Jaime Black-Morsette (she/them) is a Red River Métis artist and activist, with family scrip signed in the community of St Andrews, Manitoba. Jaime lives and works on her home territory near the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine rivers. Founder of The REDress project in 2010, Black-Morsette has been using their art practice as a way to gather community and create action and change around the epidemic of violence against Indigenous women and girls across Turtle Island for over a decade. Black-Morsette's interdisciplinary art practice includes immersive film and video, installation art, photography and performance art practices. Her work explores themes of memory, identity, place and resistance.

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REDress provides readers an overview of the REDress Project through stories, memories,and art work by contributors calling for justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit people (MMIWG2S). Why was it important for you to create and publish the anthology?

Over the years of doing this work with The REDress Project I have had the privilege of creating interconnections with a vast network of women, girls and two-spirit people who have dedicated their lives to speaking out and speaking up for justice. This publication allowed many of us a chance to have the time and space to reflect on our stories and experiences in doing this work and to make an archive of our ongoing struggles and victories. I feel that our collective acts of standing our ground are ever more important in our rapidly changing social climate.

The empty red dress has become a potent and powerful symbol all across Turtle Island. When you began the REDress Project fifteen years ago, did you imagine the impact the project would have?

I didn’t, I couldn’t even imagine that far and wide. But I did have a very strong feeling when the image came to my mind—like it was a very powerful idea to pursue and it was following that feeling that led me down this path.

In the book, you have included essays, poetry, art work, and interviews by Indigenous women, Elders, activists, and others. Can you tell us more about the process of curating these selections and your vision for the book?

In contrast to oral storytelling, a book is finite--so there truly was not enough space to include the vast constellations of women and 2S I have encountered on my journey of doing this work. So many people have inspired me to continue to speak out even when it feels difficult. I could only include a few of those people in this publication. Those I did include all had a very profound effect on my life and encouraged me on my path. They were instrumental in my healing and finding my voice and in turn lent strength to the movement for me to speak out on behalf of other women.

The project itself is a testament to the power of art and activism to demand and create change. How are you feeling in 2025 about what the project has achieved, and where do you see the project going from here?

I believe we have much to learn from the wisdom of the Matriarchies, whose ethos values community cohesion, interdependence, balance and reciprocity.

Finally, how does it feel to see the book come into the world at this particular moment?

I just got the book in my hand a few days ago and not long after that the Winnipeg police recovered the body of Morgan Harris, Cambria Harris’ mother. As the book was being written we were deep in a two-year fight against government and politicians who refused to have the landfills searched for her remains.

I feel like all the work we have been doing has led us to this moment and that there is something very big on the horizon.

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Excerpt from REDress: Art, Action, and the Power of Presence

In 2009, at an Indigenous Studies conference in Germany, the room is filled with German academics and a few delegates from Canada. Jo-Ann Episkenew, a professor from First Nations University of Canada in Saskatchewan, is there. I am on the sidelines, listening.

The Germans have a fascination with the Indigenous people of Canada, a fascination tinged with exoticization, a flattening of the real lived experience of being Indigenous in a country founded on colonial conquest.

After hours of presentation Jo-Ann stands up and speaks. She says, “There are over five hundred [the officially recorded number at the time] missing or murdered Indigenous women across Canada.” The room is so silent, you could hear a pin drop.

It is when she says this that I imagine red dresses. Red dresses along city streets and in parks and trees, where every day the public passes by. Red dresses confronting people on their way to work, to school, to dinner. Red dresses as a stark reminder of all those we’ve lost. Red dresses to remember.

After listening to Jo-Ann speak and witnessing the women working together to call out violence in Bogotá, I knew that I must follow my calling. Being witness to the courage and integrity of the women fearlessly fighting for their communities brought me back to a part of myself that I had never accessed before. What had only been a flicker became a roaring flame: my voice, my creativity, and my spirit were ignited by the fire I witnessed in those women, and I became determined to carry that fire forward.

To REDress, to put right a wrong.

I am at the thrift store again, this time with purpose, looking for crimson, scarlet, burgundy, cherry; the reds that stand out among the other fabrics. I find seven dresses—cotton, satin, polyester, a gown; floor-length, a dress, long-sleeved and long at the hem, in a fabric light as air.

I gather these dresses and keep them close, care for them. It’s winter and I bring them to the long boughs of a willow overlooking the river, place them in a group in the trees. The long-sleeved dress catches the wind first and like a dancer is animated. The other dresses sway in time. An old dance, the kind that you can only learn if you allow the wind to lead. And the dresses teach me this dance and I follow.

Over the next year more than one hundred red dresses are donated to me to begin this work. The donations come from far and wide, from Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, from Europe, the US, and all across Canada, from Nunavut to the East Coast. As the dresses continue to come in I am invited to create large installations of red dresses on college and university campuses, at community organizations and schools all across the country.

Since 2010 I have created over one hundred large-scale installations of red dresses. The installations bring together community in circles that provide care, recognition, education, and ceremony. Circles that make space for the voices of those who work on the frontlines in communities to create a safer world for women, girls, and Two-Spirit people. It is an honour to be part of these circles and to see the ways in which women across the country are working to make change. It is an honour to carry this fire together.

Reprinted with permission of the publisher