“When you’re doing corpse paint, do you go over the mustache or not…?” Justin Bear L’Arrivée laughs amongst a group of BIPOC metalheads. We were all getting ready for the evening’s events at a table in the back of Urban Shaman Contemporary Aboriginal Art’s gallery space in Winnipeg’s Exchange District, where Justin acts as Artistic Director. The exhibition is titled “Warpaint,” a solo show by Swampy Cree, Dene, and Mennonite artist Brianna Wentz. Everyone at the table (save Justin and Laura Lewis, another incredible Winnipeg artist) modelled for Brianna back in 2022 in preparation for this exhibition: she invited a group of BIPOC women, gender-diverse, and queer metalheads to be photographed for her large-scale painted portraits. Her concerns, among many BIPOC women, gender-expansive, and queer metalheads, punks, and alt-goths, are that we have experienced the ongoing intersections of racism and heteropatriarchy within these music scenes that have been touted to be “anti-establishment” and “anti-status quo.”

Indigenous ways of being lie fundamentally in the strength of our people and the land that carries us. Beading falls within our embodied knowledge and celebrating these practices encourages our modes of sovereignty and resilience. Beading can and is often done alone, though the practice also brings our community together in powerful ways. Evenings spent with kin, or lunch time beading groups, like the one I hosted weekly at Concordia University, provide meaningful spaces for intergenerational learning and healing. The act of beading prevails as an Indigenous knowledge system–it integrates modes of map-making, displays our understanding of the land and our bloodlines–while including encoded stories, language and teachings. With hundreds of beaders connecting at a distance through social media, and other means over the last ten years, the need for larger scale beading events has given rise to two in so-called Canada within as many years.