Catalogue of Practices of Production, Animation, and Socialization of Artifacts

Mishimyeuhoo: Stitching Métis Identity Back into View

by Sara McCreary

Taanishi kiya, my name is Sara McCreary. I am of French Métis and Scottish ancestry. I was born and raised in Treaty 4, Regina, Saskatchewan, however my family is from Boggy Creek, Manitoba. I am a graduate student in the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Regina's Faculty of Media, Art, and Performance. My research-creation practice revives, adapts, and expands Métis visual and material culture through wearable art.

Historically, Métis were popularly known as the flower bead people for our distinctive floral style of beaded and embroidered clothing (Ens and Sawchuk 2018: 1-2).These public adornments carried our identity and announced who we were. But, following the 1885 Northwest Resistance, a century of cultural repression drove us into near invisibility (Teillet 2019: 287-301). Because of this repression, I did not wear Métis clothing growing up. The only Métis-made objects I encountered were Grandmother pieces made by earlier generations, now secured behind glass in museums. I feel the absence of visual and tactile culture daily and deeply. My practice is shaped by this absence and I work to mend this wound through mishimyeuhoo.

Mishimyeuhoo is a Southern Michif word meaning “fancy” or “to be well dressed”, traditionally describing regalia, or everyday wear that was decorated with distinctive Métis attributes (Virtual Museum of Métis History and Culture 2025). In the generations after the resistance, Indigenous identity was often carried quietly. Fear and the erosion of visual culture altered how our culture was expressed, or whether it could be seen at all. My goal is to revive Métis identity through clothing, not just by having folks dress in recreations of historic outfits but by adapting 19th century Metis clothing to suit contemporary conditions and styles. Our fashion has always been blended from creative combinations of First Nations Plains styles and European clothing (Troupe and Gabriel Dumont Institute 2002). I am inspired by my Métis ancestors who understood, as I do, that it is not just dressing up and feeling good, but it is about individual and collective cultural artistic expression, and a sense that our innovations in clothing reflect a large sense of Métis revival and adaptation. I want the viewers, and wearers, of mishimyeuhoo to feel their culture, feel pride, and display what it means to be a contemporary Métis.

Before the Resistance of 1885, Métis women, skilled stitchers and makers, transformed available trade goods into living declarations of identity. Beaded and embroidered floral motifs on velvet, wool broadcloth, leather, hide, and silk ribbons and trim, combined European materials with Indigenous styles. They adorned coats, moccasins, gauntlets, gloves, bags, and wall pockets with intricate floral motifs that reflected both the individual they were made for and the care of the maker in every stitch. These objects are called Grandmothers. Each piece continued a tradition of artistry and resourcefulness that outshone what non-Indigenous folks on the Plains were wearing. (Racette 2004, 9-16)

After the Resistance, Indigenous cultural expression was discouraged in both public and private life. (Teillet 2008, 476) My grandparents were pressured to assimilate. Michif moved behind closed doors to avoid attention, and their clothing shifted toward European styles that allowed them to blend in and move more comfortably through public life. However, they lived as Métis in  ways that mattered most. Life moved between gatherings with family and friends, evenings filled with fiddle music and jigging, and quieter moments of visiting and drinking tea. Seasons change, and so did trapping game and harvesting medicines like Seneca root. My grandparents spoke other languages than Michif and English, also Cree, German, and Parisian French, which reflected the mix of people in their community and the value placed on being able to visit with everyone. Even as the visual culture of adorned clothing and decorated everyday objects faded, they carried Métis life quietly in how they gathered, spoke, and moved through the seasons.

 From 1870 until recently, communities faced deep economic hardship and social marginalization. Many families lost their land through the flawed scrip system, which promised land but often resulted in dispossession. Others were pushed to the literal margins, living on road allowances, the narrow strips of land set aside for roads between farmlands (Teillet 2008, 297-301). My mother and grandparents lived in a road allowance log cabin style home in Boggy Creek, Manitoba, until 1965 when they moved to Regina, where daily life shifted toward wage labour and urban routines. Living off the land was no longer possible in the same way, medicines were no longer gathered for income, and language gradually slipped out of daily use. Yet some practices endured. Tea was still poured, fiddle music was still played, and jigging continued, even as Métis life was carried forward in quieter, more private ways.

