Jennine Krauchi was dressed in black when she sat before a crowd gathered at the University of Winnipeg.<\/p>\n
She was wearing the first piece she ever beaded: a daisy-chain necklace with a small headdress pendant.\u00a0<\/p>\n
She made it as a child in the 1960s at the Indian and M\u00e9tis Friendship Centre in Winnipeg\u2019s North End, where she learned the daisy-chain technique from Dorothy Maquabeak Francis<\/a> of Waywayseecappo in Western Manitoba.\u00a0<\/p>\n The necklace marked the beginning of a practice that would carry Krauchi from the Friendship Centre to museum collections, kitchen-table lessons and now a gallery exhibition on the resurgence of Red River M\u00e9tis beadwork.<\/p>\n Now, she\u2019s part of an exhibition, Beading M\u00e9tis Resurgence<\/a>, on view at Gallery 1C03 at UWinnipeg until July 10. The show brings together the work of Krauchi and four Red River M\u00e9tis artists she has mentored.<\/p>\n The exhibition is curated by the gallery\u2019s director and curator, Jennifer Gibson, and the University of Winnipeg history professor, Cathy Mattes.<\/p>\n The exhibition looks at beadwork as both contemporary art and cultural knowledge and intergenerational practice, while also tracing how a younger generation is extending the form through gender, family history, material study, and new concerns about artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n Gibson said the idea for the exhibition came after she saw Krauchi being honoured at a Winnipeg Art Gallery event, surrounded by younger artists she had mentored in beadwork. \u201cI just thought, well, wouldn\u2019t that be a nice exhibition?\u201d Gibson said. She invited Mattes to co-curate the show, noting that Mattes brought a deep knowledge of M\u00e9tis art and beadwork to the project.<\/p>\n \u201cI never, ever thought in my lifetime I would see our beadwork represented in an art gallery, and that it was taken as an art form,\u201d Krauchi said during a March 23 artists\u2019 conversation.<\/p>\n M\u00e9tis floral beadwork became one of the most recognized visual forms of M\u00e9tis culture in the 19th century, particularly around Red River.\u00a0<\/p>\n M\u00e9tis women developed a distinctive style that brought together First Nations beadwork, quillwork, European glass seed beads, and floral embroidery patterns.<\/p>\n It became a distinct art form so closely associated with M\u00e9tis makers that they became known as the \u201cFlower Beadwork People.\u201d<\/p>\n At the centre of the exhibition is Krauchi\u2019s The Lady, a long wool coat with fur edging, floral beadwork, a beaded pillbox hat, an octopus bag-inspired muff and laced boots with florals.<\/p>\n Krauchi\u2019s matrilineal M\u00e9tis family comes from Minnewakan, beside Lake Manitoba, where she said her relatives \u201clived close to the land\u201d and \u201clived off of wild meat.\u201d<\/p>\n Her Dutch father \u201cabsolutely loved\u201d the look of floral M\u00e9tis beadwork, she said, and encouraged Krauchi and her mother to bead.<\/p>\n In the 1970s, Krauchi and her parents met Katherine Pettipas of the Manitoba Museum, who asked them to make the clothing worn by Indigenous mannequins for the museum\u2019s permanent boreal forest exhibit.<\/p>\n That began Krauchi\u2019s lifelong relationship with the museum, where she has studied artifacts and reproduced beadwork inspired by the pieces she encountered there.<\/p>\n \u201cThose pieces in museums are very, very important,\u201d Krauchi said. \u201cThey have taught me an awful lot in a silent way. It\u2019s like spending time with a really close friend.\u201d<\/p>\n For Krauchi, museum collections became a place of study and relationship. They offered access to beadwork made by earlier M\u00e9tis artists, even when the makers\u2019 names were not always preserved by collecting institutions.<\/p>\n Krauchi said she felt good about being M\u00e9tis while growing up in Winnipeg. That changed when she moved to the city of \u201cBrandon\u201d in Manitoba at 14.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s where I really felt racism,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n When she returned to Winnipeg in the 1990s, she said the move brought her back into culture \u201cin a really good way.\u201d<\/p>\n The late Lorraine Freeman<\/a>, founder of the M\u00e9tis Resource Centre in Winnipeg, looked for a beading instructor. She found Krauchi.