I started law school two thousand kilometres away from my home territory, when I was eighteen years old. Far from home and navigating these spaces as the only openly Indigenous person in my law school class, I chose survival by invisibility. I found spaces outside the law school, such as the Indigenous Students’ Association, where I was safe enough to weep in between classes and visit with kin, but within the four walls of the law school, I put my head down and said nothing. This option was a privilege grounded in my white-coded appearance, and while it was objectively the safest course of action available to me at the time, I carried sadness and shame at my decision not to resist more fully. I graduated, was called to the bar, became a lawyer, and put my experiences in an invisible box I dragged around to every professional space I operated in for the next decade.                                           

And then, I became a mum. Along with my responsibilities, my entire world view changed overnight. Ensuring that my babies encountered less-hostile spaces as they moved through the world as Indigenous people became my first priority. Survival and safety calculations became infinitely more complicated and more simple at the same time, and “head down” was no longer an option as I carried (literally) tiny humans on my back. The moment I grew up and let go of my efforts toward self-preservation, I turned my mind to the generations that would follow, determined to be a better relation and advocate for young ones. While I could not effect change in every space they would enter, I seized the opportunity to reframe my past decisions by re-entering the academy to pursue my PhD with my head up, deeply motivated to resist.              

I could lie and tell you I began my doctoral studies with the intention of prompting a beadwork revolution in legal education, of teaching countless Learners to bead in law schools across several provinces, and of recentring Indigenous ways of knowing and sharing information in my own learning practice. I could tell you I set out with the intention of reading the beads and thus changing conversations. It would be a nice story, but it isn’t true.                                            

I was determined to resist racism, colonialism, and the erasure of Indigenous peoples, and to do it in beautiful and loving ways, but my mind had suffered significant colonization through my interactions with legal education and the legal profession. Survival, as I understood it, depended on thinking, and speaking, and presenting as an agent of a colonial “justice” system. Colonial systems put in place to disrupt Indigenous ways of knowing and being are incredibly effective. Reading the beads was not, as yet, part of my vocabulary.                                                   

When I began my PhD, I had, in fact, never laid hands on beads before. Beadwork came into my life in what I would later recognize as a moment of crisis, smack in the middle of my doctoral program.                   

Somewhere between difficult classroom experiences, comprehensive examinations, birthing my third child, and accepting a full-time position working within the faculty, where I studied slowly and in stolen moments in the wee small hours while the children slept, I fell into my old patterns. I found myself ducking for cover, lowering my voice, and closing myself off from the world. The need for calm, to be grounded in culture and to come back to the purpose and intent of my graduate studies, was strong around the moment when the beads found their way to my table.

A trip to a local Indigenous-owned store to purchase sacred medicines changed my life. That tiny pocket of safety in the middle of downtown Ottawa, where I did not, as a member of the Red River Métis diasporic community, have harvesting rights, also sold beads. I entered with a little disposable income in my pocket, and I left with all the treasures needed to reclaim a practice that had not held space in my family in living memory.                                                                      

My first tentative stitches calmed my mind and body, and my practice developed at a pace that left me in no doubt of ancestral memory and learning. My thumbs and forefingers worked needle, thread, and melton tradecloth intuitively, coaxing the beads into curves and tacking them down without buckles or gaps. Eventually, I began to dream in beads. Literal dreams grew into a figurative dream of building something new, decolonizing learning spaces, and healing community.

While my scholarship had stagnated as I struggled both to maintain a precarious balance in my life and to forgive myself for not resisting the subjugation of Indigenous knowledge within the academy as robustly as I should, my body immediately understood the inherent therapeutic power of beadwork. I introduced it into the law school, gently, in hopes it might sustain the community I was part of and had also been hired to support. I gathered with Learners, colleagues, and professors to sew regalia, bespoke beaded stoles and hoods created in consultation with Learners and their kin, to honour our graduates at convocation. We beaded orange shirts to mark Orange Shirt Day in September—now the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation—poppies for National Indigenous Veterans Day on November 8, and women in red dresses to honour the work of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. Each new lapel pin, graduation stole, and beaded yoke supported learning and unlearning in community, all along the way.                      

As our collective skills improved, the patterns created for the beaded stoles and convocation hoods became increasingly complex. What began as beadwork patches, three inches in diameter and gently stitched to tradecloth stoles, evolved into fourteen-inch vines stretching from shoulder to waist and beaded directly on long strips of wool that were later professionally finished by in-house talent: professors and associate deans who moonlit as seamstresses in the lead-up to convocation. Eventually, our community collaborations required a year-long process for each future graduate involving thousands of beads and hundreds of metres of thread. Those around me would term it a “beadwork revolution” and a “transformative experience” for our little corner of education.

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Learn more about Danielle Lussier:

Dr. Danielle Lussier, Red River Métis and citizen of the Manitoba Métis Federation, is mum to a trio of tiny Métis. As a beadworker and textile artist with a PhD in law, she is keenly interested in the relationship between law and beads and the use of beadwork practice as a pedagogical tool to (re)build community, facilitate learning, and mobilize knowledge. She encourages you to #ReadTheBeads and practice #LawWithHeart. Visit daniellelussier.ca

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From Sharp Notions, edited by Marita Dachsel & Nancy Lee. Published by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2023.

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Learn more about Sharp Notions:

Personal essays from diverse voices about their relationships to the fibre arts

Sometimes the reliability of a knit stitch, the steady rocking of a quilting needle, the solid structure of a loom is all you have. During the pandemic, fibre arts newbies discovered and lapsed crafters rediscovered that picking up some sticks and string or a needle and thread is the perfect way to reduce stress, quell anxiety, and foster creativity, a remedy to endless hours of doom-scrolling.

Knitting, crochet, embroidery, weaving, beading, sewing, quilting, textiles - the fibre arts fuel intense passions that can often border on obsession. Chances are that you or someone close to you is currently in an ecstatic relationship with yarn, thread, or fabric. As we struggle with the pressures, anxieties, and impacts of daily life, fibre arts are an antidote, mirror, and metaphor for so many of life's challenges. Part time-machine, part meditation app, the simple act of working with one's hands can instantly ease the overwhelming scope of living to a human scale and to the present moment.

In this anthology, writers and artists from different backgrounds contemplate their complex relationships with the fibre arts and the intersections of creative practice and identity, technology, memory, climate change, trauma, chronic illness, and disability.

Accompanied by full-colour photographs throughout, these powerful and inspiring essays challenge the traditional view of crafting and examine the role, purpose, joy, and necessity of craft amid the alienation of contemporary life.