floral brocade works

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mînowin (recovery) contemporary Indigenous Native American abstract expressionist acrylic painting on plywood with tribal geometry floral brocade fabric circle and fringed beadwork adornments by matriarchal First Nations Plains Cree Anishnawbe artist Bebonkwe Brown (black and green colors)

‘post-traumatic garden 3’, ‘post-traumatic garden 6’ and ‘pehpehtahkwiik 4’ were created while at
the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council 2022 studio residency.
‘post-traumatic garden 3’, ‘post-traumatic garden 4’, ‘post-traumatic garden 6’ and
‘gitchi manitou will you spoon with me?’ were all shown in the recent McColl Center exhibition
‘Material: Culture’ (Charlotte, NC),
‘post-traumatic garden 4’ and ‘post-traumatic garden 5’ were exhibited at the 60 Collective exhibition
and ‘the hurt is not enough’ was exhibited at the ‘Fragile Rainbow: Traversing Habitats’.
both of which were large group shows that took place in Brooklyn, NY in the summer of 2022.

Some of these pieces also cross over into the gatherings series
and/or have elements also present in other series.

Floral brocade fabric is another repeated element in my creative practice that I began working regularly with in my painting-based works in 2014.

It has a specific history and meaning within the colonization of First Nations people, particularly within Indigenous women’s creative practices.

As part of the forced assimilation of Western/Christian practices perpetrated on Indigenous people during earlier colonial/genocidal periods, it certain places & situations nuns insisted our women give up creating longstanding tribal abstraction patterns in our beadwork in favor of floral designs based on European floral brocade fabric patterns. This was done to try to make them conform with patriarchal Western notions of how women should be, including being ‘ladylike’.

Although these patterns are pretty, they also exemplify the well-manicured Western garden and associated mind frame of controlling, taming and otherwise diminishing the natural world. They endeavored to do exactly the same to our women, who are traditionally deeply respected, hold leadership roles, have a great deal of power within our communities, and live in deep and inextricable kinship with the land.

At this point in his-tory the majority of our people had been decimated (approximately 90% in most Nations) by Settler-introduced diseases, genocidal warfare, and other forms of oppression, and the rest were suffering inexpressible consequences of these and other horrors of genocide. As a result, overtly refusing the church’s forced assimilation practices wasn’t an feasible option for most Native people at that point.

So our ‘she/hers’ began using these Western floral patterns in subversive ways, using them to continue our cultural knowledge by embedding creative expression of our traditional relationship to the land within the beadwork in ways not discernable to the church. In other words, with typical First Nations resourcefulness, tenacity, resilience & creativity, those Native women took the forced floral patterns & made them their own. This has now become a cultural ‘tradition’.

Although I appreciate floral beadwork, I’m much more drawn to using/continuing geometric abstraction & using these Euro-centric botanical patterns in other ways. In my artworks I acknowledge a simultaneous attraction and repulsion to these floral fabrics, and continue this legacy of decolonization and transformation by using floral brocade as ‘skins’/canvases and/or patterns for paintings incorporating traditional Plains abstract tribal geometries, adornment practices and/or land-aligned painting practices, patricularly my fondness for painting storms. This all further disrupts, deregulates and/or ‘re-wilds’ the brocade patterns, however ‘nice’…