Muskrat Dam women sew traditional and inventive patterns Flora Beardy plucks red beads from a pill bottle onto her needle fast – in a one, two, three, four, five motion she does by feel more than sight.
“Like playing the guitar,” her husband Alan says of her talent. Sitting at the kitchen table in their home, he watches Flora, who sits on the couch, sewing with her head bowed in concentration.
She has, after all, been sewing beadwork and tanning moosehides for over 40 years. She makes beautiful moccasins, mukluks, winter gloves, beaver hats and plaques.
For the past 30 years she’s lived in Muskrat Dam.
The red beads begin to form a rose on a round plaque the size of a small plate.
“Two at a time,” she says in Oji-Cree to her sister and fellow sewer Irene Ross, who translates. To keep the beadwork tight, she sews two beads together before spearing the needle through the black line on the paper pattern, a layer of felt, a thick piece of paper, and another layer of felt.
Just as the layers of paper and felt bond into a plaque, so do the women of Muskrat Dam come together in their traditional practices of sewing and beadwork.
Irene, Flora and usually four or five other women meet every Wednesday evening after supper at the community health centre. Sometimes they sew until midnight, talking and sewing and telling stories.
Whenever Flora’s son Gary and her daughter-in-law Cherlyn show up to the Wednesday sewing meeting, the women put them to work at the photocopier. They share patterns among each other and with women from other communities such as Sandy Lake.
Alan remembers his mother placing a pattern on the window and tracing it.
“Now we get those photocopies,” says Irene. “It’s easier now for us, eh.”
Irene explains that for First Nations in northern Ontario the patterns usually consist of flowers. Teardrop petals of blues and whites, and green leaves with beige stems decorate Flora’s moccasins. As far as Irene remembers, floral patterns have been a signature of the beadwork made in the region.
“Our grannies, our moms, they made flowers,” Irene says. In the south, you tend to find more animals and symbols immortalized in colourful beads. “You go to the city, you see a moose,” as she puts it, though she says that now things are getting a little different from the sharing of patterns and the use of pattern books.
Before the use of pattern books began, First Nations women traced leaves and flowers they found. They would also invent their own designs, something Colleen Arch says she does 80 per cent of the time when beginning new beadwork.
Colleen beads just about anything. Barrettes, necklaces, earrings, handbags, medicine bags, wall hangings, belts, guitar straps, lighter cases, and picture frames are just some of the items she beads. She takes the time to do this, of course, when she’s not busy heading the Reverend Tommy Beardy Memorial Wee Che He Wayo-Gamik Family Treatment Centre, looking after her daughter Skyra, or spending time with her husband Bill.
“I bead every day. It’s a must. It helps me express the work I create. There’s a lot of beauty in it and a lot of time it reflects how I feel,” says Colleen, who tries to make beading a ten-minute daily meditation.
“Say I’ve had a hard day, I go pick up my beadwork and just hold it and just maybe do a couple of stitches. It really uplifts me.”
The last three years she’s come in first place in a crafts competition at Muskrat Dam’s Hunter’s Festival, held in mid-September. She’s won with her detailed wolf and “Praise The Lord” plaques, and once for her spice rack. The rack consists of a dozen different coloured spice bottles, from parsley to oregano and thyme on through to ginger. Each displays the spice name reading up diagonally, woven tightly in beads of black and white around the glass.
For the spice rack, instead of a pattern, she used her instincts. It was those same instincts that led her into beadwork in the first place.
“I taught myself,” she says. Her mother did a little sewing, but as a child it never really rubbed off on Colleen. Fifteen years ago she found an old barrette on the ground, took it apart to see how it was made, and began a lifelong practice.
“It’s a lot more than just beadwork for me. It allows me to have time for self,” says Colleen.
Colleen keeps a stash of beads the size of a mechanic’s waist-high toolbox. Plastic drawers and bottles hold thousands of beads.
“Sometimes I sell beads and sometimes I just give beads, because we trade,” she says of the women of the community.
Again, it is easy to see that behind the stunning crafts, a strong sense of community and tradition brings the women of Muskrat Dam together. Colleen looks forward to making it down to Wednesday sewing nights.
“It’s nice just to get out and go sit with the ladies.”
Besides trading individual beads and sharing patterns and ideas, the women work according to each other’s needs and interests. Some women no longer have the strength or patience to tan moosehide. They will sell finished beadwork to women such as Flora who do. She will assemble their pieces into items such as mukluks or winter gloves.
A woman might send Flora an outline of someone’s foot and Flora will tailor make a pair of moosehide moccasins entirely or in part. Sometimes she will just sell cut pieces of home-tanned hide.
Sometimes, when a cause arises, as often does in the community, the women of Muskrat Dam donate their work.
“It makes her feel good,” says Cherlyn of her mother-in-law’s contributions.
Nevertheless, beadwork remains a painstaking passion.
“As they grow older their eyesight kind of goes,” adds Cherlyn, “so their beads are bigger.”
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