The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - How Two Indigenous Artists Are Keeping Their Traditions Alive

Episode Date: November 22, 2024

Quilter Alice Olsen Williams living in Curve Lake First Nation and Quillworker Sandra Moore living in Hiawatha First Nation use their art to pass on their Anishinaabe heritage so it doesn't get forgotten.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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And discover your 2-Point TVO. I am a woman and I am Anishinaabe and I have ties to this land for thousands of thousands of years and I wanted to honor that. In 2016 I took a job in Dawson City in the Yukon. In my spare time I was doing porcupine quill art. I had taken porcupine quills with me and I was meeting so many people in that community who were artists. And they were artists, cultural artists as well, in their culture. And it was the first time I felt like I was living among artists. The reputation that the system, the colonial system gives a Nishnabe is not very good. So I wanted to honour the work that Nishnabe women do.

I didn't have a passion to learn what was being taught in high school, but I have a passion to learn the art that is my people's art. And it's beautiful and it's very carefully made. That just inspired me and made me think, if I can come here and live among artists and they want to learn from me, maybe it's time I start investing in my art in a serious kind of way. In my own language, I would say,

Anin Bozho, Makakwe Binonji Indijinikaz, Wabshashi Ndo Dem, Mino Manikin Ndunjaba. So I told you who I am in the language. My Anishinaabe name translates to, Bear Woman Child. And I'm from Hiawatha First Nation. My Anishinaabe name translates to bear woman child. And I'm from Hiawatha First Nation. I'm a wife and a mom and a grandma. I am Alice Wilson Williams.

I live at Curve Lake First Nation. It's between Ottawa and Toronto. I have four children. I have five grandchildren, and three great grandchildren. Quilting is creative, can be creative. Porcupine quills, birch bark, fish scales, caribou hair, like those kinds of arts, that's what I do, that's what I teach, and I want to teach those arts so that they don't get lost. When I started quilting, I really loved it.

I loved it. I loved it so much that I knew this was going to be my life. I wanted people who looked at my quilts to know that an Anishinaabe woman made it. I had wanted to learn to do quill work for the longest time for many years. I looked at it and thought, oh, that's just so magnificent. I want to learn how to do this. But the opportunity didn't come. And then one weekend there was going to be a quill workshop in the community here. And I volunteered to be the staff person on that weekend.

And so the project was to build a quill box. I felt like my DNA had memory that knew what to do. And so it was a three day workshop that I did in a day and a half because I don't know if I had blood memory that allowed my hands to know what to do, but I knew what to do. And I mean I needed to learn lots of pieces still from the teacher, but it was so comfortable for me. I had to think about, well, how is this quilting going to be different from other women's quiltings?

And I had to think about that. And I thought about who I am. I realized that I am a Nishinaabe woman. And my mother, it was a a Nishnaabe woman, and my mother was a Nishnaabe woman, a lot of my friends are, and so what I did was I decided to put an Nishnaabe picture in the center of my work, and that represented to me the heritage my mother gave me. And I had to think about my father. He gave me a heritage also. My father was born in Oslo, Norway. And he gave me that white culture. I thought, I've got to put an Ishnabe picture in there. And then on the outside of my quilts, I used the contemporary quilting blocks that white

women make, like the log cabin, the Dresden plate, the Nine Patch. In quilting, this pattern is called a Dressed in Plate. And there are variations of the Dressed in Plate. But my mom lived to be 100 and she died two years ago. And in her things, we found these, these Dressed in Plates. Some of them were may have finished and some of them were completed. So I started putting them together like this and I can tell everybody that these were my mother's. And so you make this dressed in plate and then you plop it down on a background. This is a black background and you applique them on. So there's lots of work before you get to actually make the quill box.

Harvesting the birch bark happens in a little window of time in the spring. When the strawberries are on, the bark comes off. And then we bring it home and we have to clean it and wash it and store it and keep it flat. There's that. And then there's getting the porcupine quills. And I just collect roadkill. If I had to kill animals to make art, I wouldn't do it. And my husband spends about 25 hours with each animal, pulling the quills. When I was a kid in elementary school,

I used to do art and I was really satisfied with my art in elementary school. And then I got to high school and thought, I'm not like, I'm not an artist, like other kids are artists. And I didn't believe that I was an artist. I've reinvented myself in recent years as an artist. And that's a, maybe I was always an artist, but I didn't believe I was an artist.

But in the last 15 years, maybe longer than that really, I've recreated myself as an artist. I've always been smart enough that I could take what I knew and apply it to teaching so that other people could learn it as well. And so when I learned art, when I learned porcupine quill and birch bark art, I knew how to transfer that into a way that I could teach other people. And then here's the other thing about being a teacher. I always think that if I know these things and I go to my grave and I never taught anybody,

what was the point? What was the point in me knowing them? And so my goal is to teach as many people as I can teach. At our hide tanning camp a year ago right now, which is, I mean that's what's happening in the background here, is they're tanning hides. But I had brought a hide that I got in Tuk-Tay-Uk-Tuk in 2019 from a man I met along the shore of the Arctic Ocean. And anyway, I brought that caribou hide home

and we turned it into rawhide last year and I decided that I was going to make that raw that turn that rawhide into jingles into jingle cones. And so I was actually recovering from surgery at the time. And I had to be off my foot for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks. And so the jingle dress in our culture is a healing dress. That's the work it does. And even making the jingle cones was helping with my healing. When I decided to make that jingle dress, I was going to make the dress part out of fabric and then I got those jingles made and I dyed them the colors of sunrise red and orange and yellow and fuchsia and and when I got them made I thought I can't

put these on fabric and a woman contacted me around the same time and she said Sandra I have these pieces of rawhide, can you use them for something? And so I said, yeah, send me a couple. And they came in the mail and they were in this nice, thin rawhide. And I thought, that's it. That's it exactly. That's the dress. So I think I'm going to take that dress and I envision various size hands, women's little

girls and women's hands, to paint them red and put them on that dress. Because the red hand is an image that is about murder and missing women, murdered and missing indigenous women. And so I want to turn that healing dress into an item that is about not just about healing but about education. And so I made the jingles and then I made the dress and then I put it all together and I call it hide. Not because it's made from rawhide, although that's part of it really, because it's made from rawhide, although that's part of it really, but because as Indigenous people we're often asked to tell our history, our stories. And they're traumatic. We have a painful history. And every time we're asked to tell a piece of our history, it's like we're being asked to stand in the spotlight of trauma. And so we don't hide.

We stand up and we tell our stories and we tell our history and we have a jingle dress to help us with our healing. And that's the intent of making that jingle dress, is that it will be part of our healing. And that's the intent of making that jingle dress, is that it will be part of our healing. I used to teach a lot. And my students have come back to me and told me how wonderful it was.

I want them to know how to quilt because it is so easy and it's so accessible. And you don't have to take those quilting blocks. You can do your own picture and do your own designs. So I think when that comes out of you and you can see it, I think that must be a healing process. When I'm teaching non-Indigenous people to do our art, I teach them that it's our art.

It's, the art belongs to Indigenous people. It's not theirs to make a living from. It's not theirs to sell or to teach because it's our art, not theirs. And they can't be the teachers and they can't be making a profit from it until all of our people know this art and our people will never all know. Every one of our kids and every one of our adults should have the opportunity to dance in that dance arena and to stand tall and proud about who they are as Indigenous people. you