons learned about how settler states engage in biological colonialism, Dr. TallBear also studies the colonization of Indigenous sexuality. She combines anthropological approaches with community-based research, arts-based research, and performance, including co-producing Tipi Confessions. Dr. TallBear is a citizen of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate in South Dakota, USA. She blogs at www.criticalpolyamorist.com. You can follow her on Twitter @KimTallBear and @CriticalPoly.
Tracy Bear
Tracy BearProducer
Tracy Bear is a rabble-rouser, erotic warrior, Nehiyaw iskwêw (Cree woman) from Montreal Lake First Nation in northern Saskatchewan. She has a PhD in English and Film Studies and her dissertation: “Power In My Blood: Corporeal Sovereignty Through a Praxis of Indigenous Eroticanalysis” won the Governor General Gold Medal award in 2016.

She is Director of the McMaster Indigenous Research Institute and Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences.

Tracy has been volunteering and teaching in prisons on and off since 2010 and is developing and offering courses in partnership with the University of Alberta and the Edmonton Institute for Women.

Kirsten Lindquist
Kirsten Lindquist Producer
Kirsten Lindquist is of Cree-Métis and settler ancestry from rural north-east Alberta, and is currently a PhD student in Indigenous Studies at the Faculty of Native Studies. She introduced and taught a new selected topics course to the Faculty, Indigenous New Media, which integrates both classroom and lab learning experiences. In her role as co-producer for Tipi Confessions, she is also a research assistant for Relab, a research-creation laboratory. Kirsten moonlights as noobie burlesque dancer Pemmican Milkshake of Beaver Hills Burlesque collective.
Donia Mounsef
Donia MounsefDramaturge
Donia is the ‘in house’ dramaturge for Tipi Confessions and is Professor of Drama at the University of Alberta. She is a poet, playwright, and dramaturge. She is the author of 3 plays : Sleeping Giant (StageLab, 2018), Trajet Dit (Theatre YES and Unithéâtre) and Ayyulshun: Soft under Feet (StageLab, 2018). And 2 poetry collections – Slant of Arils (Damaged Goods Press, 2015) and Plimsoll Lines (Urban Farmhouse Press, 2018). Her poetry and performance poetry has been published and anthologized in Harpoon Review, Pacific Review, La Vague Journal, Bookends Review, Gravel Magazine, The Lavender Review, Linden Avenue, Toronto Quarterly, Skin to Skin, Iris Brown, Poetry Quarterly, 40 Below Anthology, etc.

Behind The Scenes