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The year 2016 was a turning point for Joely BigEagle-Kequahtooway.
Her creations have passed through the hands of a prime minister and a pontiff.
The year 2016 was a turning point for Joely BigEagle-Kequahtooway.
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.
“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.
“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.”
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.”
A trio plays a cover of The Eagles hit Take it Easy as a dozen people settle in for an intimate open mic night inside Derrick McCandless and Dawn Mills’s cozy spot off highways 6 and 68 in Manitoba’s Interlake.
Strings of antique-style light bulbs cast a soft glow over the mandolin, banjo and dobro guitar that hang on a wall behind the band. An array of pottery shaped in-house by Mills dots the shelves behind the audience.
The Eriksdale Music & Custom Frame Shop is full of tchotchkes — like an Elvis Presley Boulevard street sign and vintage Orange Crush ad — that create the rustic country-living vibe the couple dreamt up before buying and transforming the vacant space over the past three years.
“I have met so many people in this community through them that I probably wouldn’t have … because of this hub,” says Mills’s cousin Dana-Jo Burdett.
Mills and McCandless are bringing people together in their rural community in more ways than one — though a return to Mills’s hometown wasn’t always in the cards.
The couple met in Winnipeg in 2011 while McCandless was playing a party at Mills’s cousin’s place. They had plans to settle in the Okanagan in McCandless’s home province of B.C. until he suffered a health scare. After that, they decided to head back to the Prairies.
WATCH | McCandless and Mills channel creative spirit into Eriksdale community:
It was the height of the pandemic in fall 2020 when the pair relocated to Eriksdale, about 130 km northwest of Winnipeg. They bought the old Big Al’s shop, once a local sharpening business that was sitting vacant.
“He was an icon in the community. He was a school teacher. He did a drama program here,” said Mills. “He brought a lot to the town.”
The building has become their own personal playground and live-in studio.
“It keeps evolving and we keep changing it and every room has to serve multi-function,” says Mills. “It’s a meeting place.”
While they love the quiet life of their community, they’re also a busy couple.
McCandless is a multi-instrumentalist with a former career in the Armed Forces that took him all over. Now, he’s a shop teacher in Ashern who sells and fixes instruments out of the music shop.
WATCH | McCandless plays an original song:
Mills helped found Stoneware Gallery in 1978 — the longest running pottery collective in Canada. She offers professional framing services and sells pottery creations that she throws in-studio.
They put on open mic nights and host a summer concert series on a stage next door they built together themselves. They’re trying to start up a musicians memorial park in Eriksdale too.
One of their bigger labours of love is in honour of McCandless’s good friends Roger Leonard Young, David Kim Russell and Tony “Leon” — or Lee — Oreniuk. All died within months of each other in 2020-2021.
“That was a heart-wrenching year,” McCandless says.
They channeled their grief into something good for the community and started the RogerKimLee Music Festival.
Friends from Winnipeg and the Interlake helped them put on a weekend of “lovely music, lovely food, lovely companionship” as a sort of heart-felt send off, said Mills.
That weekend it poured rain. Festival-goers ended up in soggy dog piles on the floor of the music shop to dry out while Mills and McCandless cooked them sausages and eggs to warm up.
“It was just a great weekend,” says McCandless. “At the end of that, that Sunday, we just said that’s it, we got to do this.”
Mills says the homey community spirit on display during that inaugural year is what the couple has been trying to “encourage in people getting together” ever since.
The festival has grown to include a makers’ market, car show, kids activities, workshops, camping, beer gardens, good food and live music.
This summer, Manitoba acts The Solutions, Sweet Alibi and The JD Edwards Band are on the lineup Aug. 16-18.
Burdett has been a part of the growth, helping with branding, social media and marketing. McCandless and Mills’s habit of bringing people together has also rubbed off on Burdett.
“There’s more of my people out here than I thought, and I am very grateful for that,” says Burdett.
Their efforts to breathe new artistic life into Eriksdale caught the attention of their local MLA.
“The response from family and friend and community has been outstanding,” Derek Johnston (Interlake-Gimli) said during question period at the Manitoba Legislature in March.
“The RogerKimLee Music Festival believes music to be a powerful force for positive social change.”
Dolly Lindell, who has lived in Eriksdale for about three decades, said the couple is adding something valuable that wasn’t quite there before.
“There’s a lot of people that we didn’t even know had musical talent and aspirations and this has definitely helped bring it out,” Lindell says from the audience as McCandless, Dave Greene and Mark Chuchie wrap their rendition of Take it Easy.
McCandless, 61, said there was a time in his youth where he dreamed of a becoming a folk music star. Now his musical ambitions have changed. He’s focused on using that part of himself to bring people together.
“I think it’s that gift that I was given that that needs to be shared,” he says. “I don’t think I could live without sharing it.”
WATCH | Trio plays song at Eriksdale music shop:
Joel Jamensky’s sunny disposition explains why the artist with Down syndrome uses the name ‘J-positive’ for his online art business, started with the help of his parents two years ago. “There’s a lot more going on in [Joel’s] art than may be at first glance – just like him,” said his dad, Mark.
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