<\/p>\n \u201cI knew how to do it,\u201d Krauchi said. \u201cI didn\u2019t do much, but I did know how to teach it.\u201d<\/p>\n In the years since, she has become known for both her beadwork and her mentorship.<\/p>\n It was within the last eight years that she began sitting around her kitchen table with the four younger artists featured in Beading M\u00e9tis Resurgence.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen we\u2019re all getting together,\u201d Krauchi said, \u201cthey\u2019re teaching me just as much, if not more, than I teach them to think outside the box.\u201d<\/p>\n The exhibition also speaks to a long history of undervaluing beadwork, especially work made by Indigenous women.<\/p>\n Krauchi recalled beading florals onto a jacket with her mother in the 1980s and being offered far less than the work was worth.<\/p>\n \u201cWe sold it at that time for $375,\u201d she said, \u201cand we thought we were doing real good.\u201d<\/p>\n The artists Krauchi mentored \u2014 David Heinrichs, Vi Houssin, Claire Johnston and Brianna Oversby \u2014 told IndigiNews about how they take up that history from different directions, using beadwork to think through land, family, gender, labour and responsibility.<\/p>\n For Heinrichs, a school teacher and queer Michif beadworker, the art form became a way to bring together family history, identity and a lifelong attention to the natural world.<\/p>\n \u201cI started beading in about 2012,\u201d Heinrichs said. \u201cMy sister taught me first.\u201d<\/p>\n Growing up, his sister was the family artist, while Heinrichs was drawn to the biological sciences.<\/p>\n He said it took him \u201ca long time to feel comfortable\u201d pursuing art.<\/p>\n His mother\u2019s M\u00e9tis family is connected to St. Vital and St. Boniface through the Poitras, Champagne, Fisher and Grant family names. His Mennonite father\u2019s ancestors arrived in Manitoba in the late 1800s.<\/p>\n Heinrichs met Krauchi at the Louis Riel Institute<\/a>\u2019s Beadwork Circle in 2017, when he was \u201ctrying to do bigger things.\u201d<\/p>\n His talent struck Krauchi as she helped him make a sac de feu (fire bag), also called an octopus bag, which was used to store fire-starting tools.<\/p>\n Alongside other artists mentored by Krauchi, Heinrichs visited the Manitoba Museum to study beadwork.<\/p>\n Krauchi encouraged him to examine \u201cancestor pieces\u201d that now influence his colours, techniques and style.<\/p>\n \u201cI like to incorporate a lot of those older styles of florals, while also looking at the plant communities that are around here,\u201d Heinrichs said, \u201cand challenging myself to find ways to bead those flowers recognizably.\u201d<\/p>\n For Vi Houssin, beadwork became a way to reconnect with community and create new family heirlooms.<\/p>\n Houssin, a trans M\u00e9tis woman whose roots come from St. Vital, St. Boniface and Rooster Town, first tried beading in 2020 at a workshop hosted by Heinrichs through the Two-Spirit Michif Local.<\/a><\/p>\n As the COVID-19 pandemic began, Houssin went into social isolation and started experimenting with beads.<\/p>\n When restrictions eased, she had what she called a \u201cwonderful opportunity\u201d through Mentoring Artists for Women\u2019s Art<\/a> (MAWA) to learn from Krauchi, whom she described as \u201cthe Michelangelo of M\u00e9tis beading.\u201d<\/p>\n Houssin said she found it \u201cwild\u201d that beadwork had not been treated as a fine art form until recently \u2014 she believes \u201cbecause of racism and misogyny.\u201d<\/p>\n Her own M\u00e9tis family was \u201cdisconnected\u201d from community and from the cultural practice of beadwork.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cOur family has no ancestral pieces at all,\u201d she said. \u201cOne way that I tried to reconnect with beadwork is by making work for my siblings.\u201d<\/p>\n Each year, Houssin makes a large creative piece for one of them.<\/p>\n \u201cSo we have our own heirlooms that we can carry down,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Claire Johnston, a Red River M\u00e9tis artist whose family held scrip from St. Clements and St. Andrews near Winnipeg, traces her work through the beads themselves. Her M\u00e9tis family names include Johnston, Brown, Richards and Thomas.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cOur ancestors here, they utilized Italian beads,\u201d Johnston said.\u00a0<\/p>\n