REDress project provokes widespread reflection on campus.

SOMA DALAI

You must have seen them by now — the red dresses throughout campus are difficult to miss, fluttering in the breeze and hauntingly empty. They are a response to the over 1,000 reported cases of missing or murdered Aboriginal women across Canada and the brainchild of Winnipeg artist Jaime Black. The Sheaf had a chance last week to sit down and talk with Black on a wide-ranging interview that included, among other things, her inspiration and goals for the REDress project.

“I am an artist, so creative thoughts kind of come in semi-mysterious ways,” Black said when asked about the creation of her project. “But I think there are several different factors that kind of combined to make the idea happen.”

Black — who is part Ojibwe and Anishinabe — was first struck by the idea for the project at a performance art conference in Bogota, Colombia where she witnessed 500 women with missing family members give a nearly seven-hour-long performance.

“At one point in this performance, about 30 women in red dresses came out and they did a choreographed dance to a drum and they ran screaming around as though they were looking for someone… they helped each other grapple up to the top of the statue in the middle of the square and one woman in a red dress shouted out ‘Where are they?’ at the top of her voice and it was just the most arresting moment,” she said.

Black said another moment of inspiration came while she was attending an academic conference in Germany along with an indigenous female scholar who stood up and spoke of the — at that time — 500 cases of missing and murdered Aboriginal women across Canada, much to the astonishment of the German academics. 

“Just at that moment she said that,” Black said, “I actually was like ‘I’m going to go home and put up red dresses everywhere, all over Winnipeg, so that everybody sees them instead of it being, you know, swept under the carpet as Canada’s dirty little secret.’”

Canada’s troubling record of pursuing justice for Aboriginal women confronted Black when she was working as a teacher in the Manitoba town of The Pas, scene to the horrific murder of 19-year-old Helen Betty Osbourne as she walked home one night in 1971. It took 18 years for a conviction in her case and even then only one of the four suspected killers received a sentence. 

Osbourne’s story “affected me a lot,” Black said. “When I was there I didn’t actually know that happened. I was living and teaching with a woman whose auntie was out with Helen that night and they were leaving [the restaurant] and her auntie was like, ‘Are you okay walking by yourself?’ and she was like, ‘Yeah, I’m cool’ and then that happened.”

The way in which the murderers were allowed to walk around town when many of the inhabitants knew what they had done was what affected Black the most.

“There was a woman that I know who was living there at the time and she tells a story about walking to the skating rink where she took figure skating and she was so scared those guys were in town all the time that every time she saw a truck go by, she’d hide in the ditch until the truck went by,” Black said. 

“And this was a nine-year-old indigenous girl just trying to go to her… skating lesson, you know? So just imagine the terror in the community for like 15 years [with] these guys just walking around.”

Since 1971, hundreds more Aboriginal women have gone missing. When asked about whether the REDress project supports a national inquiry on the issue, Black said her project is really about creating discussion.

“The project is to create a space for different communities to have their voices heard so there may be different opinions and different ideas about whether an inquiry would be beneficial, but I want all of those voices to be represented throughout the project,” Black said.

Personally, Black was unsure that an inquiry could fix the issues Aboriginal women face.

“I think that if I was running things, I would just pour a lot of money into indigenous-run community organizations, into women’s shelters, into the school system where we should be teaching kids from a very young age about colonization and about poverty and about all of these things that indigenous communities have been dealing with for such a long time,” she said. “There are big holes in education that need to be filled that the government seems to be reluctant to be honest about and I feel like those things would have a bigger impact than another bunch of paperwork.”

“Maybe I’m skeptical… but I just don’t have a lot of faith in the fact that the system that created the problem can fix the problem,” Black added.

She also acknowledged the benefits an inquiry could bring, stating that indigenous groups’ work on missing and murdered Aboriginal women has created the comprehensive lists that are relied upon today.

What Black did make clear throughout the interview is that she is a firm believer in education and in informing people about the problems facing Aboriginal people today.

“I think we all need to be on the same page before we can start working towards a solution,” she said. “We need as many people as possible to understand all the factors that are at play that create unsafe spaces for women and especially for indigenous women. If we start from there, we can start thinking of solutions together.” 

Paradoxically, at the time she became inspired to create the REDress project Black was contemplating ending her career as an artist due to practical reasons and family pressures. What changed her mind was attending the conference in Colombia. 

“I saw so many amazing, powerful artists that were doing such important work that all day long, I had goose bumps watching these people do the work that they were doing,” she said. “I thought, ‘I am cheating myself and the rest of the world by not doing this. I absolutely have to do this.’ It’s a privilege to live a life like that too, because not everybody has the opportunity to not have a day job. I hope that by doing political artwork that I’m using the privilege of being able to be an artist in a way that not only benefits myself and my family, but also others.” 

On that front, Black is undoubtedly making a difference.

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Photos: Katherine Fedoroff/Photo Editor