Moter's Day

Owner & Artist

Katherin Joyette is an Afro-Indigenous artist, storyteller, and founder of Livity Tree Art. Her work is rooted in cultural memory and resistance, weaving together the ancestral threads of the Caribbean, Africa, and the Americas. Through painting, writing, and creative activism, she reclaims erased histories and honors the resilience of Black and Indigenous peoples who survived genocide, enslavement, and forced misclassification.

Her art carries deep spiritual and ancestral symbolism—whether through the Tree of Life, Mahamaya, or her goddess series—each piece is both prayer and protest. Inspired by traditions of matriarchal sovereignty, Katherin’s practice confronts the colonial legacies that redefined dark-skinned Natives as “Negro” under laws like the 1924 Racial Integrity Act, and amplifies the voices of Caribbean and American Aboriginal women whose stories were buried under empire.

For Katherin, art is not just creation—it is remembrance, healing, and resistance. Her pieces invite viewers into dialogue with their own ancestral roots, urging them to unlearn colonial narratives and embrace the wisdom of Indigenous ways of being. Through Livity Tree Art, she creates sustainable, conscious art that bridges past and future, spirit and matter, resistance and beauty.

Art Symbolism and Stories:

The Aboriginal Cacique (Tribal Chief)

Cycles of Resistance

The spiral goddess has appeared across cultures and millennia as humanity's earliest representation of the divine feminine—the creatrix, the earth mother, the keeper of sacred mysteries. In "The Aboriginal Cacique," she manifests not in her traditional freedom, but with her hands bound behind her back, reflecting the lived reality of indigenous women across the globe who carry ancient wisdom while navigating modern colonialism's lasting wounds.

Her title invokes the "Cacique"—the Indigenous Caribbean leaders whose very existence has been written out of history, much like the systematic erasure of indigenous women's voices, bodies, and sovereignty. The triple spiral blazing at her womb center represents the threefold goddess—maiden, mother, and crone—and the three realms of land, sea, and sky. It pulses with creative force, suggesting that even bound, she remains a portal of life, culture, and ancestral memory. The ouroboros—the ancient serpent devouring its tail—wraps her in an eternal circle, symbolizing both the cyclical nature of oppression and the infinite resilience of indigenous peoples. It represents wholeness and completion, destruction and recreation occurring simultaneously. Her bondage is temporary; the cycles she embodies are eternal. She is trapped yet whole, silenced yet speaking through symbols that predate her oppressors, carrying forward what cannot be extinguished.

Livity Tree of Life

The Wood of Life

The Livity Tree is carved from the spirit of Lignum Vitae—literally "wood of life"—the sacred hardwood native to the Caribbean and national tree of the Bahamas. Within its dense, resilient trunk, masculine and feminine bodies embrace in eternal union, representing the two halves of the whole, the divine balance from which all creation flows. This tree roots deep into Caribbean soil and stretches its branches toward the heavens, embodying the axis that connects all realms of existence.

The Lignum Vitae is no ordinary tree. Its wood is among the hardest and densest in the world, so heavy it sinks in water, so durable it has been called "ironwood." For centuries, Caribbean peoples recognized its sacred properties—its resin heals, its strength endures, its flowers bloom in brilliant blue like pieces of sky fallen to earth. The Taíno and Arawak peoples revered the great trees of the Caribbean as cosmic pillars, particularly the ceiba, but the Lignum Vitae carries its own medicine: the tree that cannot be easily broken, the wood that outlasts empires.

In Rastafarian philosophy, "Livity" means living life force, the divine energy coursing through all creation, the practice of righteous living in harmony with natural law. The Lignum Vitae becomes the perfect embodiment of Livity—indigenous to Caribbean lands, impossible to conquer, healing in its essence. The masculine and feminine carved within its trunk speak to the completeness of Jah, the sacred androgyny of the divine, the truth that balance and union are our natural state. Rooted in Bahamian and Caribbean earth, reaching toward Zion, holding lovers at its heart—this is the Tree of Life that grew here first, that belongs here, that remembers everything.

Sekhmet (Egyptian Lion Goddess)

The Lion of Zion

Sekhmet rises in fury and majesty—the ancient Egyptian lion goddess of war, healing, and divine retribution. She stands crowned with her solar disk, the uraeus serpent coiled at her brow, ready to strike down injustice with the fire of Ra himself. Behind her, the Eye of Horus watches eternal, the symbol of protection, royal power, and wholeness restored after being shattered and made complete again. At her throat rests the ankh, the key of life, the union of masculine and feminine, the breath of immortality held in her keeping.

But this Sekhmet wears the colors of liberation: red for the blood shed in resistance and the fire of revolution; gold for the wealth stolen and the crown reclaimed; green for the fertile earth and the promise of renewal. These are the colors of the Rastafarian faith and the Ethiopian flag—the only African nation never colonized, the seat of the Solomonic dynasty, the spiritual homeland of the African diaspora. By draping Sekhmet in these hues, the painting declares a truth often obscured: that African spirituality, from the Nile to the Caribbean, forms one continuous river of resistance and divine power.

Sekhmet is the goddess who cannot be controlled. When she was sent to punish humanity, even the gods feared they could not stop her rampage. She is righteous fury incarnate, the necessary destruction that precedes healing, the lioness who devours what is corrupt so that what is sacred may survive. In Rastafarian red, gold, and green, she becomes the embodiment of African consciousness—rooted in ancient Kemet, flowing through Ethiopia, reaching the Caribbean shores. She wears the ankh because she holds the key to life itself, and her colors proclaim: Africa rises, Africa remembers, Africa reclaims.

