QC: Art feeds the soul for Joely BigEagle-Kequahtooway – Regina Leader-Post

Article content

The year 2016 was a turning point for Joely BigEagle-Kequahtooway.

Article content

After training as an engineer, she was working for SaskEnergy and running a boutique with her family. But that year, she lost the boutique and her job.

“I was devastated,” she said. “What am I going to do?”

Something else was happening that year that gave her new direction. The family went to the Standing Rock demonstration against the Dakota Access Pipeline. It left her with a renewed sense of the power of serving the community.

“Am I best suited to go back and be an engineer and to do project management?” she remembers asking herself. “Or am I best suited to just focus on community development?”

The answer, it turned out, was simple enough. Community work had always been her passion, even if it didn’t pay the bills. But by combining art, storytelling and the project management skills she learned as an engineer, she’s since become a force to be reckoned with in Regina.

BigEagle-Kequahtooway was one of the loudest voices calling on the city to deal more honestly with its past, notably by pushing for renaming Dewdney Avenue as Buffalo Avenue. That struggle is still being fought.

Yet another fight was recently won. She spoke to the Leader-Post in what was once the Dewdney Park and Pool, now renamed to Buffalo Meadows. She grew up just two blocks from here, in Regina’s North Central area.

Later, for two-and-a-half years, she spent time at her familial White Bear First Nation. It was there that she reconnected with her enormous family — 37 aunts and uncles and about 200 first cousins — and with the land.

Article content

“I feel more connected, as they’re connected over there to the land, so I got to be connected through them,” she said. “I think that’s the biggest lesson… our ceremonies are still alive.”

So it was natural enough for BigEagle-Kequahtooway and her husband, Lorne, to co-found Buffalo People Art Institute to help preserve those traditions. In the years since her turning point, they’ve been scraping, stretching, tanning and braining buffalo hides, creating art and sharing the process with those eager to learn.

They’ve done it about 50 times, in Lorne’s estimation. But in BigEagle-Kequahtooway’s view, it’s only an initiation.

“I feel like we’re still babies in learning this,” she said.

But the couple has nonetheless hosted a seven-part video series as a how-to guide on their work. They’ve led workshops across the province, including at Grasslands National Park. BigEagle-Kequahtooway held an exhibition at the University of Regina, where she was named artist in residence.

The buffalo is at the centre of everything they do. But so is their relationship. “I’m his muse; he’s my muse,” she said.

For BigEagle-Kequahtooway, the buffalo is a symbol of resilience. Long after they were nearly eradicated in the 19th century, she feels like they are still everywhere — in the sweat lodge, in the sun dance, in the land.

But she hasn’t given up on seeing the buffalo return on a grand scale, like they were when her people depended on them for every aspect of life.

Article content

“There’s 90 million cattle that are on this continent — zero from 500 years ago to 90 million,” she explained. “Well, maybe in another 500 years people will realize, hey we have to go back to buffalo, because the way that we’re running our ecosystem here with mono-agriculture and non-sustainable farming, maybe there’s better ways to do it.”

Working with buffalo hide can be an arduous process. First they have to find the hide, which can be the toughest step of all. Then they haul it. They soak the hide, poke holes in it, stretch it out on a 10-by-10 foot frame and use tools to scrape the muscle. They dry the hide before scraping still more layers. By then, the hide is ready to be brained. One buffalo brain is enough to treat its own hide. The brain, she explained, contains a chemical called lecithin that breaks down fibres and softens the hide.

The result can make robes, drum skins and parfleche for so much more.

“For me it’s about feeding our soul,” said BigEagle-Kequahtooway. “It’s about the process.”

Her training in mathematics and engineering has stayed with her, and still influences her work. “The art that I enjoy is based on geometry,” she explained. However much she tries to let loose and work with the spontaneity of a child, she can’t quite free herself from her love of order.

“I’ve got to get out my geometry kit. I’ve got to make my designs. I’ve got to make sure it’s symmetrical,” said BigEagle-Kequahtooway. “That controlled way that I do things.”

Article content

Her art has passed through the hands of a prime minister and a pontiff. She and Lorne made a parfleche gift commissioned by Justin Trudeau’s office as a gift to Cowessess First Nation Chief Cadmus Delorme. Trudeau passed it on with his own hands at an event this month.

A couple years ago, the Kequahtooways gifted a beaded cross to Pope Francis. As the pair worked on the project, BigEagle-Kequahtooway had her mother in mind.

“My mother went to residential schools… thinking of her, and so many others that have been to residential school in my family,” she said.

She saw the work as an opportunity, given the questionable role of the Catholic Church in Canada’s history with Indigenous people. BigEagle-Kequahtooway believes energy, feelings and messages can be transferred through art. So this one was important.

“Should we write a message?” she remembers asking during their beading work. “We put a prayer in it, and the prayer was: We want our people to live.”

She was told that the gift did, in fact, reach the pope.

Now, as the pandemic recedes, BigEagle-Kequahtooway is thinking about another turning point. She’s looking for ways to take her work to White Bear and her husband’s Zagime Anishnabek community.

“We’ve been focused on urban places because it’s where we live, and it’s where our kids live, and so we’ve been focused on bringing ceremony, bringing community here,” she said.

“Then sometimes we ask ourselves, what are we bringing into our home communities, because that’s where we’re from… It’s kind of in the back of our minds, because we always want to go back home — we want to feel like we belong.”

awhite-crummey@postmedia.com