REDress art show fuels need for change
By Adelle Ellis, Times Reporter
Adelle Ellis Photo
The 17-year-old Siksika Nation member has taken what she has learned at a leadership conference and put together an art show highlighting the extreme injustice of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada, and more locally in our own county.
“I chose the REDress project, which was originally the idea of Jaime Black of Winnipeg. The red dress is used as a symbol for missing and murdered Indigenous women and I kind of built off that,” said Old Woman who decorated a donated red dress and surrounded it with the photographs and stories of local missing native women.
The art show is viewable at the Wheatland Society of Arts studio on Third Avenue in Strathmore from June 18 to July 6.
The project was originated by Black in 2014 to visually represent the more than 1,000 missing and murdered Aboriginal women in Canada, and with Black’s permission, Old Woman created her own version of the project and gave it a more local base.
Old Woman has witnessed first-hand the injustice that can be bestowed upon Indigenous women, and their friends and loved ones, if they go missing. She has seen family members needing to push authorities to be made a top priority and to be paid attention to when dealing with missing women cases.
“I think that’s a huge injustice and that’s not right. These women deserve peace and they deserve to have their stories resolved. I want to bring closure for not only the victims but their families. I think it’s important that non-nation and non-native people also know about this because it kind of gets swept up into only being known by native peoples,” said Old Woman, who noted that Indigenous women who go missing aren’t only older ladies, they are also teenage and elementary age girls. “I think it’s really important that everybody knows about this because it’s a huge tragedy and a huge injustice.”
In 2011, Old Woman’s 21-year-old cousin, Desiree Old Woman, went missing and was last seen near her home on Siksika First Nation, close to Gleichen. At the time, RCMP concluded she may have wandered off along the highway and was presumed to have been picked up. She was never found.
Old Woman started the project at the end of a Seeds Connections leadership program where participants were encouraged to create a project to be the change they want to see in the world. She chose this project, she said, because she believes everyone should be treated better and with more respect than they currently are, and that the safety and equality of women is an important thing to be gained.
“I do have my cousin featured in this exhibit. We never found out what happened to her and she and our family were never brought closure, and that was a really big part of why I did this,” said Old Woman.
Before her art show, Old Woman had also displayed the same red dress at a gala for the Wheatland Crisis Society to help raise awareness.
“I had this dress displayed at a gala for the woman’s shelter. I also made the red dress pins and sold them and made $500 that I donated to the women’s shelter in town. A lot of people use it and need it to escape violent and abusive circumstances.
“The first way of getting people to care is to get them aware. If they knew how widespread this was and how long it has been going on for, I believe more people would care and they would want to help.”