Leaena de Judah

Golden Sovereignty Under Stars

She emerges from the liminal space where ocean meets land, where night meets divine illumination—Leaena de Judah, the Lioness crowned in gold. Her gown flows like molten sun, like the wealth of African kingdoms that never needed Europe's validation, like the divine radiance that marks those chosen to lead. Upon her head sits the vulture uraeus, that ancient symbol of Egyptian queenship worn by Hatshepsut, Nefertiti, Cleopatra, and the goddess Mut herself. The vulture represents fierce maternal protection, Upper Egypt's sovereignty, and the divine feminine's right to rule. Unlike the cobra uraeus that spits fire, the vulture spreads wings of shelter—she protects through encompassing love made militant.

The twin lion statues flanking her are more than guards; they are echoes of her own power made manifest. Lions represent the tribe of Judah, the royal line from which King Solomon descended, the lineage that Ethiopian emperors claimed for three thousand years. The Lion of Judah appears on Ethiopia's flag, roars through Rastafarian faith as the symbol of Haile Selassie I—Jah Rastafari, the returned Christ, the King of Kings. But Leaena reclaims this symbol in feminine form: she IS the lioness, not consort but sovereign, not subject but ruler. Her stone guardians mirror her nature—she who walks between worlds, who is both flesh and monument, both mortal queen and immortal archetype.

Behind her, the ocean holds the memory of crossing—the Atlantic's trauma and triumph, the Mediterranean's ancient trade routes, the Caribbean's arrival and survival. Before her, the moon and stars arrange themselves as her cosmic court. She stands crowned at the threshold, wearing Egypt's ancient authority and claiming Judah's royal title, merging the wisdom of the Nile with the strength of Zion. Leaena de Judah is the synthesis, the reclamation, the coronation that needed no permission: African goddess-queen standing in her power, golden under the night sky, with lions at her command and the vulture's wings upon her head.

Picasso's Maternity

Reclaiming Motherhood

This piece takes direct inspiration from Pablo Picasso's "Motherhood" (1901), but transforms it from European sentiment into Caribbean indigenous truth. Where Picasso painted a universal maternal ideal through a Western lens during his Blue Period, this work reclaims that intimate gesture—mother cradling child—and roots it firmly in Aboriginal and indigenous Caribbean identity. The composition honors the original's tender embrace while asserting: this moment belongs to us first, was ours always, and speaks our story, not his.

Picasso's fame eclipsed entire art histories, his "primitive" period appropriating African and indigenous forms without acknowledgment or understanding. This reimagining reverses that extraction. The mother and child are rendered as Taíno, Arawak, Lucayan—the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean whose motherhood predates European observation by thousands of years. Their features, their bearing, their very presence challenges the notion that maternal love needed a Spanish man in Paris to validate its artistic worth.

The piece becomes a visual reclamation: Caribbean indigenous women have cradled their children through colonization's genocide, through the erasure of entire populations, through the deliberate destruction of culture and language. Their motherhood survived what was meant to annihilate it. By recreating Picasso's composition with Aboriginal Caribbean subjects, the work asks: whose motherhood gets immortalized in museums? Whose tenderness is considered "universal"? Whose story of survival through maternal love gets told? This is not homage but retrieval—taking back the narrative, centering the indigenous Caribbean mother whose embrace kept her people alive when empires declared them extinct. The geometry may echo Picasso, but the story, the survival, the sacred act of indigenous motherhood continuing against all odds—that belongs to the islands, to the Aboriginal peoples, to the mothers who refused to let their children be the last.

Maha Maya

The Mother Who Lived

MahaMaya stands as elder, as ancestor, as the mother who survived—a radical reimagining of Queen Maya, the Buddha's mother. Traditional Buddhist texts tell us she died seven days after giving birth to Siddhartha Gautama, ascending to the Tavalimsa heaven, forever frozen as young mother, forever denied the chance to see her son become enlightened. But this painting asks: what if that narrative served a purpose? What if removing the mother's living presence, her elder wisdom, her continued influence made it easier to center patriarchal monastic traditions? Here, MahaMaya lives. She ages. She watches her son's journey. She embodies the elder feminine wisdom that patriarchy always tries to erase.

While popular imagery often shows the Buddha with the ushnisha (cranial bump) topped by tight coils, scholars and ancient sculptures reveal that historical depictions show him with natural locks—hair described in Pali texts as "nīla" (dark/black) and arranged in tight spirals that curl to the right. Some interpretations suggest these were natural locked coils, not unlike the hair textures found in African and Aboriginal populations. Early Buddhist communities spread through regions where dark-skinned, locked-hair peoples lived. The historical Buddha was not European, not East Asian in the modern sense, but potentially closer to the dark-skinned, locked-hair peoples of ancient India and surrounding regions—peoples with genetic and cultural connections to African and Aboriginal diasporic populations.

By depicting Maha Maya as an older Indigenous woman this piece centers what has been whitewashed from Buddhism's image: its roots among dark-skinned peoples, its birth from a mother who carried indigenous wisdom. The Caribbean lens asks: what if we see Maha Maya as Taíno grandmother, as Arawak elder, as the indigenous mother whose wisdom of plants, spirits, and cycles informed her son's enlightenment? What if the "middle way" echoes indigenous balance philosophy? What if liberation teachings sound familiar because they've always existed in indigenous cosmologies? Maha Maya lives here, ages here, and her Aboriginal face reminds us: wisdom traditions belong to dark-skinned, locked-hair peoples long before Buddhism was sanitized for Western consumption.