During a course called “Radical Stitch” that I took with Sherry Farrell Racette during the 2024 Winter term, Sherry shared stories about stitching techniques, their histories, and the wider histories of material culture. She also spoke about visiting Métis communities to see their Grandmother pieces. When they spoke about the garments they once wore, they often touched the places on their bodies where that beauty once rested. Their hands touched their chests where beaded vests sat, their stomachs where belts and sashes were tied, their shins and feet where leggings and moccasins wrapped them. That gesture showed how deeply connected they felt to these items that they reach for them, like a phantom limb.

Visiting Grandmother pieces was what first made me curious about my own family. For the longest time I only carried fragments. Family stories, scattered michif words, jigging, and guitar music. I had been stitching since I was twelve years old, but I did not know whether that practice connected to Métis stitching in my family, or if it had ever been part of our lineage. Instead, I learned that the truth sat further back than living memory. There were no surviving garments or stories of adornment, only the knowledge that my grandmother sewed and knitted for practical reasons, meeting the demands of daily life rather than decoration, or art.

Through Sherry’s stories, I began to see how tactile memory is formed through lived relationships with specific garments and objects. These objects were not just symbolic but relational, holding knowledge through repeated wear, touch, and care, a form of embodied knowing that I could not trace within my own family. Even though these pieces were made for specific individuals, visiting with them gave me something that did not depend on ownership. What mattered was the relationship they opened. Questions of repatriation and intention are central to how these Grandmothers should be understood, and they directly inform how I carry my own work as a Métis artist.

My grandparents lived as Métis, but without mishimyeuhoo. That absence shaped how Métis life was expressed in our family, shifting meaning away from visual adornment and toward gesture, gathering, and shared moments. What was carried forward was not worn on the body, but held in how we moved, visited, and lived together.

One summer in the early 1990s, my Aunt Laurine taught my brother and me to jig so we could perform at our annual family Christmas concert. I struggled to stay on beat and felt out of place, wondering why something that seemed so Métis didn’t come easily to me. Later that summer, during our annual family camping trip at Duck Mountain Provincial Park, evenings were filled with laughter, card games, jigging, and music. It did not take long for someone to request an Aunty to sing and play the fiddle or guitar. Soon, everyone was up and jigging on the dusty chip stone that surrounded the fire pit. I remember feeling self-conscious until Aunty Laurine noticed I wasn’t joining in. She told me, “It doesn’t matter what you look like. Even if you forget the steps I taught you, just get your feet moving. You’ll know you’re doing it right when you make dust.” And so, I jigged in my runners until the dust began to rise around my feet, until it joined the family’s cloud of dust. The next morning, a dusty layer covered our tents, coolers, and vehicles. I felt proud, knowing this was simply our family’s way of having fun, realizing we were continuing something that had been passed down for generations. I’d imagine my Aunty as a child, learning to jig in the road allowance home. Maybe she felt as amazing as I did the first time she contributed to the family’s dust plume. I began to think about how much of our lives were spent jigging. How many hours my Aunty danced, from her childhood until she passed. Remembering her and the others who came before me pushed me to imagine what comes next. I picture a family gathering, with the next generation’s laughter, card games, jigging, and music, and a massive plume of dust lifting before settling, and each of us wearing our own mishimyeuhoo.

Observing jigging was where I felt most at ease. I was connecting through watching everyone dance, hearing the fiddle music and my aunties singing, taking in the smell of campfire and taste of tea. It took time to understand that this, too, is part of Métis life, because I had imagined it would look different in a time shaped by greater freedom and visibility. My contribution comes through making, allowing material culture to speak where my steps could not. That sense of ease did not ask me to perform, but to respond, translating what I felt into care through making art.

For my first piece, I chose my brother. As latchkey kids, we learned to rely on each other from a young age. After school, he walked me home safely, made our snacks, and watched over me until our mom returned. When we jigged for the family, he guided me with small gestures and whispered cues, helping me find the rhythm without ever making me feel out of place. Creating something for him to dance in felt like a natural way to honour what we share as the same blend of Métis with similar wounds to mend.

