Chataya Holy Singer | No’tsiitsi – My Hands

×

Expand

Chataya Holy Singer, "No'tsiitsi - My Hands," 2023

black and white film photography printed on luster/pearl photo paper, dry mounted on sintra board. Courtesy of the artist.

Opening Reception: 25 February 2023 | 7-9 PM

Stitching can be radical; stitching can be healing. In Chataya Holy Singer’s No’tsiitsi – My Hands stitching and beading are both and more. Over the course of many months in 2022, Holy Singer sat at her dining room table, leather vamps and moccasin pieces spread out in front of her, beads and thread at hand, her tripod and analogue camera set up to capture the slow process of her beadwork and stitching: a thread connecting her to her Blackfoot ancestors. As she worked, the audiobook of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass played softly as her hands worked stitch after stitch, bead after bead. No’tsiitsi – My Hands is comprised of 80 black and white photographs of the artist slowly crafting a pair of leather moccasins with traditional Blackfoot beaded diamond patterns on the vamps as well as the completed moccasins themselves, representing the outcome of the artist’s process and progress. 

From the 19th century until 1951 the Indian Act made it illegal for Indigenous people to practice their cultural traditions and ceremonies in Canada, including the Sun Dance and beadwork. Traditional dress was forbidden in residential schools and, prior to 1951, Indigenous peoples required the permission of the Indian Agent to wear ceremonial dress off reserve. Despite these attempts at assimilation, cultural genocide, and the threat of criminal prosecution, Indigenous elders and knowledge keepers worked to preserve traditional practices. Holy Singer’s reclamation of her Blackfoot roots is a response to this history and has involved re/learning traditional craft techniques, combining them with her knowledge and understanding of contemporary art. 

There are affinities between the reclamation of Indigenous cultural practices and the attempt to elevate “women’s craft” by feminist artists beginning in the 1970s. Holy Singer’s stitching and beading are as much about survivance as they are feminist gestures. In one image, the artist’s blurred hands underscore the active process of making and stitching. The moccasins are a manifestation of Blackfoot identity in a state of becoming: tying past to present and future. 

No’tsiitsi – My Hands is also about reciprocity. Holy Singer has reflected that “The action of creating the moccasins is a way of reciprocating the relationship that I have with the materials I am working with. The animal’s hide that was processed and… which I purchased at the craft store and am now shaping it to the size of my foot and adorning it with beads with the intention of wearing them out on special occasions… gives the material of the animal’s skin meaning.” The idea of creating something “from scratch” also informs the artist’s use of analogue black and white photography, intended to underscore the image’s materiality—a materiality present in the photographs’ subject. This an assertion of sovereignty: of the endangered history of beadwork and moccasin-making, of the domestic space of the home and Indigenous women’s craft traditions, and the use of the camera as a powerful (and historically colonial) tool of representation.