Joyce Beaver has way, way too many beads.
Big ones, small ones, wood ones, bone ones; crimson, turquoise, navy and green … all jarred and bottled in her cupboard. There are a few zillion more in the dish before her, the pile resembling the jewelled horde of a very small dragon.
She spears a bead the size of a pen-tip on her needle and sews it onto a thick scrap of leather — part of a pair of moccasins. And then does it again, and again, and again.
"This is an Alberta rose I'm working on," she says, as the beaded flower takes shape, "a special order." It'll be days before she's finished this and the other flowing blossoms on the little shoe. The jacket behind her will take over a week.
"I'll wake up and sew till nine and then have breakfast," she says. After that, she'll sew some more. She sews so much that the apartment's manager can track her by the trail of threads she leaves behind, she jokes.
Beaver, 70, is a Métis beadworker who frequents St. Albert's Michif Institute. She'll be at the opening ceremony of a new exhibit on Métis beadwork in St. Albert later this month.
The exhibit is called Patterns in Glass: Métis Design in Beads, says Joanne White, curator of the Musée Héritage Museum, the exhibit's home. St. Albert has a rich Métis history, and the museum happens to have a big collection of Métis beadwork. This exhibit is a way to present both, and leads into next year's 150th anniversary.
Ancient art
The show, which opened to the public on Sept. 28, features about 30 pieces of beadwork, most of which were made or worn by St. Albert Métis women. They're all practical items, such as boots, belts and baubles, and all beautiful. Emerald vines snake between amethyst and fiery blossoms on a simple white gauntlet. Stylized petals decorate a man's old boots with rings of yellow, red, orange and indigo.
Aboriginals have decorated their duds with beads since time immemorial, says Susan Berry, curator of ethnology at the Royal Alberta Museum. In the old days, they used natural dyes to colour seeds, bones, porcupine quills and fungus. European traders introduced them to glass beads from Venice and what is now the Czech Republic, and they caught on fast — unlike natural materials, the beads were easy to sew, durable and colourfast.
"Almost all women would bead and would teach their children from a young age," Berry says. Some became famous for it, and took requests from neighbours.
Beaver says she learned to bead from her neighbour, one Aunty Marie-Louise. "I've always done it, since I was six years old." They couldn't afford shoes back then, so her parents made them moccasins by hand. If they wanted them fancy, they had to decorate them themselves.
Beaver takes a sheet of sinew from her cupboard. This is what you sewed with back in the day, she explains. It has the look and feel of bamboo. She tears some strands off, wets them in her mouth, and rolls them together. "That's strong stuff. You'll cut your finger before you break it."
The Métis favoured flowers in their bead designs, Berry says, which led many to call them "the flower-beadwork people." The wild rose was particularly common, as were pinks, reds and greens.
The symbols and colours of beadwork always had personal significance to the wearer, Beaver says. Her moccasins feature the blue-and-white infinity symbol of the Alberta Métis, for example. "If I were to put an animal on my moccasins, it would be a horse," she adds, as it's her spirit animal. Others might sew wolves for cunning, eagles for wisdom, or bears for power.
The 1850s saw the introduction of metal beads, Berry says, which were used as accents on certain petals. "They'd really glitter and catch the light." That decade also saw a move away from the stylized, symmetrical flowers of the past to today's more realistic flowing ones. Beads also seem to get larger after 1900; older works favoured tiny ones, some just two millimetres wide, which are no longer manufactured.
Skilled hands
Today, Beaver does custom beadwork for locals as a small business, selling her work in places like the Michif Institute.
"First you cut the pattern," she says, explaining the process. "Then you draw the design on. Then you do the beadwork." You always bead from the outside in, and you always count your beads so you can keep the size of each pattern consistent. Stiff fabric behind each pattern keeps the beads from bunching up.
A single flower might have 225 beads in its petals alone, Beaver says. "There's probably about a thousand or more just on this one piece," she says, referring to an unfinished jacket. A simple pair of moccasins involves about 40 hours of work; a jacket takes about 240.
There aren't any Picassos or Rembrandts of Métis beadwork, White says, as most artists did their work for family and friends. Several of the women in the museum's exhibit did find local renown, however, and made some money in the process.
Suzette Swift (1866–1946), for example, was known throughout the province for her leatherwork. Born in St. Albert, she worked as a maid for an Edmontonian named John Norris — who, with Edward Carey, founded that city's first store. Swift cut her patterns from whatever paper she had, White says, which means they often had snatches of maps or pictures of cows on them.
Others are historic figures. Ivory and orange flower-work shines from the worn, hole-riddled coat of Adrian Hope, a champion cowboy, St. Albert student and key figure in the Métis Association (now Nation) of Alberta. Bold geometric flowers sparkle on a vest made by Victoria Callihoo, a local woman who was baptized by Father Albert Lacombe, witnessed one of the last buffalo hunts, and died at age 104.
Lost art
Beadwork is fast becoming a lost art amongst the Métis, Beaver says. People of her generation were discouraged from learning about their roots, while later generations simply didn't bother to learn — if they wanted beads, they'd ask their grandparents for them. It's also an expensive hobby — one moccasin takes $25 worth of material, and that's if you use cheap leather.
She does have students, she adds — most are non-aboriginal — and she is running classes at the Michif. She also keeps sewing herself for about 12 to 13 hours a day.
"I was chosen to do it," she says, and it's relaxing. "If I'm upset at something, I sit and do my beadwork."
Patterns in Glass runs until next June at the Musée, and will have an opening reception on Oct. 14. Call White at 780-459-1528 for details.