As I began designing his mishimyeuhoo in January 2025, those early memories resurfaced. For me, they came to represent how Métis life continues to move through time, carried through the senses and recorded through making. I wanted to give that feeling a physical form, bringing movement and clothing back into conversation through something my brother could wear and dance in.

While searching through my collection of fabrics and notions, I rediscovered the hand-carved tuning pegs from an old fiddle our grandfather built out of scrap parts more than sixty years ago. He named all his fiddles; this one was called Cedo. The pegs had warped over time and no longer held a string tight, but I could never discard something shaped by his hands. He played that fiddle for his children, teaching our aunties the music that brought our family together to dance. Incorporating those tuning pegs into my brother’s outfit became a way to connect him to that line of music and movement, carrying forward through the body once again.

The first design was a black velvet three-peaked tie-on belt adorned with Cedo’s tuning pegs, and purple (semi-traditional) floral beadwork, paired with a four-panel tie skirt inspired by early twentieth-century prairie silhouettes. While inspired by historical Métis and settler prairie styles, the skirt is a contemporary formal piece with four separate panels with long slits for movement (Gillen, 2019: 2). I imagined how the skirt behaved when he jigged: the panels lifting to his knee and curling with each spin, drawn close to the body and then released again, moving in and out with the breath of his dance. I made a sample for my brother to test its feel and movement. As the work moved beyond our private process and into shared spaces, its responsibilities began to change.

When I brought the initial sample of my brother’s first mishimyeuhoo at Uncommon Senses V in Montreal in May 2025, the sharing generated a level of responsibility I had not fully anticipated. As a work that engages both visual and tactile senses, the garment invited viewers to feel the weight of the beadwork, the texture of the fabrics, and the smoothness of the carved tuning pegs. Because the piece was still a sample, I chose to allow people to touch it, offering that access intentionally while it remained unfinished. Once completed, the garment would need to be held differently, within a more specific relationship. Touch allowed viewers to understand the tactility of a piece they would normally encounter only visually, a limitation I have often felt myself when viewing Grandmother pieces in institutional collections.

The experience at the conference made it clear that my ethics in displaying mishimyeuhoo requires ongoing attention. Working with my brother and other Métis collaborators, including those I met at the Kapishkum Métis artist residency in Banff in June 2025, has revealed shared gaps in our visual culture alongside a growing sense of collective direction. Together, we are learning to how pieces are shared, what forms of access feel appropriate, and when touch should be welcomed or withheld. Just as our family is blended, each of us holds our own understanding of how we wish to be seen. Some are comfortable with public circulation through performance, photography, or exhibition. Others prefer to keep mishimyeuhoo within more intimate spaces of visiting, making, and community, where it is not worn or witnessed alone. These differences are not obstacles, but necessary guides that shape how mishimyeuhoo experiences the world.

For example, offering visitors a way to engage with the materials and without granting physical access. I plan to include a table with objects made specifically for handling. This table will hold beadwork samples, small stitched pieces, fabric swatches, and other materials that communicate how the work feels in the hand. This approach allows people to experience the texture of beadwork, embroidery, and hide without crossing personal boundaries. I want to encourage an ethic of consent and relationality, where touch is guided through conversation and responsibility rather than assumed through institutional norms. In this way, audiences can learn through feeling, while the integrity of each finished piece remains protected.

After the conference, my brother and I visited and collaborated further on his mishimyeuhoo, we decided to alter the initial design. He asked if I could include our Scottish heritage from our father’s side, our parents often joked that we were “McMétis,” a blend of French-Métis and Scottish ancestry. The change felt natural, as we share blendedness, though I had not previously considered how central this was to our own sense of identity and belonging. I replaced the four-panel tie skirt with a pleated kilt, paired with welt pocketed shorts made from Manitoba tartan, weaving both sides of our family history into the piece. The kilt will still breathe when he spins, if not more dramatically, due to the volume of the pleats.

