A Publication of the Region 2 Arts Council Vol. 4 No. 3 Jun/Jul '00
Recovering the Quilting Circles
Guest Commentary
by Robyn Carter
Maawandoogwaason (quilting) is an Anishinaabe Art that has brought the women in our community together in social circles to create quilts. A core group of women once traveled from township to township to hand sew quilts with anyone who would like to learn. It's been a lasting tradition that in these quilting circles hundreds of Anishinaabe Quilts were created every year. The quilting artists would have potluck dinners and celebrations in completion of the maawandoogwaason.
These women stopped their quilting circles over five years ago. The hundreds of quilts they created together in communities throughout White Earth Reservation were no longer being made. Relationships were becoming distant. To bring back the quilting Circles and the Traditional Quilts that were once made, and to give our women an opportunity to grow a quilting business, in October 1999, we organized meetings with over 20 of our women quilters to discuss reviving quilting circles.
Winona LaDuke, Founding Executive Director of White Earth Land Recovery Project, launched this Quilting Project. WELRP is a multi-issue, non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, based on the White Earth Reservation in northern Minnesota. Founded in 1989, WELRP is the only group of its kind on a reservation in Minnesota, and one of the largest reservation-based non-profit organizations nationally. The three primary areas of WELRP's work include sustainable communities; community and economic development; and education and culture restoration.
Through the Circle Loan Fund WELRP invested $10,000 to purchase a quilting machine for community use to make the finishing techniques easy and fun. The women took on the task of shopping. After three months of site visits, many phone calls, they chose, "Gammill, because it's the best!" The Gammill Machine is now housed in Naytahwaush Sports Complex and is being used by people from communities in Mahnomen, Clearwater, Beltrami and Hubbard Counties.
Few Elder Master Quilters remain on our Reservation. We need to aggressively teach the younger and less experienced quilters the traditional patterns and techniques. The quilting Circles are being revived and the elderly are uniting with the young to teach them their skills and knowledge. Our women are once again hand sewing traditional Anishinaabe star quilts and patchwork quilts.
Robynn Carter is the community organizer who called the women quilters together to launch this project. She works with youth, family and community education; language recovery; economic development; as well as arts programs on the
White Earth Reservation.
Bemidji Community Receives
Blandin Grant for the ArtsBemidji has recently been awarded $250,000 from the Blandin Foundation, through its community partnership program. For many years, Bemidji and Blandin have enjoyed a partnership focused on building a better Bemidji. Following a community-wide assessment process, priorities for investment were identified by all sectors of the community. The Bemidji/Blandin Community Partnership Steering Committee then took on the task of identifying activities to address those priorities—a project that could enhance the wonderful work already being done by so many capable organizations, government entities and businesses throughout the community.
It became clear that the top priority of housing was being addressed successfully by a number of agencies. And the priority of building assets in children was being pursued with tremendous results by Healthy Community, Healthy Kids—an organization that the Bemidji/Blandin Community Partnership Steering Committee helped establish several years ago. But what was also brought up on numerous occasions, throughout the entire community—was the need to create a stronger “sense of place” in our hometown. A place where people feel at home, where our heritage is honored, where people of different cultures and generations respect and work with each other, where children who grow up and find it desirable to stay to raise their own families, where our love of the earth is demonstrated, and where we celebrate all this as a community.
With the leadership of the Bemidji Area Council of Nonprofits and area non-profit arts and cultural institutions, Bemidji now has the resources to build on what we all know instinctively—(borrowing the words from the Rural Arts Task Force, p. 5) “The Arts connect us to each other and build equality through promoting common understanding; the Arts help us to reconcile our differences; and the Arts help us to honor our relationship to nature, create a sense of place and share our common history.”
—by Jeanne Edevold Larson
“Northern Arts News” Editor and Co-Chair of the
Bemidji/Blandin Community Partnership Steering Committee
