Virtual conversation – Exploring Métis Beadwork: Territory, Style, and Relations

Sherry Farrell Racette (Metis/Anicinabe-Algonquin/Irish) is a scholar with an active arts and curatorial practice. Born in Manitoba, she is a member of Timiskaming First Nation in Quebec. Her work as a cultural historian is grounded in archives and museum collections with an emphasis on recovering Indigenous women’s histories and aesthetic knowledge. Beadwork and stitch-based work is important to her artistic practice, creative research, and pedagogy. Farrell is a Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Regina. In 2021 she received the University Art Association of Canada’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and she is the inaugural Audain Fellow in Historical Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Canada.

Gregory Scofield is of Red River Métis ancestry whose family roots can be traced to the historic Métis community of Kinosota-Reedy Creek, Manitoba. He has taught Creative Writing and First Nations and Métis Literature at Brandon University, Emily Carr University of Art + Design, the Alberta University of the Arts, and the Laurentian University and is currently at the Department of Writing of University of Victoria. He has served as writer-in-residence at the University of Manitoba, the University of Winnipeg and Memorial University of Newfoundland. Further to writing and teaching, Scofield is also a skilled bead-worker, and he creates in the medium of traditional Métis arts. He continues to assemble a collection of mid to late 19^thcentury Cree-Métis artifacts, which are used as learning and teaching pieces.

Gregory won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in 1994 for his debut collection, The Gathering: Stones for the Medicine Wheel, and has since published seven further volumes of poetry including, Witness, I am. He is the recipient of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal (2012) and the Writers’ Trust of Canada Latner Poetry Prize (2016) that is awarded to a mid-career poet in recognition of a remarkable body of work. Gregory’s first memoir, Thunder Through My Veins (Doubleday Canada/Anchor Books), was re-published in the fall of 2019. He was part of the three-person jury for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize and edited the resulting collection, The 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology. His most recent publication is the award-winning kôhkominawak ocihcîwâwa – Our Grandmothers’ Hands: Repatriating Métis Material Art (Gabriel Dumont Institute Press).

Carrie Allison (nêhiýaw/Métis/mixed European descent) is a multidisciplinary visual artist based in K’jipuktuk, Mi’kma’ki (Halifax, Nova Scotia). Her Métis and nêhiýaw family names are Beaudry, Surprenant, Noskeye, and Payiw; her maternal roots and relations are based in and around maskotewisipiy (High Prairie, Alberta), Treaty 8, and she is a Manitoba Métis Federation citizen.

She grew up on the unceded and unsurrendered lands of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh), xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) and Tsawwassen Nations.

Allison holds a Master of Fine Arts, a Bachelor of Art History, and a Bachelor of Fine Art from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. She was the 2020 recipient of the Melissa Levin Award from the Textile Museum of Canada, received an Emerging Artist Recognition Award from the Creative Nova Scotia Awards in 2021, and was longlisted for the 2021, 2024 and 2026 Sobey Art Award.