I really enjoyed reading about Debra Sparrow’s journey to reconnect with her roots and find purpose through the weaving of her ancestors.
It is remarkable to me that our First People have been able to persevere in reclaiming their traditions and their cultural heritage in the face of the centuries-long, systemic and vicious attacks that they faced. Despite the deep scars made by residential schools, despite the outlawing of the potlatch and cultural gatherings, and despite being pushed-off their traditional territories and being relegated to reserve lands, Aboriginal people in North America have persevered. Their arts, crafts and stories have survived. Sparrow puts it succinctly:
That has been our goal, to share the intelligence and the integrity of the people who existed before…. on this land. We were a functioning people with skills and intellect equal to any other (pg. 154).
In the reading, I was struck by Sparrow’s honesty, her recognition of turning her back to her origins and her face “out the door and into mainstream society”. She reminisces on being a rebel who still, every once in a while, was struck by the “gentleness of her grandparents’ life”. I also loved her recognition that after she and her sister became interested traditional weaving, she was still a reluctant learner: dragging her feet in her spinning, being purposefully slow. She eventually got caught up in the momentum of the women learning and creating around her. The women weavers in her cohort were not learning, like so many generations had before, from skilled elders: mothers and grandmothers. The women weavers had to recreate the lost craft from books, pictures and from trial and error.
Through it all, Sparrow speaks of the guidance that she felt in the patterns, traditions and skills of her ancestors, “I have this belief-that each blanket, each tapestry has a message within it… but the messsage does not come from me individually, they belong to all our people” (page 154).
As I am learning new skills in this textile arts course, (most for the first time) I too, feel that pull of my mothers and their mothers, in a way that I have never before experienced in my drawing and painting classes.
My mother had many textile art skills and she tried patiently to teach them to me, but I was too busy with school and friends to take much time to perfect the skills she showed me. Why would I want to learn to knit, sew or create things that I could much more easily buy at the mall?
But now, as I am learning these new skills, I feel a kinship with past. As I knit, I imagine my Ukrainian immigrant great-grandmother, raising her 14 kids in a sod house on a farm where the land had just been cleared. I imagine her, knitting endless pairs of socks and mufflers, knowing that these items would literally save her children from the harsh chill and frostbite of the prairie winter.
Or, as I embroider, I imagine my Scottish middle-class grandmother, smocking her first baby’s christening gown. I see her dreaming of this heirloom being passed from generation to generation.
As I do these things, I too, like Debra Sparrow, hear the whispers of my ancestors, I hear the voices and see the activity of the generations past who created durable, serviceable, culturally important and beautiful textiles.
Reading source:
Sparrow, Debra, (1998). “A Journey.” In Ingrid Bachmann and Ruth Scheuing (Eds.), “Material Matters: The Art and Culture of Contemporary Textiles” (pp. 149-156) Toronto: YYZ Books