A new art installation in Selkirk, Man., is being created to honour missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls and it is being spearheaded by a woman who lost her mother at an early age.
“Sometimes it’s really hard for people to articulate what it means to be a family member of the missing and murdered because our emotions get really involved in the process,” said Jeannie Red Eagle.
“And sometimes we can’t articulate in the way that we can do it artistically.”
Red Eagle is Anishinaabekwe member of Rolling River First Nation and is from Selkirk.
When she was four, her mother Mary Alvina Whitebird was killed. Red Eagle spoke about her experiences before the national inquiry for missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.
“I began part of that healing journey when I spoke at the national inquiry regarding the death of my mother and for being a survivor of violence myself,” said Red Eagle.
Ashley Christiansen is a Métis tattoo artist from Selkirk, Man. She hopes that when the artwork is completed, people will see the talent that exists in the city and that people will look out for one another. (Jaison Empson/CBC)
After the inquiry, the Government of Canada set up a $13 million commemoration fund for projects to honour missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. Red Eagle submitted a project on behalf of the Interlake Art Board and Rolling River First Nation.
Her project was among those chosen and it received $50,000. They began consultations with families of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls to talk about what they would like to see included.
The art installation will be set within the natural prairie grass field of the Gaynor Family Regional Library in Selkirk.
“It’s going to look like a gigantic turtle emerging up out of the ground,” said Red Eagle.
A healing space
One of the consultants and artists helping with the project is Charlie Johnston, who has 32 years of mural experience.
From above, the project will be the shape of a turtle and from the turtle’s nose to tail, the installation will be approximately 23 metres in length.
The project will include four panels made out of Lexan polycarbonate, and will be painted in four different colours representing the medicine wheel, the four directions and four seasons. It will have a space for a fire and will have rocks which will be placed in the shape of the turtle.
The plan was to design the space as a place for the community to gather.
“It’s a way for a person or family to come into this site and feel protected while they go on a healing journey,” said Johnston.
Charlie Johnston shows a picture of what the finished turtle amphitheatre will look like. (Jaison Empson/CBC)
Johnston, who is non-Indigenous, said his brother’s girlfriend Cathy Williams went missing in 1988. He said working on this project is an opportunity to honour her and he sees it as his own personal act of reconciliation.
Progress was slowed by the pandemic, but with the help of local artists Ashley Christiansen, Bradley Lent and Annie Beach, two out of the four panels have been painted.
Beach, who just graduated from the University of Manitoba, said she has experience painting about a dozen public murals but that this one is different.
“Eventually people can gather here or individually come visit the mural and spend time and just heal with it if they need to.”
Red Eagle said phase one is completing the painting of the four panels and phase two will be landscaping the project, which is expected to begin in the spring and will hopefully be finished by fall 2021.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
