Joely BigEagle-Kequahtooway
2018 Michele Sereda Artist-in-Residence
Joely BigEagle-Kequahtooway. Photograph by the Dean’s Office, Faculty of Media, Art, and Performance, 2018.
Saskatchewan artist Joely BigEagle-Kequahtooway’s project Bringing Back the Buffalo, focuses on the plains buffalo, its decimation through government policy and the settling of the west 150 years ago. Working on the project since February 2018, Joely has been scraping and brain tanning the hide in preparation for the next phase of her project. Using Nakoda words and pictographs and employing natural tints, dyes and paints, BigEagle-Kequahtooway will illustrate her connection to the buffalo on the finished robe. The project will culminate in an exposition on May 29th during Congress 2018.
Co-founder of the Buffalo People Arts Institute, Bigeagle-Kequahtooway is a multi-media artist and clothing designer with a focus on problematizing Indigenous fashion stereotypes, misconceptions and appropriations. She has shown work in Venice as part of the Imago Mundi, the North American Indigenous Art and Canada 150 celebration. While there, she participated in the opening exhibition creating an impromptu dance performance in pow-wow regalia to honour her ancestors, grandmothers and mother, reclaiming power from the land of Christopher Columbus, counting coup and bringing the energy back to Canada. She also facilitates art workshops in the community, including making moccasins, quilting star blankets, creating pow-wow regalia, buffalo parfleche art, and children’s art classes.
ASSOCIATED EVENTS
Bringing back the buffalo: Indigenizing Institutions through cultural practices with more-than-human relations
This discussion offers a range of perspectives on the roles of more-than-human beings as agents of living heritage which shape communities, bodies, places and histories. The creative project at the centre of this discussion focuses on the plains buffalo, its decimation through government policy and the settling of the West, 150 years ago. The event, organized as a talking circle, will share ideas on the concept of the institution, the processes of Indigenization and the importance of bringing back the buffalo.
Speakers: Joely BigEagle-Kequahtooway, Michele Sereda Artist-in-Residence, Faculty of Media, Art, and Performance, University of Regina; Sherry Farrell-Racette, Associate Professor, Visual Arts, Faculty of Media, Art, and Performance, University of Regina; Angela Snowshoe, Assistant Professor, Educational Psychology, Faculty of Education, University of Regina; Darlene Chalmers, Associate Professor, Faculty of Social Work, University of Regina
ABOUT THE MICHELE SEREDA RESIDENCY IN SOCIALLY ENGAGED PRACTICE
This residency was established in memory of Michele Sereda who died in 2015. Sereda was a multidisciplinary artist who explored social issues that touched on intercultural dialogue and creation. This residency takes up the terms of Sereda’s creative energy in offering an artist residency for a professional artist interested in exploring socially engaged practice and community interaction in a supportive academic environment. The residency aims to create engagements between artists, University units and their students, and community organizations around socially relevant issues.