The belt also underwent significant changes. While the original black velvet three-peaked belt was conceptually strong, the dark colour of the tuning pegs visually disappeared against the velvet. Altering the colour of the pegs felt improper, as I wanted to keep them as they were. I chose instead to remake the belt from split bison hide. The hide is strong and time-consuming to work with, even for appliqué, beadwork, or embroidery. Working this material made me feel connected to our ancestors’ relationships with bison, through hunting and the use of hide, bone, and sinew for making. The bison leather has a warm tobacco tone and wraps comfortably around the body, with fringe that cuts cleanly and moves when danced in, drawing inspiration from historical buckskin jackets.

Against the lighter hide, Cedo’s tuning pegs remain visible and sit at a slight angle, echoing their original placement on the fiddle itself. Mirrored on either side of the pegs is an embroidered motifs of a thistle, referencing popular Scottish embroidery and a plant that was introduced yet grows locally, and a sprig of Saskatoon berries, a food our ancestors relied on as a staple and that we now eat as a treat. Together, these elements speak to our blended lineage. While inspired by Grandmother pieces, my embroidery shifts from traditional techniques. I use the vine stitch to form tendrils and leaves, and a combination of fishbone and satin stitch to cover larger areas, rather than relying primarily on split stitch and the satin stitch. This choice was intuitive rather than corrective, guided by what felt right to make and by the pleasure of how it emerged visually.

When my brother’s mishimyeuhoo is complete, my brother and I will document its first moments of being worn on the land. We will film and photograph at Duck Mountain, where we jigged as children, and later in Boggy Creek, near the old road allowance home. The tuning pegs our grandfather carved will return to the places where our family once gathered to play music and dance. These recordings will trace his movement across the land that shaped us, serving as both personal record and public witness to our continuity.

This documentation will remain a collaborative process. My brother and I will decide together which images and moments can be shared publicly, and which will stay within the family. These conversations about comfort, consent, and representation are central to the work and will be an on going process. They ensure that the mishimyeuhoo is not just an art object but a relational practice accountable to family, community, and culture. The installation will include the garment, the documentation, and tactile materials visitors can explore.

Mishimyeuhoo is more than finery. It is a tactile relationship that begins with kinship and visiting, and continues through designing, choosing materials, and having the maker and wearer deciding together. Cultural meaning does not emerge only when the sewing is finished; it begins with the first exchange of ideas and carries forward as the garment is worn and lived with. When the piece is completed and gifted, it holds both the maker and the wearer, moving with them into future gatherings. My role ends when it leaves my hands, but its life continues through my brother in the moments he decides to be visible in it. In this way, making becomes a shared act of memory and continuation, much like how Métis women once created finery for their kin as part of an ongoing cultural practice. I hope this work contributes to a future where Métis people define mishimyeuhoo for themselves and choose how they want it to be seen.

Works Cited

Dissanayake, Ellen. “The Genesis and Development of Making Special and Aesthetic Philosophy.” Journal of Art and Design Education 1, no. 1 (1991).

Ens, Gerhard J., and Joe Sawchuk. From New Peoples to New Nations: Aspects of Métis History and Identity from the Eighteenth to the Twenty-First Centuries. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. https://doi.org/10.3138/9781442621497.

Farrell Racette, Sherry. Sewing Ourselves Together: Clothing, Decorative Arts and the Expression of Métis and Half Breed Identity. PhD diss., University of Manitoba, 2004.

Gillen, Megan. Utility, Rebellion, Modesty: A History of the Prairie Dress, 1850 to 2019. MA thesis, Fashion Institute of Technology, 2020.

Michif Dictionary. The Virtual Museum of Métis History and Culture. Accessed October 17, 2025. https://www.metismuseum.ca/michif_dictionary.php.

Teillet, Jean. The North-West Is Our Mother: The Story of Louis Riel’s People, the Métis Nation. New York: Patrick Crean Editions, 2019. http://link.overdrive.com/?websiteID=340131&titleID=4489723.

Troupe, Cheryl, and Gabriel Dumont Institute of Native Studies and Applied Research. Expressing Our Heritage: Métis Artistic Designs. Saskatoon: Gabriel Dumont Institute, 2002.