Iremember in kindergarten, when I was about six-years-old, I became very conscious of my cultural identity in a way that I had never been before. I was the pale by-product of an Aussie father and a Tongan mother, who contrasted each other (literally), and the fact that I was the result of this union was something of a foreign concept to many people. Picture it: a brown-skinned woman picking up her white-skinned daughter from school. I remember a lot of my school peers, upon the striking revelation that I was Tongan, would hit me with the classic:
Indigenous Art Voices, We Are The Seeds
Her family is of Narragansett decent, and as a very young girl, Tailinh remembers joining her father, TChin (pronounced ‘Chin) at his art classes at the Rhode…