Pairs of baby vamps will be featured at Walking With Our Sisters, a traveling art exhibit commemorating the lives of missing and murdered Aboriginal women, which can be seen at Carleton University Art Gallery between Sept. 25 and Oct. 16. Little Italy’s Gallery 101 is commemorating the hundreds of missing and murdered indigenous women across Canada and the U.S. with a travelling art memorial that opens Friday at Carleton University. Walking With Our Sisters will be on display in the St. Patrick’s building at the Carleton University Art Gallery.
“We are extremely excited to be working with Walking With Our Sisters,” says Georgia Mathewson, Gallery 101’s administrator. “It is a pretty big installation and we’re excited to be a part of it.”
The memorial is designed like a pathway to represent the journeys of the missing and murdered Indigenous women that prematurely ended.
Each missing woman or child is represented through hand-crafted vamps, or the tops of moccasins, with the designs intentionally not sewn into the moccasins to represent the unfinished lives of the women and girls. These vamps are placed along the floor creating a route to walk through. Along with the vamps, 60 songs were also submitted for the audio portion of the exhibit. These songs will be played throughout the exhibit, as well.
Nearly 2,000 Indigenous women have been missing or murdered in Canada alone in the past 30 years. The missing and murdered Indigenous women have become a part of Canada’s secret, and unresolved, shame.
Without adequate investigation from law enforcement, the media, and the general public, Walking With Our Sisters calls the lost lives, “a travesty of justice,” on their website.
The travelling memorial has been touring since 2013 and has been to 25 different locations nationwide, as well as in the United States. Walking With Our Sisters was created by Christi Belcourt, a Metis artist, and started in Edmonton in 2013. It exists to pay respect to the lost indigenous lives, acknowledge the heartache of the families of these women and continues to raise awareness and shed light on this issue.
Co-lead of Walking With Our Sisters, activist and Ottawa-local Gabby Richichi-Fried, said that community involvement, whichever community Walking With Our Sisters visits, is paramount to the success and survival of the entire organization. “At its core, Walking With Our Sisters is about supporting the families of the missing and murdered indigenous women, the ceremonies and the relationships,” she said.
The project, planned to tour until 2019, has evolved into a funeral space for these women who lost their lives, and for their unborn children. The large collaborative art piece is sustained completely through crowd-sourcing – which means that the artists, the organizers and the locations are contributing to Walking With Our Sisters by choice without pay.
“It’s just really heavy and sad. There is no cemetery for these women. This is their memorial,” said Evelyn Harney, an art contributor from British Columbia who made baby moccasins symbolizing an unborn child.
The project organizers called out for 600-plus pairs of vamps in June 2012 and Walking With Our Sisters has received 1,800 vamps, Richichi-Fried said.
Some of these supporters are close to people who come from families from residential schools, including Harney, whose great-grandmother and grandmother’s siblings were in residential schools in Cochrane, Ont.
“Our family has a history of that,” says Harney. “I really wanted to do this because our great-grandma had a really hard time. It’s just healing.”
The memorial has been repeatedly described as a healing balm for the Ottawa aboriginal community.
What started as an art exhibition has transformed into a ceremonial memorial for these women, says Richichi-Fried.
“Respecting it in the community is an amazing way to support it,” she says. “Be there with the intention of honouring the sisters and engage and respect the elders.”
For the duration of the memorial, Gallery 101 will be closed as its staff relocates to help manage the Walking With Our Sisters memorial at the Carleton University Art Gallery, located at the north end of the campus in the St. Patrick’s Building. The university will host the art installation from Sept. 25 to Oct. 16 and admission is free.
Anyone wishing to support Walking With Our Sisters by volunteering or offering donations is invited to contact wwosottawa@gmail.com for more details.