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 two Indigenous women: PhD student Kirsten Lindquist (Métis Nation of Alberta), and Assistant Professor (MacEwan University) and PhD student Brittany Johnson (Beaver First Nation). Co-founders Dr. Kim TallBear (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate) and Dr. Savage Bear (Montreal Lake Cree Nation) remain as advisors to the show. 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

Kirsten Lindquist
Kirsten Lindquist Producer
Kirsten Lindquist (she/her & they/them) is a PhD student at the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta. She is a citizen of the Métis Nation of Alberta, with Cree-Métis and settler ancestry from the Moose Hills area, NE Alberta. Lindquist’s research focuses on relationality, governance, and sexual and gender diversity through arts and performance based practices. Kirsten has piloted alternative courses for the Faculty of Native Studies that integrate classroom, lab, and land-based learning experiences, such as Indigenous New Media and Indigenous Economies. Kirsten has been part of the Tipi Confessions production team since 2016. Their performance art and burlesque acts include the Indian Act Unitard and Pemmican Milkshake of the Beaver Hills Burlesque collective.
Brittany Johnson
Brittany JohnsonProducer
Brittany Johnson (she/her) is an Assistant Professor at MacEwan University and a PhD student at the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta. She is a member of the Beaver First Nation. Johnson’s research focuses on relationality through beadwork, burlesque, and sexual/reproductive justice. When she is not working on her academic pursuits, she is a busy mom of three. Johnson is also a published creative writer and singer/songwriter who is always happy to jam and make sweet, sweet music! As a long-time Tipi Confessions performer and collaborator, Brittany joined as co-producer in 2022, and also has been assisting the Indigenous Feminist Collective since 2020.

Co-Founders & Advisors

Kim TallBear
Kim TallBearCo-Founder
Kim TallBear is Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience, and Society, 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-founding Tipi Confessions. Dr. TallBear is a citizen of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate in South Dakota, USA. You can read her latest Substack posts at Unsettle, where she writes on Indigenous affairs, cultural politics and (de)colonization. Photo Credit: Steinhauer Photography
Savage Bear
Savage BearCo-Founder
Savage Bear is a citizen of the Montreal Lake Cree Nation. The Director for the McMaster Indigenous Research Institute (MIRI, an Assistant Professor within the Indigenous Studies Department and, also the National Director of Walls to Bridges; an education program bringing post-secondary education to incarcerated and formerly incarcerated folks. Prior to arriving at McMaster in 2021, Bear worked at the University of Alberta, where she was the Director of the Indigenous Women & Youth Resilience Project and the academic lead on ‘Indigenous Canada,’ a highly successful online course boasting over 560,000 learners; she was also an assistant professor of Native Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies.

An accomplished academic, Bear has made significant contributions to Indigenous scholarship and the national Indigenous education landscape since earning her PhD from the University of Alberta in 2016. Her dissertation, ‘Power in My Blood: Corporeal Sovereignty through the Praxis of an Indigenous Eroticanalysis’ won the highly coveted Governor General Gold Medal. In 2023 Bear was appointed to the Order of Canada for her exemplary achievement and positive impacts for transformative change in the areas of Indigenous rights, prison education and academic leadership.