Slow Scrape (2012–2015)

In 2012, I turned my attention towards my location in northern Ontario, where I live with my family in the traditional territory of Nipissing First Nation and other First Nations within a two-hour radius. We make our home not far from the traditional territory of my husband, Treaty no. 9 of northern Ontario. Like many Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Canada in the winter of 2012 and 2013, I watched as the Idle No More movement unfolded on social media and news outlets across the country through teach-ins and civil disobedience to the omnibus bill, Bill C-45, legislation that would impact the Indian Act, Fisheries Act, Navigable Waters Act, and the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act (Coulthard 2014, 160).

As I watched Idle No More sweep the country, I was particularly moved by round dances, a cultural event that I understand to be Plains Cree and Anishnaabe with accompanying ceremonies, feast, and giveaway. Round dances are held in winter and are a way of honoring our ancestors. Hand drum singers stand and sing at the center and are surrounded by the community, dancing, holding hands. Round dance country is primarily Saskatchewan and Alberta, and as I lived in Alberta for nine years, I had the privilege to attend many round dances, which are held nearly every weekend in winter in First Nations, as well as in schools, universities, and community centers. Several cities organized what could be called flash mob–style round dances in shopping malls at the height of the Christmas shopping season. Watching documentation of these dance interventions on social media was profound, as they created a way for Indigenous peoples to be visible and heard. The locations, shopping malls, and the timing became an intervention to the capitalist system with the bodies of Indigenous peoples, but through a distinctly Indigenous way: the songs and dances meant for winter time that honor our ancestors and celebrate community.

Other images of note at the time that have stayed with me were the signs documented at many walks and protests that told the Canadian public: “We are all treaty people,” acknowledging that treaty is the foundational relationship within Canada. In Northwest Territories another sign proclaimed: “Moose hide tanners against fascism,” which speaks to the labor we enact and embody on the land.

Amidst the Idle No More movement, in the winter of 2012–2013, Chief Theresa Spence from Attawapiskat First Nation, James Bay, Ontario, began a hunger strike in Ottawa, a forty-four-day political action centered on treaty (Lukin Linklater in Turions 2014). Inspired by her, on the twenty-first day, I wrote.

Chief Spence’s hunger strike was documented through photos on social media, on YouTube, and in televised press engagements. I noticed that she often wore James Bay moosehide mitts, hanging on a braided string made of yarn around her neck. I began to consider Chief Spence’s leadership, her stance for treaty, and her sacrifice, as well as the women in my extended family who labor on the land in James Bay, who labor in their homes, and who have a very specific and real relationship to treaty in their everyday lives. This interest partly grew out of my ongoing interest in women’s work, and Alaska Native, Canadian First Nations, and Metis women’s “craft” and their “intricate designs passed on from their relatives, sewing smoked moose hide into moccasins, and fur into mukluks, mitts, toques. This functional art is practiced in the intimacy of . . . home,” but also can become a kind of performance of women’s work, of cultural work, as I’ve written about elsewhere (Lukin Linklater in Swensen 2013). Yet “craft” is de-valued within art hierarchies due to its association with domesticity, culture, and utilitarianism. Beading, specifically, as an action and as art object interest me. As I’ve discussed, “trade beads conjure a past of ill-gotten land gains in the Americas, international trade routes, and Indigenous women’s appropriation of trade beads in indigenous designs. We are reminded of a historical global economy through the intimacy of women’s work” (Lukin Linklater in Swensen 2013...