Walking With Our Sisters

Christi Belcourt in front of one of her large scale beadwork paintings

It all started with a dream.  Metis artist, Christi Belcourt dreamed that she was in a lodge and she was surrounded by women standing in rows.  She wanted to honour these women.  These were the missing and murdered Indigenous women of Canada.  It is estimated that there are approximately 1200  such women since 1960.

Belcourt wanted to pay respect to the lives and existence of these women.  She came up with the idea of asking people to bead moccasin tops (vamps).  They would not be sewn into moccasins since these lives were all cut short.  “They are not forgotten.  They are sisters, mothers, daughters, cousins, aunties, grandmothers, friends and wives.  They have been cared for, they have been loved, and they are missing.” (WWOS Website)

In 2012, Belcourt put a call out on Facebook to create these vamps.  Women, men and children of all ages and races answered the call and by July of 2013, 1600 pairs of vamps had been received which nearly tripled the original goal of 600 pairs.

These lovingly created works of art represent thousands of hours of work and thousands of beads sewn by people who wanted to acknowledge the grief and torment of the families of these women, to raise awareness of the issue and to create the opportunity for a “broad community-based dialogue”.

This large collaborative art installation is called Walking With Our Sisters.  The vamps are displayed on fabric on the floor.  There are now 1810 pairs of vamps and 118 pairs of children’s vamps to honour the children of residential schools who never returned home.  The installation is a memorial ceremony.  Elders are involved in setting up each location to include the sacred plants of cedar and tobacco.  Visitors are invited to remove their shoes and take a small red pouch of tobacco to carry as they walk through the installation.  The tobacco which is a sacred plant absorbs the prayers of those that walk through the memorial.  It is common for people to cry and there are tissues along the way as well.  Elders are present to guide people in this healing process which is meant for all people.  At the end, the tobacco and tissues are collected and are burned at the end of each day in a sacred fire to release the emotions of the healing process.

Each pair of vamps represents one woman.  Spread over time and geography it may seem to some that this is not a big problem but when viewing the vamps, or women’s lives in one room, the problem is felt at its true weight.  Kristine McCorkell, a member of the Kanien’ kaha:ka (Mohawk) Six Nations is a group tour educator for WWOS.  She is quoted by Lauren Scott  in The Leveller:  “It’s this dark history that people, when they start to realize what’s happening, they kind of shut down and they don’t want to be part of it.  They know that they should be but there’s an emotional response that kind of builds a wall.”  She goes on to say, “Just stand behind us.  Let us know that it’s not just the Indigenous people fighting for our rights.  If the whole country was like, ‘this needs to stop,’ then something would happen.”

Walking With Our Sisters is entirely crowd funded and is fueled by thousands of people who have chosen to join their voices on this issue.  These are people who believe that there is power in art and power in working together to create change.  The stories of the missing and murdered Indigenous women are being told and in the telling, a new story is emerging.  

You can watch an interview of Christi Belcourt for MUSKRAT Magazine by Rebeka Tabobondung here.  

It includes footage of exhibition/memorial hosted by the G'zaagin Art Gallery at the Parry Sound Museum in January 2014.