Handle with care

Handle with care, 2025

Vintage Venitian and Czech glass beads, modern Japanese and Czech beads, stroud, smoked moosehide, cotton lining.

8" x 35.5"

This bag is a reflection of my place as someone who holds many relationships with the land. The bag serves as a container for the following questions: How do we reconcile our many conflicting relationships with the land, despite their natural symbiotic interactions with one another?

In June 2025, as I left my job as a treeplanter to attend an artist residency at the Banff Centre for Arts + Creativity, I witnessed my home territory in Manitoba burn from afar. Participating in a for-profit industry that I am morally against is not mutually exclusive to also being a beadwork artist: moving seasonally to work as a treeplanter to support my art practice, my art practice being something that was gifted to me from four generations of beadwork artists who came before me, from a territory that my family has been displaced from, a territory that spent the whole summer burning, due to the current state of the world's climate catastrophe— circling back to planting trees for forestry contracts that hold an intimate relationship with Canada’s natural resource extraction industry. 

The colonial, romanticized view of the “ecological Indian” myth does not exactly fit into this complex, cyclical web of my own relationships with the land. This ancient view lacks honesty and nuance. Due to colonialism being imposed on my own family and people, we have also had to extract from the land to survive— we have not been perfect. We do however, continue to resist what was imposed on us, and grow and learn to figure out our old ways. We cannot be the sole bearers of responsibility in this movement— others must do the same. 

As treeplanters, we often work in wildfire burns. This is typically a prime worksite: the land is fast as the space is clearer, with less obstacles than a usual cutblock, meaning we can manoeuvre easier and plants more trees. The layer of ash creates soil that makes it easier for our small blades to open holes for the seedlings quicker and thus, tallies are higher in burn— and pay checks positively reflect this. 

Planters also must plant a specific diversity of seedlings, typically spruce and pine, to meet the standards of mixing species for forest diversity. Each tree is marked with blue flag tape, so that the forester can easily identify your trees as they are checking to make sure your trees are quality and meet the specifications of the contract.

I enjoy the monotony of the work, being outside and on my feet all day. I find the constant movement to be meditative, and while this was never my intention, to be extremely helpful within my artist practice. While I am planting, I can often intensely visualize and day dream about future beadwork projects. It is a part of my process that I have developed over my 5 year career as a planter, which I understand to be inextricably linked to my 5 year career as a full-time artist.

The colours in this piece were intentionally chosen. Dramatic flashes of light green prairie sage against the crisp darkness of wildfire burns, dusty fireweed persisting, alongside new, nearly-blue spruce growth and disrupted pine needles-turned-orange were prominent as I passed through and beyond Jasper, along my route to the Banff centre. Alongside these colours and florals depicted in this piece, the use of bright blue is to acknowledge the anthropogenic role that reforestation efforts play in wildfires, a reminder that our actions imprint the future generations, such as fireweed, spruce, pine, sage, as depicted in the piece; of these landscapes.

Creating a bag for this piece acts as a functional, moving container for uncomfortable questions. The finished piece is to be carried in travel, rather than providing a specific resolution or destination. Similar to my other work, the construction of this bag is a nod to traditional octopus bags, stylizing tentacles reaching upwards rather than at the bottom of the bag. Long fringed beads replacing the traditional placement of octopus bag tentacles reach towards the ground, brown beads being blocked from reaching the earth by tiny isolated blue beads. This curious, non-traditional construction is intentional, symbolizing the importance of questioning and making room for new foundations of understanding based on wonder, reflection and dreams.

A quick moment driving through this landscape developed into a long-term mental debate around this web of my whole existence as an artist, which would shortly evolve into the project that I had not proposed for my residency at the Banff Centre, but what I would end up spending the entire residency focusing on. 

This project is ongoing— I hope to create a body of work to investigate each moving part of this web.